September 2004
- Tuplespaces and MUDs J C Lawrence
- Tuplespaces and MUDs Matt Cruikshank
- Dragon Empires is cancelled dienw
- Dragon Empires is cancelled ceo
- Dragon Empires is cancelled Jim Purbrick
- Dragon Empires is cancelled OWEN, Matt, FM
- Dragon Empires is cancelled Alex Arnon
- Dragon Empires is cancelled Dana V. Baldwin
- Dragon Empires is cancelled Daniel.Harman@barclayscapital.com
- Room for more? (was Dragon Empires is cancelled) Michael Sellers
- Room for more? (was Dragon Empires is cancelled) Lee Sheldon
- Room for more? (was Dragon Empires is cancelled) Tamzen Cannoy
- Room for more? (was Dragon Empires is cancelled) Damion Schubert
- Room for more? (was Dragon Empires is cancelled) Lee Sheldon
- Room for more? (was Dragon Empires is cancelled) zgj22@drexel.edu
- Dragon Empires is cancelled Jim Purbrick
- Tuplespaces and MUDs Alex Arnon
- Tuplespaces and MUDs Zach Collins (Siege)
- Tuplespaces and MUDs ceo
- Tuplespaces and MUDs Jim Purbrick
- Tuplespaces and MUDs Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- Out of Office AutoReply: Distributed State Systems John Borland
- "flat" power treadmill [was: Casual Crowd vs.Time Rich Crowd] HRose
- Cognitively Interesting Combat Mike Rozak
- DGN/TECH: exploiting/hacking in MMOGs - sources of info?
- DGN/TECH: exploiting/hacking in MMOGs - sources of info? Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- DGN/TECH: exploiting/hacking in MMOGs - sources of info? Douglas Goodall
- DGN/TECH: exploiting/hacking in MMOGs - sources of info? John MacQueen
- DGN/TECH: exploiting/hacking in MMOGs - sources of info? HRose
- DGN/TECH: exploiting/hacking in MMOGs - sources of info? Damion Schubert
- DGN/TECH: exploiting/hacking in MMOGs - sources of info? Mike Rozak
- DGN/TECH: exploiting/hacking in MMOGs - sources of info? Daniel.Harman@barclayscapital.com
- DGN/TECH: Implementing server side spatial partitiong was:(exploiting/hacking in MMOGs - sources of info?) William Leader
- DGN/TECH: Implementing server side spatial partitiong was:(exploiting/hacking in MMOGs - sources of info?) Alistair Milne
- DGN/TECH: Implementing server side spatial partitiongwas:(exploiting/hacking in MMOGs - sources of info?) John Buehler
- DGN/TECH: Implementing server side spatial partitiong was:(exploiting/hacking in MMOGs - sources of info?) Bruce Mitchener
- DGN/TECH: Implementing server side spatial partitiong was:(exploiting/hacking in MMOGs - sources of info?) HRose
- DGN/TECH: Implementing server side spatial partitiongwas:(exploiting/hacking in MMOGs - sources of info?) John Buehler
- DGN/TECH: exploiting/hacking in MMOGs - sources of info? Per Vognsen
- PHP Mud Jones, Channing
- PHP Mud Chris
- Anyone remember this thesis? Scott Jennings
- Anyone remember this thesis? Paul Schwanz
- SOC Roll play vs. Role play Matthew Rick
- SOC Roll play vs. Role play Zach Collins (Siege)
- SOC Roll play vs. Role play darksuit
- SOC Roll play vs. Role play richard@kavir.org
- SOC Roll play vs. Role play Christopher Allen
- Fwd: Distributed State Systems Alex Arnon
- Fwd: Distributed State Systems Michael Tindal
- Decision making... J C Lawrence
- Decision making... Mike Rozak
- Decision making... Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- Decision making... Byron Ellacott
- Decision making... Rayzam
- Decision making... Matt Mihaly
- Decision making... Rayzam
- Decision making... Mike Rozak
- Decision making... Kalle
- Decision making... Jason Messer
- Decision making... Douglas Goodall
- Decision making... Mike Rozak
- Decision making... Byron Ellacott
- Decision making... Tess Lowe
- Decision making... ceo
- Decision making... Douglas Goodall
- Decision making... David Kennerly
- Separating newbies and oldbies Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- Separating newbies and oldbies HRose
- Separating newbies and oldbies Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- Removing the almighty experience point... Vincent Archer
- Removing the almighty experience point... Adam Burr
- Removing the almighty experience point... Vincent Archer
- Removing the almighty experience point... Matt Mihaly
- Removing the almighty experience point... Vincent Archer
- Removing the almighty experience point... Sean Middleditch
- Removing the almighty experience point... Michael Hartman
- Removing the almighty experience point... Matt Mihaly
- Removing the almighty experience point... HRose
- Removing the almighty experience point... Matt Mihaly
- Removing the almighty experience point... Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- Removing the almighty experience point... HRose
- Removing the almighty experience point... Matt Mihaly
- Removing the almighty experience point... brian@thyer.net
- Removing the almighty experience point... Paul Schwanz
- Removing the almighty experience point... asteroid@rocketmail.com
- Removing the almighty experience point... Byron Ellacott
- Removing the almighty experience point... Kiztent Hatepriest
