Breakfast in Shrunkland

Phytotron · Post by **Phytotron** » Sat Sep 03, 2005 7:51 pm

I'd just like to express my appreciation and happiness over this server. I like the small arena and the speed. It could possibly get up there with BiH as one of my faves.

Of course, I have my little comments, which shouldn't be taken as "your server sucks!" criticisms, but just my single, solitary personal preferences, and could be disregarded if you like. There are really only two things. One, for my tastes the rubber could be diminished a bit, say to 5/50, maybe. Two, it's a bit too laggy (yes, I know I know, common, annoying refrain—and also probably largely out of your control, I'd assume—but wouldn't reducing the rubber also help the lag? Most of the lag seems to happen at times when I get stuck on walls because of the rubber...right?). Oh, and whenever it's upgraded I reckon it'll feel better too, when client and server are the same version...right?

But hey, still, I'm growing awfully fond of it. To paraphrase Swampy, it's all the excitement of the close-up action without all the waiting.

(Oh, I understand it's basically just the old original Swampland, but I wasn't around in the pre-2.7.1 days, so it's somewhat novel to me.)

Swampy · Post by **Swampy** » Sat Sep 03, 2005 8:18 pm

Thanks for showing your appreciation of the server. Its always good to hear some feedback - good or bad. (Was that the appropriate use of the em-dash?

)

One, for my tastes the rubber could be diminished a bit, say to 5/50, maybe.

I agree with you on the rubber settings - so I reduced it to 5 from 10. Let's see how that plays out and I'll adjust it from there, depending on the feedback about the current setting.

Two, it's a bit too laggy (yes, I know I know, common, annoying refrain—and also probably largely out of your control, I'd assume—but wouldn't reducing the rubber also help the lag? Most of the lag seems to happen at times when I get stuck on walls because of the rubber...right?).

The server does seems to be doggin on me, so I'll dig into that over the next day or so and try to get that ironed out.

Thanks again and see you on the Grid!

Post by **Lucifer** » Sat Sep 03, 2005 8:30 pm

Speaking of whiches. I was thinking about removing the "Breakfast" part of the servername for my servers and tossed the idea at Swampy, and he was receptive. I figure if eggcozy says we aren't Breakfast anymore, and there's evidently some disagreement on what "Breakfast" means, exactly, it makes more sense for us to pick a new name and let eggcozy keep his and be definitive about it (even if he does leave the game for awhile/forever).

So, anybody got any ideas, then? We *could* go with a hell theme, but we don't have to. So I'm fishing for ideas that aren't hell. (I've already done some tests on hellish themes and the ones I've come up with don't have a lot of room for extension, and since Swampy and I are planning to have a server in every house, and two chickens in every pot, we need room for expansion)

(Ok, maybe that last was an exaggeration)

I don't mean to hijack this thread, but the conversation started on Shrunkland anyway.

Phytotron · Post by **Phytotron** » Sat Sep 03, 2005 11:07 pm

Yeah, I noticed you reduced the rubber, and that did seem to reduce some of the sticky lag stuff, so cool.

The other thing I'd like to add is that I find myself with a much better framerate in that server than in others. This is something I still don't understand—why Swampland or somewhere will knock me down to the low teens while BiH or Shrunkland will have me in the mid-to-upper 20's, or even higher. But whatever the reason, it just makes it appeal to me that much more. I can actually play.

As for the renamings and whatnot, I got nothin'. WhatTheHell, HellIfIKnow, Eliphino (that old joke), BrunchInHeck (same acronym), DinnerInHades, heh. So long as the server is there with the settings, the name doesn't matter much to me.

SuPeRTaRD · Post by **SuPeRTaRD** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 7:22 pm

i've noticed the smaller the grid the higher the fps

mebbe scale is way off in armagetron engine & or something

perhaps if everything was rendered in a much smaller scale, we would see fps increases & "lag" monsters die

much of the "lag" is visual IMO weird glitchy visual lag

any idea zman if what im talking about makes ANY sense?

i've seen other games act similarly glitcy when the scale was way oversized.. for the engine worldspace to calculate

i dunno if that applies to all 3d games or this one or.. what.. jsut a thot tho..

ALSO: i think the default starting speed afects this visual glitchyness or mebbe that affects lag,.. there is a speed setting that if put too high (which is all the rage these days) it makes the visuals more jumpy..

