Factorio Forums

( Context: this suggestion is being written during Arumba's Twitch stream, where an excess of 50 players are playing in the same server. )

I'm just thinking, having all of the burden of sending the map being put on the host is a little less than ideal. When there's only one other person playing (ie, just the host) then it's unavoidable, however when there's a lot of people also on the map, then they could potentially assist in the map transfer.

If everyone starts saving the map into memory (as opposed to the server saving to the disk), the saves should be much faster. That ephemeral save doesn't need to last that long - only long enough for the map to be transferred to the joining player.

Once the host finishes saving, the map transfers to the joiner as normal. But once the other players finish as well, they join in, adding their upload bandwidth to the host's to ship the whole map over to the joiner - just like BitTorrent. In theory, the transfers should increase greatly with more players, and the host's Internet doesn't outright die when several people join in.

I don't know how possible it might be, buuuuut in theory it should be simple. Just need to figure out how Bittorrent works, and emulate it.

It might work well with only the map, the mods and the event-stream... My experience is, that it uses some resources (CPU and bandwith), it depends on the number of similar connections and quality of internet. That needs to compared with the gain: Not needed, if there is only one or two downloading...

But possible:
http://www.libtorrent.org/projects.html