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Messages - ivern

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General Discussion / Well...
« on: May 10, 2003, 11:35:25 am »
Just a little bit of random thinking...don\'t take the following too seriously :)

Honestly, for static / quest NPCs I don\'t think you need very sophisticated AI...a static conversation tree with some magic in the middle to make \"close enough\" replies count as a trigger will work very well...just as long as it\'s not like EverQuest where sometimes you have to sit next to an NPC saying semi-random phrases for hours until you hit the right trigger (or until someone figures it out and puts out a spoiler.)  This shouldn\'t be too hard, but give the game some time...remember, it\'s a pre-alpha :)

For hack and slash mobs, a good AI can make the game a lot more insteresting...specially if the ones that escape can learn and fight differently next time around.  Of course, this can take some pretty massive processing power on the server side.  It could, perhaps, be added as an optional server-side plugin...or used only when a certain NPC flag is set (so tough / boss mobs would have it, and their flunkies would not.)

Javier

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General Discussion /
« on: May 10, 2003, 11:20:45 am »
This argument doesn\'t really make any sense...one of the aims of PS is to be a massively multiplayer game.  You (leeta) accept that a client needs to have \"important\" information such as character / mob position updates.  Well, there\'s two problems right there:

1)  When player A moves, either all other players need to know about it (impossible in a p2p environment, unless you want to extend that \"massive\" bandwidth requirement to every client rather than just the server), or a select group of players need to be notified (the ones close enough to notice.)  In this second (more realistic case), what\'s stopping the server from filtering this and only broadcasting the update to the clients that need to know about it?  There is absolutely nothing to gain from a p2p approach to this.

Another thing to keep in mind is position updates are possibly *the* most frequent packet that will be sent out.  People (and mobs) move a lot more than they speak or perform complex actions.  At the same time, they\'re one of the most important things to keep track off if you don\'t want the visuals to suffer.  And yet you seem happy to have every client broadcast these packets directly to the other clients...client bandwidth consumption should not be affected by the number of players on the server...that makes absolutely no sense.

2)  The other key problem is that this is a player-versus-environment centered game.  Who\'s going to run the environment?  You need a centralized game engine to run the creatures people are going to be fighting against...and we\'re back to square one again...your pick: a server broadcasting the mob updates, or a mass of clients trying to make a decision about them.  Once the client count breaks a few hundred, you\'re in a world of pain.

The p2p idea uses up entirely too much client bandwidth, and this brings me to my third and final point:  it\'s a good idea...for small groups of clients.  Well, guess what:  running a centralized server for a small group of clients takes up very little bandwidth too.

I wonder if I simply missed the point of the original post...since I don\'t see how on earth a p2p approach would relieve the \"bandwidth problem\" any more than pruning the broadcasts serverside would.  Please, if you can, enlighten me :)

Javier

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