(sorry off subject)

Jonathan · Post by **Jonathan** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 7:34 pm

I think these are at least part of the cause:
- Walls are split for some reason, so the bigger the arena the more rim walls (I'm not sure exactly what happens in that function of 400 million lines, but it's likely).
- Bigger map -> more space -> more/longer walls.

philippeqc · Post by **philippeqc** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 7:50 pm

Jonathan wrote:I think these are at least part of the cause:
- Walls are split for some reason, so the bigger the arena the more rim walls (I'm not sure exactly what happens in that function of 400 million lines, but it's likely).
- Bigger map -> more space -> more/longer walls.

jonathan, a graphical accelerator could be done by separating the topology engine's wall from the graphical engine's. The real walls are chunked down to bits, but a new object could just store the positions between bends in a wall (not splits between 2 on the cause of the topology engine), and use that info for a faster rendering.

But thats probably a discussion for another thread, so dont anser here.

-ph

Website · Post by **Z-Man** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 8:44 pm

The topological splitting is probably not the problem here; it should not scale, i.e. the number of pieces the walls get split in should not increase significantly with the arena size. Combining them again for rendering (as is done for the player walls) should have no big effect on rendering speed.
I already have thought about a new grid placement method that will eliminate the splits unless two walls intersect.

However, if a moviepack is active, the wall is split into additional pieces for rendering and each piece gets a separate texture. The reason is that the original texture is 1024x256, and at the time the moviepack was introduced, the maximum single texture resolution of many accelerators was 256x256. Thus, the bigger the arena size, the more texture context changes there are. And texture changes are bad.
I did a test for this: I set SP_SIZE_FACTOR to 20. With activated moviepack, I get 2 fps. With moviepack deactivated, I get my usual 50.

Another factor for rendering speed could be player behavior: if there is more room, there will likely be more turns and player walls.

Anyway, I have never experienced such an effect myself; my usual gaming machines are in the fillrate limited regime all of the time. I get speed hits for complex maps, like the crazy maze ones on the Crack Pipe.

Phytotron · Post by **Phytotron** » Thu Oct 20, 2005 5:06 am

I've been meaning to ask, Swampy, is it just me or did you increase the speed and/or acceleration around the time of my hiatus (beginning of October)?

Swampy · Post by **Swampy** » Fri Oct 21, 2005 2:26 am

Nope.. no changes. I haven't changed anything since the reduction of rubber way back when, in fact.

Phytotron · Post by **Phytotron** » Mon Jan 30, 2006 2:16 am

At about 7:50 eastern tonight, I noticed Shrunk is down. Swampland and Hell are still up. Posting this in case it wasn't deliberate.

Swampy · Post by **Swampy** » Mon Jan 30, 2006 2:54 am

It was intentional

I needed to take it down while I brought up the server that replaced the Swampland machine. Swampland is now running on an AMD 64 3500 system and the hardware that it was once running on now belongs to my "other half"

She's excited to have it since she was using a PIII 700. Her old machine is going to hell (pun intended) and Shrunkland is staying right where it is.

Shrunkland is back up now, btw.

Phytotron · Post by **Phytotron** » Mon Jan 30, 2006 11:09 pm

Okee doke. By the way, I'm supposed to mention this. Lately—perhaps over the last week or two—Shrunkland gets very laggy once about 5+ players enter. I'm talking about persistent Luciferian mail server type lag that makes it nigh on unplayable, not the normal myth sorts, heh. It didn't used to have this problem, so here I mention it.

(Heh, I glanced back at my first post in this topic. It probably won't come as any surprise to anyone for me to say that, nah, Shrunkland is definitely my favorite now.)

Fonkay · Post by **Fonkay** » Tue Jan 31, 2006 2:03 am

Oscilloscope wrote:(Heh, I glanced back at my first post in this topic. It probably won't come as any surprise to anyone for me to say that, nah, Shrunkland is definitely my favorite now.)

Mine too... best server ever. I like it most when it's empty too, 3-4 people max.

KamP · Post by **KamP** » Tue Jan 31, 2006 5:20 am

Heh, it's best to me when there's a bunch of people there. But people that know what they're doing. One or two rim hugging 180 lovers at most.
Fonk, you're a lobster?