new engine and a hope..

[MalaTempora]

Originally Posted by Pizdzius

apart from the rest of your interesting post which I am not quite healthy enough to give you some not stupid answer, this part made me wonder a bit.

hi Pizdius, (btw thanks a lot for the 1000 laught you make me reading your
very wonderful comics )

There are games like Single Player ones (let's say, Fallout3) and MMO ones (like Darkfall) where this solid player thing is essential, mostly because combat is real-time - you attack and block with your own decisions and the result of battle depends on your skill. In games like that collision detection is quite important for every hit.

i was an old time player that stopped mmorpg in DaoC times, cause work
and reallife drain all free /spare times so forgive me, i don't have seen
Darkfall and Fallout3 (i've played the Fallout1 indeed... like all the Ultima
series from 1 to 7 and others..)

In games that use mostly autoattack and just buttoned skills like Regnum, World of Warcraft and other similar ones, this isn't needed. It would be a "luxury", since it's not essential in the game's design. And that luxury could really drain down performance, and increase the lag - believe me, not "a bit".
It's a not a huge corporation which can supply us with great quality servers like Darkfall does.

Also that "luxury" can be exploited like it was in Age of Conan I think (remember kicking players from bridges?) or Oblivion (yes the best way to kill all the Imperial guards is to push them off the edge...)

have to look at darkfall example, (and oblivion yes..i remember this cool single
player game ) and probably i'll pay more xymer in the hope that NGD
will buy better servers??

[Pizdzius]

Originally Posted by MalaTempora

have to look at darkfall example, (and oblivion yes..i remember this cool single
player game ) and probably i'll pay more xymer in the hope that NGD
will buy better servers??

Very good idea ;D

[Erikose]

Originally Posted by Pizdzius

That's true, collision detection would really slow down the game and increase lag ;S

Metin2 has collision detection which works fine. It's the numpties that play it that let that particular grindfest down.

[Pizdzius]

Originally Posted by Erikose

Metin2 has collision detection which works fine. It's the numpties that play it that let that particular grindfest down.

Tibia does too, but Metin still sucks like Tibia even if it's 3d ;P

[Erikose]

Originally Posted by Pizdzius

Tibia does too, but Metin still sucks like Tibia even if it's 3d ;P

Lol

True

[Razvan87]

real colision system suck big time.I played age of conan ,darkfall and it is realy weird...

So a big NO from me

[ArcticWolf]

Originally Posted by Pizdzius

That's true, collision detection would really slow down the game and increase lag ;S

Exactly.

I can't tell you how painful it is to design a reliable, fast and accurate collision & boundary detection algorithm without being too technical, but I'll do my best:

First, you have to check if you can move to a certain position, so you have to query the objects along the path (i.e.: if you want to move from A to B and you have a wall in the middle, you shouldn't be able to move, unless you're Chuck Norris or Surak). But that requires you to first calculate the path and then query the objects. With static boundaries it's easy because you can load the map in memory (you don't have to re-calculate them, so why not cache the data?), and pathfinding isn't difficult. The problem is, well, you do this for each movement message the client sends. And that's awful.

Now, suppose you have a super-efficient algorithm, but it doesn't do any checking on speed. That's right, you got speedhacks! How can we avoid that? We can calculate the distance over time. Sounds simple, and in fact it is simple, but that adds to your previously super-efficient algorithm, which is now a little less efficient. And you end up having roughly twice the memory footprint than your previous version, because now you have to "remember" your previous position.

And add status effects, such as paralysis or slow-down spells. That requires you to do some extra checking.

Ok, no problem, we can live with that. Now it comes the really awful part: checking against mobile objects. Now you have to tell your now-a-little-less-efficient-pathfinding-and-collision-detection-algorithm that it has to ask for all the objects along the path, check if there are any of those objects, check if you can move to that physical spot, check your speed, check if you can move and then move. That requires more memory.

Well, we could make use of parallel computing and multithreading! Not so fast, buddy. Two objects can't be at the same place, at the same time (unless you make characters non-collisional), so now you have to make your entire movement system thread-safe or process-safe. And that adds more overhead to your now-not-so-efficient algorithm. Split the map, and make boundaries non-safe environments, or maybe define groups based on density and topology and then assign a thread to it.

Or just throw your idea away and keep it simple.




PS: And remember that you have to flush changes to a database, and that movement functions are called quite a lot per user (and that you may have a lot of users online).

PPS: And, just in case, assembler won't do the trick for you this time. It's not worth it.

PPPS: You don't have to do all this for each message the client sends, because you should make an equipotential system: that is, ignore repeated or similar messages within a period of time.

That period of time may be variable, depending on the ratio of total incoming messages and total repeated incoming messages over time.

[surak]

Originally Posted by ArcticWolf

.....

[NaturalBornKiller]

Originally Posted by Pizdzius

That's true, collision detection would really slow down the game and increase lag ;S

It would not, if done properly

[Razvan87]

No solidity ...bye