How is the lag in comparison to Minecraft? Minecraft was way too laggy for anything like PVP fighting for me. Im really interested, but a PVP game where everyone teleports around is not going to work for me
Hm.
I wonder if, maybe, just maybe, your lag could be your connection or your computer, not the game? Huh.
That's a new concept, eliminating the other variables before claiming one of them to be the problem.
I rarely see any actual lag on Jaycraft when the network/server is stable (No, I'm not connected locally! The server is 300 miles away from me!)...
I'm not saying my connection is good, its not by any means, but Minecraft uses obscene amounts of bandwidth in comparison to most games. Im sure its because of everything that has to be recorded, but when a game is that laggy while other games play just dandy, I have to call that game out for being a bandwidth hog.
One chunk: 16x128x16 area full of blocks (32768 x the amount of data each one uses), each of which have several bytes (2x 8-byte var for X/Z and 1 byte for height IIRC) of data just for positioning, plus metadata and whatever else (chests = items = 2-byte ID, 1 byte damage, 1 byte stack size for a total of 4 bytes per inventory slot in usage; one low bit for empty slots, as I recall).
Every time you move 16 blocks in a direction, you have to grab 21 new chunks.
It doesn't take a programmer to figure out that this is a lot more data to be needing compared to 4-8 bytes of data per player for an FPS or any game in which the world is static (IE:
most other games) or pre-downloaded with simulations run independently on each system (OpenTTD runs this way, as does Infiniminer)
Unreal Tournament 3 is my best example of this situation. Most of the maps are static, so there's very little bandwidth usage. Some of them are PhsyX-enabled, and on these, bandwidth usage is multiplied ten-or-twenty-fold, because you're also downloading data for all of the various physical objects flying around.
Yes, Minecraft requires a large amount of bandwidth compared to other games, because it has to download the world, and there is absolutely
no way around that, but even so, it really shouldn't be a problem for any modern-ish connection.
And, like I said, if this game is the same way, you're not going to see a difference.
From what I saw, though, it has a fixed-size map, so all of that downloading should only be necessary once, much like Infiniminer.
That's not to say they don't know how to write a protocol to handle that transfer, though (and judging from the gray-world errors, they don't
), so I guess what I'm saying is:
It's not Minecraft, but what Minecraft is. Any other game doing anything like it would run into the exact same problem.