Mar 23 2004, 6:32 pm
In response to Loduwijk
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Vakir
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I use Lag Guard for my games, the library I created. If you want to use it. Search for it in libraries or just look for it.
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I'll forward a statement I made over at the SS13 forum. Note that I'm not pulling any punches -- sorry. ;-)
There's no such thing as a lag guard. Lag is caused by three things: One; too many calculations at a time on the server's end. This is referred to as "server lag". Space Station 13 has this problem because every second, it calculates the spread of gases between each and every tile on the world map (yes, even on map levels where no such gases exist). The only way to fix server lag is to perform fewer calculations per second -- in other words, not perform calculations. No lag protection program can do that and still retain the same game functionality. Two; a long distance between the server and the client, with servers along the way which happen to be bogged down from many other users. This is referred to as "transmission lag". This is completely unavoidable -- the only way to fix this problem is to somehow find an alternate path along the internet. No such technology exists, and if Vakir had made it, Bill Gates himself would probably be amazed. Three; a slow computer on the client's end. This is "client lag". This isn't actually as big of a problem as people make it out to be. BitBlt, BYOND's drawing routine, is provided by the Win32 API and is horribly slow. However, BitBlt only really lags when using a pixel mask (that is, when some parts of an icon are transparent). In other words, having a moving background in SS13 doesn't cause any really appreciable client-side lag, because the icons aren't being layered above other static icons. Unless Vakir has hacked BYOND and rewritten the vast majority of Dream Seeker's code to take advantage of OpenGL or some other more efficient drawing routine, the lag guard has no effect there either. In other words, Vakir is full of crap. The only conceivable thing he could be doing is increasing or decreasing world.tick_lag when the CPU count begins to get high. In that case, he's only really making it such that the server deliberately slows down when heavy calculations are being made. This obviously doesn't make anything faster. | |
Spuzzum wrote:
This is completely unavoidable -- the only way to fix this problem is to somehow find an alternate path along the internet. No such technology exists, and if Vakir had made it, Bill Gates himself would probably be amazed. 'Course he would be. He thought this "internet" thing would never even catch on. :P | |