Cities And Housing Archive

Lag is usually due to server/client communication and not much else.

Actually rendering the terrain and static/non-static objects on the client side shouldn't cause much of a problem unless your own system is being over burdened with the job. In which case you could upgrade your system or turn down or turn off all Level-Of-Detail and non essential graphics and objects on your end and drastically reduce your own lag.

Communication lag results from sending down all the differences between the static terrain and object maps you have installed on your system with the game, and the things (like NPC's, players, houses, harvesters, bases, player cities, spawns, etc) that exist on the server that you do not have on your system.

This has nothing to do with your system. You can set your resolution and other effects and graphics settings to anything you want, but communication lag will not change.

There's could also be server-side lag assembling all this info before it's even sent to you.

What we need, for terrain anyway, is a way to quickly and easily update the maps on your system (client-side) with things like level ground in player cities and other semi-permanent changes that have been made to the game world. And then some way to revert these semi-permanent changes back to the original state when these items change or disappear.

Anyone want longer load times?

It's easier to do in smaller, limited scope, multi-player games like an FPS where players can affect the terrain. But an MMO is a vastly different beast.

You either have to update these changes to the entire world or a region when you load it, or do it on the fly as the player moves through the world whichcauses terrible lag even with a dynamic look-ahead or zoned pre-load system.

Oki flatten player cities cant be done

do the big problem maker is thetree's and rock. are that all so made into the hard-coded of the landscape?

cause many times you cant place a house because of a freaking tree or rock

I had actually thought about asking about this several times in the past, and have found this thread very interesting so far. I would like to ask a few questions in regards to this topic, and perhaps someone in the know can answer them for me.

1. 
   
   You say that the planet terrain is hard coded, yet when we initially placed our guildhall the land in front of it was flat, several months later a tremendous ditch showed up in front of the hall, how could this occur since the terrain should have never changed?


2. 
   
   I have noticed when a certain bug occurs that allows you to see through the terrain that there is animated water under all the land masses, so they are basically loading layer upon layer of unnecessary detail, animated detail no less, why are they not clipping this to cut down load lag?


3. 
   
   So if the static terrain is stored on the client side, but the changeable stuff like city locations are stored server side, why is the location and size of each city not sent fist on initial load when you get to a planet, then the client automatically flattening the area appropriate for a city of that size, and suspending loading what is underneath it and the fringe layer (grass, etc)?

I run this game on a somewhat outdated machine, and the lag at times especially in large cities is almost unbearable, I would think that fixing number two and three of this would drastically improve performance on some slower computers, besides allowing for better looking more functional cities.

Message Edited by MecoXolo on 08-20-2005 09:33 PM

This is a very interesting and useful discussion, IMO.

As a software engineer, I see this as an interesting technical problem. Paraphrasing, it means that Imight havea foggyidea what an effective solution would be, but I wouldn't be willing to take it to the bank.

Saego, Wanderhome