[CF-Devel] Re: 25 x 25

[Mark Wedel]

On Thu, 24 May 2001, Peter Mardahl wrote:

>
     
      > I think that the spliting of the project into two branches might be the
     
     >
     
      > best option - mabey you can have votes on a name. I only got the game 3
     
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      We don't really have the development resources to support two branches.
     
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      I do not consider forking a good option.
     
     

 As a note, there are already 2 branches for the server - the main
cvs branch and a patch-1-0(-0? - can't remember).

 The patch one is just for that - minor patches/things to improve
stability.  As  of this instant, it is the same as CVS tree, but that
is not likely to be the case soon (I do plan to rip out all the code
in CVS to deal with older client revisions for example).

 I agree with Peter on that we don't really have the resource to
be doing several things at once.  Also, I think we will get a better
product if we focus on one thing vs trying to do 10 things.

>
     
      > >From a bandwidth point of view I would be interested to know what
     
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      > percent of the trafic is the pixel maps and what is the maping info (I
     
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      > only had a quick play with the code but it seems to send the updating of
     
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     >
     
      Take this up on the list, I do not know it.
     
     
 This is not a simple question.

 First, by pixel maps, I'm taking you mean images.

 Given that, if the client is caching the images, very little bandwidth is
used for that - the only bandwidth is to fill in missing images that the
client does not have.

 Even if the client is not caching (which really means caching between
different servers/runs), the client still caches the images for a
connection to the server.  So worst case, for any session, each image is
only sent once.

 Given that case, bandwith portions depend on how long the person plays.  If
they just hop on, play for 10 minutes, and then leave, the portion for images
will be much higher than that for map information.

 But if they hop on, and play for 5 hours, probably the bulk of the images
will have been sent in the first 10-15 minutes, with occasional batches as the
player runs into new monters or goes to a new map set with different style.
But in that case, it will be the map (and item, and other protocol actions)
which have the bulk of the bandwith.

 The image file in total is a little under 2 megabytes.  So worst case,
2 megabytes of image information will get sent.

 From what I have seen, it isn't amount of data sent, but when that data is
sent.

 If I'm in town selling/identifying items, having some lag as I do
that isn't that big a deal.  A little annoying, but this is the best time
for the server to be sending bunches of data to the client.

 A little lag in the middle of combat is a big deal - it can literally
be deadly.  Now you hit some image information if that is the first
you have seen the monster.  But after that, it is just a matter of the
spells flying and other bandwidth consuming tasks.