When a player moves, there is currently a delay of one round trip until anything starts happening. Whilst for most modern Internet connections this does not pose a significant problem, when interacting with other players the lag seems to accumulate. They have 900ms lag, I have 1200ms lag, now between us we suddenly have 2100ms lag. Since a player can cover many tiles in 2100ms, it becomes very difficult to keep track of any other player when travelling, and in general to coordiante with others successfuly. This limits the useful multiplayernes of crossfire. Parties 5-6 players in size start to fall apart as players can not keep track of each other. Similar problems exist for persise stopping of movement. Laggy connections tend to make you overrun your destination. For example if I am running, and want to stop, it will take another 3-4 screens (at 20x20 tiles) before I come to a halt.
Is there anything that can be done to improve movement on laggy connections? Could the server send the client a matrix of what tiles on the map can be moved to, and send updates of that as they change for example? Any better ideas? _______________________________________________ crossfire mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.metalforge.org/mailman/listinfo/crossfire
