Matthew
Caldari
BloodStar Technologies
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Posted - 2006.12.04 09:19:00 -
[1]
 Originally by: Lygos
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.
That's pretty much how the old gang health system worked, yes. It scaled as N^2. The spam in the log server became very obvious in large gangs.
Originally by: Lygos
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.
But of course they didn't do anything about gang health message spam in this patch. Oh no, nothing at all 
They only capped the old gang system at 50 players, and introduced the new fleet system with structured reporting which means that no-one in the fleet sees the health bars of more than 11 other players in the fleet, regardless of how big the fleet grows.
So lets compare, old gang of 256 players vs full new fleet of 256 players.
Old gang: 256^2 = 65536 notifications per tick
New fleet:
Fleet commander sees 5 wing commanders: 5 notifications
5 wing commanders each see 1 fleet commander and 5 squad commanders: 30 notifications
250 squad members (inc squad commanders) see 10 squad members and 1 wing commander: 2750 notifications
Total: 5+30+2750 = 2785 notifications
Note also how the new system scales. Assuming an umlimited number of wings could be formed, and each wing is filled before the next opens:
Fleet commander scales as N/51, so O(N)
Wing commander sees max 6 players, nomatter how large N grows
Squad members see max 11 players, nomatter how large N gets.
They also used this new fleet structure to sort out similar scalability issues with the application of gang bonuses.
Previously, gang bonuses had to be determined by comparing the skills and modules of all members of the gang against each other, again scaling as O(N^2). In the new system, only the three tiers of commander need to be compared. Only the number of 3 person compares are increased with increasing gang size, which makes it an O(N) problem.
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