- Removing the almighty experience point... Johan
- Removing the almighty experience point... Kiztent Hatepriest
- Removing the almighty experience point... Amanda Walker
- Removing the almighty experience point... Vincent Archer
- Removing the almighty experience point... Ben Hawes
- Removing the almighty experience point... Johan
- Removing the almighty experience point... Johan
- Removing the almighty experience point... Amanda Walker
- Removing the almighty experience point... Sean Kelly
- Removing the almighty experience point... John Buehler
- Removing the almighty experience point... Damion Schubert
- Removing the almighty experience point... Matt Mihaly
- Removing the almighty experience point... Damion Schubert
- Removing the almighty experience point... Johan
- Removing the almighty experience point... Travis Casey
- Removing the almighty experience point... Matt Mihaly
- [SPAM] Removing the almighty experience point... Dana V. Baldwin
- [SPAM] Removing the almighty experience point... J C Lawrence
- [SPAM] Removing the almighty experience point... Matt Mihaly
- [SPAM] Removing the almighty experience point... Dana V. Baldwin
- Removing the almighty experience point... ceo
- Removing the almighty experience point... Dana V. Baldwin
- Removing the almighty experience point... ceo
- Removing the almighty experience point... Bloo
- Removing the almighty experience point... Matt Mihaly
- Removing the almighty experience point... Sean Kelly
- Removing the almighty experience point... Matt Mihaly
- Removing the almighty experience point... Sean Kelly
- Removing the almighty experience point... Matt Mihaly
- Removing the almighty experience point... Morgan Dodge
- Removing the almighty experience point... Douglas Goodall
- Removing the almighty experience point... Vincent Archer
- Removing the almighty experience point... Ben Hawes
- Removing the almighty experience point... neild-mud@misago.org
- Removing the almighty experience point... Damion Schubert
- Removing the almighty experience point... John Buehler
- Removing the almighty experience point... Matt Mihaly
- Removing the almighty experience point... David Wright
- Removing the almighty experience point... Vincent Archer
- Removing the almighty experience point... David Wright
- Removing the almighty experience point... John Buehler
- Removing the almighty experience point... Tim Schubert
- Removing the almighty experience point... Devin Smoth
- Removing the almighty experience point... zgj22@drexel.edu
- Removing the almighty experience point... Vincent Archer
- Removing the almighty experience point... Jason Messer
- Removing the almighty experience point... Michael Hartman
- Removing the almighty experience point... cruise
- Removing the almighty experience point... Devin Smoth
- Removing the almighty experience point... brian@thyer.net
- Removing the almighty experience point... Devin Smoth
- Removing the almighty experience point... Otis Viles
- Removing the almighty experience point... brian@thyer.net
- Removing the almighty experience point... Vincent Archer
- Removing the almighty experience point... Matt Mihaly
- Removing the almighty experience point... brian@thyer.net
- Removing the almighty experience point... Matt Mihaly
- Removing the almighty experience point... Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- Removing the almighty experience point... brian@thyer.net
- Removing the almighty experience point... neild-mud@misago.org
- Removing the almighty experience point... Sean Middleditch
- Removing the almighty experience point... neild-mud@misago.org
- Removing the almighty experience point... Sean Middleditch
- Removing the almighty experience point... richard@kavir.org
- Removing the almighty experience point... Sean Middleditch
- Removing the almighty experience point... Corey Cauble
- Removing the almighty experience point... Vincent Archer
- Removing the almighty experience point... Vincent Archer
- Removing the almighty experience point... brian@thyer.net
- Removing the almighty experience point... Ben Hawes
- Removing the almighty experience point... Brian Hook
- Removing the almighty experience point... Ben Hawes
- Removing the almighty experience point... Vincent Archer
- Removing the almighty experience point... brian@thyer.net
- Removing the almighty experience point... Bloo
- Removing the almighty experience point... ceo
- Removing the almighty experience point... Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- Removing the almighty experience point... richard@kavir.org
- Removing the almighty experience point... Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt
- Removing the almighty experience point... Corey Crawford
- Removing the almighty experience point... Vincent Archer
- Removing the almighty experience point... Freeman, Jeff
- Removing the almighty experience point... HRose
- Removing the almighty experience point... Vincent Archer
