New Concept: Proximity Spawning (to reduce bandwidth usage)

[KLS]

Personally I really hate this idea, not because i'm against the idea behind it but because I think it's the wrong approach. We really need a more involved spawn conditionals system so people can setup their events in an intelligent manner.

Perhaps a system where npcs can spawn and despawn based on certain conditions set by the quest system. Ex: In this case your boss is engaged and you have it set boss_one_engaged flag for the zone and all npcs that aren't essential despawn. Or perhaps you have a linear zone and only once a boss is killed the trash and next boss will spawn. etc etc.

[KLS]

Oh yeah and how wow works is just more efficient, it's also facilitated by the client.

Every continent is separated into zones which are separated into smaller areas which are all separated into smaller map nodes. Npcs in a node are only active if a player is nearby. At least this is how the emu basically works; not how the official servers work.

Perhaps we could have npcs freeze and not do ai if they're a certain distance from player characters. Might cause some problems for existing events.

[ChaosSlayer]

Originally Posted by KLS

Personally I really hate this idea, not because i'm against the idea behind it but because I think it's the wrong approach. We really need a more involved spawn conditionals system so people can setup their events in an intelligent manner.

Perhaps a system where npcs can spawn and despawn based on certain conditions set by the quest system. Ex: In this case your boss is engaged and you have it set boss_one_engaged flag for the zone and all npcs that aren't essential despawn. Or perhaps you have a linear zone and only once a boss is killed the trash and next boss will spawn. etc etc.

well this may work for sort of ldon/raid/encounter instance, but then you don't realy need anything special - when boss is engage you simply send a signal to depop entire zone exept the econuter


the real issue comes to handlign somethign as large as West Karana or Dread Lands which supose to have crap load of trash mobs running around

[KLS]

The more I think about it the more I think having npcs freeze if there's no pc nearby would help a lot with the situation and have less of a downside than popping and repopping based on proximity.

[trevius]

We have already been testing a quest system to depopall() on all trash mobs when a boss mob or named is being killed. It seems to completely stop all lag as compared to previously people would go LD and lag extremely bad in some cases.

But, I really don't like the quest solution, because then anyone else in the same zone will then see an empty zone, which not only looks bad, but also lets them roam freely without clearing anything and basically negates all of the work to create the trash mobs in the first place.

Any special settings like the radius_spawn idea or freezing them to stop all AI and pathing would have to be specified by a setting in the NPC_types table so it could be done on a per mob basis. Then you can decide which ones you want to be affected by any of these ideas, and which ones to remain normal all of the time. So, bosses, scripted NPCs and maybe some roamers might want to have this setting turned off, but other than that, almost all trash mobs aren't always needed.

By turning off the AI or freezing the mobs like KLS mentioned, that might help the server performance, but I honestly don't see any issues at all lag-wise on my local lan, ever. I only ever hear about the lag, so it is pretty obviously a bandwidth issue. I have 1MB upload bandwidth from my ISP, which is fairly decent as far as home connections go. If 1MB up can have lag during a raid of about 3 groups with maybe 70 people logged into the server, then I think there could be some definite improvements to improve bandwidth utilization.

Unfortunately, I don't know of any way to not send regular updates of the current location of every spawn in the zone every second to every character in the zone. So, the only solution I can think of is to not have trash mobs spawn unless a player is within range. The only other option would be if someone could figure out a way for the server to only send location updates for NPCs within a radius of the client.

[AndMetal]

I wonder if we might be able to look at this a different way, especially since this seems to be more a bandwidth issue than a processing issue (which could also explain the issues with Warrior Rampage in AoE situations).

While roaming around in a zone, what kind of information is transmitted to the client on a regular basis? Spawn information, etc? Also, are there any kind of limits? So, is everything being sent to everyone, or are there proximity limits on these? If there aren't proximity limits, I think that's where we need to start.

Anyways, just a thought...

[KLS]

Spawn info is sent on login and new spawn. Or if a spawn has to change shape for some reason, typically walking around you wont see many spawn infos. Movement updates are the big thing... which if it's a mob far away they only send movement updates once every 60 seconds, close npcs ie ones you can see send movement updates every few seconds.

