Re: cheating & LOS

[Philip Brown <philb@soda.berkeley.edu>]

>>>>[From Carl Edman]

    > I guess that makes your method a bandwidth win, at the expense of
    > some server time.
    
    Why does this cost extra server time ?  
    
It costs the server extra time vs the full transmission method.

Full transmission just says:

   Check all squares that have changed , in vicinity of player, and send.

This is a constant order of calculation.

With precalculated LOS... I think you may hav to do som extra handling on
the server. I'm not sure you can automatically say ONLY...

"send squares in vicinity of player that have changed in that update, and
are in line of sight".

AHA! Now I remember. It also has to keep a per-player line-of-sight map.
This is so the server can send across stuff that just came into view,
reguardless of whether it actually changed, last update. Likewise, it has
to check and see if anything was visible last round, but out-of-sight
this round, and blank it if so.

Aha. Which brings us to the point that your method has a slight hole in
it. You can't just "not transmit" blank spots. You hav to also have an
explicit "blank this spot" call.   Apologies if you covered this already.