- Removing the almighty experience point... Mike Shaver
- Removing the almighty experience point... Vincent Archer
- Removing the almighty experience point... Mike Rozak
- Removing the almighty experience point... Zach Collins (Siege)
- Removing the almighty experience point... Vincent Archer
- Removing the almighty experience point... Mike Rozak
- Removing the almighty experience point... Will Jennings
- Removing the almighty experience point... Matt Mihaly
- Removing the almighty experience point... Travis Casey
- Removing the almighty experience point... Matt Mihaly
- Removing the almighty experience point... Damion Schubert
- Removing the almighty experience point... P J
- [SPAM] Removing the almighty experience point... Dana V. Baldwin
- Removing the almighty experience point... P J
- Removing the almighty experience point... Will Jennings
- Removing the almighty experience point... Mike Rozak
- Removing the almighty experience point... Matt Mihaly
- Removing the almighty experience point... Amanda Walker
- Removing the almighty experience point... Miroslav Silovic
- Removing the almighty experience point... Matt Mihaly
- Removing the almighty experience point... Miroslav Silovic
- Removing the almighty experience point... Matt Mihaly
- Removing the almighty experience point... Miroslav Silovic
- Removing the almighty experience point... Mike Rozak
- Removing the almighty experience point... Matt Mihaly
- Removing the almighty experience point... Miroslav Silovic
- Removing the almighty experience point... Matt Mihaly
- Removing the almighty experience point... Miroslav Silovic
- Removing the almighty experience point... Matt Mihaly
- Removing the almighty experience point... Miroslav Silovic
- Removing the almighty experience point... Matt Mihaly
- Griefer repellant (Was Decision making...) Mike Rozak
- Griefer repellant (Was Decision making...) Chek Yang FOO
- Griefer repellant (Was Decision making...) Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- Griefer repellant (Was Decision making...) Corey Cauble
- Griefer repellant (Was Decision making...) Damion Schubert
- Griefer repellant (Was Decision making...) Mike Rozak
- Griefer repellant (Was Decision making...) Chek Yang FOO
- State of Play Conference Invitation Noveck, Beth
- BIZ: Breaking the VW marketing model Mike Rozak
- Has the circle gone rusty? (fwd) J C Lawrence
- Has the circle gone rusty? (fwd) Chris
- Has the circle gone rusty? (fwd) Ren Reynolds
- Has the circle gone rusty? (fwd) zgj22@drexel.edu
- Has the circle gone rusty? (fwd) Chek Yang FOO
- Has the circle gone rusty? (fwd) Paul Schwanz
- ClicheQuest J C Lawrence
- Putting the crawl to a halt David Johansson
- Putting the crawl to a halt Vincent Archer
- Shift in time Brian Lindahl
- Shift in time Peter A. Harkins
- Shift in time Mike Rozak
- Shift in time Michael Sellers
- Shift in time Arnau Rosselló Castelló
- Shift in time Robert Zubek
- Shift in time Thomas Clive Richards
- Shift in time Mike Rozak
- Shift in time Robert Zubek
- Shift in time Amanda Walker
- Shift in time Paolo Piselli
- Shift in time Damion Schubert
- Shift in time Paolo Piselli
- Shift in time Michael Sellers
- Shift in time Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
- Shift in time Sunny Gulati
- Shift in time Brian Lindahl
- Shift in time Matt Mihaly
- Shift in time Brian Lindahl
- Shift in time Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- TCP/UDP/IP Offload NIC for gamers? Harlan Beverly
- TCP/UDP/IP Offload NIC for gamers? Ben Greear
- TCP/UDP/IP Offload NIC for gamers? Jay Moran
- TCP/UDP/IP Offload NIC for gamers? Harlan Beverly
- TCP/UDP/IP Offload NIC for gamers? Ben Greear
- TCP/UDP/IP Offload NIC for gamers? Harlan Beverly
- TCP/UDP/IP Offload NIC for gamers? Jay Moran
- OpenTNL and DirectPlay (hardware acceleration) Harlan Beverly
- OpenTNL and DirectPlay (hardware acceleration) Brian Hook
- OpenTNL and DirectPlay (hardware acceleration) Jeremy Noetzelman
- OpenTNL and DirectPlay (hardware acceleration) Harlan Beverly
- OpenTNL and DirectPlay (hardware acceleration) Brett Bibby
- BIZ: Gaming Hardware Startup, looking for good Gaming Business Development Person Harlan Beverly
- BIZ: Gaming Hardware Startup, looking for good Gaming Business Development Person
- BIZ: Gaming Hardware Startup, looking for good Gaming Business Development Person Amanda Walker
- The Lag monster... Harlan Beverly
- The Lag monster... Matthew D. Fuller
- The Lag monster... Kiztent Hatepriest
- The Lag monster... Kiztent Hatepriest
- The Lag monster... Sean Kelly
- The Lag monster... Justin Randall
- The Lag monster... Sean Kelly
- The Lag monster... Harlan Beverly
- The Lag monster... Amanda Walker
On Nov 6, 2004, at 7:06 PM, Harlan Beverly wrote:
> I'm a gamer, obviously. I for one hate LAG more than anything
> else. When playing U.O., Everquest, Galaxies, Asherons, and the
> rest it was the only thing that frust actually made me throw my
> mouse.
