Outerra forum

Outerra Engine => Technology => Topic started by: foxfiles on May 30, 2012, 05:58:59 am

Title: How does terrain Internet download affect the in-game perf ?
Post by: foxfiles on May 30, 2012, 05:58:59 am

As I am still running Anteworld on a small Nvidia laptop (I look forward to running it soon on a recent CPU/GPU workstation),
I'd like to understand something about performance vs. remote access :
- the engine is server-side downloading the necessary portion(s) of the world (mainly terrain I see, .wad files) based on the user position in the world, exact?
- the corresponding downloaded datas are then cached or stored on the local disk,
- when the user is somewhere at a position where there is nothing more to download, the download stops and there is no more any interaction with the remote "streamer-server", is there ?

BUT does the download affect the performance so much on the user-side that it is necessary to stop any interaction with the remote server ?

Of course it depends on the platform and on the remote server, but on a serious desktop, multi core, with good Ram and GPU, why not run a quasi-continuous download ?

In other word, why not pre-store some tiles ? even if they have no immediate usage ? you would say which tile... I don't know, more probable would be neighbor ones?
of course, it the user jumps vertically into space, then rotate 180 degrees around the planet, this pre-download must be stopped at the profit of the new position...

Title: Re: How does terrain Internet download affect the in-game perf ?
Post by: cameni on May 30, 2012, 08:19:21 am

Performance isn't affected, the download runs in a separate thread - well, runs is a wrong word here, waits. Why it doesn't download continuously - well, at the moment we are limiting the bandwidth, pre-downloads would unnecessarily suck more. But we plan to serve the data for registered users from the cloud later, which should run at full speed.

Title: Re: How does terrain Internet download affect the in-game perf ?
Post by: foxfiles on May 30, 2012, 08:52:01 am

Full good, nothing more to say - Thks

Title: Re: How does terrain Internet download affect the in-game perf ?
Post by: XZS on May 30, 2012, 09:53:55 am

Beside, you can download the whole 13 gigs of data via a torrent file, see : http://www.outerra.com/forum/index.php?topic=645.msg8073#msg8073 (http://www.outerra.com/forum/index.php?topic=645.msg8073#msg8073)

Ok, you'll need 13 gigs freespace on your harddrive, but what is 13 gigs nowaday ? :)
I did it and now I can go anywhere in Outerra and all is well!

Title: Re: How does terrain Internet download affect the in-game perf ?
Post by: foxfiles on May 30, 2012, 10:44:59 am

 thank you XZS but I know that, as I already torrent-ed all the terrain weeks ago  ;) 

my above question is general, just for having a confirmation about a potential continuous process of "feeding the beast"