DoubleWolf
Stalker
- Joined
- Apr 25, 2008
- Posts
- 1,592
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- Lost Renegades
I had to go back and find my post in this cause I had no idea what I typed here 
Mobs still behave the exact same way as they always did. But I'm starting to think that perhaps this isn't a result of MA being poor programmers, or not trying to make the game fun, but that it's more of a technical limitation.
This is a worldwide game where everyone in the world plays on the exact same server. You end up having to compensate for a LOT of lag. You need to make it so that a team composing of players, for instance, from the UK, Australia and the US all see the same thing happening and that everything syncs up correctly.
If you made the mobs perform a lot of complex movements, it's likely that things wouldn't match up for everyone, and you'd see a lot of odd lag issues. It's much easier for the system to give a command like "run straight at player" and have that sync up as any lag can be compensated for on the player's end by predicting what would happen next.
I've been playing a racing MMO lately that uses this same sort of prediction to compensate for lag. However in racing, there are a lot of quick movements that players make. So you constantly have players jumping around all over the track as the server and the player's computer talk to each other, trying to determine the real position. This gets really annoying when you end up hitting their car because of lag. The game slows you down because you hit something, but on their end, there was no collision, so they just keep on going like nothing happened.
What makes it worse is that the game has two servers to choose from: North America and Europe. For whatever reason, I guess not many Europeans play this particular game, so many of the ones that do will log into the NA server so they have people to play with. The lag I notice from them is considerably worse than players from NA.
So I think until we can really eliminate worldwide lag, the way it is now is probably the way it's going to be. Which is sad, but is also quite impressive when you consider the hurdles they have to overcome to make it work at all.
Mobs still behave the exact same way as they always did. But I'm starting to think that perhaps this isn't a result of MA being poor programmers, or not trying to make the game fun, but that it's more of a technical limitation.
This is a worldwide game where everyone in the world plays on the exact same server. You end up having to compensate for a LOT of lag. You need to make it so that a team composing of players, for instance, from the UK, Australia and the US all see the same thing happening and that everything syncs up correctly.
If you made the mobs perform a lot of complex movements, it's likely that things wouldn't match up for everyone, and you'd see a lot of odd lag issues. It's much easier for the system to give a command like "run straight at player" and have that sync up as any lag can be compensated for on the player's end by predicting what would happen next.
I've been playing a racing MMO lately that uses this same sort of prediction to compensate for lag. However in racing, there are a lot of quick movements that players make. So you constantly have players jumping around all over the track as the server and the player's computer talk to each other, trying to determine the real position. This gets really annoying when you end up hitting their car because of lag. The game slows you down because you hit something, but on their end, there was no collision, so they just keep on going like nothing happened.
What makes it worse is that the game has two servers to choose from: North America and Europe. For whatever reason, I guess not many Europeans play this particular game, so many of the ones that do will log into the NA server so they have people to play with. The lag I notice from them is considerably worse than players from NA.
So I think until we can really eliminate worldwide lag, the way it is now is probably the way it's going to be. Which is sad, but is also quite impressive when you consider the hurdles they have to overcome to make it work at all.
