- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Posted by: Lakatu
It would eb great to have three guests but the problems are technical. Xbox live is available to anyone with broadband and so the options available have to work with the worst compatible connection.
Lots of live games have 1 guest (correct me if i'm wrong) but 3 guests means your getting just one quarter of the bandwidth you could get in One player.
The average broadband connection in the UK is probably 512k, with a 256k upload. Which provides good play for one or two people. Having four people sharing that connection would only give them 56k each.. Lag would become a real problem.
I have no real knowledge of the exact limitations but i'd imagine 4 player lagless on one broadband connection would be tecnically very difficult. Bungie may surprise me but i think 1 guest is likely but 3 isn't.
Of course, if people had upload speeds such as 1meg this problem wouldn't exist. It is perhaps possible that the game could sense your upload speed and then limit you to none, one or three guest depending on your connection.
Anyway, i think bandwidth rather than FPS is the problem.
Read one of my other posts on the first page as I go into how the networking works. The lag is significantly better when you clump more people onto your box (mean guests = less lag). If you don't believe my words go play on XBC a little and you will there is a huge difference when its 4 on 4 with two boxes instead of 2 on 2 with four boxes. The lag much favors the 4 on 4 despite there being more players because of the less number of xboxes talking.
Since I only talked about the host side in that previous post, and while the host side is really the clincher, I'll talk a little about the client side. The average numbers you gave were 512 down and 256 up right? Earlier the 128k number was tossed around for what a host needs to get out to each box. Well first of all thats each box, not each player. If a box has 4 players the data sent to it is not split. A single packet can be sent and the local xbox can figure how it applies to everyone from there.
As for the upload of a client, I don't know what the specific number is that is idea, but the amount of upload for a client is much less than what the host needs to do. Your number was a tiny bit off 256/4 = 64. On a client side upload this is definitely sufficient. This is not to mention that the host will get all these 4 players packets at the same time which makes things easier on it.
We could all sit here and talk about theory of lag, but the best demonstration is to go play XBC and compare the differences. The difference is phenominal.