Ape Apps

Ansom said: lag/bad connection

if one person has a good connection with no lag, no one will have lag unless their own internet is slow:it take only one good connection to eliminate lag for new people. the more people have a given "file" or in this case "map" the faster everyone else will be.

Stecat94 said:

Ansom said: lag/bad connection

if one person has a good connection with no lag, no one will have lag unless their own internet is slow:it take only one good connection to eliminate lag for new people. the more people have a given "file" or in this case "map" the faster everyone else will be.

Isn't the opposite? Since everyone need to be synchronized, everyone will have lag/velocity equal to the worst connection. Everyone need to interchange data at the same speed and quantity...

Ansom said:everyone will have lag

no only the information from the slow person will lag: example: if Lag makes building x at 1200 server time, but that information is not synced until 1210 someone else might have built something else there. but this is true regardless of p2p or centralized server.

@bastecklein what are your thoughts?

Well no matter what there will not be a centralized server for "building-in-the-same-map" multiplayer, as I cannot afford that kind of infrastructure. That would only work decentralized. I am fine with still allowing decentralized multiplayer, as it would not be overly difficult to implement, it just requires the understanding that other players would not be able to connect when the host is offline.

Thinking of the lag, I think it would only really be a major issue if two people were building right next to each other at the same time. If the server only transmits to the client the information needed for the current "chunk" of the map that the client is currently focused on, it wouldn't really matter so much if a client was lagging behind. It's when you get several players all building in the same area that issues would start to arise.

I guess it really depends on how much info needs to actually transmit between server and client. For example, if all rover activity is just simulated client-side, then no path information would have to cross the network, which would be the majority of the network activity if the current version of My Colony was online. Really, the client wouldn't even need to know any of the stats for any of the buildings until the player selects one. So it's hard telling. Really the biggest issue is going to be when the host player is offline. That is really going to bug people.

bastecklein said:biggest issue is going to be when the host player is offline.

p2p will solve that

I do not understand how the P2P would work logistically. I think there has to be one "master" copy of the game world that all of the other players are synced to.

bastecklein said: one "master" copy

nope, if you start a map you become a "seed" or "someone with all the info." if I join you I become a "peer" and all the info that you have is sent to me and then I become a seed. As long as there is at least one seed, new logins will be possible. If all people shut off their program, the first to reopen the map will become the first seed, starting the process all over again. if you make it central to the map maker, but if the map maker is on a slow internet, EVERYONE on that map will be slow. In addition, the more people who login to a central map, the slower that person's internet will be. If there is one seed and many peers, it will take a relatively long time to spread the info around. On the other hand, if there is a lot of seeds, then it will go fast. Seeds are like servers and peers are like users, if you have one server(seed) and 1000 users(peer), you need a server that can handle that. If you have 1000 servers(seed) and 1 user(peer)... you get the idea.

bastecklein said: one "master" copy

nope, if you start a map you become a "seed" or "someone with all the info." if I join you I become a "peer" and all the info that you have is sent to me and then I become a seed. As long as there is at least one seed, new logins will be possible. If all people shut off their program, the first to reopen the map will become the first seed, starting the process all over again. if you make it central to the map maker, but if the map maker is on a slow internet, EVERYONE on that map will be slow. In addition, the more people who login to a central map, the slower that person's internet will be. If there is one seed and many peers, it will take a relatively long time to spread the info around. On the other hand, if there is a lot of seeds, then it will go fast. Seeds are like servers and peers are like users, if you have one server(seed) and 1000 users(peer), you need a server that can handle that. If you have 1000 servers(seed) and 1 user(peer)... you get the idea.

Right @Stecat94 , but the issue I see is that we are not "seeding" a static video or music file, it's a game world that is changing each time somebody plays. So if a world has 10 players total for example, and players 1-4 are all playing Tuesday and then on Wednesday players 5-8 only play, and then Thursday players 2,6 and 10 play, now we have 4 different copies of the map out there all with different data. I think it could lead to major issues.