Prof Patpending
Warp badgers with guns
   |
Posted - 2008.07.23 11:38:00 -
[1]
 Originally by: Batolemaeus
Edited by: Batolemaeus on 21/07/2008 21:16:59
I think most will agree that the goal of "fixing lag" can not be achieved by just throwing hardware or spiffy software solutions at it.
Here come the words people.
OK so lets say a large fleet battle is 250 a side. This would cause the system to lag out horrifically.
Now lets abstract this situation out.
You have 500 Player entities in the system. Also you need to keep states on all towers and tower mods, asteroids, any plexs waiting to be discovered, outposts, rats, Moons, Planets etc...
So just for arguments sake we say there are 5000 objects in one system and each of these objects needs a session to keep track of its status. Thats alot of nuts.
There are current mechanics in game to try and help lag. These being grids and what is know as 'reinforcing' the node. Grid is rather self explanatory as it means the current area of a system where players currently are. 'Reinforcing' is a bit more of a black art. I would expect this means moving a system onto its own physical server to try and give it more resources to run the system and reduce the lag. This helps but is not perfect.
If even on its own hardware a system is lagging due to all the players and asteroids and rats etc... etc... then this leaves three routes.
1. Reduce the size of fleets. Surely this is a no go as it is the huge scale pvp that people look for. There is only so much fun that can be had in a roaming gang compared to a massive battle.
What you could do is rather than reduce the size of the fleets involved is try and spread them about in a system. Example:- Have all active towers in a system require all other active towers to enter reinforced mode within day an hour of each other. A shot tower will regen shields and be immune from hostile or friendly action until it hits 50% shields. This takes 60 minutes. If all active towers in a system are in this regen state at the same time then it goes into old fashioned reinforced. This does have a problem in that systems with lots of moons will be impossible to take. So lets say rather than all towers the minimum in an hour is 4 and any others after the initial 4 where the total number of towers in a system is greater than 4. If it is 4 or less then you need to hit them all.
What does this mean? Well it means that fleets need to be split up to hit multiple targets and defences can concentrate on one to keep the enemy out. This has the side effect of allowing alliances that are under attack by an alliance that is on the otherside of the world a chance to defend their space and not be subject to timezone ping pong.
2. Upgrade the hardware. Yeah that would work until you get more subscribers or the fleets again reach a point where the servers struggle again.
3. Software trickery. As discussed above about how I would see the objects in a system being abstracted you could add if it does not already exist an extension to how the grid system works. Anything not on a player grid that doesn't move? Stick it into the swap/page and leave the RAM free for dynamic elements. System that currently is being contested? No rat spawns. Are you going to stick about and get involved in a fight thats not yours?
In the end the Devs are not gods and I am sure the community when and I include myself in this pull their heads out of their arses and work together to help solve the issues in the game. Either through mechanics changes, code changes or hardware changes and more likely a mixture of all three will the demon of lag be slain. Until then stop whining about it, the players know there is a problem, CCP would be blind to not know there is a problem if you have an idea then give some details on it, how would it work, how would it effect other elements of game play? Hell one of these ideas might get read!
|