Extremely high network traffic when hosting a game

[Adam.Podstavka]

Hi all, when I host a game, I have a critical issue because the game eats up all my upload bandwidth (2-2.5 Mbps on ADSL and no option to upgrade at my location), but when there are 5+ players, this is not enough, especially during bloodmoon. I don't know why the game needs to send so much data per second to clients. Is there a way Fun Pimps can fix that? We don't want to play PvP on some public dedicated server, we're happy to host our own game, but the bandwidth reqs of the game make it impossible. 

 

Resulting effects are that clients have pings even in minutes during bloodmoon and during regular game it sometimes catches up okay, with pings 20-100ms, but sometimes it goes to 5-20 seconds when there are too much information waiting to be sent to clients. Plus anybody else at our household cannot even play CS, LOL or WOW as their latency goes crazy when I eat up all upload with 7 days to die....

[meganoth]

I have heard from others that the network load of 7D2D isn't too high, but I myself had problems hosting a game from home as well. It may have been network problems with the provider or even insufficient hardware, I never investigated the problem in detail. Maybe there are steps to reduce network load, I don't know of any.

 

If the fun pimps ever decide to rework their network code it will be still months or years in the future until that version arrives at your machine. So I would suggest what I have done:

 

Rent yourself a dedicated server, but don't set it public, set it private. It won't get listed on the server list, instead your players have to enter the IP address and password of the server the first time. And you should add a long and complicated password (12 chars or more) to the configuration and distribute the password only to your friends (obviously).

 

If you are good at operating system stuff (especially if you also know linux) a good alternative to a managed gaming server is renting a barebones server since you have a lot more control over the server and don't depend on the service of the server provider.

 

 

 

[Liesel Weppen]

1 hour ago, Adam.Podstavka said:

Hi all, when I host a game, I have a critical issue because the game eats up all my upload bandwidth (2-2.5 Mbps on ADSL and no option to upgrade at my location), but when there are 5+ players, this is not enough, especially during bloodmoon.

2.5 Mbps is very slow and from my experience not sufficient for 5 players.

Bloodmoon is aan additional different issue, too, mostly caused by performance issues of the host.

Ingame-hosting on my Ryzen 2700X was barely playable during a later bloodmoon with many Zs active. Moving to a dedicated server on an i7-7700K made it a lot better.

Note that 7d2d has different bottlenecks. So it does bottleneck even if it doesn't utilize your CPU at 100%. On my ryzen it dropped the performance for every player to <20fps with the cpu only beeing at ~60% usage with not even a single thread being at 100%. So maybe there are also sync issues between threads. A cpu with higher single-core-perfomance seems to easily outplay cpus with more cores (as the i7-7700K@5Ghz even performs better than my 2700X).

 

1 hour ago, Adam.Podstavka said:

I don't know why the game needs to send so much data per second to clients.

It's a voxel world and every singel voxel needs to be synced with every client.

Also Zs position and their actions need to be synced, shooting and hitting, player positions and actions, too. Every blockdamage done by anybody needs to be synced. So during a bloodmoon where you have lots of Zs active there comes a lot of information together that needs to be transfered to every client.

It's not at all comparable to playing Quake 3 or even Battlefield V.

 

[SylenThunder]

If you're going to host a game, you need 5mbps upload at a minimum, though 10 is what I would really recommend as a minimum.

 

With your internet speeds, you shouldn't try hosting a game. 

[Beelzybub]

9 hours ago, Adam.Podstavka said:

when there are 5+ players, this is not enough

Maybe one of your friends has more bandwidth and can be the host.

[Adam.Podstavka]

19 hours ago, meganoth said:

I have heard from others that the network load of 7D2D isn't too high, but I myself had problems hosting a game from home as well. It may have been network problems with the provider or even insufficient hardware, I never investigated the problem in detail. Maybe there are steps to reduce network load, I don't know of any.

 

If the fun pimps ever decide to rework their network code it will be still months or years in the future until that version arrives at your machine. So I would suggest what I have done:

 

Rent yourself a dedicated server, but don't set it public, set it private. It won't get listed on the server list, instead your players have to enter the IP address and password of the server the first time. And you should add a long and complicated password (12 chars or more) to the configuration and distribute the password only to your friends (obviously).

 

If you are good at operating system stuff (especially if you also know linux) a good alternative to a managed gaming server is renting a barebones server since you have a lot more control over the server and don't depend on the service of the server provider.

 

 

 

Hey Meganoth, thanks for suggestions, sounds reasonable. We'd need to figure out wher we'd get the best price. Managing linux server would not be an issue, in few hours I'd fill in the missing knowledge to manage that, so renting barebones server sounds interesting.  Have a great day!

[Adam.Podstavka]

19 hours ago, Liesel Weppen said:

2.5 Mbps is very slow and from my experience not sufficient for 5 players.

Bloodmoon is aan additional different issue, too, mostly caused by performance issues of the host.

Ingame-hosting on my Ryzen 2700X was barely playable during a later bloodmoon with many Zs active. Moving to a dedicated server on an i7-7700K made it a lot better.

Note that 7d2d has different bottlenecks. So it does bottleneck even if it doesn't utilize your CPU at 100%. On my ryzen it dropped the performance for every player to <20fps with the cpu only beeing at ~60% usage with not even a single thread being at 100%. So maybe there are also sync issues between threads. A cpu with higher single-core-perfomance seems to easily outplay cpus with more cores (as the i7-7700K@5Ghz even performs better than my 2700X).

 

It's a voxel world and every singel voxel needs to be synced with every client.

Also Zs position and their actions need to be synced, shooting and hitting, player positions and actions, too. Every blockdamage done by anybody needs to be synced. So during a bloodmoon where you have lots of Zs active there comes a lot of information together that needs to be transfered to every client.

It's not at all comparable to playing Quake 3 or even Battlefield V.

 

Hey Liesel, thank you for your input. I see how this as voxel game eats up more CPU - I have i5 6600K, overclocked to 4.6 GHz, when I play alone, the game utilizes about 50-60% of all 4 cores, and when multiplayer with 3--5 players, it utilizes 75-80% of all cores and I have FPS drops to around 30, when playing 1440p on GTX 1080 Ti, so CPU was not my concern, so far it was only the network. One of us is buying new rig, so he may try to host our world, but his interent albeit being faster is less stable... so going dedicated, renting a server might be a good option for us.

 

But even with this being voxel game I don't understand the amount of data per second which needs to be sent. Most of the world does not change every second so the difference between this game and non-voxel ones should not be that extreme. Also the number of active zombies is what I'd see as the highest portion of traffic, but this count can be in other games much higher... Plus most of the data sent to other players is the same, so why send the package 4 times to 4 other players instead of streaming it just once? There are many people who cannot go optic cable connection, and only ADSL of crappy wifi are available... or quite fast mobile network signal, but those are heavily limited on total data transmitted per month, one short session and the limit is gone. So I see many reasons why Fun Pimps should optimize this. 

 

Have a great day Liesel!

[SylenThunder]

6 minutes ago, Adam.Podstavka said:

when playing 1440p on GTX 1080 Ti

No offense, but your CPU isn't 1440p capable for a voxel game. Drop your client res to 1080p and it'll free up some of your CPU.