Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyhm
Yeah, Peer-To-Peer (as opposed to the other P2P, Pay-to-Play).
Like I said, I don't really know enough about the architecture...I don't reckon the AIM server has a whole lot of thinking to do in maintaining people talking to each other, even while masking their IPs from each other. But then, making random connections and randomly quizzing these connections could be just as bad.
Which pretty much leaves us back at "Either have the player do the calculations, or have the server do it." If we lived in a world where players could be assigned relative lag indexes, and said indices would be stable, we could trust the two high-powered processors to do each others' work: player1's fighting the bomylord while processing the mushroomlord for player 2, and player2's fighting the mushroomlord while processing the bomylord for player 1, and all the server's doing is occasionally checking up on them...
Pipe dreams, oh well, it woulda been nice.
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There is no advantage in the NPC-Server passing the jobs to the clients. It'd be a security risk if the tasks were somehow intercepted (and it'd happen), and if a client dropped out, suddenly the server has lost some instructions. The transfer mechanism isn't fast enough, and the server would suddenly have to start regulating tasks instead of just doing them itself in a third of the time.
The machines that the NPC-Servers are running on are pretty good machines; it's just as easy to leave them there doing the work in the same fashion.
In theory the idea is probably a good one, but there are so many architectural limitations that make it highly impractical for something like this.