Yeah, this strikes me as strange. If you're sending that much data constantly, you're either syncing too much stuff too often, or you're not using compression when you should be (shout-out to Oodle)

Something that this article doesn't mention that's going to be a big constraint: each of your clients parsing 20mbps of updates is going to have a performance impact on those clients.

At the end of the day, you can only "democratize" while you have players, and performance constraints on end users aren't getting any looser

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gafferongames 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Something that this article doesn't mention that's going to be a big constraint: each of your clients parsing 20mbps of updates is going to have a performance impact on those clients.

I can assure you that parsing 20 megabits per-second worth of packets on a client is not a significant CPU cost.

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gafferongames 6 hours ago | parent [-]

20 megabits per-second is 2.5 megabytes per second.

Do you really think PCs have difficulty processing 2.5 megabytes of data per-second in 2026?

	▲	thunderfork 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Taking 2.5 megabytes per second of compressed new state information, uncompressing it, and applying it (across the "thousands and thousands of networked entities", etc, that keep being talked about) to the game state? All the memory thrash that implies, along with the knock-on effects (animation updates, yadda yadda)? Yeah, that has a performance cost. Will this impact a big-money gaming rig? Probably not? Will it run good on the Steam Deck? Probably not. Generally, in a game loop, all this stuff is going to be single-threaded and blocking, right? It's mutating the game state, that's the classic why-games-suck-at-thriving-on-many-small-cores problem. So your performance capacity ends up being tighter than you might think relative to other "ingest data" tasks. Let's say your game's networking runs at 30 ticks a second, and you've done a great job in uncoupling rendering from the game loop, so you're lucky enough to not have to worry about that. You still only have 30ms, on a single thread, to handle networking (likely no special kernel-skipping stuff on clients!), unpack, apply and propagate your changes, and also do your local game loop stuff. If you miss that interval once, the game starts to fall behind and feel bad to play. Now, you could say "lower the tick rate", but then you'd need less data, too, and your game gets less responsive (fine for some games, not for others)

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gafferongames 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Maybe you can just be doing all the standard compression tricks, but still have a 10-20 times larger world? If so, why not?

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thunderfork 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Client performance characteristics? Speaking very broadly... I can't imagine a game that'd need that much data unless it involved a lot of streaming assets (audio, video, etc) or really, really naive netcode.

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gafferongames 8 hours ago | parent [-]

> I can't imagine a game that'd need that much data

I can :)

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mvdtnz 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Maybe instead of leaving drive by comments like this you can explain this to the overwhelming majority of people in this thread who think it's bananas.

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gafferongames 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Nobody has answered my question, which is if you can use more bandwidth, and in doing so supports a larger, more detailed world, then why not?

Why limit yourself to bandwidth usage designed around the turn of the century?

It's 2026. We can do better :)

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frollogaston 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The article already started off saying the bandwidth itself was a problem due to egress costs, but that's not the only issue. Thunderfork already answered what else is wrong with it. Now if you're the author, can you tell me what the space game does?

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gafferongames 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Now if you're the author, can you tell me what the space game does?

A larger more detailed world with a higher player count, networked using quake style netcode techniques ala. Counterstrike, Titanfall, Apex Legends with snapshots and delta compression, client side prediction and lag compensation.

In short, FPS netcode scaled up to 1000 players, but applied to a space game, not an FPS, because the world doesn't need another FPS right now...

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frollogaston 7 hours ago | parent [-]

My question and its followups have all been reasonable and non-assuming. I was interested in some more details, but not anymore, best of luck.

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gafferongames 6 hours ago | parent [-]

This thread absolutely has not been full of reasonable and non-assuming questions.

1. "I can't imagine a game that'd need that much data unless it involved a lot of streaming assets (audio, video, etc) or really, really naive netcode"

2. "If you're sending that much data constantly, you're either syncing too much stuff too often, or you're not using compression when you should be"

3. "overwhelming majority of people in this thread who think it's bananas."

Sorry folks, but if you want to have a positive discussion with me about game netcode this is not the way to do it.

	▲	thunderfork 9 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The person you're replying to isn't me (the person you're quoting above), but to be clear: I'm not trying to be insulting, here, it's just kind of a bizarre, eyebrow-raising thing to see. There's a reason you're not seeing any AAA games doing this, y'know? If you're doing something that's really unusual, you're going to have people going "this is really unusual". Please don't take this the wrong way - this is sincere, well-intentioned advice: have you ever watched Shark Tank? The best people on there can still give a good pitch when their ideas are challenged. The games industry - and especially the multiplayer games space - are brutal, and players are going to be way more critical, way more rudely, than anyone on HN. It would benefit you and your game greatly to practice selling your idea in the face of criticism and doubt.
	▲	6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
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