Posted - 2005.09.08 19:09:00 - [2]

 

Fun idea! "Pimp my Iteron."

Some problems:
+People might use naughty images; it's hard for the computer to enforce.

+It would add to load times; every time you got close to a group of people, you'd have to load all their images. It may not seem that bad, until 60 people are all trying to load each others' images all at once.

I think, though, that adding corporate decals might not be quite as hard. It wouldn't necessarily be a bad idea either.

Posted - 2005.09.09 12:41:00 - [4]

 

Edited by: Binary Mind on 09/09/2005 12:42:23
I don't really share that 'too much lag' theory

if you can only color 10 parts of your ship in let's say 64 different colors, that would mean that you only have to send 60 more bits per ship in local. for all those not who don't know, that's almost nothing. for specific logos and stuff I don't think it's necessairy.. but yes, coloring textures wouldn't involve any remarquable lag.

Posted - 2005.09.09 16:28:00 - [6]

 

What if I jump into a fleet battle of 100 v 100. That increases the info a bit, and it is laggy enough as it is.

Posted - 2005.09.10 15:28:00 - [8]

 

Edited by: Aion Amarra on 10/09/2005 15:32:54
If this idea is implemented correctly, it won't be a lag factor at all.

Let's say we have six areas on each ship that we are free to pick a color for. Like engine trails, primary and secondary hull platings, window color, and e.g. two different types of hull and wing stripes. Each of those colors is in 32-bit, meaning that there is four byte per color, or 24 byte per ship. Now lets go with the most complex case, 100v100 ship battle, and no player has cached any ship colors but his own, meaning that he needs to recieve the colorations of 199 other ships. That'd be 4776 Bytes per player. An amount of traffic a 56k modem could recieve in well under a second. For the server that'd be 955200 Bytes, still well below one megabyte. An amount of information that should be neglegible compared to the other informations that have to be transferred. If the data was transferred to the clients after all the more urgent info, like ship types and positions, was transferred, the players would already be able to act while the ship colors are still being transferred.

Now let's simplify that example further and either limit the different colors to corporations, or alliances, and thus tie the colors to either corporation or alliance tags. If it were tied to alliances, only the ONE color scheme of the OPPOSING side would have to be transferred to the players in the 100v100 fleetbattle, as the clients of course know the colors of the alliance the player belongs to. That would mean that only one color sheme, along with the alliance tag the color scheme belongs to, would have to be passed to each player. Around 30 Byte per player or 6000 Byte for the server. If it was tied to the corp tags, it would be around 30 bytes per player per other corporation involved, or even less if the clients already know all color schemes of the allied corporations.

Claiming that something like this would cause lag is just plain dumb. Please note that this was an example with 6 colors per ship with 32 Bit each. Something that easily could be simplified more.

Overall I would prefer the idea of corporation or alliance colors over individual colors, as it not only decreases bandwidth usage, but also creates a unified look for fleets. All the NPC factions have their own colors. Why shouldn't the same go for the players? A fleet of hundred ships, all with the same color scheme regardless of race should look waay impressive.

If custom pictures were implemented, things would be different, though. Even a small jpg is way larger than a simple color scheme. If anything, these should be limited to corporation or alliance logos, as even a rather small 64x64 pixel jpg image (and you hafta admit, anything smaller wouldn't look good anyways) has a size of 1-2KB. Two hundred players, each with their own 1KB image, with each player having to load like 199 other 1KB pictures, now that ain't gonna go well. Only streaming the pictures when someone directly looks at a ship using the 'look at' function (duh) would be different, though, as this wouldn't cause that much traffic.

On the same note, the option to write something onto the ship would be interesting as well. If there was only one font to pick, itd be a simple one byte per letter (non unicode, that is), plus again 4 byte for the font color. Limit the max length to like 16 or 32 letters (depending on the ship? Apoc is bigger than a Rifter, and thus a longer line would be easier to read), and only stream the string to the client when the ship is looked at, and this wouldn't be a major lag factor either.

I really don't think the main problem with these ideas is that it'd cause lag, but the amount of work this would need from the devs.

Whew, done for now. I'm sure there was more I wanted to write, but I guess I can't remember.

Posted - 2005.09.11 01:01:00 - [10]

 

Adding the corp logo's to ships is easy as pie, it's just an extra bit of info, coz u already get ship name, character name, corp name etc when u select a ship on overview, so the corp decal wud be tied into the corps ticker. Instead of downloading the image, u find the 3 images on ur local client that make up that corps logo.