Re: CF: Win32 Client

[Christian Stieber <stieber@informatik.tu-muenchen.de>]

Mark Wedel (mark@icp.siemens.com) wrote:

> > 2) How many players can connect at a time before the server starts to slow
> > down ?
> 
>  Depends greatly on server hardware.
> ...
> 2 or 3 groups - if the former cases, that is 5 maps/areas that need to get
> updated each tick, in the later case, it is only 2 or 3.  So at some point, you
> probably start getting more of that overlap.

Other considerations:
- very full apartments are very bad for speed (large piles of objects on
  the floor, in general --- having the same stuff in a bag is no problem)
- if the server runs out of real memory you are bound to have problems

Also, it depends on how good the players are / what level they are. In
general, low level characters and newbies won't cause that much load
on the server since they don't deal with spellcasters a lot --- they
generally run away if they see one, or they run away if they see more
than one :-)

"Medium" level players might cause more problems --- a reasoanbly large
room with a lot of spellcasters can cause a lot of server load, esp.
when cone spells are used. And they usually need a while to clear
out that room.

"High" level players are able to clear out such rooms in a matter of
seconds, or very quickly (depends on the room and what bugs are
current on the server in use...), so they cause less server load. On
the other hand, they don't care about spells at all, and they only
visit places with millions of spellcasters, making things worse again
:-)

"Very good" players don't let monsters call spells --- they can clear out
the two "extremely high load" maps (Jessies zoo, dragon hangar) and
other "very high load" maps (chaos lair and the two "fire & ice" maps,
mostly) without causing lag.

But all this, of course, just emphasizes what Mark said: it depends on
what the players do --- even a single player can be too much if he's
doing "the wrong thing".

Christian


-- 
Christian Stieber        http://www.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/~stieber
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