Synchronizing 1000 characters
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Hello,
We'd like to be able to synchronize 1000 or more different characters and I'm wondering if my approach is going to run into some unexpected issues.
I imagine having 1000 PhotonViews would not be a good idea, so I've opted to collect all the data from those characters together and send it all at once, via a single PhotonView (synchronization, not RPC). Fortunately, I'm able to minimize the number of bytes for each character to a fairly small number, and not all data from all characters need to be sent every time. I think I can keep the combined amount of data under 1kb per frame.
I'm sending this data as unreliable and will implement my own acknowledgement and resend system. The resend system works on a per-variable basis, so every package will have exactly the changes that have not yet been acknowledged by all other clients.
It's only the host that needs to send a lot of data. It's received by all the clients. Each non-host client will send a small amount of data to inform the other clients about what the player is doing.
I'm mostly worried about the fact this goes against the usual way Photon is used, where there are a lot of PhotonViews sending many small packets. I would, instead, be sending one big packet per frame. When experimenting this, I sometimes experienced a problem where a client simply stopped receiving packets, with no explanation why. That seemed to always happen when I upped the amount of data over a specific threshold (unfortunately I've forgotten what the threshold was).
Is there some guidelines on how big you can and should make your packets? And also: I'm not trying to circumvent the 500 (I think) packets per second rule.
Thank you in advance for any insight you might be able to share.
We'd like to be able to synchronize 1000 or more different characters and I'm wondering if my approach is going to run into some unexpected issues.
I imagine having 1000 PhotonViews would not be a good idea, so I've opted to collect all the data from those characters together and send it all at once, via a single PhotonView (synchronization, not RPC). Fortunately, I'm able to minimize the number of bytes for each character to a fairly small number, and not all data from all characters need to be sent every time. I think I can keep the combined amount of data under 1kb per frame.
I'm sending this data as unreliable and will implement my own acknowledgement and resend system. The resend system works on a per-variable basis, so every package will have exactly the changes that have not yet been acknowledged by all other clients.
It's only the host that needs to send a lot of data. It's received by all the clients. Each non-host client will send a small amount of data to inform the other clients about what the player is doing.
I'm mostly worried about the fact this goes against the usual way Photon is used, where there are a lot of PhotonViews sending many small packets. I would, instead, be sending one big packet per frame. When experimenting this, I sometimes experienced a problem where a client simply stopped receiving packets, with no explanation why. That seemed to always happen when I upped the amount of data over a specific threshold (unfortunately I've forgotten what the threshold was).
Is there some guidelines on how big you can and should make your packets? And also: I'm not trying to circumvent the 500 (I think) packets per second rule.
Thank you in advance for any insight you might be able to share.
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