don’t know if someone else got this issue, but to me boundless is causing a lot of traffic.
I got between 8 (in busy evening times) and 16 Mbit/s download and guess up to 0.9 Mbits upload or something.
I know it is not super fast, but till now I played no game causing this problem.
But when I am in Boundless it causes so much traffic, that my girlfriend sometimes cannot even download or stream something. We both are connected via cable to the router, so should have equal permissions in traffic usage. I don’t know if this is depending on something with your servers. Just wanted to tell that I have this issue.
Some routers you can tell them what traffic should have priority. You might be able to make her traffic have more priority and allow her to download/stream. It is not the best answer, but it might be a temporary fix until the Devs figure out what is going on.
Thanks, but already had this in mind. My router has a prefab option of how much each port gets.
I think Boundless is at the moment just unusually much traffic using.
This can either be the game itself, using up a lot of traffic or the current servers. I don’t know how the amazon servers word.
I would be surprised if Boundless was killing your connection.
There are a few bandwidth states to consider:
Starting the game: When you first start there will be a burst of network activity as the game requests all the world chunks around you. This will push your connection. But this will only happen for a few seconds / minutes depending on your connection speed.
Moving around: As you gradually move around additional chunks are requested. But at a much lower rate than #1. This is not a constant bandwidth.
Not-moving around: If you’re stationary the game only streams ~5KB/s with the servers. This is a minimum continuous streaming requirement.
If you’re having network contention see if it happens during #1, #2 and / or #3. Your connection should easily be able to handle #3. #2 is irregular (ie. not continuous) and #1 only happens for a few minutes.
Additional details will help us isolate if Boundless is causing a problem here. (But I doubt it - better to explore options on your router.)
My connection rate is described within my first post. I always move within 8 and 16 Mbits.
Connected with a cable, wi fi is pretty unstable, I don’t like that. Inappropriate for gaming in my opinion.
Think I played all Blizzard Games, Wildstar, Elder Scrolls, etc. Never had high latency / bandwith probs at eu servers, as far as I can remember…
I’ll keep that in mind. But yet I have no idea how to check how much traffic particularly Boundless is causing. Do I need special programs to monitore with program is using which amount of bandwith? Also shows me how much bandwith in total I currently have?
First I wanted to mention that the blue marked are has Bytes/second as Units and the red marked area has Bits/second. I want to avoid wrong interpretion.
now the different states:
not moving in a loaded area about 15 KB/s (as you can see in the screenshot)
moving after an server area loaded about 200 KB/s
connecting to a unknown (not yet visited) server and directly moving about 500 KB/s
So here we talk about bytes. As everyone know 1 Byte are 8 Bits. so 500 KB/s means 4 Mbits/s.
My internet is Maximum having 16.000 Mbits (when there is not much use in my neighbourhood).
In rush hour times it reduces drastically so it can fall down to 8-10 Mbits/s.
Means if I am playing boundless I am occupying 2-4 Mbits. That can of course slow down my girlfriends internet usage.
So I guess she is right when she complains about less fast streaming series that she is watching.
When your neighborhood is busy, you use 1/16 of your lowest probable bandwidth moving around on a new server. If your girlfriend complains about streaming rates (and again, what could she possibly be watching that’s more important than Boundless? Whoops, there I go again), then the likelihood is that your modem or router is having a load issue–especially if she’s streaming over wi-fi while across the domicile, especially if she’s using a 5GHz connection. Some appliances don’t do well with simultaneous uploading and downloading–I went through that with DSL years ago and switched to cable to get a higher data rate.
Based on your comment that your neighborhood traffic affects your data rate, I assume you’re on cable (WAN) rather than DSL (LAN) but since I don’t know where you are, I can’t be 100% sure. If you’re DSL you should have the interfacing device checked out and get a line-check done. If you’re on cable get the device checked out. (And check all other devices that might be involved outside of the one that provides the base connectivity.)
Hit up http://www.speedtest.net/ during different times of the day to ensure you’re really getting the paid-for data rate, too. Do it through your router/firewall, and do it on a direct connection to see if there’s a difference. So far the way the numbers add up it doesn’t look like Boundless is the actual issue–it might be revealing an issue, though.
Hi Brook, if I want to tell her my priorities… well she is brasilian. You would probably see me never again xD
I know the ratio between bits and bytes. That’s why I explained. To make people who somewhen read this post understand what we are talking about. Just don’t get what you want to tell me with:
However if the ratio is 10, the calculation would have even worse effects.
What I can say is: I am indeed talking about kilo Bits, when I say I have a maximum of 16.000 kb download.
And what I also mean is, that Boundless takes 2-4 mb (when walking through pre-loaded or un-loaded server area). I didn’t miscalculated.
I also don’t really know why you tried to correct my calculation o.o I checked my post once more, and completely took the right units. I think you did not read right. My post is exactly reflecting what you said. However, I don’t want to argue about that. But you statement with 1/16 is wrong. 500 kB/s = 4 Mb/s = 1/4 * 16 Mb/s = 1/2 * 8 Mb/s.
