Spatial Hashing

Spatial Hash Interest Management

Spatial Hashing Interest Management

First things first: "Spatial Hashing" sounds complicated so that we network programmers can stroke our egos. The technique is actually pretty simple, and if you used uMMORPG before then you probably remember this as "Grid Checker". We go with "Spatial Hashing" anyway since that's the industry term.

Setting Up

Add the Spatial Hashing Interest Management component to the same object as your Network Manager:

How It Works

Previously we Vector3.Distance checked each spawned entity against each connection. Instead, we put each spawned entity into a Grid and for each connection, we send all 8-neighbor grid entries to it. This is extremely fast. In early uMMORPG tests, it was 30x faster than distance checking. The algorithm is less complex, so it scales well to large amounts of entities.

Check out Mirror's Benchmark example. It uses Spatial Hashing and displays a runtime slider to let you play around with the visibility range.

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