Suppress sending data at high score screen

[Javantea]

Looking at the traffic while the player is sitting at the high score screen, I notice a lot of data. By using the binary=0 flag, I am able to see the JSON version of the data that is being sent. It's sending information that can be suppressed to save some bandwidth and processing. This seems like it would have some benefit to players and those trying to debug.

{"gameid":21167,"lines":null,"level":null,"preview":null,
"field":[0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0],
"score":null,"T":null,"J":null,"Z":null,"O":null,"S":null,"L":null,"I":null,
"game_type":1,"ctime":12446}

[timotheeg]

Sorry I missed this ticket 😰

NTC frame representation is very compact at 73 bytes per frame, which means that at the highest level (29), when data is submitted at 60 frames per seconds, a player stream only consumes about 4kb/s.

In high score and menu screen, since when the data is null and static, data frames are sent over the network only every 250ms (i.e. at 4 frames per second), which is 292 bytes per seconds (see code here). Even though the traffic is technically unnecessary, I consider that bandwidth consumption a freshness/keep-alive mechanism, and 292bp/s is negligible.

We could indeed make this smaller or replace sending the frames by sending a ping instead, but I don't think that's very high priority.