Spring RTS Engine

If you happen to be fortunate enough to come from Australia
you will be faced with the problem of having a limited amount of megabites / gigabites that you can download per month before your internet connection is hideously crippled to 28k, or you have to fork out extra $$ for anything over your limit.

I just moved house and will be sharing an internet connection.
Its 12 gigs a month wich should be plenty for just browsing the web etc.

Just wondering how many megs an average 2v2 / 3v3 game would use.

I will be turning down the graphics if this helps as I have only brought
my crusty old laptop with me and not my beastly pc..

Also is there an option to turn off the replay setting?

Lumpy wrote: I will be turning down the graphics if this helps as I have only brought
my crusty old laptop with me and not my beastly pc..

Also is there an option to turn off the replay setting?

lol, I don't know the answer to your first question, but neither of these things would have the slightest impact on bandwidth usage. I suggest you don't host games though.

Spring's bandwidth usage is pretty negligible if you aren't hosting (and to a lesser extent if you are)....most likely much less than a megabyte per hour of gameplay.

It's probably slightly higher than the size of a game replay (Because of network protocol overhead), so you can check it yourself.

i have about 20 mb of replays since the last spring release

Think of it this way, the only things you ever transmit are unit positions and status, and weapon shots.... that's pretty much it. My understanding is that almost everything is calculated client-side (ie, each computer's running the same program so actual simulated data like projectile positions, physics, etc don't need to be transmitted), so there's not really a lot going anywhere. No settings of any kind on your computer will have an effect on how much data is transmitted, since graphics etc are strictly a visual representation of: "unit pos 2900,3829,21 rot 312.3", that kind of thing.

Not even that is transmitted. Just the commands you send and some kind of checksum to ensure that simulations are synced.

on some of the longer / larger map games that I have played the game lags up when theres alot of units on the screen at once...

and even when theres heaps offscreen.

but I dont know if that counts as more stuff being downloaded..


Looks like I will be able to play some spring tonight..


Goooooo TEAM!

You can test it yourself if you want. I can't recommend a nice win bandwidth monitor for you. Iftop is nice for linux though.
I tested it once and it was negligible.

I share your plight, friend, with an even lower limit of 8 gigs.

But I tell you this : spring needs veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeery little bandwidth.

I was able to play fine with 64 Kbits, only problem was slight spiking at times but it was mostly negligble.

Next release of spring will write detailed networking information in the infolog, including total traffic, packet loss etc.
IIRC spring uses less than 16kbit/s when someone else is host, and it can't be reduced further without hacking the code.

However a 3v3 game which lasts 1 hour should not take more than 7 or 8 MB.

(16kbit = 2kb)

uh. kb = kilobit
You meant kB.

No, he meant KiB.

FLOZi wrote:No, he meant KiB.

The conversion being pointed out is 8 kilobits per second is equal to 1 kilobyte per second. In networking we use kilobits for no explainable reason, mostly just to screw up people who don't know anything about networking.

speaking of crusty laptop..


in the battle lobby... it says I am 0.6 ghz..


BLISTERING SPEED!

I did fine playing any sized games most afternoons for a few hours on 2 gigs (+ misc other downloads) so seriously you dont have to worry about that, its the downloading mods and maps that kill your cap.
(woot up too 8 gigs / month now)

SwiftSpear wrote:

FLOZi wrote:No, he meant KiB.

The conversion being pointed out is 8 kilobits per second is equal to 1 kilobyte per second. In networking we use kilobits for no explainable reason, mostly just to screw up people who don't know anything about networking.

And it sounds better to the customer. People would much rather see "5mbit per second" than "0.625 mbyte per second".

9600 baud modem or 1.125 kilobyte modem?

my connection sounds really slow at 1.25 mbyte