Cubber, the original suggestion to actually depop mobs that were out of range would have worked perfectly fine for everything accept Track. The spawn timers would still be checked before a mob would be spawned if a player entered the spawn radius. The only thing you would need to take into account to avoid possible exploits would be to remember that you don't want to depop and repop named or anything with particularly nice loot tables, especially if they are set to equip the items. As long as they don't equip the items, the players would still have no way to tell what loot was or wasn't on the mob, so even named could potentially be depopped. The main thing is that there would be a per NPCID setting to allow you to enable the spawn to use the system or just to stay up like mobs currently do.
But, it looks like this change may not even be needed anyway as there seems to be a much better way to accomplish what I was originally wanting to do just by adjusting values in the source for setting the radius that the updates are sent.
The last code changes I posted in this thread show how to adjust the source to help reduce bandwidth. As far as I can tell and have heard so far, even just making the changes I posted has made a HUGE impact (in a positive way) on the amount of lag and performance problems on the server. The only time my players have seen noticeable lag since the change was when my server broke 100+ players this weekend, which hasn't happened in a while. So, I am fairly confident that if we can make some code that allows each of these settings to be tweaked in the source, I think we can potentially make a great reduction in bandwidth utilization and allow more players on servers with lower upload speeds and with less lag.
I think we should have settings added to the zones table to set the QueueCloseClients settings for both warping to location and for walking animations. I also think we should have the options to be able to adjust all 4 of the level_distances2 settings individually as well as all 5 of the UPDATE_RESOLUTION settings. Of course there should be defaults set if the fields are left at 0, which would be default for the new fields. But, by giving this option, I really think high traffic zones could be tweaked enough to really make a big difference on any server.
Also, I have set zone wide updates to 10 minutes and so far I haven't noticed any different at all in game other than less lag from when it was set to the default of 1 minute. I will have to try running around in an open zone at GM speed to see if I notice anything weird. But, unless I am wrong, maybe we should allow the globalpositionupdate rule to have a setting that will completely disable zone wide updates. Maybe setting it to something like 0 or so could make it disabled.
Either way, I think we are on the way to increasing server performance for servers with limited bandwidth. I would love to see home servers able to reach the 200 or 250+ player counts that are seen on PEQ or the CEQ Dragon Soul server. I know PEQ is/was hosted in a Data Center which essentially gave it unlimited upload speeds and I assume Dragon Soul is as well.
|