I think it would be best to not do that. We do not want to leak information to the client that he cannot see, nor do we want to tell him what is connected. I think the best would be to specify what is cosmetic animations (ex: monster animations, water, spell animations (fire etc) (these eat bandwith), etc) and keep the funcitonal ones as is (doors, gates, triggers, spikes). Most of the bandwith hit is on the spell, water, etc animations. --- Sebastian Andersson < bofh-lists-crossfire-dev at diegeekdie.com > wrote: > On Mon, Oct 10, 2005 at 10:08:05PM -0700, Mark Wedel > wrote: > > The problem is with gates and the like - keeping > those in sync with the > > client is critical. For example, you could > imagine a map that has spikes > > going up and down. The player sees them when he > enters the map, but has to > > kill a bunch of monsters to get there. > > For cyclic animations (like spikes moving up and > down), perhaps the > server could just send out a "the current clock-tick > is X" message to > the client and all the animations could be based on > that clock-tick, > to make the client and server be in sync? > > Also "one shot" animations like gates could be > improved by just > triggering a start of the animation, not one message > for every animation. > To make things even more efficient, perhaps the > server could somehow > tell the client which arches are connected like when > 20 gates are > connected and will move all of them at the same time > which is rather > common in many maps. If the client knows that they > are connected, a > single command could be used to start all of their > animations. > > Regards, > /Sebastian > -- > .oooO o,o Oooo. Ad: > http://dum.acc.umu.se/ > ( ) \_/ ( ) > (o_ > "Life is not fair, but root \ ( /|\ ) / (o_ > //\ > password helps!" -- The BOFH \_) (_/ (/)_ > V_/_ > > _______________________________________________ > crossfire mailing list > crossfire at metalforge.org > http://mailman.metalforge.org/mailman/listinfo/crossfire > ed __________________________________ Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 http://mail.yahoo.com