Netcode
crakinshot
Join Date: 2010-07-06 Member: 72271Members
Join Date: 2010-07-06 Member: 72271Members
<div class="IPBDescription">Seriously Hack away at it.</div>Hack at the net-code until your paws bleed. Apart from the obvious that it makes people's experience of the game more enjoyable, it will effect new maps.
For example, if you can add on sparse network traffic, so you only get delta changes, and then every 1 or 2 seconds you get a full sync for an object (but not all objects at the same time). And such that you don't get much about players not within your general region so long as they are not within your frustum. With something like this you could have 64+ players... but then you need to make the maps able to handle the various player sizes. i.e, dynamic map changes... so corridors open up to reveal new areas of the map, while other corridors close down.
Look at COD4... it's netcode was outstanding and you could have 48 to 64 players on those maps. Only downside was the maps were too small. Saying that very large maps suck for small numbers of people.
So I just hope you consider this early on, because it would effect map design.
For example, if you can add on sparse network traffic, so you only get delta changes, and then every 1 or 2 seconds you get a full sync for an object (but not all objects at the same time). And such that you don't get much about players not within your general region so long as they are not within your frustum. With something like this you could have 64+ players... but then you need to make the maps able to handle the various player sizes. i.e, dynamic map changes... so corridors open up to reveal new areas of the map, while other corridors close down.
Look at COD4... it's netcode was outstanding and you could have 48 to 64 players on those maps. Only downside was the maps were too small. Saying that very large maps suck for small numbers of people.
So I just hope you consider this early on, because it would effect map design.
Comments
Marines don't want to shoot them, aliens love the extra snack!! WIN WIN!
In any-case, netcode and the method used (whether its delta updates or lockstep) will impact the game to the point of impacting level design, so its doubly important that the engine coders focus on it intensely.
Because that's how I see it.
It does currently seem to have issues with sending un-needed data, but I doubt it's a lack of delta compression.
As had been said 1.9e24358 times... we're playing an alpha, focus is on finding bugs and getting things to work at all, then later you get to making things work well.
Now as to speculating about netcode ... as NS2 doesn't use PVS, they're probably using something really simple like a bounding box to filter what entities clients get updates on.
The difficult thing though will be to also track enough information of the entire map so that your map stays updated. I know League of Legends doesn't give you the entire game state to the client, just what you can see, so their map is sent as a separate piece of information and is not generated on the client side.