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PVE Warfare - NPC Pirates


EasternGamer

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okay let's not pretend having NPCs or AI in a game is some sort of mind-bender. 

 

it's a standard pillar of game dev...AI is present in virtually every game developed, MMO or otherwise. 

 

i think there's misunderstanding about what "run in client" actually means in the context of AI.

 

physics happen in clients, that's normal -- servers just do sanity checks and syncs. that doesn't mean each NPC needs its own clients -- because those NPCs only need to care about real physics when they are being perceived by players...at which point they exist in each player's client. 

 

this is already how it works when you perceive other players -- those meshes that exist in your client are independent of the meshes that exist in every other client -- synced with the server, but still separate universes technically. And yes DU handles them as meshes, not voxels. 

 

your game is handling those meshes as if they were local just to your client. 

 

that's why there's things like rubber-banding or "skipping" -- because slight variations exist and your client realizes that a given object is "actually" somewhere else. Even basic movement is usually done through LERPs -- interpolated movement that exists in each client that loads an object, not just your machine -- so when I say "go forward" it has an illusion of smooth movement. 

 

the game already has to validate physics on the server -- otherwise there's nothing to stop a rogue client from throwing the server nonsense data and skipping across the universe. 

 

the game already has solved this issues in the context of multiplayer -- each player that you see on your machine is not just "using data from another client", it's using data from a server and running on your client the same as an AI would. It actually just has one more "hop" -- instead of the server feeding each client sync data to update their local data, it comes directly from the server. 

 

Multiplayer programming can be complicated.

 

i probably made about zero sense here, but despite not knowing every facet of DU's dev, I feel headless clients would be far more complex than traditional AI. 

 

they did stress tests on headless clients is because in the context of stress tests it wouldn't make any sense otherwise 

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12 minutes ago, ShippyLongstalking said:

they did stress tests on headless clients is because in the context of stress tests it wouldn't make any sense otherwise 

Yea, ppl refer to that as a headless client test................. 

Avatars walking around in a straight line for a youtube technology promotion video is not the same as actual headless clients. 

 

For once, we dont know it those clients ever received any data about the other 9999 avatars walking around. 

For all we know, each client was not aware of the other clients. 

 

Those tests were made inside NQ's infrastructure. With no latency related issues. 

 

We also dont know how many tries were needed with the entire system crashing before that take was recorded. 

 

There are no constructs with physics and elements being calculated.

 

There is no lua being calculated. 

 

There are no world voxel changes being calculated. The world is in its default form. 

 

For all we know, those "headless clients" could be a simple python script sending "movement" data

 

That video only assured us one thing:

In a controled enviroment it is possible to recieve movement data from 10000 avatars. 

 

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