I'd like to inform everyone about an upcoming test version that will disrupt things. My current plan has been to release ever more stable versions of 1.08 every weekend or so with bug fixes for those bugs reported. However, I have an important feature that has been implemented but is not enabled or fully tested. That feature is client-side player movement. Client-side player movement is where your client does all of the calculations for deciding where to move and checking if you can move there. The benefit is that this saves cpu time on the server since the client will be doing the majority of the work, and the server only needs to perform a simple check to make sure the player isn't doing something outrageous like walking through walls. This same concept is being applied to vehicles, but it's only about 50% done for vehicles. The server and client dlls need to be updated to support this, and it still has bugs because it hasn't been thoroughly tested. There are still some issues with players getting stuck in things and caught on stuff. The main purpose of this test is to determine if it really affords performance improvements that makes it worth it. I plan on releasing an upcoming RC that will have this feature enabled, but everyone must understand and acknowledge that this feature is being turned on temporarily to determine what the performance gains are. Once we ascertain its benefits, then I will disable the feature, and we can get back to doing our normal bug testing.
Sounds like a good thing; server Hosts have been saying that Empires is a beast on a server :p If people don't understand that this whole forum release is a beta test, and take it as the full, if you want to flip all models up side down for the sake of testing, then by all means :p
Rock and roll let put my damn cpu to some use. About the only thing Empires stresses on my system is the gpu... To bad you couldn't put more on the client side...
The funny thing is that it won't really stress your cpu because it's just you. The server gets bogged down because it's dealing with every player in-game.
Sounds neat. Will that mean that vehicle-based movements and battles will be more accurate, since the server has more CPU to spend on calculating things?
maybe, I did notice that the minimap calculations were resource intensive towards the end of the round back when I ran a short term server.
is there a way that perhaps when you get near an object that you are likely to become stuck on, you start sending double the amount of info to the server to prevent you getting clipped... something like that?
Lag? Well, I'll find out what it's like when I finish downloading it. And that "Lag" was meant for Sandbag, not for Krenzo. Sandbag's idea would make my modem cry more loudly than it already does. I dunno if RC9 will. Hopefully, it'll cry a little less, as usual.
I guess I'll have to let you know how it performs on old school hardware, as my 2400 is already taxed enough.
Is this "client-side movement" stuff common for the source engine? That is, do games like CS:Source use this system, or is this some revolutionary new approach you're taking?
It's revolutionary to Source. The only other games that use it are MMOs and those with lots of players. Source's method is becoming obsolete, but it still works because they have so few players and objects to check for collision against. Source is designed with BSP levels being the majority of the collisions. Empires has lots of large objects within a large unseparated level. What do you mean?
I think he means cheaters and client side hacks. I think empires is just as liable for hackers as any other game.
