Ship version hash

[esabrats]

I noticed that when ship hosting changes, the ship goes into its low poly state before becoming high resolution again. My assumption is that it takes time to download the ship state from the new host, even though the ship hasn't changed and the new clients all have the correct state of the ship locally.

It seems like some kind of version-control or hash would solve this problem. Every time the ship is modified, the hash is changed and everyone has to download the new state (ideally just the delta). Heck, if you make the ship specification plaintext, you could even use git to do it

With a system like this ideally one could "preload" all ships within a certain radius with intercept trajectories that would make co-visibility likely, so that ships aren't low-res like they currently are.

I'm sure you're already thinking of this, or otherwise there's some limitation of the peer to peer network that makes it challenging, but I thought to throw it out there just in case. Feel free to ignore if it's irrelevant!

 

[HardworkingSlacker]

This is a good idea although very complex to implement. +1 Anyways!

 

[RustyDawwwg]

That is a good idea! Another idea would be to reduce such heavy dependence on peer-to-peer by using radius/intercept trajectories to load 2+ ships into an instanced server - just for that particular area of space, then switch back to player-hosted for any players that leave the area and eventually free up the server once all players in the area are back to self-hosted state. This would be the ideal solution for PVP especially. If they can afford to rent some co-located servers in various regions of the world, they could program this in a way that chooses the best available server for all players involved based on ping. Could even set it up so specific Origin stations are best suited for certain regions by permanently dedicating servers to each of them.

But all of this is IF they can afford to do so at this stage of development. And that's a big if cuz servers ain't cheap!