World ... is almost GO!

[Karl G.]

After a long weekend of banging my head against the problem of trying to make it so that every client in the world isn't sent a message every time something in the world moves I've finally locked in my solution. Instead of 1024 characters in the world moving 10 times a second x 8 players = roughly 1 MB of data traffic per second, I now use an average of 1k/second. This is the new stuff the server can do:

• Dead monsters disappear from the world after a certain amount of time
• Monsters can be spawned asynchronously (they don't immediately show up in the world when spawned--see next item)
• New "active" monsters are only generated from "spawned" monsters when a player enters an area of the world that previously had no players
  • The result = I can spawn TONS more monsters--all spawn points can be filled at the same time, since the limit is only in the number of points that simultaneously have players in them
• Only "active" monsters are updated--so they can have much more complex AI since I'm processing far fewer
• Items disappear from the world when clients are too far away to see
• General speed increase on all spells

So this was pretty much a tech-y weekend. I'm going to add some new fun content with spawn points to the world this week and make another demo. Oh yeah, I forgot:

• Players gain experience from monsters
• Players level-up, including gaining HP and MP (no stat points yet though)
• I have two level 8 characters...which are too high level to do any good testing with, so I deleted them

[thadiusofx3]

man i can almost taste it
thats a lot of work done under the hood in a short amount of time

[kuba]

Awesome progress, looking forward to the upcoming weeks

[Nirvana9832]

Nice Karl. keep up the good workm, dont over do it now! haha. how are them bags under your eyes lookin eh? lmao

*Continues to wait for alpha*

=]

[Richard. UK]

Hey guys,

This is amazing job Karl, I have to say this is a very very very tough decision for me...Both around the same time...Beta release of Volucris, or Beta release of Warhammer Online:WAR (Open Beta, Live Headstart - Collector Edition)..i'm in on both! but the choice is a tough one so thats saying something Karl Totally amazing work, well done!

(P.S - It will more than definately be volucris )


All the Best Guys,
Richard

[Slayne]

Sounds great....to bad release date is 1 day after i start school back up

[lawn gnome]

ahhhh i cant wait!

[Ratiotile]

regarding AI: an approach that would allow for more complex AI is to segregate the monster AI functionality from the main server and instead have one or multiple AI servers log on the the main server. This way the load of calculating AI is distributed among multiple computers.