Great read guys, happy to see some details on how the networking actually plays out. Since you noted that
At least double the player count that we could support in M&B: Warband - Napoleonic Wars.
And the bug with bonuses lagging servers has gone away. Can we expect to see the player count raised next patch?
You're talking about Napoleonic Wars?
Taleworlds did not want to raise the limit higher than 200 players since 300+ players is a unique selling point for Mount & Blade 2.
In either case, in our own engine we have our own rules!
So even if a server has a 200 player cap, it should be ultra lag-free?
200 players will come down to 10.1 megabit per second in our network engine, which is 25% of what warband can do at that player count.
Interesting. However I am more interested in the voice communication. I'm concerned as to whether it's server-wide, team-wide, or Direct (like in ArmA, where only those around you hear it).
Voices are compressed down heavily with the latest voice encoding technology, read about it here:
http://opus-codec.org/So far in our implementation, you only hear people in your team, and only those that are close to you.
also you are able to mute people etc etc.