We delayed trying compression because we figured the overhead of compressing/decompressing would be prohibitive. When we finally gave it a try, though, it was a huge success. Bandwidth used dropped significantly, and the game seemed much more "snappy" than before.
The time required to compress/decompress the data is significantly less than the time saved by sending less information.
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DavidRM
Samu Games
http://www.samugames.com
The zlib home page is http://www.cdrom.com/pub/infozip/zlib/
The official zlib ftp site is
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/infozip/zlib/
zlib is used in the Linuz/Unix gzip/gunzip commands. It's fast and compresses reasonably well.
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DavidRM
Samu Games
http://www.samugames.com
) the thought occurred to me that some sort of data compression might improve connection speed. Picture this: all the packets you send would be compressed (maybe with pkzip?) and then upon recieving a packet the client would decompress it. Now, i'm guessing that this would create a significant performance hit, but, I don't think it would be an issue on high end systems, like my own. Of course, multiplayer data compression could already be common place and i'm just wasting my time. Just a thought...-Chlorine
