NO DIALUP ALLOWED

[bot2600]

Lets say someone is working on a online only game that will not be finished for another 1.5-2 years. The game takes too much bandwidth for 56k so it will be limited to cable/dsl etc only. The upstream is minimal so cable would not be a disadvantage. Do you think that in another years and a half, not allowing dialup will hurt sales too much to make it viable?

Bot

 

[pulpp]

keep in mind that probably over 90% of internet users world wide are still on dialup

 

[Rankor]

How many of those play online games with a dial-up?

As broadband (hopefully) gets cheaper eventually it might replace dial-up.

[edit]

It's to the best interest of the game developer (and the game publisher) to include net code for dial-up connections.

They'd be shooting themselves in the foot otherwise.

[/edit]

 

[bot2600]

It would not be feasible. It is moving way too much data. It would pretty much require atleast 80k/sec with a few higher peaks.

Bot

 

[Rankor]

W/c (future) online game is this? :Q

 

[MrBond]

I play games online with my dialup connection.

To expect a consistant 80k/sec from some connections, you're asking a lot, even from broadband. Can you imagine the server feed that's going to require?

 

[Mem]

<< How many of those play online games with a dial-up? >>



I play online gaming with 56k all the time 98% of my friends still use 56k,it`s all down to cable modem availability and in my area it`s not available yet,infact most of my friends don`t have it available in their area as well.

 

[TunaBoo]

You can make the code better than that can't you? I mean 80KB/sec? Even if there is a game with 5,000 players in once, divide the map into small zones and only keep track of the players in THAT zone. Fine ways to compress the stream, I dunno.

I would buy a cable only game if it was really sweet, but the general idea of games is to make the most money possible. Starcraft could play on almost every PC in the world. It sold many many copies. Yes it was a very very good game, but if (for its time) it needed a high end PC, it would NOT have been so successful.

 

[bot2600]

It doesnt maintain anything like 80k a sec, but peaks there often and if the connection doesnt keep up the lag in the connection really tears up the world... we call it TZing, because it makes us think of being in the twilight zone. We could switch alot more to the client side, but it just seems like everyone wants to be a hacker nowadays . As far as breaking up the world, the world is broken up as much as possible, the line of sight is very far and so is the line of hearing. If a tree is burning and falls over on a house, it can be heard from quite a distance... heh. We will be working on some compression techniques, but I still very seriously doubt 56k would even come close.

Bot

 

[TunaBoo]

ASlso realize, is your company going to host (battlenet), or will it have public hostings (like counter strike) In any case.. 80 KB a second (peaks) times how many people in game (20?) thats a LOT of bandwith. And if it is MMP and has 1000 people... hope you can afford the bandwith bill. That is th BIGGER problem. A lot of online gamers are or will be broadband in a few years, but bandwith is STILL expensive.

BTW, where do I get to sign up for alpha testing since I helped u out so much

 

[bot2600]

The only servers will be ours. There are several servers to run the game. Hell, there is a seperate server just for the NPCs, they are logged in very similar to the regular players and the NPC server controls their AI. It will have in excess of 1000 players and I know bandwidth isn't cheap... The constant bandwidth is not as high as I am letting on, but the spikes peak fast and high, there are sometimes alot going on at one time, and sometimes there is nothing going on. There will be a public beta in about 4 months, and we will have beta sign ups on our website.

Bot

 

[Dark4ng3l]

what website??, what kind of game??

 

[bot2600]

I'll have to check and see exactly what info I can give out. I probably shouldn't have even said as much as I did, I was just tossing some thoughts around in my head and wanted some opinions about the bandwidth usage.

Bot

 

[bevancoleman]

I don't know about the USA but most people in Australia still use dial-up.

This is because ADSL costs a arm and a leg (and the major carrier caps at 3Gb a month )

 

[Zach]

<< It would not be feasible. It is moving way too much data. It would pretty much require atleast 80k/sec with a few higher peaks.

Bot >>



You are a crackhead if you expect a game with those requirements to sell at all. I have trouble hitting over 40/k per second consitantly, mostly due to geography. I've gone over 1.5mbps, so it aint my like.

Besides, in another 1.5 or 2 years there might be downstream caps on cable modem service, and most DSL currently is 256k variety I bet.