[trevius]

Maybe if there was a way to adjust how far away the regular movement updates get sent. I use MQ which helps a ton with developing content and standing in the main part of Dreadspire, I can see probably 50 mobs in the entire main section all moving very accurately and seemingly sending multiple updates per second. It seems to be somewhere around 800 distance away. I can only ever see a max of 400 distance in the entire zone since it is all indoors. So, if I could somehow set that range on a per zone basis, that might help a bit. Also, if it was possible, I wouldn't mind the option to completely disable the zonewide 1 minute updates on a per zone basis. I don't see why my client even needs to be aware of mobs outside of my visual range other than for MQ purposes, which really has no part in actual game play.

I know that the rule for it could be adjusted, but for some zones, the location information might be more important than others. And I know for a fact that those updates are pretty heavy on the server or bandwidth. At one point, I tried setting those zonewide updates in the rules to be every 1 second, because I didn't know what it was doing exactly. With it set that way, my server was so insanely laggy that it was unplayable after a few people logged on. Even 1 time per minute, if you multiply that times 60 clients on the entire server, you are averaging a zone wide update to 1 client per second. Double the players to 120, which is about the max my server can handle and it goes up to an average of 2 zonewide updates per second.

Then, once you start factoring in combat spam that has to go out to each client, a big raid can cause a significant hit to bandwidth and performance. If all of those players were all fighting in separate areas, they would only be receiving their own combat spam, but all in a tight area, everyone gets everyone's combat spam, so it multiplies what needs to be sent by how many characters are there.

I think the AE issue with rampage is more of a server resource issue than it is on bandwidth, since AndMetal brought it up. The main reason to think this is because it is one of the few things that can an will crash a zone if you have too many mobs in the rampage pull. I don't think bandwidth can cause a zone crash, just cause lag and LDs. Only high running processes or bugs can cause crashes, or at least that is my guess. I think a rampage pull of 30+ mobs is just too much combat spam all hitting at the exact same time for the server to handle at once.

I am sure there are some solutions to help this stuff considerably. Even a 20% decrease in bandwidth could make a considerable difference on home run servers that don't have practically unlimited upload speeds. Right now, I think players seem to average about 5k per player on normal use. Though, that probably spikes up a lot during large raids.

[trevius]

Woot! I think I found part of what KLS is talking about:

zone/updatemgr.cpp

//squared distances for each level
//these values are pulled out of my ass, should be tuned some day
const float UpdateManager::level_distances2[UPDATE_LEVELS]
	= { 50*50, 250*250, 500*500, 800*800 };
	
//delay between sending packets in each level, in ms
//its best if they are all multiples of UPDATE_RESOLUTION
//these values are pulled out of my ass, should be tuned some day
const int32 UpdateManager::level_timers[UPDATE_LEVELS+1]
	= { UPDATE_RESOLUTION,		//.3s
		2*UPDATE_RESOLUTION, 	//.6s
		3*UPDATE_RESOLUTION,	//.9s
		9*UPDATE_RESOLUTION,	//~2s
		34*UPDATE_RESOLUTION	//~10s
	  };

I like how he says they are pulled out of his ass and need to be tuned lol. If there was a way to set these on a per zone basis, I think that would be amazing. If that would be too complex, I think these could each easily just have rules tied to them so you can adjust them all manually to find which is the best combination.

I think more could definitely be done, but I will have to look into finding other parts that could possibly be tweaked further.

[cubber]

This sounds interesting but I have a few questions to think about.

1. If this despawns mobs that are not in a certian radius of the player then couldn't this approach be used as an exploit? If a player is trying to camp a named mob and the mob is not up, couldn't the player just venture out of the place holder's radius to despawn it? Triggering a respawn when they come back into it's radius, essentialy cycling the camp without killing anything? What about named mobs like CT that are only supposed to spawn on a schedual?

Or will the "despawned mob" basically be "cached" until it is revealed again, killed, or cycled by spawn timer?

2. What about respawn times in general? Could this be used to get around respawn times?

3. Also in comparison to WoW, I think that the spawn radius would have to be quite larger than what they impliment. It is quite annoying to be able to see a few hundred yards away but not see any mobs in that area until you are almost right on top of them.