Originally posted by pogowolf Originally posted by dsorrentOriginally posted by psychoduckThey'll NEVER implement WASD movement because(little technical):When you use WASD momement you have to send informatian to the server for every key you press, with pnc movement you have to only send one sever request instead of hundreds per minute. And because they want to support like 50k of people online at the same time server performance is very important. Umm, you know.. I accepted your answer initially, but after mullling it over, this is ridiculous. You just need to transmit state changes to the server which is not hundreds per minute. The server knows your current position, the direction you are facing and what speed you are capable of moving at therefore calculating your position over time and keeping you moving, is all calculated server side and reflected back to the client to be displayed on your screen. When someone presses "W", their character object gets a property set on it that indicates it is moving. The character's trajectory is stored on the object since it knows which way you arte facing. Now the player holds the "D" key down which sends a packet to the server which upates the trajectory to a 45 degree movement and keeps the character moving. When the player releases the "D" key, a state change is transmitted to the server indicating a trajectory change back to 0. The "W" key is release, a packet informs the server that the character has stopped, changing the moving property to false and then stopping the position calculations to be updated. So, "technically" using a WASD setup is possible and will not cause as much overhead as you would initially think. However, when you use the WASD you tend to play the game like a FPS.. even as you stated above, there's a lot more packets floating back and forth between the client and server. By switching to a click style of movement, there's 'one' packet.... Also you didn't calculate in, that if you've got 10,000 players.. all of them using the WASD, and the server is handleing all the 'I'm moving' packets, and then transmit ALL those keystrokes to each client, that's in the area of you... that's a lot of overhead, which in turn causes lag... BTW, anyone reading these boards in game yet????
I'm not following how there will be that much of an increase in packets. People who play point and click games don't normally click on the other side of a town and let the pathfinding figure it out. No, they click 20 paces in front of their character and then do the same when the character reaches (or gets close) to the clicked point. If people did click on the other side of town and let the AI pathfinding do it's work, then, yes, I can see the decrease in packets, however I sincerely doubt that's the way most people play PnC games. Consider walking in a straight line from point A to B where A and B are 1000 paces away. In the PnC way, you will have players clicking multiple points between A and B to get from A to B. In a WASD setup, you turn toward point B which is 2 state changes (up and down) of a rotate key. Now they hold W down (one state change) until they reach B. They get to B and let up on W (second state change). In the WASD setup, you've sent 4 packets. To send 4 packets PnC way, each click would be 250 paces, which is not very likely.
As for the server reporting "I'm moving" back to all of the clients, it would need to do that in the PnC way as well since other clients will need to be made aware of your characters location.
Originally posted by dsorrent I'm not following how there will be that much of an increase in packets. People who play point and click games don't normally click on the other side of a town and let the pathfinding figure it out. No, they click 20 paces in front of their character and then do the same when the character reaches (or gets close) to the clicked point. If people did click on the other side of town and let the AI pathfinding do it's work, then, yes, I can see the decrease in packets, however I sincerely doubt that's the way most people play PnC games.
Well, I know that I tend to use the mouse less after I've gotton used to the system (still don't like it though), but then again 90% of the time the reason that people click the mouse every 20 paces is because the path-finding sucks so badly that they can't help but click 50 times to move around that small rock...
Originally posted by dsorrent Consider walking in a straight line from point A to B where A and B are 1000 paces away. In the PnC way, you will have players clicking multiple points between A and B to get from A to B. In a WASD setup, you turn toward point B which is 2 state changes (up and down) of a rotate key. Now they hold W down (one state change) until they reach B. They get to B and let up on W (second state change). In the WASD setup, you've sent 4 packets. To send 4 packets PnC way, each click would be 250 paces, which is not very likely.
However, according to the news about WISH you won't need to click those "20" times in order to go from point A to point B. Just once as long as your point B is on the screen. The Path finding is that good. (I've not been actived yet.. so I don't know from experaince) Where as even in your example you've sent 4 packets to one.
Originally posted by dsorrentAs for the server reporting "I'm moving" back to all of the clients, it would need to do that in the PnC way as well since other clients will need to be made aware of your characters location.
Which is Very true, however again from the example the server then would only need to send the Direction, Distance, and velocity of each user once.
of course, this argument is assumeing that EVERYONE will use the PnC interface the way it's designed. But as an added note, as I posted above, I don't like the PnC interface anyway, I would much rather see a slight drop in the total amount of players per server to allow me to feel more in control of my avatar.
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I'm not following how there will be that much of an increase in packets. People who play point and click games don't normally click on the other side of a town and let the pathfinding figure it out. No, they click 20 paces in front of their character and then do the same when the character reaches (or gets close) to the clicked point. If people did click on the other side of town and let the AI pathfinding do it's work, then, yes, I can see the decrease in packets, however I sincerely doubt that's the way most people play PnC games. Consider walking in a straight line from point A to B where A and B are 1000 paces away. In the PnC way, you will have players clicking multiple points between A and B to get from A to B. In a WASD setup, you turn toward point B which is 2 state changes (up and down) of a rotate key. Now they hold W down (one state change) until they reach B. They get to B and let up on W (second state change). In the WASD setup, you've sent 4 packets. To send 4 packets PnC way, each click would be 250 paces, which is not very likely.
As for the server reporting "I'm moving" back to all of the clients, it would need to do that in the PnC way as well since other clients will need to be made aware of your characters location.