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Over at the official site for Anarchy Online, Game Director Gaute Godager wrote a letter about a new feature that will be introduced to AO soon: The Crowd Limiting System. Here's how the letter starts:
Let me first define what I mean with Crowd Limiting (CL). CL is a method where a player is either moved out from - or stopped from moving into an area that contains too many players for your client (and our server) to handle. It is also a system (in our case anyway) where you get an alternative location to log in if everything freezes up because of too many players.
This article is not the easiest of documents - and I am sorry about that. The content is complicated, the solutions and problems likewise. Also – please understand that I don’t write this because it is a "nerf" - it is something that will flatly affect everyone to only a very small degree.
I will handle details further down, but let me first explain the motivation.
Anarchy Online is getting a much more organised PvP system with The Notum Wars. You fight for a reason, to keep or obtain prerogatives. You fight for your organisation and for land. You fight for your side! Still - AO has to run on several different PC configurations from relatively low end - to state of the art high ends. They all have to meet and be able to participate. The Notum Wars is not meant to be a playable only by the people with a P4 3K.
The AO engine also lets you personalise your character to very large degree. Several body forms (meshes) plus loads and loads of different clothes and looks (textures). Any player is today of course free to move wherever he or she wants.
If you connect these things you will see that we might possibly get a problem. People have experience what they call "lag" in many situations while playing the game. Usually this is when you get into an extremely crowded area with a lot of other players. To call this "lag" is actually a wrong definition of the problem. Most of the time this is not network lag, or the server running slowly, but what we call the "Resource Manager" loading new meshes and textures from the hard-disk of your computer or the loading of textures and meshes into the 3D card - to be able to display it all gloriously on your monitor :)
The problem is that people can actively start "exploiting" / "using" the dynamic loading of textures and meshes to make PvP'ing very difficult - even downright impossible. Yes, they actually have a huge motivation to do so! How: People can crowd in - so many with so many different looks - that other people coming into the area freeze up or sometimes experience client crashes when your computer tries to load more than the size of the 3D card memory. (You get lock-ups from infinite swapping...) I could certainly use a crowd limiting feaure on those saturdays when I go shopping in a big mall - it would be nice if half of the people could disappear *g* |
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Anarchy Online: Crowd Limiting System
