(04-09-2014, 06:06 PM)Ildur Wrote: It is all contained locally: all the characters, no matter how many sliders you slap into them, will be made from a preset. They are all basically modification of it. Think of TERA: Bob's character makes a human and chooses preset 6 and hair 31, and then moved the sliders. Your computer receives the data from the server: Bob is entering at coordinates X,Y,Z, moving in W direction. He used Preset Face #3 and Hair #31. At the same time, your computer receives the data of the sliders. Then it renders Bob in all his slidy glory. There's no meaningful difference between someone's computer sending you the data of their face than them sending you their position which is constantly changing, unlike their face/body. And all faces, textures and models are already in your computer. All the game has to do is receive the slider data which, I repeat, is no more taxing that someone's position when bunnyhopping and randomly turning. It is still not an issue.
And what Synaesthetic said.
I think the problem is that you guys are examining this as a polygon solution, all self contained within a local system. Â MMORPGs aren't like that, as so much data has to be sent to you from the central server. Â I think it's not always apparent how the data gets to you or sometimes how long it takes to get there.
The GPU, playing with your personal polygons on screen, might be relatively fast. Â We're talking about a Stormwind City scenario, walking into a place where you're going to get rendering instructions on a few hundred players at a time.
Aion's actually one of those games that had the problem, but hid it well (we looked it over to see how it was going to handle the game for just that reason). Â We got a relatively decent (at the time) PC to chug by walking into Sanctum during a REALLY crushing population boom. Â The amount of character data you had to load at the time simply choked it out, not only did the framerate stutter, but people were popping into existence from nowhere.
Luckily, Aion's graphics, while appearing pretty, used World of Warcraft-style methods of saving bandwidth. Â Like I said, the more crap you throw onto a local list, the more you tax the system rather than the connection. Â So you'll see arcades of what look like the same stamp of modular wall over and over again, and in fact that's exactly what it is. Â I wasn't much of a fan of Aion's gameplay, but I can appreciate the smart design choices and the economy of the computer. Â They made as much as they could local and did their best to keep things to list. Â It freed up space for the character variety.
I think a lot of people kind of think of that as cheating, in a way, but NCSoft, for all their flaws, were very aware of how hard they'd be taxing the servers with the character generator. Â But this is why we don't really have enemies that have deep AI. Â The enemies are controlled by the network server, not the local drive, and so if you start eating the bandwidth for use in character modeling, there's less you can allocate to the position and reaction of enemies.
It's one of the reasons that games have generally opted to limiting the size of parties and raids. Â While it's generally assumed that it's meant to make it easier to put a raiding party together, what it's actually doing is limiting the information zipping back and forth between players and server. Â Imagine you're in a raid, and an AOE goes off that hits every single member of a 40 man raid. Â Every character has a longwinded formula determine their damage, which is then sent to them and everyone else in the raid, so they all know what their health is at. Â If there's a status effect, that means not only does the server tell you that you have it, but the other 39 people as well.
What this essentially means is that, as characters are added and variables added that need to be sent back and forth, the growth of data is exponential, not proportional. Â It doesn't seem like much, sending the variables of things like noses to every other character in an area with a hundred players, but every single character needs that information sent to the other 99 people and needs to receive the information of those 99 people. Â Instancing has helped a lot, since this means that big boss fights tend to be fought with people who know each other and have limited information it needs to send (at that point, mostly skeletal movement and raw gameplay data). Â That's much more of a problem in the kinds of open worlds people say they really want.
There's a reason EVE Online has limited ship models and colors with little customization of the actual ship avatar. Â You can play with the character creator all you'd like, all it needs is a snapshot. Â Its character creator, coupled with its high graphical polish, means that EVE players won't be able to congregate at a station for a long time. Â It's incredibly difficult to pull off that kind of data transfer.
Just some of the things that get handled behind the scenes that isn't always appreciated. Â In the grand scheme of things, as I said, I'd much rather my bandwidth was spent giving an enemy the ability to track me stealthily and ambush me across a mile of terrain rather than giving me the ability to position a custom scar wherever I want on my jaw. Â Nice as it might be, I RPed for a very long time without video games and my powers of literary description have always outpaced even the most powerful character generators.
Then again, it doesn't look like anyone's using that economy of server load to allocate to AI or other gameplay attributes. Â Parametric customization is better than nothing, and everyone seems to be at least capable of making that. Â Shoddy AI seems to also permeate games that can't use server load as an excuse.
