Taking a look at this week’s server deployment I notice nothing that stands out and excites me. The new profile system is getting closer to whereby anyone on your inworld mute list won’t be able to hassle you on your web profile, that will be fully rolled out when the code is in all versions of the server release.
However there is something in the works that looks interesting regarding region crossings, the truth is that this will be a long time in the works before it makes life much improved, but they are getting there with something called “Threaded Crossings Project“, keep your eyes on the Blue Steel Release Notes for this. The more technical term for this is: “threaded RPC/thread state machine mechanism” I have no idea what this means, but I’ll keep an eye on it anyway, to do so initially I had to go back to the Beta Server user group meeting of November 17th, there wasn’t one last week due to the Thanksgiving holiday in the USA.
If you’re unsure of what the issues are with region crossings, Carmilla Linden sums up the current problems in their opening comment in that meeting : “The existing region crossing code is a horrible piece of crap” after that it gets quite geeky!
First of all, when looking at code it’s important to remember that technology improvements can mean something that was pretty nifty at the time, now looks like a horrible piece of crap, so I don’t read this as meaning Carmilla is criticising anyone past or present, just that when looking at it today from a different perspective, the coding would be approached from a different angle, but it looks horrible when you look at that older code today.
Carmilla goes on to explain how the current region crossing procedures are inefficient, blocks the whole sim whilst crossing is in progress, has to compress data, eats up sim frame time even when we’re not talking about a hugely heavily laden avatar involved in the crossing.
Carmilla seems to understand the issues and the big positive is that Carmilla seems to have a plan, the bad news is that it’s a long plan, although that bad news is better than no news at all, patience should prove to be a virtue here if Carmilla can improve region crossing performance.
Stage one involves solving the issue of avatars crossing regions, this won’t help vehicles. Apparently when a vehicle crosses a region with an avatar on it, the avatar gets unseated and then gets sat back on when everything is cosy and the vehicle is passed through, as many of you will know, this often doesn’t work smoothly and often doesn’t work at all. Then there are issues with cross border physics, which are even further in the future when it comes to sorting out and as with all improvement talk, may never see the light of day.
However despite all the techie talk in the user group meeting of physics, wormholes, threads, the shining light is that someone is looking at it all, and trying to improve it, however as I said earlier, this is likely to be a long process, we really will have to be patient over these issues.
Yay!
I remember not so long ago data compression was announced at Oskar’s meeting.
It was supposed to speed up region border crossing and everybody cheered.
So now it’s suddenly part of “a horrible piece of crap”?
During my waking hours (MET) I hardly ever see anyone cross a border at all.
Except for some automated vehicles and freebie hunters.
Most people I know teleport to a dancing, a beach, a shopping mall, or another place where they will spend some time.
I do use a sailboat myself now and then. Crossing water sims is surprisingly smooth though.
I can imagine that people on combat sims would love to have a more smooth region crossing, but I think keeping adjacent sims on the same server version may help them a lot.
To be fair, I think it was a flip comment from someone looking at the way the code is now, when the original code was probably written with a lot less variables being considered.
I briefly played the Linden Realms game and didn’t really notice any border crossing issues, I don’t sail, so I’m pleased to see you comment about crossing sims now is rather smooth, I didn’t realise that the way it worked was to unseat and resit someone, I can see now why it can be rocky but it’s good to read feedback from a vehicle user.
Water sim xings will be good one week and horrible the next. Earlier this week I was rubber banding while sailing without even crossing sim lines.
I had a good sailing ship battle in the Blake Contested Waters just now. Xings were fine for once. Even so, xings are not smooth even when at their best, we’ve just learned to cope with them.
Thanks Amanda, especially for the xings lingo! I’d never heard that one before 🙂
There’s still a long way to go but hopefully it will be improved eventually, I should sail on the Blake Sea at some point, time is my main enemy.