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Comment by spidy__ | Hacker News Reader

Reallly?? So have you published something so far? Can i read something? Sounds like you got some interesting ideas.

I will be showcasing something on hackernews soon! Basically I found a way to “compress” a multiplayer game state from ~100KB+ to ~1KB

But it’s only for the game I’m building and it’s not pure compression work, I had to do some tricky things

And just for comparison, my absolute best compression method managed to get down to 10s of KB, but the real unlock got to the ~1KB figures. Note these numbers are ALL post-compression numbers. This is not raw data vs compressed data. The ~100KB figure IS POST COMPRESSION.

For context these numbers are for a grid based game where players can perform 4 actions per second, and the numbers I’m sharing are for 30 minutes of gameplay with anywhere from 2-1024+ players (human players) playing simultaneously

So if you do the math, my compression feat is effectively ~99% compression on naive best case. And if you compare it to the raw data, it’s closing in on an even higher number than that I haven’t done the math but the raw data is another factor of 10 greater than ~100KB so the “compression” versus raw data is ~99.9%

It sounds absolutely bullshit I know :D

But I will be posting a blog post soon once I release the game.

I do compression in quotes because it’s not a pure compression feat, the 99%+ feat is effectively being clever about what actually requires compression to achieve the same outcome

Sounds interesting man, soo am a bit confused maybe but can you run this on enwik9?

Probably not lol, it’s very specific to PvP multiplayer games, tested on my own game. But maybe I can extract the core concept to enwiki9 but I doubt it

I was working on a multiplayer game a while ago, and one of the iterations of the netcode was "thin client" where clients just sent input, server simulated the game, and it dumped world state onto the pipe at 60hz. I didn't ship that version but I estimated a $3000 bandwidth bill with that approach!

I started looking into diffing the state, compression, etc... until I realized, wait a minute! My player movement is linear so I only need a packet for start and stop! And so I achieved near infinite efficiency improvement :)

I think the word is... a specialized solution can beat a general one.

Also, "remembering what the program actually needs to do, and just making it do that"... I de-pessimized the netcode: https://youtube.com/watch?v=pgoetgxecw8

$3000 bill wow!!

Clever insight :) yes a specialised solution usually wins! Good effort

Did you end up publishing your game?

My game has been in development hell for several years. I've worked out most of the single-node issues and now I'm working out how to scale it to multiple nodes. (It is embarrassingly parallel, but I am embarrassingly stupid!)

Meanwhile I'm learning how to ship a trivial single player game -- I went with Pong, and it turns out polishing Pong and getting it ready for mass consumption is a surprisingly labor-intensive endeavour (yes, even with the fabled miracle machine assistants!)

But, it should probably be online by the end of July. Like, for real this time :)

What are you working on?

I hope you can get around to shipping!

I’m working on a game engine/platform and my first game on the engine.

Lots of compression work so that I can fit the games into qr codes which I’m super stubborn about achieving and finally achieved for 30 minute+ games for N number of players

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