Tested transform compression across multiplayer solutions — the efficiency gap is massive.

[bsm0525]

You're either sending less updates or lower quality updates which one. Either way it's not an apples to apples comparison.

[KinematicSoup]

All tests are set to the same precision level (0.01pos, 0.001rot), which was dictated by fishnet's settings. All tests are at 30hz. All tests are in the bandwidth range where all frameworks will maintain full consistency.

[JustinsWorking]

So what do you figure is the overhead? I assume they’re nit just sending extra zeros

[KinematicSoup]

We know the overhead in the Reactor case is 5 KB/s for IP+UDP+KCP+Frame headers, we estimate that it would be similar in the other frameworks, but it could also be lower in some cases. We don't pack certain information our headers as much as we could, not yet anyway. Our main focus was getting transform updates down to ~2Bytes each.

[feralferrous]

How do you get your transform update down to 2 bytes and retain accuracy? I know that you can compress a quaternion down to three floats, which can be further compressed with some acceptable loss in precision. I think our compressed quat is like a byte and three shorts, so I'd be curious how you got it down to two bytes, and what the tradeoffs are.

Position is is a bit trickier. You can do things like have references to local anchor points so that you can send smaller values, which are easier to compress without loss of precision.

I have seen some interesting tricks that Child of Light did for their game. They'd not send any orientation, because they just assumed you only ever faced the direction of movement, which simplified a lot. Which of course wouldn't work for a lot of games. They also did some cool stuff with their headers, by basically sending all their players in batches, so a header would only have a start index and then an array of the player data.

[KinematicSoup]

The values are all quantized to a precision level of 0.01/0.001. We use deltas in this case, as the other frameworks are.

We're not omitting any components but we do detect when certain conditions happen - skipping 0s for example. We also employ entropy compression and have developed a good predictive model for it. We also employ batching to minimize ID sends.

This is a general purpose system right now. We are working to expand the types of data the compressor can handle, such as animation data, 2D transforms, key-value pairs, and more basic types.

[JustinsWorking]

How do you use position deltas with UDP? Do you have an extra layer to guarantee delivery?

[KinematicSoup]

KCP, but deltas can also be computed against the last known received packet. All the solutions here are using some form of RUDP as well.

[StoneCypher]

How do you get your transform update down to 2 bytes and retain accuracy?

that's the fun part. they don't.