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Author Topic: How does terrain Internet download affect the in-game perf ?  (Read 8339 times)

foxfiles

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How does terrain Internet download affect the in-game perf ?
« 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...

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cameni

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Re: How does terrain Internet download affect the in-game perf ?
« Reply #1 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.
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foxfiles

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Re: How does terrain Internet download affect the in-game perf ?
« Reply #2 on: May 30, 2012, 08:52:01 am »
Full good, nothing more to say - Thks
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XZS

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Re: How does terrain Internet download affect the in-game perf ?
« Reply #3 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

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!
« Last Edit: May 30, 2012, 09:55:29 am by XZS »
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foxfiles

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Re: How does terrain Internet download affect the in-game perf ?
« Reply #4 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"
« Last Edit: May 30, 2012, 10:57:06 am by foxfiles »
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