Lygos
ISS Navy Task Force
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Posted - 2006.12.04 06:00:00 -
[1]
The artful use of timesinks in a virtual world can alleviate much problems with latency.
Think of the Earth as the perfect mmog, but with a really high pixel count, and relatively little latency. Usually, there are timesinks everywhere, but most of them are well accepted by the players, except for the relatively recently implemented ones. Everything that the users expect to be able to do is generally within the limits of the firmware.
In the simplest terms, mmogs need more software engineering and less development. It's necessary to ask, "Given flawless operation on our end, what is the theoretical performance limit of the infrastructure that connects us to our users?" Once that is established, surely it must be necessary to place restrictions on user actions where they can with varying degrees of subtlety be implemented, and extended distractions where they cannot.
Aspects of the program, which are bound to cause continuously worsening effects as more users are added, must be retooled fundamentally, rather than have bandaids applied to them, or approached through optimizations. I'm not a programmer. Matter of fact, fractions confuse me frequently. Some things just seem kind of simple though.
For an example, take gang health status reporting. Now, I don't know how it works, but I have an idea that it is an entry field on a server somewhere that is broadcast to a user, and that the user confirms it, and twice the number of packets are required to verify the data either way. I also suspect that with each added user, the number of packets increases multiplicatively, probably moreso if client confirmation happens to be required somewhere. It's always at least N collated broadcasts sent to N users. The problem is reduced without peerage, but it is still present.
While it might be impressive to get 250 collated messages to 250 users every 5 seconds, it probably makes more sense to send 250 collated messages to 1 or 2 users who opt (or are selected) to recieve the data for some purpose sensible to the user, while non-opting clients know not to wait for it.
Judicious economy prevails where technological innovation stumbles. If I had to speculate, it may be that because most code factories do not have a modern history or bourgeois antecedant, and so they must tend to have underdeveloped industry institutions such as controllership outside of the marketting division, or practices which encourage developmental thrift. Artistic media is no exception, and it never has been.
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