[CF-Devel] reduction of data when casting spells

[Mark Wedel]

Philipp Currlin wrote:
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      Hello
     
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      I know only small changes should be made now, however I think gameplay
     
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      got _slower_ since Mark reduced the time for updates of tiles.
     
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      Now even one dragon can be enough to make me stop moving for one second.
     
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      For me it is still possible to play, but sometimes it can really reduce
     
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      the fun of it.
     
     
 Its possible my changes may have effected this, but I'm unsure how.

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      My suggestion is to reduce the amount of spells shown per tile. I don't
     
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      think we really need to show poison cloud and icestorm ten times on
     
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      every tile on the screen when you are fighting a chinese dragon. If it
     
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      is shown once you still see what is going on but your connection will be
     
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      a lot faster.
     
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      What I mean is to keep the monsters casting their spells and the damage
     
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      should be calculated the same way as before but the client shouldn't be
     
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      allowed to show each spell more than once.
     
     
 tile in what regard?  There are two areas you may be using to refer to tile
here:

1) The tiles as they appear in the map window (where the player icon is).  In
that case, no more than 3 tiles will ever be sent for any space (and its
typically a floor plus two objects above it).  One of the things on the drawing
board is to have the number of objects send here more settable - if you're on a
slow connectiion, you may only want the floor + the top object, and ignore that
middle one for bandwidth savings.  Certainly, right now, anyone playing that
uses the xbm graphics would really want just the top object, since the xbm
graphics don't have transparencies.  But xbm graphics will go away, so that
contingent should not be very large.

2) The look window is a different category.  Currently, 50 objects can get sent
to the client each tick.  Note the number of spells shown could be reduced or
even eliminated in this window.  However, to selectively show each one as unique
would be a pain (ie, if you were being hit by 10 fires, 3 slows and 8 fears, and
the order was fire, fear, fire, fire, slow, fear, fire, fire.. ..  and you only
wanted to see the top 3, you would get fire, fear, fire.

 It would be too compute intensive to try to reduce that stack to just fire,
fear, slow, as it would basically require an O(n^2) operation on each tick.

 The problem is that even with this, it won't help out if your standing on a
stack of 50 items, as the server will still send the entire stack each tick -
now you'll just get 5 spells and 45 items instead of 40 spells and 10 items.