NetworkTransform sends always all informations. Improve network perfomance with flags and buffer.

[itismarcii]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
The NetworkTransform syncs its Position/Scale/Rotation every time and with all information. Which really costs a lot of resources if you got several objects that need to be synced over the whole network. For example:

If you never changed your position you still need as much resources as some did that re scaled, moved and rotated.

Describe the solution you'd like
The solution is simple. Buffer the information of the last tick in NetworkTransform and check if a change occurred. If so use a bitmask to determine what has changed and send a flag with a float array from server back to client which unwraps the information.

Like that you only send the smallest amount of information.
Best case: none.
Second best case: One and flag.
Worst case: All information with flag.

Since we can make the flag a byte. The extra amount of traffic is nearly insignificant.

Additional context
We used this method for our Test environment and it improved the traffic a lot.

[NoelStephensUnity]

Hello itismarcii
What are your NetworkTransform position, rotation, and scale threshold values?
If they are zero, could you try to increase them to some non-zero value and see if this problem persists?

[itismarcii]

Hello NoelStephensUnity,

We used the default values for the test.
Which is:
Position: 0.001
Rotation: 0.01
Scale: 0.01

We didnt test scale, the X and Z rotations and the Y position much.

[NoelStephensUnity]

@itismarcii Thank you for that additional information, it helped me better understand the issue you are experiencing.
If I understand correctly, you are saying that NetworkTransform is sending all values that are marked to be synchronized whether they all change or only some changed. To better clarify, here would be a hypothetical example:

• You are only synchronizing the position and rotation values for a NetworkTransform
  • The X and Z component change enough for a synchronization update
    • The X, Y, and Z components for both position and rotation are sent in the synchronization update

If you are seeing it send updates when none of the elements of the six have changed, then that is indeed a bug and I will open a ticket for that.
If you are seeing that it is sending an update for all elements when perhaps only one of the six elements (i.e. from above example) has change, then that is a known network performance related issue we will address in a future update.

Once you confirm that the above is what you are experiencing with this issue, if it is a bug I will make sure to get this into our backlog so we can take this into consideration for our next update.

Cheers,

Noel

[itismarcii]

It is in fact the issue you described. On 1 value change, inside the tolerance, all other flagged values will be updated. On none changed, none will be updated.

[NoelStephensUnity]

@itismarcii
Thank you for responding! I am re-opening this issue and associating it with an internal ticket.

For the time being, to help reduce the bandwidth consumption, you might try increasing the threshold values to reduce the granularity (i,e. depending upon what 1 world unit translates to for the over-all relative scale of your art assets the default values may be way too granular).