Once again the question to @james, should it be like that? so much traffic?
Edit: I worked with the speedtest you recommended and several others. They comfirmed my statement about minimum and maximum data capacity I have. I have DSL 16.000.
PS: this is an serious issue. I know a lot about options in network configurations and bit/byte calculations. I don’t want to bother dev’s with something unimportant in support topics. the download rates appear while using Boundless specifically. And as you saw in the beginning, I used the recommended Ressource monitor. If you tell me now the ressource monitor is lying, then I’m out
The game clearly needs to communicate with the servers for assets, world chunks and entities. There are some improvements planned to try and reduce the data sent, so it’ll go down, but at the same time - they’ll be more entities in the game (more creatures, more players, etc) so the data will increase.
I think we’re already reasonably efficient. We only send what is required to keep the bandwidth down and the game responsive. I’d be interested to know if Boundless was significantly more demanding than other online games. But I doubt it.
Additional: We’ll keep working on making the game more efficient. But there will always be a minimum required connection. I would hope 8Mb/s would be sufficient - but can’t promise anything at this stage in development.
Double Additional: The game doesn’t do anything particularly funky for networking. So there is no reason why contention on your network would be unduly effected by Boundless. It’s a good networking citizen. Potentially there are some networking / router options you can tweak. (But I’m no expert here.)
Boundless has bandwidth requirements that many online games don’t have (as the world itself requires a lot more data than many game meshes would be), but to compare to the obvious Minecraft, some googling suggests its bandwidth is roughly:
6.7KiB/s whilst standing there doing nothing, up to 50KiB/s when flying in a straight line (Noting that minecraft fly speed is roughly our sprint speed) and spikes of 500KiB/s when teleporting to a new area of the world.
Noting also, that minecrafts chunk data is often significantly smaller than our own because of there (cough) rather flat, featureless worlds.
Our ‘standing’ bandwidth will probably remain somewhere around where it is now, we know there are things to be improved, but as James says, we also know that the number of entities is going to go up, not down. However we do have plans to do far more caching of things like chunk data client side so that moving around a world you’ve already visited (and that hasn’t massively changed since you were last there) will be both way faster, and not require a load of bandwidth.
And, again, kilobits -> megabits is a factor of 1000, not a factor of 8 or 10.
The network tool shows 192Kbits per second, not 192KBytes. The Gesamt column, in Bytes/sec is still only 15KBits per second, which is far below your threshold.
Now, that being said: @james@lucadeltodecso , I can see Boundless pulling 10Mbit/sec some times when I run it. The usual moving around rate is about 200Kbits/sec, which doubles when my character runs. When I crest into a new view, it spikes to 1Mbit/sec for a short interval and settles back down. Seeing 6-8Mbit/second spikes isn’t unusual for complicated far fields. Traffic like that will definitely saturate @Smoothy’s connection, especially if his machine has trouble keeping up with the block loading/meshing and requires re-sends. The idea of 500Kbit/sec spikes seems a bit optimistic to me based on what I just saw this morning.
There is nothing at all we can do about Smoothy’s girlfriend being Brazilian, so we’ll have to look elsewhere for a solution. (And by “we” I mean someone else, of course, since I’m not on the team.)
I feel very misunderstood. of course kb → mb is factor 1000.
but kB (Bytes) → kb (bits) is factor 8.
However I don’t want to argue about this understanding. My numbers are what was recorded. Just thought it is pretty high. So in my situation I sometimes have to resign on playing probably. This topic was more about informing what I recorded and asking if it could be the game traffic. Seems like it is.
Is there a way to increase traffic for #3?
I use a hybrid technology mixed with DSL/LTE. I only have dsl 384 kbit/s and a LTE connection. Everytime I stand/move around i got a big rubberbanding because LTE activates/deactivates/activates/deactivates. In other games, the bandwidth overall is not as high or they require a steady connection with higher bandwidth all time which increases my gameplay.
I have to turn off DSL atm, to play boundless fluently.
It’s never a good idea to incease the Traffic artificial. Because you have that exceptional situation it would be a waste of traffic if all other players have to waste bandwidth.
If you don’t like to turn off your DSL you could try to increas your own traffic artificial (Upload something to a FTP-Server and limit the used bandwidth as low as possible for your LTE to work). [That’s a bad idea either, but it’s only local for you]
It’ll naturally increase when the game expands. Also as the worlds get busier with more players, creatures and entities our concern will be sending too much rather than too little data.
If this was a significant issue hitting more people we could always add a minimum packet size to every message. But I don’t really know if this is a common issue for players.
Yeah me and my bro have the same problem. lol We both have decent system’s and internet plus my bro bought a new router which is rock solid. But we seem to have alot of traffic and slow network alot of the time we both play in the network test version of the game.This massively helps performance.