Distributed updates when players are far away from each others

[MartinW]

Is it possible to send updates to players only if they are in a certain zone / region?

I have a fairly large world, and it is often possible to have a situation where 20 players are not in viewing distance from each others, even minutes away. In that situation, players actions do not affect other players. They would only need to receive updates on the region they are in and start to receive update when moving to a new update zone ( or an update radius around the player ).

Is this something that can be controlled with Tnet? Would that approach improve the bandwidth in a significant way or do not worth the trouble?

[PerfectPanda]

This is certainly possible to accomplish with Tnet, but as far as I know there is no built in support for it, and I wouldn't really expect there to ever be (but of course that is not for me to say!). Different games will have quite different ways to identify what is considered far away, so you will have to implement it yourself. A good overview to start looking for information could be http://gram.cs.mcgill.ca/papers/boulanger-06-comparing.pdf

Edit: And for the bandwidth saving estimate, that would depend heavily on average amount of players in the world, patterns for whether they spread out evenly or cluster naturally and frequency and size of player updates. If the expected number of players is 20 it wouldn't really be something I'd consider until I had good evidence that the bandwidth requirements end up being above what you can tolerate, unless maybe if you already have other systems that have already handled most of the necessary systems.