You can gleen some(or a lot) from using a packet analysis tool like Wireshark(it’s been a decade since I’ve done anything like that, there may be better tools on the market).

I think a big part of it is the modeling. The maps and characters and vehicles and sprites and everything are fairly bland. So not having to draw tons of triangles for every character I’m sure makes a huge difference.

From there, no. They haven’t let anyone in on how their network code works. They have supposedly been working on this for 7 years. I’m not sure at what capacity though. Like 7 straight years of full time game dev or 7 years it’s been a hobby that only recently has made it to release.

I can’t imagine it was easy either way. It’s a fun as hell game.

Are you mostly interested in the networking aspect? I’m not sure what Battle Bit does but many games employ a prioritization strategy when determining which characters should be updated per state snapshot for a client. Check out an old GDC talk about Halo networking, it’s pretty interesting.

I think this is a written summary of the video: http://blog.wolfire.com/2011/03/GDC-Session-Summary-Halo-networking

This article is also informative: https://www.gafferongames.com/post/state_synchronization/

Honestly, I’d love to see a deeper writeup from the Planetside devs as well.

I know that games using SpatialOS were able to scale to these numbers, though I don’t know any that posted full numbers or the like.