Though there are posts stating that Zwift sips bandwidth, I inadvertently ran an interesting experiment this morning.
My wife wanted to try the kit so I opened up a screen sharing session from my MacBook pro at work to my Mac Pro at home and guided her through the setup. It was kind of cool to watch but as soon as she started playing two things started happening:
- The list of riders on the right started disappearing and re-appearing, stretching up and down like an accordion.
- All of the riders (especially the AIs) were riding all over the place. The AIs riding the opposite direction came right for her and onto the grass on the right. They rolled through the grass and up the hill out of sight. It was crazy.
I’d never seen anything like it in my beta testing so I cracked open a ping: 2500ms from one New York location to another. Usually this is closer to 10ms so my screen sharing must have hammered the connection.
As soon as I turned the screen sharing off she reported that everything snapped back into place and there was no more strange behavior for the rest of her ride. Ping times dropped back to normal.
The behavior is almost like the game gets some information (direction, velocity) and if it misses additional ones it’s just keeping the player moving in that direction, boundaries of the tarmac be damned.
Ride on.