Well, I had an idea before. You know all those times that you send a player a message that never changes, such as 'Not enough mana points' or 'A door has opened', etc. Each time that event occurs, it sends the player the whole string. Now, that's a pointless use of bandwidth as the message will never change, and this will build up after a while of constantly sending the string over and over. So I was thinking, why not just store those repetitive message in a string table/array on the client side?
Then you can just send over a byte (the Index of the message in the array) which would bring down the packet size by quite a few bites. If you want to save even a few more, store the color on the client
Sure people say never trust the client, but it's not like it matters if the client changes those messages through hacking cause it will only show up different on their client
.
Just a thought to save some bandwidth