Not sure if this helps or not, but I'm really happy with the way the site is being run, bugs sorted, etc. I do agree lag is a problem though since I had both radar and log live and saw the attack on my ship show in my log, but no ship on the radar. Also parts of my log go blank, e.g the inbound attacks section. What I think would help is if the data pulled from the server was compressed before coming to our computers. Like our computers store where ships are on the radar and what's in the log until that data needs to be refreshed by the server. Think how many ships we pass which haven't moved in days, yet the name, place, colour, etc, all gets sent to our computer each time. The log shouldn't be too hard to change since when we open the log it checks the server for new attacks. Then it's live but doesn't update until the server tells it there is new data, in which it them updates again, then saves it to memory until the server tells it there's more data, and so on. As for the radar, firstly all the data about inactive players would be loaded to our computers memory and maybe even a cookie. That way only the data for active players would be downloaded by the live radar. When a ship sinks that is then loaded to every players computer. All this kind of data would of course be encrypted so no player could see the ship locations without going there. Really I'm thinking the less data going between our computers and the server the better. Things like ship indexes in which instead of the ship names of other players going to our computers each time there could be an index number. Our computers would already have a list of the ships in the game, and the player name would be displayed based on the index number. E.g If the game only had 3 players (A, B, and C.) then our computer would download the list: 1) A 2) B 3) C
Then my ship gets attacked by B, but instead of my log downloading B, it would download the number 2, and from that it would find and display B. The reason this would speed things up is because most player names are longer than say a 4 digit number. These are all simple ideas but I'm sure they would speed up the game play for everyone, and would use no more than 5 Mb of our computer space (Including a full player list, the locations of all inactive players, display pics, etc.).
Hope all that makes sense as it's late at night and I haven't proof read it very well. I'm happy to try and explain it in more detail though.
_________________ It angers me that bottles can say for you to shake well before use, but don't have to say to put the cap back on 1st.
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