i have a few ideas for *very* simple compression on my serialized buffers that i send back and forth. but, i think that there is already compression on packets in hardware, is writing compression on packets in the engine worth it?

[edit] whoops, misread the question...

Yes. Compression is worth it, but it really depends what kind of data you are sending. I think* that a lot of games compress their data appropriately depending on the chosen connection speed.

* I dont actually know this, its an educated guess.

[edited by - sark on January 14, 2003 5:54:31 AM]

Just think about downloading something compressed and something uncompressed from the web, if it's compressed it takes less time, but it has to be a big data to worth the compression. Compressing *very* little data could increase the number of bytes depending on the compression algorithm.

[edited by - xaxa on January 14, 2003 6:00:12 AM]

Just to give an example, Half-Life doesn''t actually compress the data it sends over the network. However, it does its best to reduce the amount of data sent. This includes obvious stuff like sending only information about items in the player''s PVS (Potentially Visible Set). However, it also tries to reduce the amount of data sent by bitpacking. I.e. if you really only need 5 bits of a char, only those 5 bits are sent over the network.

cu,
Prefect

yes, i know you need to do everything possible to cut down on bandwidth usage, but my question was that isn''t it normally so that when you compress something, its less compressable by other algorithms? rar-ing a zip file does hardly anything, and i THOUGHT either the drivers for the network card/modem or the modem/net card itself did hardware compression. if thats the case, won''t it make my compression make the net card''s compressoin not do anything? if thats the case, i''d rather let the card do it, its tried and proven, mine most likely will not work as well.

Yes, modems do compress data, but not all of them, and not all connections. The type of compression that it uses is a simple history compression method which has very little over-head, but is also not very efficient for most files, so compressing data manually may still yeild better results (very likely) than leaving it up to the modem. Also, a bunch of modem connections don''t use any sort of compression, so these would also benefit. Also, this was assuming a modem connection, as you didn''t specifiy what kind of connection you are using. If the compression method is simple enough, best way to find out if it is more efficient or not, is to try it .