Tuesday 1 June 2010

World clocks now in sync

The game world clock is now synced across network clients, time advance and day-night cycles locked. Accuracy is down to round-trip packet times plus a few milliseconds. More than enough to keep entity spawn times and waypoint navigation in close sync.

I'm as yet unsure how often to send clock updates, currently it's every half-second which is quite aggressive, it's easy enough to tweak. Clocks run on client and frame-rate independent so they don't need to be updated  often. They just need the occasional time sync from the host or when the host is changing the time-of-day.

Chat channels work well, need to add the player name to the prefix. We have a player profile set in the game config but this carries no player name or any other data as yet.

Almost ready to test that NAT punch-through.

** update **

More testing with the network raised some points. My wife likes to chat a lot, console input buffer isn't long enough to accommodate all in one entry. The flashing Cursor sucks isn't very good.

Clock sync every 2 seconds works just as good with forced update on time-advance.

Issues with keeping track of current client/host connection were resolved. Status bar now shows connection status and number of connected clients as (H:n) as a suffix.

Using GUIDs instead of IPs to map clients.

Sent first goldspam message in Combat-Helo, which doesn't even use gold.

2 comments:

  1. I don't know about how many times you need to actually refresh time but every 2-5 seconds sounds nice enough. You can always make it available through the game settings or an external config file for people to tweak it if necessary.

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  2. Hello friend. Can I interest you in some gold? We have over 100k gold in this server. Speedy delivery (less thank 10 minutes).

    Ah... The joys of gold spamming. Misty eyes here.

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