As needed after Pestis Scale Test

Horde Health

Everything in Fusion is stored as a VarInt behind the scenes. A VarInt changes the size of its backing data depending on the size of what it stores. This means if you can, storing your data as smaller values results in decreased storage required. Sure this is nice for memory reasons, but we have lots of memory. The real benefit is in bandwidth consumption. Fusion only networks “deltas”, i.e. the change between the previous state and the current state. If your variable makes a big jump between ticks then its delta will take more space to represent.

Currently, we store a horde’s health as a float. Because of the bit representation of a float, a small change in the float can completely change the bit representation! This means a small change is likely to result in a large delta! So if we can swap to storing small integers instead, we should massively reduce our bandwidth usage. In the case of horde health, we can instead network the number of alive rats. The catch with this is that internally we need the ability to deal damage as a fraction of a rat. The solution is to store a non-networked remainder float, which the state authority can use to ensure it keeps track of fractional changes, while the other clients only receive the whole part.