[MUD-Dev] Locations vs Social Spaces (was: I Want to Forge Sw ords)

[Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com]

-----Original Message-----
From: Koster, Raph [mailto:rkoster at verant.com]
Sent: 15 May 2001 00:02
To: 'mud-dev at kanga.nu'
Subject: RE: [MUD-Dev] Locations vs Social Spaces (was: I Want to Forge
Sw ords)

> The slowdowns on the server side caused by large congregations are
> very soon to be a thing of the past (eg, no cause for teleport
> storms and the like) as server architectures move away from
> single-server models pasted together to make multiserver
> models. More difficult are concerns like the bandwidth involved in
> sending you the updates for that many people and having it still
> look good. What'll really be harder is client-side scalability for
> the display of all those people. ;)

I can just see it now, the latest 3rd generation game comes out, lots
of people congregate, and the client is forced to render everyone as a
beige cube...

I will be intrigued to see how well these dynamic systems work as they
still seem very hard to write from my perspective. If you end up
having such a congregation that they have to cross a server boundry,
I'd imagine you'd have a serious problem however good your
architecture is (i.e. too many people in an area for one server to
handle). It would be interesting to know how people plan to architect
this, but I imagine its a little too close to state of the art for
people to talk freely about.

If I was to try, I'd probably start with some form of geographical
quadtree subdivision, but keeping thrashing down whilst dynamically
moving or sizing quadrants between servers etc. is probably a
pain. Then again since its new server filters, EQ seems to support 70
people in a zone without too many drops outs. Its hard to tell whether
the 5fps is due to graphical lag or some other issue though - although
I suspect graphical lag as the engine seems fairly 3rd rate (by
current standards anyway).

Dan
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