I currently have Verizon as my DSL provider.  I'm using this package:

Starter
Up to 768 Kbps/128 Kbps

and get about 90kbs download with that speed.

If I switched to the

Power
Up to 3 Mbps/768 Kbps

what should the difference in speed actually be?

I cannot get Fios at this time, so this is really the only choice I have.  Any help would be appreciated.

This post was last modified: 08-25-2008 01:56 PM by gft77.

Probably your average DL will be between 350-400k/s

I'm just getting tired of waiting forever for larger demos to download, and I think for the $10 difference in price, I'll get the Power package.  I was looking at ATT, and their prices are similar, but they're upload speeds are less.

This post was last modified: 08-25-2008 02:40 PM by gft77.

Do upload speeds matter that much unless you're a web designer or plan on updtreaming live video?

Not really ¬_¬

but when games like LBP come out and I want to upload my custom levels, it will help to have a higher upload speed, and at the same price, why not go for the better upload.

Point taken.

The levels on LBP will not be big at all.

I'd recommend the download speed.

The only group of people that need an upload speed greater than 0.5 meg are torrenteers who want to keep ratios up.

I'm a heavy web user and mine is only around the 400 mark.

Still beats my 128

I'm not so sure about that.

really?

from what I've seen, I bet they won't top 10mb

Its tough. With the physics, each object may have many attributes. If the objects aren't sizeable, and standard, I guess it shouldn't be too bad.

the thing with dsl is the upload speeds are less affected by distance to the exchange,
because it uses the lower end of the frequency band for transmition,

if you get the up to 3 meg package, that would be great for your uploads but, your download speed could be anything from what it is now up to 340kbps. this depends mostly on your distance to the telephone exchange, and has some other factors like line noise to take into concideration. this being said it's likly you would see some increase, but no one would know how much until it was tested, they could run a line check on what you have now, but becasue youre modem won't sync at above it's current speed because of the limit on your line, they couldn't know unless that limit was removed.

oh the physics won't matter becuase that will be generated locally

This post was last modified: 08-26-2008 12:05 AM by SmokeyAssassin.

How much are cable prices in your area? I have 8 down, 1.5 up for about $43/mon from Comcast. I get 700-800 while downloading files all day and night (not affected by distance to hub, can be affected by number of users online but my area isn't congested).

I checked with my address through comcast and this is what they can give me.

Performance with PowerBoost® (Speeds up to 12 Mbps) for 42.95 a month, but my apartment complex has their own cable service, so I don't believe that would be an option.

have you checked the cable service for your appartments cable tariffs, if you want good speed then cable is a more stable option, unless you get masive contention from everyone in your appartments using it

I know that, but the objects, if you cant set size/weight of each object, that data will increase the size, especially if weight is added because of the physics part.

erm no.

each object will have scalar and rotational values, and an object id. oh and a location id
something like
id9989,sc-00020,xyz320343432,rot359222.
and will probably just be a string like
998900020320343432359222

each number will be 4 bit so
998900 020320 343432 359222
will be 4 32bit values. and will be 128bits.
which is 16bytes.

so even with 200 items that's only 200*16 =3.2kbytes
now say each item has 3.2kbytes worth of texture information
i.e. which textures on what plane on rotation of what, still allows for 200*16 byte words, then. well, the only thing that will take loads of space are custom hi-res textures, that's if they do it smart.

so for a 10meg level you should be looking at hundreds of objects fully textued, with pleanty of custom designs, including information about the level creator and some stats and even then you can add a little packet overhead, error checking, and a long level title.

ok i think i started to waffle, my point being is that each object will have a set bit size, not including it's name. so everything will have a locaiton hight weight rotation, just because you resize it, it aint gonna be more bits, all in all each object added should be pleanty less that 1kbyte, so 1024kbyte is 1megabyte, see what i mean?

This post was last modified: 08-26-2008 03:31 PM by SmokeyAssassin.

I meant to say that the other way around. If you can set such attributes. Anyway, if that's the way they're doing it, it shouldn't be an issue. The problem is, textures are going to be a lot bigger than 3.2 kb.

I realize everything would be a set size, as obviously the size you make it has no effect on the size of the file, since all the "size" rendering is done in real time anyway.

The fact that it is sizeable lends chance to the way things are done. If done on a scalar level, where textures can only be small/medium/large, but no rendering is done real time (which you tell me it isn't), filesizes could be large.

If it's a scalable, resolution independant (much like many of the new APIs I've been designing software for), sizes can be changed on the fly with just the edit of a few short/parsed fixed-size string data values.

the only textures likely to be sent with the level are custom, why bother sending anything that's already at the other end, just send it's name it's smaller.

Aren't most of the textures going to be custom?