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Update to the Vision MMO engine

Name:	Vince Gee
Date Posted:	Feb 10, 2006
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Folks,

I'm kinda hyped atm, I have spent the last couple days trying to figure out a way around the new problem w/ 1.4 head that we couldn't break the max damage and max energy out of the datablock anymore. (I'm guessing it's due to the new threading system). So, as a test, I rewrote my program to dynamically generate datablocks on the fly for players and npc's so that I can still control the health and energy.

What I really need now is people to go to www.geeconsulting.net register and download the client and post back what they find... lag etc.

Cause this is my bet... the reason this is such a bad idea is because of the bandwidth and memory issues related to it. Well, I'm wondering about that.... When tge came out back in the 90's the best computers where at most 1 gightrz and 500 megs of ram, let alone dialup.... So my bet is this, I put the server on a dedicated box w/ a 1.7 gighrtz cpu, raid 5 harddrives, win 2003 server os, and 1 gig of ram... and I'm monitering my bandwidth and will try to compare it to last week.

My bet is that this isn't as much as a concern as it use to be w/ modern technology such as high speed and faster computers....

Be warned though, the login process take a lil longer now.

I'll post my testing results when I feel confident about them, maybe I can get 25-50 people online this weekend to see if my 384 dsl line up can handle em.... If that can't handle em I'll upgrade it to 784 up and try again....

The way I see it, is that if no one test's this and just takes facts from 10 years ago at face value how can we ever really now w/ todays technology.

Vince

Recent Blog Posts

List:	12/22/06 - Need a head start on modding 1.5? 12/20/06 - Just thought I would post my going ons. 12/09/06 - Game Patcher Release 1 Finished!!!! 12/07/06 - Opensource Patcher Part 2 11/17/06 - Looking for a mountable Dragon 03/27/06 - The Current state of affairs (pics inside) 02/14/06 - Finnally an opensource patcher!!!!! 02/12/06 - Things are smoothing out for the Vision Toolkit

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Vince Gee (Feb 10, 2006 at 04:59 GMT)

oh, one more thing... now in the gm controls you can change the amount of damage a weapon does on the fly... so if your trying to tune a weapon, you can keep modifying the damage until you get it where you want it then reboot all your zone servers and the new damage amount will take :)

Vince

Vince Gee (Feb 10, 2006 at 05:23 GMT)

ok, this is looking bad, we might have more bandwidth these days but I don't think we have enough.. so on to round two... guess I'll be reverting back to the old build and figuring out whats wrong w/ the code changing the datablocks dynamically... I must be missing some mask settings when I do it or something....

Enough for tonight

Vince

Prairie Games (Feb 10, 2006 at 08:47 GMT)

Bandwidth hasn't been an issue at all for MoM... CPU is another story entirely. If you haven't already, you should run the profiler and check out what the CPU is doing with player/bots... Torque's player collision code is an absolute killer. I wrote a very simple version for MoM. Another thing you can do (which I did) is to 1/2 the engine's tick rate. This helps bandwidth and CPU.

Phil Carlisle (Feb 10, 2006 at 09:32 GMT)

I'll add an "amen" to that. Josh hit the nail on the head.. player's physics is kinda sloow. Given what its doing.

I found a load of speedups I could do when I last looked, but I'd suggest maybe looking at Bens solution in the RTS pack for inspiration there. Especially for an MMO.

Vince Gee (Feb 10, 2006 at 12:12 GMT)

Thanks Josh, I'll take a look tonight.

Vince

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