I can’t really think of a title that quite describes what I’m talking about quite right.
Problem: The servers can’t send all the data needed to render all the members of a zerg all the time.
Proposed solution: When the server needs to send more data than it can send, Send only the alliance, location, and direction of a player, and have the client simply render a simple team color stylized humanoid silhouette until it gets more information.
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From what I understand much of the problem with the culling is that the servers can’t send all the needed information to all players quickly enough for the full detail renders. For a player to be rendered at this point the server needs to have sent us race, class, all armor, all weapons, boons, conditions, hairstyle, haircolor, skincolor, skin pattern, height, buildtype, eyecolor, all the facial feature variables, animations, location, heading... Basically every single character creation option has a numeric value that must be sent from the server when the game wants to see a player.
That’s a hell of a lot of data to get one player rendering. Might not be much with current high speed internet, but when a server needs to send all that to hundreds of players at the same time, it adds up which seems to be giving us the culling issue.
That’s why I propose an intermediate level between rendering fully and not rendering at all. I think if the servers sent the location and heading of a player first, which the client only renders a quickly painted looking simple humanoid figure for, and then sent the rest of the data when it gets the chance the culling issue would be greatly reduced if not removed completely.
Location and heading is only a fraction of the data that needs to be sent currently. I for one would much rather have 2 people fully rendered with an army of faceless figures behind them that slowly fills out, than 4 people fully rendered and an empty field behind them that slowly renders a portion of the army.
