Firiya Boomsloop
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Posted - 2011.04.28 16:42:00 -
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I'll geek out a bit :)
I think folks are missing part of the point of TiDi. Going back to Veritas' dev blog, there are certain aspects of fleet fights that cause massive storms of activity (jump in, deploy drones, ship death, jump out). The normal slug fest from my understanding once everyone is loaded is largely OK and tolerable on a dedicated node. The problem is that the system never gets to that state and worse off, you get weird, emergent behavior when the task queues get overloaded that f's up all sorts of things.
If I had to hazard a guess, here is what would likely happen:
- Fleet A of 1k is already in the system, TiDi feels a bit of a pinch and puts things around 90% of normal with a few scattered Fleet B dudes
- Fleet B fellows light the cyno and Fleet A's 1k ships bridge / jump through said cyno
- The system sees that, says, ZOMG, TiDi drops down to a 10x dilation
- Fleet A's ships appear, they deploy their drones, modules, etc. and the 10 second process takes 100 seconds
- The ships are now in the normal fleet fight state with the expensive switch systems / etc. calls out of the way and dilates up to 75% of normal (1.5x)
- The system chugs along between 50-75% of normal, typically dipping as ships are destroyed / etc.
- Fleet A gets whomped, sad they their grid overloading failed, FC orders GTFO. The system again sees, ZOMG, I'm dying, dilates down to 10%
- Fleet A escapes with 40% of their fleet, the remaining 30% is trapped by bubbles and slaughtered at 80% of normal speed
The bottom line is that most of the time, the system should cruise at something akin to normal speeds (10-50% slower, i.e. 1-2x). You just would likely see the burps come during the massive movement changes (jump in, jump out, etc.).
The trick is going to be determining what factor of TiDi to apply, balancing flow of the game (close to real-time as possible) versus predictable behavior (avoiding the random glitches from overloading). Most likely, the TiDi will have to be overly aggressive (i.e. overcorrect, slow down too much) as it is better to be predictable and then recover rather than messing things up and adding non-deterministic behavior.
Very interesting real-time and control theory too that one could apply to it as well. Wicked cool CCP, wicked cool.
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