I don't want to beat a horse that you know you're going to kill in a few weeks, so forgive me. But that last test had some performance issues.
It was common for the game to hang for anywhere between a fraction of a second and several seconds. I could not find a perfect correlation between my actions and the hangs. Sometimes they seemed to happen when I passed another character. Other times, they seemed to happen when a bunch of us were working on a street project, gathered under the street vendor that was offering the project.
In any case, the game seemed to ignore (and throw away) keyboard and mouse input for a few seconds and then, when it was ready, rip through a bunch of queued-up inputs in a fraction of a second. Needless to say, this cause my poor character to do all sorts of things that were unintended.
The second performance issue is moving between regions. The "preparing region" screen stays on long enough for me to make tea. Yet there's almost nothing on the region, as measured by pixel content or behavior. I've seen FPSs with *way* more level content load *way* more quickly.
Now sure, I know it's in alpha and all. My concern is that there are hardly any players at the moment. If this is ever going to scale up, the performance needs to be ***way*** better.
I'm not sure if the "lag" issue is a platform issue. If it is, then please, please abandon this platform and find one that isn't a pig waiting to be petted.
So: caching. It's a good thing! And it will almost completely eliminate the delay in moving to a region that you've already seen. If you know that I'm going to place P and have to pass through a sequence of regions to get there, there's no excuse for not caching them ahead of time. Heck, the kind of anticipatory caching that Chrome does for nearby websites could easily be done for nearby regions even if I'm not going to a particular place.