We would like to give you a deeper insight into our development. We are currently testing the "server performance patch", which we have implemented in the last few days on the development server.
What does this mean?
In the course of the current Alpha we have determined that we have enormous peaks in the user data traffic. A detailed investigation has shown that the AoI handling of the headless clients did not work properly.
What the hell is AoI and Headless Client?!?!?
AoI is the area of ??interest. This means that clients from the server are only supplied with the relevant data. This is relative to their absolute world position. According to the motto what interests the player when in Nurimon a sack of rice falls over when he is currently in the league. The AoI radius is 375 meters at Negaia. This results in AoI clusters of 750 meters edge length.
Headless clients are specially designed clients for Linux that provide the terrain information for the server. These headless clients run on the server in the background and are responsible for controlling the NPC-AI (navigation, aggrolist handling, etc). Pro AoI cluster, a headless client is positioned centrally in the AoI cluster, which controls the NPCs located there.
What was the traffic problem?
The two main points were:
Because the headless clients are actually outside their AoIs, they should not send each other data.
All headless clients have received the position update from the logged in players. This information is completely unimportant for the headless clients and secondly, the AoI handling did not work.
What did the "server performance patch" bring?
The "server performance patch" reduces the user data traffic by up to 99%. In real play, a reduction of 90-95% will result.
The screenshot shows the improvement. In the upper part of the screenshot you can see the traffic and utilization of the currently running Alpha server. In the lower part, the development server is compared to the same user number (15 headless clients + 1 player + 1 web console)
What happens next?
We are currently testing the server communication and will publish the server performance patch with version 0.0.1.13.
We hope it was understandable what we are currently doing ...