"I imagine that 100-200 bots would be possible without killing the servers too much"

http://design.vendetta-online.com/wiki/index.php?title=Hive#Implementation

Just had to ask... How?!?! 100-200 bots is screamin lag. Not to mention with 50+ people in the sector.

"This is the sort of location that an entire guild of 50 people might attempt to assault,"

There's no way the servers can take 200 bots let alone 50 ppl in the same sector. I remember a few times I spawned 300+ bots and let me tell ya there was LAG! (exploit.. can't do it no more) Soooo how is this possible? Anyone without a ping of 150 or lower is out.

Sorry just had to comment on it, (which is why I put this in off topic).

/givemoney Devs 2c

Maybe all the bots will be synchronized to coordinate an attack in a fashion similar to the enemies found in the well-known arcade game titled "Space Invaders", whereby all the bots move down one row as they've reached a certain point, and then continue in the opposite direction as they inch one step closer to your doom.

actually i'm sure the devs can dynamically allocate more server resources to a sector with a leviathan in it. Right now all the sectors get the same % of server capacity unless i'm mistaken.

whoa spellcast....thats really cool. By the way, I think we need some more of those dynamically allocated server resource thingymajigs in a sector we all know as B8.

B8 is so last month! I say we assign them to Deneb, so people can fight the BP without lag and us traders can use B8 without fear of being attacked.

make it so by the lag by teh' players in the sector it alocates the right amout, so laggyer players can stop being so laggy :D

I don't see how 200 bots and 50 players in a single sector should be a major problem as it has been solved in other games. ;)

idk Margoth, All the mmo's I've played have major lag during a raid and VO is one of those games where if you have lag for more than a second your dead. I'm just wondering how in the world they can do this and still have the raids actually "work". If it wasn't twitch there'd be no problem (of course I wouldn't be playing then...)

Just wonderin.

I'm pretty sure the servers can probably handle it; if not it's just a matter of adding more (possibly faster) servers to the cluster (yeah, nothing a few thousand dollars wouldn't solve, easily...). What I think is more likely to be an issue, is the graphics rendering in the clients. Hundreds of ships, plus hundreds of 'roids, means lots and lots of ploygons to render. Computers that normally run fine with everything at the max setting might need to have their Level of Detail lowered when going into a big raid like these.

Isn't that the point of LOD? Things farther away get rendered with fewer polys... Anyhow, Beolach is probably right. Considering that the bandwidth usage of VO is in the bpspc (bits per second per client), I don't think it's the pipe that's the limiting factor- it's the servers. You should all count yourselves lucky- back in the day, we used to suffer over a 300MHz Celeron server! Y'all got it easy...

Considering some of the "framerate killer sectors" out there it doesn't seem like VO implements (yet) a dynamic LOD. Hopefully some day it will.

Serving a twitch/reaction game with 250 moving object is probably a challenge though. :) Hmm, 250 objects updated five times a second... 35kB of uncompressed data? Add ammunition flying around and it might become that as compressed. Transferring that takes around 0,5s on a 512kbps DSL, making the total "lag" something like 0,9-1s.

Maybe some kind of dynamic level of detail for tactical information is also needed?

Margoth, Vendetta DOES implement a dynamic LOD. Try tweaking your graphics settings "scene level of detail" and see if that has any effect. Unfortunately it hasn't helped raise my framerates by much, at least in the OS X version, so I just leave it up anyway. Oh well. Back to hoping and dreaming that someday those troubled sectors will be further optimized.

There's two LOD settings you can play with, "Scene Level of Detail" and "Distance Level of Detail". Scene applies to how high the level of detail is for everything, Distance applies to how far away models are when they start losing detail. You can see the effect of Distance LOD easily at stations. From far away, they don't have windows, as you get closer they do.

Tweaking settings is hardly dynamic... What I meant was that the rendering engine adjusts the LOD automatically depending on the complexity of the scene being rendered. Including geometric LOD, not just textures (like those windows). That way a minimum or constant framerate can be guaranteed in almost any situation, unlike with static distance-LOD bindings.

Well, it is dynamic in that it changes the level of detail based of how far different models are from the camera - ships that are further away are drawn with fewer polygons than closer ships, as well as less detailed textures. But I don't think it takes the total number of polygons in the scene into account, just distance. I don't know, though.

LOD in vendetta does decrease the mesh resolution...

You know, I've been pretyt much everywhere and have YET to find ANY of those "frame-rate killer" sectors Margoth talks about. Not even the capship fights cause me any noticeable drop. I believe the issue has more to do with Margoth's setup than anything else, as my machine is a Wintel that's somewhat obsolete by today's standards.

Still, we'll see when we get to the Leviathan and all those bots, won't we?

Try Pherona E-2. Extremely dense 'roid field of Silicate "bone" 'roids. I have a nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra w/ 256MiB video RAM, and a Athlon64 3200+ w/ 2GiB system RAM. Most places in Vendetta I'm well over 100 fps, often closer to or above 200 fps. In Pherona E-2 I dropped to 10 fps.

But as long as the Stronghold isn't in a Silicate "bone" 'roid field, it'll probably be fine. Those "bone" 'roids are framerate killers.

10 fps with a 6800 Beolach!!!!!!!!!! I have a 6600 and I've never been below 20 fps.

O_O

That's the only sector I've had a bad framerate in, and it was with all settings maxed out. /me still loves his video card.