Well you only need to send the outfit information once, and have it generated asynchronously on the client, so you won't need to send the info over and over again. If you send the information to the client whenever changes are being made
ex:
- other player enters the area -> send his equipment info to the client, generate character on client, store character in cache
- other/own player switchest clothes -> generate the new equipment on the client
- player dies -> same
etc, etc, etc. plus, you can compress your packets,making bytes even less important.

Also, a good occlusion system may help you reduce bandwidth. For example, I'm standing near the pub's wall, but my line of sight doesn't allow me to see inside -> do not send/get info on the characters inside.

You may also want to check out This Post for some more Shadowrun stuff. I'd kindof like to see what your demo's like also, being an avid Shadowrun junky myself. ;)

[Edited by - Gyrthok on January 12, 2005 7:52:18 PM]

Quote:

Original post by Vaipa- Well you only need to send the outfit information once, and have it generated asynchronously on the client, so you won't need to send the info over and over again. If you send the information to the client whenever changes are being made ex: - other player enters the area -> send his equipment info to the client, generate character on client, store character in cache - other/own player switchest clothes -> generate the new equipment on the client - player dies -> same etc, etc, etc. plus, you can compress your packets,making bytes even less important. Also, a good occlusion system may help you reduce bandwidth. For example, I'm standing near the pub's wall, but my line of sight doesn't allow me to see inside -> do not send/get info on the characters inside.

yes, of course, i would only send character outfit information when things changed. and yes, i do visability filtering. still, this adds up.

for example, lets say i go with coloring outfits. bare outfits are 4 bytes - head, arms, chest, legs. now, with coloring, this adds 8 bytes (2 bytes for each clothing piece) to say the R/G/B values of that clothing piece. this is a total of 12 bytes.

if 30 players are on a map, when one person enters a map, he must be told about these 30 players - this is where things start to add up fast. that 12 bytes just became 360 bytes. adding a possibly 360 byte overhead to the already large packet could really drain the bandwith.

Hmmm..
*edit* oops, my math sucks XP
With Coloring
30(users) x 12 = 360 Bytes
1000(users) x 12 = 12000 bytes

Without Coloring
30(users) x 4 = 120 Bytes
1000(users) x 4 = 4000 bytes

Now, you should factor in things like Movement, Actions (like attacking, talking, loading map, etc) and things like that before deciding that you can't afford it. For 30 users, 240 extra bytes really doesn't seem like much when you add it all together, but then again streamlining everything to as small as possible is good, especially when you end up dealing with alot more than 30, every byte counts after that. But this all depends on whether or not you have an artist to do alot of clothing images, or cover-up the lack of artwork with coloring.

And this is all assuming the current copyright holder doesn't smack you around for ripping off Shadowrun. XD

[Edited by - Gyrthok on January 13, 2005 6:11:12 AM]

hi Grythok,

thanks for the reply. indeed, i have already factored in everything else. that 360 bytes isnt by itself. that is 360 bytes added to the already large packet i must send a player when he enters a map.

and, even at 5 players, every byte counts [smile]. especially considering im planning on running a dedicated server on my cable modem. my goal is to handle 30 players, but id like it to scale as good as possible, so if i add another server or get a dedicated connection then it will scale properly.

about the art, like i said, im not looking for anything entirely special here. 4 directions x 5 frames each direction is only 20 images for each item. im even willing to lower this to 4 frames if its nessasary. ive played an indy MMORPG which used 3 frames for their characters, and it didnt look very bad at all. of course, he used small sprites, smaller then what mine are.

btw, i am not violating any copyrights. Wiz Kids, or Microsoft, or whoever owns the SR name does not own the idea of a futuristic world in which people can live and go on runs and kill each other [grin]. in fact, no one can own any idea. i dont plan on using any coprighten names, and furthermore, my game is NOT a SR clone, but is just inspired by it a lot [smile].

Quote:

Original post by Gyrthok Hmmm.. *edit* oops, my math sucks XP With Coloring 30(users) x 12 = 360 Bytes 1000(users) x 12 = 12000 bytes Without Coloring 30(users) x 4 = 120 Bytes 1000(users) x 4 = 4000 bytes Now, you should factor in things like Movement, Actions (like attacking, talking, loading map, etc) and things like that before deciding that you can't afford it. For 30 users, 240 extra bytes really doesn't seem like much when you add it all together, but then again streamlining everything to as small as possible is good, especially when you end up dealing with alot more than 30, every byte counts after that. But this all depends on whether or not you have an artist to do alot of clothing images, or cover-up the lack of artwork with coloring. And this is all assuming the current copyright holder doesn't smack you around for ripping off Shadowrun. XD

What size of Sprites are you using exactly? and/or how many races do you plan on having?

im actually now leaning towards scrapping other races, since it might look cheezy they are all the same dimension.

but, in SR, wasnt the main character the same dimensions as other characters you could control? e.g. the troll guy in the bar at the left part of the middle city and Stark are 2 i can think of off the top of my head.

i was thinking about it more, and if i make entire outfits that covered the whole body rather then individual pieces ala UO, i could send the whole outfit as 1 byte instead of 4. so full body outfits (e.g. robes) are a good cheat to save on bandwith. also, i can actually only use 1 byte for color. im just going to use a lookup table which maps a byte to an RGB value, then i just send the byte to represent the color of something. this limits me to 256 different colors in the game, which is way more then enough. i have a suspicion this is how UO did it as well [smile].

Hmm... In the SEGA version of Shadowrun the dimensions of the characters were all pretty uniform (though the dwarfs and elves had different height/width, they didn't exceed the parameters set by the other races). In the SNES version though the Orcs/Trolls/Dwarves were all different sizes, and the only commonly sized group was the Humans/Elves.

Combining all pieces of equipment together could work pretty well, in both the SEGA/SNES versions of Shadowrun they only let you equip 1 piece of armor/weapon at a time. Any other form of customization after that came from implants/stats, *which* weren't visually displayed for the character.

[Edited by - Gyrthok on January 15, 2005 4:20:53 PM]