| Hey, I used to be a games networking programmer, and your estimate is pretty good. A few corrections that bring it down to something not entirely unaffordable: * You can bit-pack your structures a lot more efficiently - let's say 2 bytes for a local player ID, 10 bytes for each of velocity/orientation (quaternion represention and heavily quantizing the theta component), and 10 bytes for the location. Clients are never allowed to determine the canonical physics simulation, so all of the above are really just for display purposes, and can be trimmed down as appopriate - we don't need to worry about desyncing (as I'll explain in a bit) * 30 packets-per-second is way too high for network play, with a game of EVE's mechanics you could probably get away with something perhaps as low as 1 pps. Intermediate simulation of the player entities is done by a technique called dead reckoning that's linked earlier (though in practice you'd use a slight improvement on it to stop entities leaping around the world). * Sometimes game mechanics allow you to strongly cut down the number packets you send. For example, in EVE, it might be desirable to not send information about a ship if it's completely occluded by another ship, or to only send information about ships that are in a frontal cone ahead of you. This usually doesn't affect the bandwidth function (though sometimes it does), but you can almost always cut a constant factor of (rule of thumb) 50% off the bill. So that ends up being 32 * 1 * 3000 * 3000 ~= 250MB/s, which looks about right to me. One thing you didn't account for is that you don't typically allow MMO game clients to connect to each other, but to multiplex everything through a server. So it ends up being twice as large as that - 500MB/s. Good luck with your game! 100 interacting players in an MMO is a challenging target but not an unreachable one for a single-developer game, and it's definitely a very interesting project to undertake. |