Steam Networking Sockets issues

[undone estuary]

Hey, we have encountered a problem in that we need to send some initial map data when starting a game. The data is somewhere around 10 Mb and when we try to send that over the network with Steam networking sockets & relay we seem to reach a limit of about 256 kb per second.

Has anyone encountered something similar and did you find a way to get around the possible bandwidth limit that Steam put on their p2p relay socket traffic? The wait time seems a bit much for 10 Mb.

We would like to avoid establishing our own sockets and networking since we don't want our players to have to worry about port forwarding NAT issues.

Thanks in advance

[sullen drum]

10 MB is way too much to send over the network. That will require a file server of some sort

[candid imp]

You should probably find some way to crunch that down rather than figuring out how to send that much data through.

Basic map generation usually makes use of seeds, so that you can just sync the seed and each client can generate the map on their end from the seed.

[pine crater]

Maybe you could try to use a service like a firebase, where you could temporarily store the information that you want to be shared with the user and then have it automatically deleted after sometime.

Firebase has a few GBs for free, in your case that would be around 5 Gbs / 10 Mbs ≈ 500 Games. If you keep the db clean, you could get away not paying any penny.

With Firebase you don't need to manage a backend, so this a good point to keep in mind.