Recieving Land.....

[Great Phoenix]

I am clueless as to WHY would some one would develop an engine to where the terrain is broken down to so many sectors as it is. and whats even more disturbing to me is WHY there hasnt been anything done to improve the ways the terrain is loaded. IT IS SO FRUSTRATING to wait for terrain filed to be downloaded while using travel gates. Surely there something that can be done to improve this.

[Chasing]

/setpref useloadingscreen false

If you havent used that command already

[Zexoin]

I am clueless as to WHY would some one would develop an engine to where the terrain is broken down to so many sectors as it is. and whats even more disturbing to me is WHY there hasnt been anything done to improve the ways the terrain is loaded. IT IS SO FRUSTRATING to wait for terrain filed to be downloaded while using travel gates. Surely there something that can be done to improve this.

Blight client is supposed to fix that.

[Deth]

I think it is broken down into sectors so they can do land changes on the fly as well as making it easier to work with.

[Great Phoenix]

I think it is broken down into sectors so they can do land changes on the fly as well as making it easier to work with.

I understand the reason now.. but I think a faster way could be found for the sectors downloaded which is technically is my main complaint..

for example, you teleported to elenath and waiting to download the terrain files and in the meantime you can get pounded and owned by any mobs wondering by there

/setpref useloadingscreen false

I could try that in case I have to make another dangerous trip.

[Steelclaw]

I am clueless as to WHY would some one would develop an engine to where the terrain is broken down to so many sectors as it is.

The reason for breaking the terrain down into sectors is so that the world can be managed and loaded dynamically. Note that once you're wandering around, there is no zoning or loading screen (unless you teleport or recall). It's actually a nice feature once you have your world cache built.

As for sectors, there aren't a lot of them. Each sector is 500x500m.

The delay you see is a result the way that the terrain for each sector is represented: as layers. Each sector has about 20 separate files, between 30K and a few hundred bytes going across the wire for each. The transfer for a sector averages out to around 3K per file.

Here's where the problem comes in: Those files are broken into 500-byte chunks and sent down the same pipe that has chat, mob and other player character positions, combat actions and other server messages. If the files were bundled together in a gigantic chunk, they'd transfer slightly faster, at the expense of playability (no other messages would get through until the big chunk of data finished transferring, which would make battles kind of frustrating if the client decided to start loading more terrain). The current blight client requests one file at a time, so that other server messages can be interleaved with terrain data.

and whats even more disturbing to me is WHY there hasnt been anything done to improve the ways the terrain is loaded.

That's what the world cache is for. You'll get a big initial delay as each sector in the cache is populated the first time it loads, but afterwards, your teleports should be pretty fast.

My advice to speed up ports at this point is to turn off your loading screen and/or reduce your view distance. You can even hotkey the latter:
low view distance: /setpref fogenddist 150
high view distance: /setpref fogenddist 800 (or whatever you have the slider set to -- the slider goes from 150 to 1000)

I know it's a bit frustrating and that's something I suffer from too. I try to get around a lot (and avoid flushing my world cache). Exploring not a bad idea anyway; sometimes you make your own personal discoveries while wandering around.

[velveeta]

I know it's a bit frustrating and that's something I suffer from too. I try to get around a lot (and avoid flushing my world cache). Exploring not a bad idea anyway; sometimes you make your own personal discoveries while wandering around.

boy howdy, true dat all day!