Forum Multiplayer Region of Interest Management via Inter-Room Communication

Discussion and help relating to the PlayerIO Multiplayer API.

Region of Interest Management via Inter-Room Communication

Postby hyperion51 » July 21st, 2017, 4:29 pm

Greetings,

As I understand it, PlayerIO requires players to be separated into rooms, which can be considered a trivial form of ROI management. As long as there is no limitation on when players can be moved from room-to-room, this is sufficient for me to implement a sort of open world for a game like Aetheria where rooms could be connected by wormholes and loading screens.

Aetheria is currently on my backburner as I work on another game, Rust to Dust, the networking for which requires a rather more convincing open world implementation. With what PlayerIO provides by default, a naive grid-based implementation would result in not being able to see players right next to you when you are standing near the border of a grid cell. The best I could accomplish is "sharding" the world into stochastically sampled localized clusters of players not exceeding the room size limit, but that is both a lot of engineering and not likely to yield great results (what if you agree to meet somewhere in-game but the other player was assigned another shard?)

Much better would be if I could communicate between "rooms" in a limited way, for example by assigning each room a cell in a multiresolution grid (so that rooms can expand to cover sparsely populated areas) - and sending to each player in a room the updates (perhaps at a reduced rate) for players in adjacent cells. But as far as I know PlayerIO does not support any kind of messaging between rooms that would allow that. Please let me know if there's an option for that.

Also I would much rather be sending this in an email, but I understand that's a feature of one of your pricing tiers.

Cheers,
Reinier Vens
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Re: Region of Interest Management via Inter-Room Communicati

Postby Henrik » August 12th, 2017, 1:46 am

Hey Reinier,

No, sorry, there's no real-time inter-room messaging. You could use BigDB and polling, but that's admittedly not a very good solution.
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Re: Region of Interest Management via Inter-Room Communicati

Postby hyperion51 » August 12th, 2017, 5:15 pm

Alternatively, I could keep all my players in one big room and use RoI management to lower the message rate. The documentation mentions a limit of 45 players. Is this enforced? Can it be increased? I'd be content if that could be doubled or tripled.
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Re: Region of Interest Management via Inter-Room Communicati

Postby Henrik » August 15th, 2017, 9:25 pm

If you get a private server, you can set the room limits to whatever you want.

The limits on the main cluster are chosen for a reason though, and we do not recommend increasing them. It's better to design your game such that it can handle an arbitrary amount of users in a distributed fashion, but it's your choice. :-)
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Re: Region of Interest Management via Inter-Room Communicati

Postby hyperion51 » August 15th, 2017, 10:17 pm

It's not about what the game can handle, but what users expect. Rust to Dust is targeting the Battle Royale genre, where players expect a lobby to contain 80-100 users maximum at the start of a match, spread out over a large area, contracting to a tiny area as players eliminate each other over the course of about half an hour.
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Re: Region of Interest Management via Inter-Room Communicati

Postby Henrik » August 16th, 2017, 6:03 am

Oh I see, 100 players per room is definitely something you can have on a private cluster.

If I were you, i would develop and beta-test your game on the Main cluster and just live with the 45-player limit, and when you think your game is good enough and can attract enough players, switch to a private cluster and increase the limit.
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Re: Region of Interest Management via Inter-Room Communicati

Postby robertflesch » September 28th, 2017, 2:50 am

I believe to can subscribe to unlimited rooms at the same time.
So another option would be to subscribe to multiple rooms which are adjacent to each other logically.
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