Topic

pre-load streets

an annoying thing about glitch is how stuttered traveling through the world is, with so many load screens along the way. moving through 10 streets requires waiting on 10 load screens.

i'm not exactly sure what is being loaded, or if pre-loading is even feasible or desireable, but am suggesting pre-loading the streets connected to the streets a player is on in order to speed the transition from street to street as much as possible.

Posted 2 years ago by striatic Subscriber! | Permalink

Replies

  • If I'm repeatedly walking the same path for an hour, it'd help a lot to preload the static part of the streets on that path. Can't think of another good use.
    Posted 2 years ago by Tingly Claus Subscriber! | Permalink
  • This sounds like a really good idea, I have gotten a bit tired of the loading aswell and since the areas are fairly small i don't think preloading would be too difficult.
    Posted 2 years ago by Logrus Subscriber! | Permalink
  • yeah, this would be superb. i've been getting load times of 10-11 seconds per area, which really does add up!
    Posted 2 years ago by katlazam Subscriber! | Permalink
  • "i don't think preloading would be too difficult."

    could potentially burn a ton of bandwidth. not scale well.
    Posted 2 years ago by striatic Subscriber! | Permalink
  • i agree with striatic. intelligent preloading is hard to do correctly. it is also kind of hard for us to completely guess as to what sort of data is being loaded when you go to a street, in teh first place, and i'm sure tinyspeck isn't feeling shary. obviously the landscape and static objects like houses, other players and their position, piggies and chickens, etc. also plants, patches, etc etc. that's only the stuff we know about.

    now, for the landscape and static objects, i would be surprised if there isn't already a local cache of those items, so that the client doesn't have to go ask the server every single time, it only needs to ask about the things that might have changed in some way since the last time.

    i can think of several efficient ways to cache the objects that move around and/or change appearance (version numbers, delta diffs, etc), but once again, i would be surprised if those strategies weren't already thought of and either implemented or planned.

    but yeah, striatic has the right of it, blindly preloading all connected streets to the one you are on is a huge waste of bandwidth and begins to perform miserably when you have a busy nexus like groddle junction. just imagine, that street has how many streets off of it? and what if each street had dozens of moving objects (players, butterflies, piggies, etc), all of which have variable attributes (has been massaged, has been fed/watered/pet)... all of that would have to be accounted for and sent to *every single player* on *all* of those streets, *constantly*. huge waste of server time.
    Posted 2 years ago by Mabs Subscriber! | Permalink
  • "huge waste of server time"

    and ours, makes transition times even longer
    Posted 2 years ago by Tingly Claus Subscriber! | Permalink
  • While testing, not all things which could be cached are cached (to make debugging easier) so that part of it will get better. And once everything Just Works, we can spend some time optimizing. But as every good software engineer knows, premature optimization is the root of all evil :)
    Posted 2 years ago by stoot barfield Subscriber! | Permalink
  • ah, it makes me so happy to hear those words out of.. your... mouth.
    Posted 2 years ago by Mabs Subscriber! | Permalink