Can I create a Terrain from an image in memory?
not trying to speak for Az here but I think what he may be trying to do is a system like Asheron''s Call has...but i could be wrong...there is still disk activity and such cause it really isn''t a zoneless world...but I *think* that may be what hes trying to get at...at least that is what i got from what i read...
Looking back at my last post, I said "This could be used in conjunction with the terrain load (perhaps done post- or pre-load), and upload it to the card''s RAM."
Hehehe, that made me laugh out loud. Obviously you can''t generate terrain pre-load because you don''t know the terrain topology yet.
Chris is right -- it''s a great idea is to spread chunks of the world over servers. How large the chunks are would be dependant on a number of things, such as the projected normal (or peak) number of users simultaneously connected. I don''t know much about Beowulf, and only cursory knowledge of Microsofts Server Load Balancing services (free addon for NT servers); but it would be nice to have a cluster for each world segment.
The only problem is, while clustering is great for balancing loads of isolated users (most commonly being HTTP requests), I don''t know if it is usable in a multiplayer environment. Each of the cluster servers would be running the same game server, and should (under normal circumstances) handle the worlds the same -- i.e., physics, NPC a.i., etc. all plays out identically.
The only problem is, while you might have a couple users on a given cluster server, how do you allow them to see and interact with players on another cluster server for the same world segment? AFAIK, you''d have to do alot of backend inter-server communications setup. This would be pretty fast (locally over 100Mbit cables =P), but setting it up would be a great bit of fun. You might go about tagging each client with it''s respective server, for when two players from different servers interact (fight, trade, chat, whatever).
Blah, networking isn''t relaly my area, =P, although it''s pretty interesting.
Hehehe, that made me laugh out loud. Obviously you can''t generate terrain pre-load because you don''t know the terrain topology yet.
Chris is right -- it''s a great idea is to spread chunks of the world over servers. How large the chunks are would be dependant on a number of things, such as the projected normal (or peak) number of users simultaneously connected. I don''t know much about Beowulf, and only cursory knowledge of Microsofts Server Load Balancing services (free addon for NT servers); but it would be nice to have a cluster for each world segment.
The only problem is, while clustering is great for balancing loads of isolated users (most commonly being HTTP requests), I don''t know if it is usable in a multiplayer environment. Each of the cluster servers would be running the same game server, and should (under normal circumstances) handle the worlds the same -- i.e., physics, NPC a.i., etc. all plays out identically.
The only problem is, while you might have a couple users on a given cluster server, how do you allow them to see and interact with players on another cluster server for the same world segment? AFAIK, you''d have to do alot of backend inter-server communications setup. This would be pretty fast (locally over 100Mbit cables =P), but setting it up would be a great bit of fun. You might go about tagging each client with it''s respective server, for when two players from different servers interact (fight, trade, chat, whatever).
Blah, networking isn''t relaly my area, =P, although it''s pretty interesting.
That would require me to diss the single user who can''t afford 10 servers to play the entire game, and being the guy who rarely plays games online, that would be dissing myself. Doing the multimap thing would also force design limitations, aka, the magic door approach to navigation, unless you implemented a slick way to overlap the maps.
Of interest for you people interested in seeing some tools used to do terrain in other games, check out the June issue of ''insight'' which has a interview of the dudes working on tribes. Part of the interview involves their terrain tool. I saw it, but didn''t get to listen to it since Media Player insists that I use my DVD decoder card to watch it and I didn''t feel like turning on my AV equipment that late at night.
Of interest for you people interested in seeing some tools used to do terrain in other games, check out the June issue of ''insight'' which has a interview of the dudes working on tribes. Part of the interview involves their terrain tool. I saw it, but didn''t get to listen to it since Media Player insists that I use my DVD decoder card to watch it and I didn''t feel like turning on my AV equipment that late at night.
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