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There's a new topic in core developement about upping the sector overload limit again. I beleive that sector overload is a silly idea and just playing with the the limit will never fix anything.

I suggested a long time ago to use team based overload. It would create a real incitative for a team to not swarm a sector.


But now, I bring new ideas: Instead of doing damage, sector overload should both gives incitatives to teams to split between different sectors and while we're at it, I think it should also reduce the amount of datas transfered between players.

I'll list many ideas with little details, just to start somewhere.

Idea #1:

Having many different ships in the same sector could "jam" sensors and make ships harder to detect. Sector overload could just lower the sig of the ships in the sector. With lower sig, many ships might not be seen, which would reduce the datas that needs to be transfered and the lag.

Problems:
-While reducing the lag of the people in crowded sectors, it could incitate some teams to create them.
-It could have serious gameplay impact

On the good side, it could create new strategies.


Idea #2:

Create priority patterns(Some already exists AFAIK) and code a more interesting way to handle lag.

Examples of what could happen when sector overload is triggered:

- The icon of a fighter 5k away could turn white, It's model would be replaced by a ? and the game would only update it's location every 5 seconds(Or as fast as bandwith allows). There could also be an arrows showing its last known direction. Even better would be making the arrow longer the faster the ship was going.
- Friendlies ship should have a lower priority than enemy ones.
- Enemies who are closer would have top priority and rarely suffer from overload features.
- The target would get as much info as bandwitch allows.

Idea #3:
-Make overload team based
-When a team triggers its overload(They got more than the limit of ships in the same sector), lower the team scanning linking. With a massive overload, ships would only be able to see things that they can personally scan, they couldn't get help from others.

Problems:
-It could have no effect without some work because teams will usually form up together. A ship that could scan 1 ship might be able to scan them all, which would have no positve impact on lag.
-It could have negative impact on gameplay.



There's probably a lot more ways to to lower the datas that are sent in crowded sectors, I just think that

When Allegiance was first released many people were still using slow dial up connections. Do we actually still need it? Surely data bandwith can't be the issue in this day and age. I for one don't notice any lag when sector overload triggers. I DO need a new set of eardrums though. That siren sound is deafening. I demand it beeing replaced it with the Benny Hill theme music.

As I mentioned in the other thread, The Alleg server code only sends out dial-up level information regardless of your connection. R5 already has a fix for this thanks to vodka.

How about instead we do some real stress testing of the beta and see how well that works, possibly putting up some test cores with higher threshhold's before making more code changes?

Adaven wrote:QUOTE (Adaven @ Feb 3 2009, 12:46 AM) As I mentioned in the other thread, The Alleg server code only sends out dial-up level information regardless of your connection. R5 already has a fix for this thanks to vodka.

Have I mentioned I love you guys on the dev team

I fear that R5 will just push the limit farther. It will probably fix most of the issues on primetime as well as making sub-overload combat much funnier, but I doubt it'll magically handle 100 people in a single when there's a specially big game.

Fixing overload is obviously not as interesting as a code change than better bandwitch, but still, I'd like a better way to handle bigger sectors.

Btw, I can't wait to test R5. I feel there'll be a difference even with only 10 person in a sector.

Idea #4:
-"Lock" all alephs, teleporters, and red doors in the sector; preventing new players from entering.

combine ideas 1 and 3, then each team could kill its own radar, without hurting the other teams.
this wont guarantee that there wont be anyone who can see too many people (the enemy team could suffer) but it seems unlikely that a team would hurt itself like that.

juckto wrote:QUOTE (juckto @ Feb 3 2009, 01:54 AM) Idea #4:
-"Lock" all alephs, teleporters, and red doors in the sector; preventing new players from entering.

Nah - when a large team is turtling in a single sector - it would make it impossible for the other team to finish the game, as they couldn't enter the sector, all the defending team would have to do is stay out of base.

Juckto's idea would work if overload was team based. However, I'm wondering how bases could be handled(Again, 1 team is stuck in their home, they'd have to get people run away to other sectors to get their full team out?)

Adept wrote:QUOTE (Adept @ Feb 3 2009, 12:44 AM) Have I mentioned I love you guys on the dev team

lol hehe, you know I coded this "hack" like 2 years ago, and considering the speed in which new releases go live, its at least another year for R5 and by then the bandwidth patch will have absolutely no value since there'll only be a few people playing.