Following on from my last post this afternoon.
Quote: "Even with todays low latency and all, is it going to be viable? Will i be able to exchange data between 2 remote players at least 30 times per second, idealy 60 times?"
Sometimes. You are not going to get consistency throughout.
As for an example, I doubt your swedish players will be complaining since some of them have 1GB per second download speed with their suppior ISPs... Actually a few of them have 10GB per second
If those people complaining about latency happen to live in the UK, then you can pretty much take that with a grain of salt. The internet access available in the UK is extremely bad and over priced, lots of games have latency problems over here. Possibly one of reasons we do not have many professional multiplayer video gamers.
Quote: "
Competitive gaming has been big business for years in places like South Korea and the US, where superstar players earn hundreds of thousands of pounds.
But there aren't many Brits among those top earners, and the boss of one team has told Newsbeat that Britain is still "lagging behind" when it comes to e-sports."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/27975313/can-more-british-people-become-professional-gamers
As for the others with perfect internet and low latency in the fighting games; think about this from another perspective and ask did the developers have a choice not to bother with multiplayer?
Even if there are issues, is it viable to not practice, perfect and master multiplayer programming if you want to enter into the fighter game market? Only you can answer that. It is your talent, not mine. I am just thinking out loud, I do know a thing or two about the general gaming industry, and can deal with multiplayer programming side of things. (It is what I do)
So what I would say is, you are not going to experience a plain sailing, easy peasy implentation of multiplayer as a service. And we have not even mentioned hackers and cheaters yet.
In line with Ortu's point about early planning, for you, the earliest point for planning is right now. It will not get easier to restructure your code the longer it is allowed to expand without considering multiplayer support.
Don't worry about the how? I will help you with that. Just worry about the 'what', what do you want. A great offline game, online one or both. Do you want to be dealing with online cheaters, hackers trying to dDos your player's machines via their IP addresses? Do you want to deal with
inevitable complaints about latency? Do you want to manage user accounts and moderate racist chat rooms, ban players from joining games? Spend time moderating players instead of focusing on designing your nice characters and next storyline. Consider the big picture before making the decision.
All the technical stuff can be explained as we go. There is no point talking about UDP and TCP, if you do not want to deal with the ugly side of multiplayer as a service. This might not be your style. Personally, I am willing to deal with that stuff because what I am creating is fundamentally multiplayer in nature, so I know what to expect. But you might not like it, if you think you won't like that type of work, just forget it and focus on making a great single player campaign and some nice offline battle modes.
So make the decision, multiplayer or not; does Exodos need it? and are you up for the up hill battle?
If you think it does, I will help make your multiplayer, at this rear moment that I have some spare time, might as well make the most out of it because when I release my game, that's it, I am going to be too busy to focus properly. So it is kind of now or never situation for me and you; unless you expect to find someone else to help you later in which case you could take your time. My goal would be to make the start and eventually make you able to hold your own and write your own networking code.