Hey all, I'm halfway through making my game multiplayer now, and at the moment I'm wondering how it's going to perform over the net. To get an idea of how many players my game can support, I'd like to know what the current acceptable upload and download rates are for both clients and servers. I imagine that LAN would have a much larger bandwidth.. but by how much? Also, when I eventually do finish my game.. what are some of my options regarding hosting? I'm designing it so it can be played on LAN.. but also hosted over the net, just like Counter Strike. If I wanted to get a company to host my game (such as GameArena over here in Australia), would I have to pay them? Or do they host popular games for free? I know that there are a few Soldat servers over here in Australia.. and I wouldn't have thought that MM (the creator of Soldat) would have had to pay for them himself, since there are Soldat servers all around the world. So yeah, 2 questions. Bandwidth, and hosting options.. Any thoughts? Thanks.

Antheus has a point with the no free lunch thing, there are loads of options out there for Dedicated servers or you can look into colocation of your own server.

As far as how many players your game can support, you can really calculate that on your own to find your requirements. How much RAM do you intend to have on the system, how much RAM does your game require per player, per map etc. add that all up. For the bandwidth, how much data is sent every second, every minute, assuming the server is running at capacity. calculate that out for the monthly max, because you don't want to be stuck with excess transfer fees. It's highly unlikely that any dedicated server plan would not support your transfer rate, but make sure your data per second doesn't exceed your max up bandwidth or your burstable limit.

Do the math so you know what you need, then shop around. Don't pay more than you expect it to be worth, some dedicated server plans are $40-$50 a month, some colocation plans are as low also, but they go way up in price really fast. The best thing to do though, is always shop around.

You can assume that clients with broadband will reliable get 384 kilobit downstream, and 20 kilobit upstream (based on some crappy cable connections).
If you want to aim for something higher, you can assume 1,024 kilobit down and 128 kilobit up. Xbox Live certification requires that your game work with a 64 kilobit uplink for the "hosting" client (and all others).

A wireless LAN varies between 11 Mbit/s and 240 Mbit/s, although there is usually packet loss and jitter involved. A wired LAN typically is either 100 Mbit/s or 1,000 Mbit/s, although you can now get 10,000 Mbit/s LANs too (at a cost). So, expecting a factor of between 100 and 1,000 difference between LAN and internet bandwidth is reasonable. Same thing for latencies: 1 ms is a reasonable wired LAN latency, whereas 100 ms is a reasonable internet latency.

Networking bandwidth in bulk costs about $10 per megabit per second per month. I e, a gigabit/s of network packet routing for a month will cost you about $10k. That does not include the physical link needed to send/receive the bits -- that varies wildly in cost. In a well connected co-location facility, getting a gigabit ethernet port access may be essentially free (included with the cost of space); if you need to run your own DS-3 or SONET or whatever, it can outstrip the cost of the bandwidth itself, depending on length and already available infrastructure in the streets around your location.

Yes, those guys in yellow helmets with a backhoe still matter to the high-tech world of internetworking :-)

So does that mean that Valve is paying for all those counter strike servers around the world? Or do they usually just let the community create the servers for them?

Tons of high-action games like Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2, Soldat, etc distribute their server and let people run it. They maintain non-gaming servers for the lobby (tracks the list of active servers) and, where applicable, updates and such. Once you get a list of servers, your client just asks the server for the ping, player count, current map, etc. Anyone can host a server from anywhere.

Of course, to get people to host servers for you, you'll have to have a good and popular game. If only a few servers are being hosted, most people will probably get poor performance since they're so far away from the server's location.

Ahh, I see. That's what I wanted to know.

I can design my game to be hosted by others, and if all goes well, the community will provide servers for me. If not, then at least it'll be a fun LAN game.

I don't mind hosting just 1 master server to keep a track of other servers.

On the topic of a master server though.. Is it possible to combine the hosting for the master server with the hosting for my website? This would save me from having to pay extra - and most website hosting is heaps cheap and has a massive bandwidth. Seeing as I won't actually be running the game on the master server, but just keeping a database, would this be possible?

Also, my master server is going to keep a track of the player's statistics - such as their experience and unlocked skills, etc.. People get experience by playing online and killing other people, and this info gets sent to the master server. My concern is that if people are able to host their own servers, they could cheat by sending false experience values to the master server. Also, they could make their own custom maps, which are really really easy to get XP on, and just play on them to level up really quickly.

Is there some way that I could designate certain servers to be 'rated'? So only rated servers contribute to your global score? How would one go about doing something like that?

Thanks!

Seems like it might be a bit of work, but it's good to know that it's possible.

try a cheap vps or dedicated server first, until you have tested it.