A question.
 

I have a net provider that gives its customers limited bandwidth and I want to know do playing muds or downloading a mud client will effect my bandwidth? I know it's a stupid question but I don't want them to restrict me again for using "too much" which I never even heard of but anyway I just wanted to know if it does.


Thanks

Re: A question.
 

I don't think it does. A MU* client is pretty small, a couple of MB (the biggest they get its probably 7), and playing on MU*s shouldn't as far as I know.

Re: A question.
 

Yeah, you can probably play a mud all month, and only have downloaded about the same amount of data as one mp3.

If you go over your limit again, it won't be because of playing muds. So no concern there.

Re: A question.
 

Okey thanks guys for the info I appreciate it.

Re: A question.
 

It's not a dumb question. NWA has players in the military that play overseas on limited bandwidth (costly limited bandwidth). While yes, the amount of data is minimal, it is not so insignificant that it doesn't matter if you are on a per megabyte connection. You can reach a megabyte of data easily in a day on an active MUD like New Worlds. So the MP3 relationship is not true in my opinion. MP3's are 1 to 5 MBs depending on quality.

This is why in the olden days it was important for clients and MUDs to compress data. On a 300 baud modem it was a tight squeeze. Nowadays the only reason the net is so damn slow is because of all the morons watching YouTube all day.

Re: A question.
 

Agreed...it can vary quite a lot from mud to mud, but I could certainly see highly active players racking up a few mb per day on certain games - particularly if there are large room descriptions containing a lot of colour (such as ASCII maps)...think how often you type "look", or move to another room and autolook.

I believe MCCP was primarily added for the benefit of muds, not players, as most players were already on broadband when the protocol was first introduced. One of the first muds to use it was Aardwolf, back in 2001, and Lasher reported that it reduced his bandwidth usage (over an unspecified period of time) from 230mb down to 42mb - that's down to nearly 18% of its previous amount, which is not an insignificant saving for the mud owner even by todays standards.

However it can also be beneficial for players who have bandwidth restrictions. An obvious example is mobile phone clients - I use my Android to connect to my mud when I'm not at home, and I've got a limit of 200mb per month.

Re: A question.
 

I also play my mud from my android phone with a 200 meg limit and have never gone over that's even with surfing the net. Also do consider the mud your playing each character that comes at you is data and can add up

Re: A question.
 

Sadly I always seem to hit my limit about two thirds of the way into the month, after which my connection speed is drastically reduced (although it's still okay for mudding, it makes it very hard to surf). I should start recording how much data is sent from the mud though, it would be interesting to see some statistics.

Re: A question.
 

Here are some stats from the server side on Alter Aeon, I figure they might be interesting, if not useful.

4623343 socket writes for a total of 653457072 bytes (141.339 average per write)
1025989 socket reads for a total of 14262288 bytes (13.901 average per read)
Total uptime: 1 days, 18 hours, 55 minutes, 18 seconds. (4954 ticks, 154518 seconds, 31.19 per tick)
Time weighted userload - 47.7

That's approximately 89 bytes per second per player outgoing, 2 bytes per second incoming. My guess (and it's completely a guess) of small packet overhead would be to double these numbers, then double them again to remove the effect of idling players. As such, I'd expect approximately 400 bytes per second outgoing per active player, and probably 10 bytes per second incoming. 400 bytes per second over the course of a month is nearly a gig of data transfer.

There's a lot of other factors to keep in mind with these numbers; the raw data includes http connections and portscan connects, which inflate the data rate somewhat. There are also a number of players using our custom client, which has additional side channel data, and blind players with clients that aggressively (and I mean aggressively) poll for status updates.

Based on the above, an average of 400 bytes per second seems like a decent guess as to upper limit for mobile data transfer.

This is incidentally the first time I've ever heard an argument for MCCP that wasn't just stupid; thank you once again for your contributions to the forum, KaVir.

-dentin

Re: A question.
 

A few hours ago I started tracking bandwidth usage. I've got quite a few players who just hang out and chat, making them a rather poor benchmark, but there's a newbie who only started playing last night and he's playing pretty actively. After playing for 1 hour, 7 minutes and 40 seconds he'd received 1470848 bytes of data from the mud, which was compressed down to 100866 bytes using MCCP.

So that's an average of 362.3 bytes per second uncompressed, or 24.8 bytes per second compressed, for a period of active play. At that rate it would take me 160.8 hours to hit my 200mb bandwidth limit, or 2344.8 hours if my client supports MCCP.

EDIT: Here's the same player again over a period of exactly 2.5 hours (9000 seconds).

3945900 bytes, compressed to 467928 bytes. That's 438.4 bytes per second, compressed to 60 bytes per second. It would take 132.9 hours to reach 200mb, or 1120.4 hours using compression.