Cergorach
Amarr
The Helix Foundation
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Posted - 2011.02.07 21:15:00 -
[1]
 Originally by: Axemaster
To be 100% honest, I am starting to wonder why CCP doesn't just commission a company to make a chip physically optimized to process these events (guns and missiles). I have a friend who works in the lab with me who designed a signal processor that can integrate pulses and find signal peaks in 50 nanoseconds per input event. It can do that because it's a custom chip.
Imagine doing that with these silly missiles. You could probably get the whole process down to less than 100ns in total, and remove weapon based lag forever.
Besides the custom made hardware (which the hamsters generally don't like) I suspect that it is very expensive, not only that, I suspect that the whole codebase needs to change. There are programmable processors out there that would fit in a standard CPU socket, those are not cheap either but I suspect cheaper then custom chips. Another option is using Nvidia Qaudro boards with Cuda. But the enormous task of rewriting the code is huge and probably the most expensive thing CCP has done.
Good work Dev team CCP, very impressive improvements with relatively simple (sounding) solutions. I'm not very well at home in Python, you can shoot me with some missiles if I say something really stupid. But how difficult is it to move the calculations to a separate treads or cores? I understand that the that wouldn't speed up the individual missiles, but generally speaking folks don't shoot a single missile and often many missiles are in the air at one time. Would the syncing of the data be a problem that the version of Phyton you currently use doesn't provide for?
How is the server currently handling missile weapon groups? As separate missiles or a group of missiles? If single missiles, why not as a group? Same trajectory, same target, and has all the same characteristics. The only problem I could see is the use of defender missiles, maybe you could add a stat 'number of missiles', if hit by a defender you subtract the number of defender missiles in the defender group, from the other missile group. If the group hits you multiply the damage by the number of missiles. Or would this generate other unwanted behavior?
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