(04-11-2014, 03:36 PM)Zyrusticae Wrote: I'm sorry, Ignacious, but I simply do not believe you. It contradicts everything I've experienced in my games thus far and, more to the point, there is simply no evidence for half the stuff you're asserting (especially the idea that the character creation/customization is heavy on the server-client side, which I have yet to see ANYONE making a big deal out of). I think you're confusing your client-side rendering with server-side data transmission. It only takes a few milliseconds to get all the data to reconstruct a character... it takes a lot longer to take those assets from your hard drive and get it duplicated in your RAM.
At any rate... until someone with insider knowledge or firsthand experience can come in to dispel these mysteries, let's talk about the games instead. Some new trailers:
I think the game shows quite a lot of promise. The roleplaying and crafting features are especially impressive, particularly in light of all these other games that put those on the back burner.
I actually have worked in 3ds Max, Radiant, Maya, and FormZ, and today I work in Revit. Â I'm not an expert in everything code, but I do know quite a bit about data transmittal. Â I did a study in school about the connections between digital design and architecture, and how architectural design can influence video game environments and perspectives. Â I just don't think people really give designers credit (or scorn) or examine the decisions they have to make. Â Especially the poor hard code guys (my brother does that for a living); they work really hard to make sure we don't notice how hard it can be to move data by hiding it. Â I mean, you can not believe me, but try logging into a major city and see what your transmission and received data spikes to. Â Since the city is all loaded, it's all character data. Â You don't have to take my word for it.
As a point of interest, I asked how this sort of thing might work if some of my friends were doing it (some of whom are definitely in the "sliders" camp). Â The best summary says that it's actually somewhat common practice to send the data in bits that get rendered in order of necessity. Â So the computer gets the necessary list data for the basics first, then the variables later. Â While this makes the amount of raw data larger (because then you need to transmit it in pieces in a code your computer will understand to put it together in), it does mean most people could use that sort of data to get a higher level of customization without bogging down the game.
Another point was the cumulative effect of data transmittal in a game like an MMORPG, that if you suddenly appear in a room with 39 other players, not only do you need data on all 39 people, but those 39 people need data on you. Â A friend of mine that used to work at 3d Realms (Lord knows where he works now) talked about that in WoW once, so I asked him. Â Apparently, it depends a lot on how it is integrated. Â He said that, if you have a nose on a list, and you just have to apply a quantity to it, it might not be so bad, it's just a few extra numbers that gets plugged into a formula. Â It's once you're dealing with multivariable movement that things start to get really heavy.
On your client-side rendering point, he did bring something up. Â I usually don't think about it; my computer was recently built and is pretty muscular, and I've always had a fairly well-equipped machine. Â He said that such information, regardless of the transmission, has to be kept in active memory if it's being used to do GPU calculations. Â It's getting to be less of a problem now because the cache sizes are rising and the RAM is getting easier to buy at higher prices, but he said he'd probably worry more about that if it was his game he was designing. Â The more customized numbers each individual character has, the more active memory gets eaten and can't be released until the character exits the rendering area.
System resources in PCs can be so variable, and players so harsh, that if someone has an otherwise phenomenal computer but is chugging due to one component (say, the rest of the PC is great but the RAM has been outpaced), someone could complain about the design when it really wasn't their fault. Â Therefore, MMORPGs have a tendency to be designed for a lower common denominator of computer, and they use some older techniques to shore up the graphical backlog. Â So he said computers that have highly adjustable characters will probably lose something in the transition simply because you have to keep in mind that people don't all run the SOA hardware. Â He said if you look closely enough, you see where they saved the resources.
So while the server load seems to be a problem (especially, my brother tells me, on the server's side, since the amount of data they actually push per second is mind-boggling), it's not the largest. Â That's where you're probably right, what's not a problem for my hardware personally might be a problem for someone else. Â There also seems to be a workaround for it by just loading things in order of priority rather than all at once. Â However, this isn't always used, so if a game has a universally hard time loading intense character data at once, it could be that this wasn't kept in mind. Â It also makes it a bit more intense on the server, as then every quest is parsed into bits of data over time that need to be stopped and okayed (though those bits are smaller than getting it all in one big chunk).
That's what I've got on it so far. Â I'm far more critical of the pedestrian stuff than most people considering my background, I suppose. Â I'm in a budget-heavy design field and I'm kind of half-in, half-out of the world of hard computer programming. Â My biggest problem with MMORPGs, especially the crop coming out now, is that they have a bad habit of wasting their strengths and trying to gloss over their weaknesses. Â They have a tendency to be developed just like every other single-player game, just with more people involved (sort of that quest-grind/world-PVP dichotomy). Â That seems like quite the waste, especially since the answers are out there. Â I imagine most people could come up with a decent way to escape that "traditional" MMORPG patois, just that we don't seem to get games developed that way.