Ok, HOW much does map design effect bandwidth? When more than 14 players join a map, PINGS jump to 2 or 3 times their normal rate and all are at about or exactly the same. FPS is great until that point, also.
BTW, these maps are all TOW/TDM hybrids using the 'TOW' suffix but playing without victory checks to enable the TOW logic of audio cues etc.
I am experimenting with altered scripts.... trying to simplify. Also, there are rumors at other site forums that 'triggers' can cause lag out in TOW type maps. Any ideas there?
BANDWIDTH > Map Design > #MP Players
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I'm pretty confident triggers don't cause lag, nor do scripts. Scripts can however slow down the server, but this is a problem of CPU abuse rather than a lack of bandwith.
Clever map design however may decrease player's pings. This all has to do with vis design. The server only sends entity data to a particular player when this entity is in his pvs, or 'in sight'. So in general the lesser entities are visible at a given time, the better your ping and it may actually make a slight improvement on the ping of other players.
However you should also be aware that there are quite a few errors in mohaa's rendering code. If you make the vis design too good you'll sometimes find entities and enemies popping out of nowhere, which can be very annoying on mp maps. Also I found that on certain (stock) maps you can tell from the rendering artifacts whether certain doors are opened or closed (and thus retrieve the enemy's location). This only is the case with areaportalled doors.
Clever map design however may decrease player's pings. This all has to do with vis design. The server only sends entity data to a particular player when this entity is in his pvs, or 'in sight'. So in general the lesser entities are visible at a given time, the better your ping and it may actually make a slight improvement on the ping of other players.
However you should also be aware that there are quite a few errors in mohaa's rendering code. If you make the vis design too good you'll sometimes find entities and enemies popping out of nowhere, which can be very annoying on mp maps. Also I found that on certain (stock) maps you can tell from the rendering artifacts whether certain doors are opened or closed (and thus retrieve the enemy's location). This only is the case with areaportalled doors.
Thanks, JV, good points but all accounted for. The vis design in the two maps in question is fine...no issues there and the fps is not a concern. It all starts to go bad when a critical mass of players is reached...seems to be 15ish. An EA official directly working with BT stated that the team had found some issues in SH that WERE related to TOW map lag and that they were pretty certain it was trigger induced. That or their TOW logic scripts were eating resources somehow...my guess would be the dm/tow global is doing something strange, but I'm no programmer. Or some strange mess with the func/tow_objective entity and logic....
Anyway, still looking for technical thoughts/answers. Strange issue. For now I'll concentrate on trying to make the .scr files as efficient as possible. Although there isn't too much left to do there.
Anyway, still looking for technical thoughts/answers. Strange issue. For now I'll concentrate on trying to make the .scr files as efficient as possible. Although there isn't too much left to do there.
Apparently EA found the issue with SH and triggers/TOW logic and 'thought' that they fixed it going into BT, but realized they didn't. In two weeks it won't matter anyway, I guess. Just hope that CoD is better off code wise. I know that I'm moving to CoD asap...just wanted to get the Spearhead community my last three maps so that if nothing else I can say that I finished them.