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A simple server-side queue
Latency can be a pretty big disparity between two people, and it has a pretty profound effect on a lot of aspects of the game. I'm always looking for ways to alleviate that, and there's a pretty big one that a lot of people use: spamming.
Let's take combat for example. If you want to make sure your next attack happens immediately when you regain balance, you lean on the enter key and spam the everloving life out of that attack. The issue, naturally, with spamming attacks is that you get spammed. In a text game, having all those error messages fly by isn't really conducive to understanding the fight and the situation. So, some people spam less, or others just trigger it on balance. Most systems have an on-balance queue: I believe SVO's is dofree. The issue with triggering it is the latency, like I mentioned, which means that one person's on-balance queue is going to happen faster than another person's on-balance queue. A serpent dstabbing with an on-balance queue in Chicago is going to hit about half a second faster than one in Australia, or thereabouts. That leaves people with high latency a choice between spamming (and getting spammed by error messages), or accepting slower attacks (crippling in Achaea's combat system).
The balancing solution to this, I think, is to implement a very simple server-side on-balance queue. It would let you specify a set of commands to happen as soon as you regain balance/equilibrium with about the same interface as most systems use. Let's say something like:
ONBAL <command> -- Add a command to the queue.
ONBAL SHOW -- Show the current queue.
ONBAL CLEAR -- Clear the current queue.
I think this would go a really, really long way to alleviating the effects of latency and be a pretty big convenience to people who currently spam and suffer the error messages. Thoughts?
Let's take combat for example. If you want to make sure your next attack happens immediately when you regain balance, you lean on the enter key and spam the everloving life out of that attack. The issue, naturally, with spamming attacks is that you get spammed. In a text game, having all those error messages fly by isn't really conducive to understanding the fight and the situation. So, some people spam less, or others just trigger it on balance. Most systems have an on-balance queue: I believe SVO's is dofree. The issue with triggering it is the latency, like I mentioned, which means that one person's on-balance queue is going to happen faster than another person's on-balance queue. A serpent dstabbing with an on-balance queue in Chicago is going to hit about half a second faster than one in Australia, or thereabouts. That leaves people with high latency a choice between spamming (and getting spammed by error messages), or accepting slower attacks (crippling in Achaea's combat system).
The balancing solution to this, I think, is to implement a very simple server-side on-balance queue. It would let you specify a set of commands to happen as soon as you regain balance/equilibrium with about the same interface as most systems use. Let's say something like:
ONBAL <command> -- Add a command to the queue.
ONBAL SHOW -- Show the current queue.
ONBAL CLEAR -- Clear the current queue.
I think this would go a really, really long way to alleviating the effects of latency and be a pretty big convenience to people who currently spam and suffer the error messages. Thoughts?
19
Comments
A server side balance would make the game so much more enjoyable in the aspects of combat for those that have a horrible latency.
On weekdays I run around 600-700ms, and on weekends around 300-500, with the rare exceptions of midnight and lunchtime being around 200ms. I am sure there are plenty of people this is no big deal to, but to some of us something like this would massively change our game play experience.
Please please pleaseeeee
Results of disembowel testing | Knight limb counter | GMCP AB files
http://www.achaea.com/forum/an-idea-for-dealing-with-latency
http://forums.achaea.com/discussion/968/server-side-queue
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It will still cause trouble for cases where you need compound commands on balance though, so it only addresses some of the problem as it is. For example, if you're bashing and are proned by a mob (very common, a lot of mobs prone as part of their attack), you'll generally have to STAND before you can attack. Ordinarily, this would be a compound command on balance (STAND;KILL $TAR). In the current implementation, you couldn't queue up that sort of thing, so you'd suffer the same delay issues as before. There are myriad other instances of compound commands needed to be entered on balance, such as cases of wielding weapons prior to your attacks, switching weapons between attacks, or putting up defenses that require balance but do not take it.
Could the current system be expanded to accommodate compound commands? We're almost there!
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One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important
It feels like my sword just leveled up, and without me having to even write complicated timing commands! I hope composite commands are added too. Maybe then it could just be a matter of queueing up to X commands, with a queue reset command?
My reaction to Sarapis's post was wanting a Love reaction, because I wanted to put little hearts under that post!
Since I can't do that, have them here!
♥♥♥♥♥♥♥
Oh no, I missed this and now I can't edit my post!
I just wanted to point out that discern isn't the only thing you could do after a slash. Engage is also a possibility!
Maybe combos could just be a general thing rather than monk-specific, though now that I say this, wasn't this a planned extension to the server-side alias system?
Site: https://github.com/trevize-achaea/scripts/releases
Thread: http://forums.achaea.com/discussion/4064/trevizes-scripts
Latest update: 9/26/2015 better character name handling in GoldTracker, separation of script and settings, addition of gold report and gold distribute aliases.