Donate for a better server?

[RayvenQ]

What sort of bandwidth usage are yuo guys going through on a average weekly/monthly basis? Just for curiosities sake.

[loftar]

Each client consumes an average of about 2-3 kB/s outwards (from our point of view), and a fraction of that in the other direction.

I've never been interested in cumulative statistics (since there are no cumulative quotas on Jorb's connection), so I've never kept any; but assuming that usage varies sinusoidally over the course of a day from "full" usage of about 300 users to half of that, the daily average would be 225 simultaneous users, leading to a daily usage of about 225 * 3 * 3600 * 24 = 58 GB, or about 1.5-2.0 TB per month. That's just a guess, though.

[ViciousGamer04]

you can choose wich type of banner you wanna put on. The one where you need to click give you more money, the one that don't need clicks, give lesser money. In both case, when you reach 100$ they pay you.
Anyway google is only one of lots of site.

Sounds like what you're refering to is Google Adsense. With the site traffic that haven gets they could probably get close to $100 a month as long as they do proper metatag-targeting so the Google bots can display extremely relevant ads. I was a little while back with an extremly tiny blog at the beginning of it making about $30 a month from it from Adsense when I was still new at that kind of stuff and this site is quiteeee a bit bigger then my one blog.

[Ejnekor]

Is it possible to have all data (graphic that is) stored on user`s disc? Like option you may enable to have it there, so you wont need to send graphic data from server as well?
I would think it may easy up some of server job here.

Just a whild suggestion, dont beat me up!

[Granger]

Each client consumes an average of about 2-3 kB/s outwards (from our point of view),

2-3KB is everything from ingame data to video and audio resource files?

In case you could serve the media via HTTP (as i have seen somewhere there is an option in the code to add layered loaders for resources) it could be an idea to offload that to mirrors (which maybe some of the users could supply since they might by chance have free resources on their own severs available and are willing to donate some of them) to cut this out of the picture for starters.

But i must say i'm astonished by the bandwith consumed per client (since it feels a quite high to me for what is going on), so i looked a bit closer if the client (Pacho's at insane resolution) might give me some hints.

Some questions which come into my mind:

When opening a container the first time in a session the server has to transfer a list of what's in there to the client. Now when i open a cupboard, move a step (so it closes) and open it again - does the client get the whole list again, or does it receive something like it's the same as of last time you saw it (and then a list of things that maybe have changed - as long as this would be smaller as the complete list) ?

When moving about i see whole blocks of tiles spring into and out of existance at the corner of my visibility range (like moving a tile W several 100 or so tiles get populated, then when moving one tile E the stuff there vanishes again). Are these contents transfered every time - or - does the server when i again move a tile W just tells the client to display what it had just seen before i just moved a tile to the east (plus a delta in case something happened there)? (i could provide screenshots to illustrate what i mean in case words won't get the message over)

Should you retransmit everything every time i have no further questions how you end up with 2-3 kB/s per user.

For example take a farmer: he logs in in his house and then leaves it to harvest one of his many fields (complex outside area has to load, which - say - is 10kB of info for all the crops and other stuff around there), after inventory is full with caroots he enters the house to store them.

When he's leaving the house 30 seconds later there are two possible outcomes:

Have smart caching so the server can simply tell the client use what was there 30 seconds ago (plus a delta containing the information that that one crop decided to grow in the meanwhile), ending up with a few 100 bytes pushed over the line.

Or play it simple and end up with having to push the contents for the whole area again. And again. And again... ending up with megabytes of mainly identical data being pushed to the client over and over again. And that is for one client only.

Surely, you would have to hold a representation of what each client currently knows about the world in the server, but RAM and CPU is quite cheap and available - compared to connectivity.

[sabinati]

Is it possible to have all data (graphic that is) stored on user`s disc? Like option you may enable to have it there, so you wont need to send graphic data from server as well?
I would think it may easy up some of server job here.

Just a whild suggestion, dont beat me up!

it already does that

[Ejnekor]

it already does that

Oh? I was puzzled by small client file and no additional files lying around... Or where does it saves everything then?

Edit: nwm, I never knew about java cache before .

[Flame]

58 gb per day is an huge amount of data. This game have a poor graphic that dont need so much bytes. If alone in the dark 1 is 8mg and is 3d, i'm sure that hh, 2d, can be more light if you are carefull to make every single img in 256 colors, lesser size etc etc. If you work ALL the graphic to make it more lighter, you'll cut half of the size of the game and bandwith. Warning to not understimate it only because server say that don't work so much. This game should be lighter than now and it is a matter of details, picture per picture.

If you use 2 tera per month, when you'll be beta on a real server, you'll need a server that cost 400$ montly and 5k$ for the activation, usually.

I dunno if you whould change the server one day, but if you'll want, you need to work on the game to optimize every graphic. (i dunno about the code, i've worked only with the graphic in my experience so i know that usually it is the bigger problem of bytes size in each game).

2 tera are too expensive. I saw forums with 4k users and 1 tera of usage. A forum is light but 4k users have signs, pictures and avatars. That mean that if the graphic is well worked, the bytes are few and when you have 4k users, you feel the difference.

[Granger]

58 gb per day is an huge amount of data.

Yes, at least for <500 concurrent users.

This game have a poor graphic that dont need so much bytes.

Yes again.

If alone in the dark 1 is 8mg and is 3d, i'm sure that hh, 2d, can be more light if you are carefull to make every single img in 256 colors, lesser size etc etc. If you work ALL the graphic to make it more lighter, you'll cut half of the size of the game and bandwith.

This is where you are wrong. Should you measure the internal bandwith between game core and presentation layer of aitd1 then you'll get very different metrics.

Warning to not understimate it only because server say that don't work so much. This game should be lighter than now and it is a matter of details, picture per picture.

The images are imho not the real problem (well, maybe except the minimaps).

If you use 2 tera per month, when you'll be beta on a real server, you'll need a server that cost 400$ montly and 5k$ for the activation, usually.

I have no clue where you buy your servers, but quad core 16GB machine, 1TB disk space and including 2TB traffic/month and redundant uplink is obtainable for roughly 100€ per month - no setup fee in case you take a 12 month plan.

I dunno if you whould change the server one day, but if you'll want, you need to work on the game to optimize every graphic. (i dunno about the code, i've worked only with the graphic in my experience so i know that usually it is the bigger problem of bytes size in each game).

Again, the gfx should not be the problem - the data pushed from server to the clients to feed them the state of the gameworld is a way more interesting target for optimisation.

[Flame]

if isnt the graphic, that usually is the heaviest thing in a game, what is the problem with the game then? O.o? A code can't be so much heavy.

Btw, i've used alone 1 for example, because it didnt had Textures, so it is almost only code and he have event in real time, timers, combinations of items and stuff like this, that isnt' so far from hh, just more somple. This because i thought that the code, without graphic, cant be SO heavy to take so much bandwith.