My opinion on the Bloodspilot fxi xpilot server

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Angeba
Posts: 88
Joined: Sun Feb 06, 2011 11:23 pm

My opinion on the Bloodspilot fxi xpilot server

Post by Angeba »

To me this server is a failed experiment.
It's irritating to see wrong things in extrapolated frames (e.g. balls/shots
flying through ships, ships flying through walls).

A fxi server which generates 50 frames per second, only calculates each 4th
frame for real, that is 12.5 frames per second (like old style bloods music).
The other frames are extrapolated and do not use client input for their calculations.
Hence if you press a key or move the mouse, the fxi server will only process this at
the next real frame after it received the packets from the client.
Contrary, a xpilot-ng server will generate 50 real frames and use client input
as soon as it arrives. This effectively reduces lag and doesn't create the
irritations of extrapolated frames mentioned above.

I like the behaviour of ships close to walls still better on xpilot-ng, than with
the circular ships of fxi. The good thing about the circular ships is that they are
never blocked from turning by a wall (as does happen on old 4.x servers).
But there is the problem that the player does not see the circle which the server uses,
but some shipshape. Problems occur when flying close to a wall and the circle is wider
than the players shipshape. The player will unexpectedly clip the wall, because it
apeared to him that he did not touch the wall.

Playability on fxi is not better than on ng. Probably only seasoned players,
who can't adapt their play say the opposite.
To me in fact playability is better on ng, because of all real frames at high
framerate (50 fps) and reduced lag.

I don't see any point in developing an inferior server which only supports a
fraction of XPilot features (e.g. no items, no polygon maps and related ng features).
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