Tanzania Ngamia Booty

An important part of making a complex multiplayer game like Awesomenauts is optimising bandwidth usage. Without optimisations, just sending position updates for one character to one other player already costs 240 bytes per second (30 updates per second at 4 bytes each for both X and Y). And this is just a fraction of what we need to send: Awesomenauts can have up to 35 characters running around the game world, and we need to synchronise much more than just their positions. As you can see, bandwidth usage quickly spirals out of control, so we need to be smarter than just naively sending all the data all the time. In the many months we spent on bandwidth optimisation, we employed lots of different techniques. The one I would like to talk about today can massively decrease bandwidth by crunching numbers on the level of individual bits. This technique not only worked great for the multiplayer implementation of Awesomenauts, but I am now also using this extensively for reducing the size of...

One of the biggest challenges for us in the coming period is implementing replays and spectator mode in Awesomenauts . It might not be immediately obvious, but this is actually an incredibly complex problem to solve. We have the very first bits working now, so here is a video in which I show and explain what we have so far: Our first target with replays is to get them working offline, so you store replays of your own matches on your own harddisk and you can email those files to your friends by hand. Storing and browsing replays through online servers comes after that and is still a long way away. We hope that the offline replays can go in beta before Christmas, but right now it seems like that might still be too early for how complex this all is. So why are replays so difficult to build? There are a ton of reasons for this. One is that players need to be able to do live spectating. In high-level tournament matches, we currently sometimes get near to 1000 simultaneous viewers for a sing...