zerOnet

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zerOnet is a set of methods and techniques that reduce the amount of data transfered while playing online mulitplayer games.

The files on this page are a demonstration of this techniqe being applied to games that use the "Doom 3 Engine". These "mods" reduce game side network traffic by an average of 50 percent. System side network code can't be changed with game SDK's, so the reduction only applies to the "game snapshot" message size.

The precission and rate of the data is identical to that of the standard game, so the "game data" is being transfered the same way, by using around half the bandwidth of the original.

The implementation of this technique is generic and can be applied to any game engine networking code.

Statistics for Doom 3 Engine Tests

For these test results the size of the snapshot was calculated on what the function "ServerWriteSnapshot()" adds to the message. Due to the way zerOnet works we are able to calculate both the original and modified snapshot sizes at the same time. These figures are what all the stats are based on.

Note 1: The first run for each game is noted as heavy, which means moving around as fast as possible, constantly firing weapons, jumping etc.. The second run is considered normal game play.

Note 2: The percentage figures are what zerOnet snapshot sizes are of the original, eg. Quake 4 zerOnet snapshot packets are 46% of the size of the standard Quake 4 snapshot packets (reduction of 54%).

Don't compare games. Each game is doing different things in a slightly different way.

Doom 3
Original Average Snapshot	zerOnet Average Snapshot	zerOnet % of Orig	Notes
120.5 bytes	71.7 bytes	59.59%	Heavy
90.6 bytes	46.0 bytes	50.69%	Normal

Doom 3 ROE
Original Average Snapshot	zerOnet Average Snapshot	zerOnet % of Orig	Notes
105.3 bytes	61.2 bytes	58.13%	Heavy
82.6 bytes	37.6 bytes	45.62%	Normal

Quake 4
Original Average Snapshot	zerOnet Average Snapshot	zerOnet % of Orig	Notes
62.5 byes	34.6 bytes	55.49%	Heavy
54.0 bytes	25.1 bytes	46.53%	Normal

Prey
Original Average Snapshot	zerOnet Average Snapshot	zerOnet % of Orig	Notes
114.1 bytes	58.3 bytes	51.15%	Heavy
92.1 bytes	42.1 bytes	45.73%	Normal

The results reflect the games' maps and game style, testing each game with the same simple box level would dramatically change the results, but wouldn't be a true representation of how the network changes affected the overall game performance. This is why Doom 3 and Doom 3 ROE, which are basically the same code, have different results. Prey sends more data than Doom 3 but the map style in Prey helps it to send less overall.
Testing was done using the game's map cycles scripts.

Files

Windows versions:

zerOnet Doom 3 (v1.3) or www.strategyinformer.com

zerOnet Doom 3 ROE (v1.3) or www.strategyinformer.com

zerOnet Quake 4 (v1.3) or www.strategyinformer.com

zerOnet Prey (v1.2) or www.strategyinformer.com

Contact

If you have any questions or queries
Contact: Mark Apps
email: zeronet@tpg.com.au