Battle(non)sense · @BattleNonSense
1st Jun 2016 from TwitLonger
#Overwatch has no "High Bandwidth" option on console? If so then that might be a clue why we have the 60/20 update rates.
Both Microsoft and Sony have a rule book which the developers have to follow if they want to have their game pass certification and release on these consoles.
Part of that confidential (you need to be a registered developer with a dev kit console to get access to it and you are not allowed to share it) rule book are Networking Requirements, these say:
- how much bandwidth the game is allowed to use (which is very little and that highly limits how frequently you can receive/send data)
- how much latency a player is allowed to have before you can disconnect him from your server
- how much packet loss a player is allowed to have in general before you can disconnect him from your server
- how much packet loss a player is allowed to have in a 10 second timeframe general before you can disconnect him from your server
So when you consider that you send data for your actions alone, but receive data for 11 other players, then even tho the bandwidth does not increase by factor 11, this still makes clear why you might have to reduce the receive rate to just 20 updates per second.
We have seen during the rework of BF4's netcode that the developers had to put A LOT of effort into optimizing how much bandwidth the game needs to also get rates of more than 30 to work on PS4 and XB1. So it would appear that BLIZZARD faces the same challenge to increase the receive rate of the client beyond 20.
Guess I will have a look at the bandwidth usage next. ;-)