> The burning need is Lag.
> The question is, how do I solve it?
> There are three ideas on our table: One way is to squeeze a little
> out of the client side host processing. We can do that, but it's
> a marginal improvement at best.
> Another way is to reduce network traffic: we can do that with
> compression and possible active filtering of unnecessary messages
> (both inbound and outbound).
> A final way is to improve server performance. We can do that.
> Any other ideas?
OK, let's look at lag. Lag seems like a network problem, and
occasionally it is, but usually it's not. The particular aspect
you're focussing on (the network stack and NIC hardware) isn't the
source of lag in any game of which I am aware, and so trying to
improve things by doing a game-specific network card strikes me as
being a little like looking for your keys under the streetlight
because the light is better there.
Lag can be caused by many sources, but based on my own experience
with distributed simulations, there are a few major ones. Consumer
gaming pros may have some additional factors they've encountered,
which I'd be very interested in hearing about as well.
- Graphics bottlenecks, particularly geometry and texture
management. Video cards with more texture memory help some here,
but for a large virtual world, even the biggest chunk of VRAM you
can buy is just going to be a cache. One reasons that FPSs and
single-player games feel so fast, even when playing over a
network, is that all the geometry and textures are preloaded.
Rendering a small, static game level puts a lot less load on the
video card than an open-ended virtual world.
- Simulation bottlenecks. A virtual world is, in effect, a
discrete event simulation system. If it is written poorly, a lot
of things have to happen in "lockstep" in order to update the
state of the world, which causes the entire world "update loop" to
slow down as more things are happening (more players, more
scripts, more timed actions and effects, even triggers, etc.).
The only solution to this is to rewrite the simulation so that the
interlocks happen on a more fine-grained basis. Doing so allows
you to "scale out" by throwing more processing power at the
problem via clustering or distributed simulation techniques
- Area of influence management. The more data the simulation has
to consider in order to figure out what's going on around a
particular player (actions of other players and mobs, for example,
or dynamic terrain), the more CPU horsepower it takes to tell the
client what to render, and the greater the network traffic
required to send updates to the client. This is starting to at
least get close to the network stack, but the stack is still not
the bottleneck: the lag is still occurring either in the server
processing or in the sheer amount of data that needs to get across
a fixed capacity network link at the client end. Broadband client
connections help, but they only help, they don't solve the
problem. In the long run, I think that current MMORPGs are really
beginning to hit some of the limits of "everything knows where
everything else is every moment of the time" as a simulation
technique. There's a point when things get crowded that you no
longer need to see every single player in perfect detail. You
need to see those right around you, and a crowd around them
(SpeedHumanoid, anyone?). The problem here isn't the network,
it's the simulation algorithms. When everyone has to know what
everyone else is doing, the number of updates per second required
to maintain a given performance level goes up at the server
exponentially with the number of players, and at the client
linearly with the number of players in the area of influence or
interest of that client.
Amanda Walker - The Lag monster... lynx@lynx.purrsia.com
- The Lag monster... Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- TCP/UDP/IP Offload NIC for gamers? Byron Ellacott
- DGN/TECH: Implementing server side spatial partitioning William Leader
- DGN/TECH: Implementing server side spatial partitioning Damion Schubert