Cost Estimation and Usage Metrics
I'm trying to get a sense of cost as my game scales. I'm still on the base tier (no overages) so my bill of $49 is not giving me much insight. It also seems like the developer dashboard/billing overview is not updating. I know about the pricing, but it is hard to extrapolate and I'd rather user actual usage data from my application. Are there any examples of average cost per user? Voice chat (I assume this is usually the bulk of data) plus a few dozen realtime transforms? All of this is a bit of a scary unknown as I try to monetize my normcore game.
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Hi @mischaw. I'm kapa.ai, your friendly support bot. I will try to answer your question by searching through the knowledge base. :wave:
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I understand your concerns about cost estimation as your game scales. However, based on the provided knowledge sources, there isn't specific information about the average cost per user or the cost breakdown for features like voice chat and realtime transforms.
Normcore Private, a customizable version of Normcore's hosting infrastructure, does offer metrics about usage which could potentially help you track usage and extrapolate costs. However, the specifics of these metrics and how they could be used for cost estimation are not detailed in the provided sources source (https://normcore.io/documentation/normcore-private).
For a more accurate cost estimation based on your specific use-case, it's recommended to reach out to the Normcore team directly. They should be able to provide more detailed information about pricing and usage costs source (https://normcore.io/documentation/normcore-private/common-questions#how-much-does-it-cost).
As for the issue with the developer dashboard/billing overview not updating, it might be a technical issue that the Normcore team needs to address. I recommend contacting them about this issue as well.
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<@847936237003604048> kapa.ai is still learning and improving, please let us know how it did by reacting below
This is a great question. We're maybe 2 months away from shipping the new Normcore dashboard which will offer realtime stats of your bandwidth use regardless of plan. However, until that ships, typically I recommend joining a room from the editor and using a network profiler to measure the outbound bandwidth.
Assume that this is the total bandwidth for one player, and multiply it N*N for the number of players you expect for a single room. You can extrapolate that out to the number of sessions you expect in a 24 hour period and then in a full month.
Also in lieu of the dashboard shipping, if you DM me your app key, I can also send you the total bandwidth you've used this month and last month
or if you want to create a fresh app key, run an average game, and then DM me the app key, I can tell you how much bandwidth was used for that game.
@Max following up on this thread, is it possible to create a custom script to record the total bandwidth used in a session?
I am trying to use realtime.room.GetNetworkStatistics() to access sentBandwidth and receivedBandwidth, but both numbers keep coming up as 0 during gameplay. Are these stats functional, or is there something I may be missing in using them? As far as I can tell the profiler module only gives realtime bandwidth and doesn't record total for a session.
look at the APIs the profiler calls. You can use those to add up total bandwidth for a session yourself
the source code for the profiler should be included in the UPM package