I coded it with preventing hacks in mind, but I can't think of everything. If it doesn't create massive performance improvements, I will disable it.
I was thinking krenzo.. you might want to add in the option for the client side checking. As in... have the client do a calculation test to see how fast it could do it. Then if needed it would ask the server to take on that responsibility if the clients computer is too lame. I am sure the server wouldn't need to do too many ppls calculations as I suspect there are plenty of midrange and up out there. As for security... you could always have the server randomly double check someones movements for a few seconds at a time and move on to the next person to make sure no weird crap is going on. The client would never know if it is getting checked. After all.. the client simply tells the server (position)(height)(direction)(speed)(facing) before your change and after your change too im guessing.
I find the idea good, but can it be that the upload bandwith from client side is to low?? I don´t know because i have never tested wich amount of capacity empires of my bandwith uses.
I already have checking in place to make sure the clients aren't cheating. Client-side movement adds 12 bytes to a client's upload bandwidth. Who can't spare 12 bytes?
I can spare 12 bytes per ?cmd thingy? EDIT: That's 300 bytes/sec at my favored cmdrate of 25. I've got 2800 bytes/sec of upload at the absolute maximum. So yeah. I've still got some room.
If this feature doesn't pan out and you have to disable it, will we get our 12 bytes back? :p Anywho, in all seriousness, you might be opening up a can of worms with moving player/vehicle movement tracking to the client. The only MMO I know of where this sort of client/server communication really matters is PlanetSide. There (unlike in the myriad of MMORPGs out there) this sort of a thing really matters, since bullets/missiles travel at speeds several orders of magnitude faster than players, so a player position being a even a second out of date can mean life or death. I wonder if they use client- or server-side player tracking.
Remember that Krenzo would like to get 64-player servers up. Some heavy optimizing (especially server-side) might be in order if we'd like to reach that quota.
At the moment 32 vehicles at one server can almost kill it. So whatever you do to reduce CPU use on server is great.
Generally my Linux boxen you can happily spawn run a 24 player server on larger maps where the action is more spread out but maps like district and money can lag heavily with just 12 players, and i'm taking about CPU usage. For those that know linux, i've seen load averages of >50 for emp_money when a full compliment of turrets and artys are in full swing!
Krenzo, can you include the new versions of escort and cdr canyon in this patch? for some reason all the boxes in escort are missing. Can you check the post i made in the dev forum about this?
Sounds like he didn't know to me. People tend to edit other people's maps in a dev team. Take district for example. Someone made it, I don't know who, but Solokiller took over the job of maintaining that map.
Duke made district, i optimized it and added in stuff, i also fix exploits. The missing crate may be fixed by first checking the compile log for missing models or wrong entities used for models.
