Should we add compression?

[Jenna1337]

Should we add data compression support for all or part of the server and/or client packets? Using compression would increase the time it takes to form the packet, but might decrease the time it takes to transmit the data across the network. The thing is I don't know the trade off ratio as to how large the packet needs to be for compression to be an improvement.

[Jenna1337]

We could always add the ability for optional compression now and determine later if a packet should or shouldn't be compressed, but the question still remains, what exactly should be compressible?

[Jenna1337]

Google says
Compression becomes an improvement when:
Time_compress + Time_transfer < Time_{transfer_uncompressed}
also small packets (smaller than 256 bytes) shouldn't be compressed because the compression overhead would be larger than the uncompressed data

[Jenna1337]

The shared save file that gets sent when the client first connects should probably always be compressed, since those can be pretty big.