[crossfire] channels

[Mark Wedel]

Brendan Lally wrote:
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      However, wrt the system channels, thinking that at some point there might be 
     
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      30+ people on a server (metalforge gets close at times), the traffic 
     
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      requirements could get quite high on the global channels, COMM_KILLS 
     
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      especially. if 20 of them were killing monsters at a rate of 2 a second, then 
     
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      there would be 40 messages sent a second, each of these would be about 
     
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      50bytes, that is  2KB a second. That isn't a whole lot, except that now modem 
     
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      users are unable to play the game at anything like a sane speed. for the 
     
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      server, you have 100-200KB a second being sent, which is a fair amount, and 
     
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      something that it would be nice to reduce/remove.
     
     
  Just because the preference is stored on the client doesn't mean the client 
can't tell the server what its preference is.

  In fact, this is already done for all sorts of things (map size, sound, image 
set, and so on).

  So for channels, same thing could be done - as part of setting up the 
connection, the client can get the channel listing from the server, and for ones 
it knows about, send back whether it wants to subscribe to those channels or not.