[CF-Devel] speculations about the floor (elevation)

[crossfire-devel-admin at archives.real-time.com]

 --- Yann Chachkoff <
     
     yann.chachkoff at myrealbox.com
     
     > wrote: > Some
thoughts...
>
     
      The real question to ask is: is there are real performance bottleneck
     
     >
     
      when handling elevation on a square-by-square basis ? 
     
     
<much snippage>

That is one of the things I am trying to determine with my Weather God
server.  I will be making the granularity of the speed hack changeable. 
The current 100x100 is hard coded, and certain routines will be non trivial
to change.

By seperating the weather code out it stops being a game mechanics bottle
neck since the game server no longer has to worry about it.  On the other
hand, you will want to keep your granularity low if you are running the WG
on the same CPU as the game server.  On the gripping hand, if you have a
spare machine (or cluster B-) ) you can run your weather system with a high
granularity.  Finally, you could run the WG in GUI mode as a screen saver
on your workstation B-).

As for what effect granularity has on the world, the answer to that is
obvious when you wonder around near the poles and see large square
icebergs.

Currently, the WG waits for a tick from the server (about once every two
and a half minutes), does its calculations in a fraction of a second on my
Athlon XP 3000+, then waits for the next tick.  When my system was a Duron
900, and the weather system was part of the game server, there was a
noticable pause every two and a half minutes.  If all goes well, I should
be able to configure WG on my server to have per tile granularity, it will
take most of two minutes to calculate, but will also have two and a half
minutes to update the map it is currently on.

Note that last bit, the weather system calculates the overall weather every
tick, but only updates one map per tick.  It also updates maps that the
players are on (when they enter from memory).  Since WG is a DM like player
that teleports to a new map per tick, a small part now happens
automatically B-).  Updating a map every two minutes should not slow down
the server much, as all you are doing is sprinkling some snow and rain
tiles around.  Roughly the equivilent game server load as an ordinary
player killing a few dozen orcs in a couple of minutes.



     
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