Donate for a better server?

[spectacle]

I think you would get a lot more donations if you were to post a plan for what you would do with them. Like "if we get X€ we can buy Y, which would have Z effect on game performance". As it is the connection between the rather anonymous "donate" button and improved game performance is somewhat unclear, so donating becomes more of a feelgood issue.

[jorb]

Probably, on the other hand that requires us to actually have a plan, which we don't.

We know we need a better connection, though.

[ThirdEmperor]

you can choose wich type of banner you wanna put on. The one where you need to click give you more money, the one that don't need clicks, give lesser money. In both case, when you reach 100$ they pay you.
Anyway google is only one of lots of site.

I vote jorb sticks one of the ones that needs clicks up, and we all click on it 20 times a day, it's like donating except the advertisers pay.

[Granger]

Probably, on the other hand that requires us to actually have a plan, which we don't.

I must admit, for not actually having a plan you two have created something wonderful.

We know we need a better connection, though.

In case the problem is related to exceeded bandwith (and packets getting queued) at peak times a more aggressive client side caching of the area (using deltas on reentry, eg. to cut area loading on repeated entering/leaving houses or frequent travelling between 2 locations while ferrying stuff) might help to cut current bandwidth enough to make it fit through the existing cable at all times.

Stronger caching of the minimaps might also help, they seem to reload every time i leave a building.

[loftar]

In case the problem is related to exceeded bandwith (and packets getting queued) at peak times a more aggressive client side caching of the area (using deltas on reentry, eg. to cut area loading on repeated entering/leaving houses or frequent travelling between 2 locations while ferrying stuff) might help to cut current bandwidth enough to make it fit through the existing cable at all times.

Speculating on such things is vain without profiling actual bandwidth use, though. I'll do that at some point.

Stronger caching of the minimaps might also help, they seem to reload every time i leave a building.

I did try that a couple of months ago. Unfortunately, the JNLP cache mechanism turned out to be slower than snails (IIRC, it actually turned out to take 1-2 seconds or so to store a single minimap tile -- CPU time!), so I had to turn it off. Of course, it might help retrying it with a more limited in-memory cache.

[sabinati]

try smaller minimap files too!

[Riou1231]

Maybe loftar and jorb should get part-time jobs? Otherwise, if my parents would let me I'd donate all my money, which would roughly be 100 bucks. Too bad that will never happen.

[Flame]

loftar, suggested a way to have a light map size, having it with high quality but 256 colors. You can see the suggest in the right forum, check if the difference between your map and the 256 was ok or wasn't.

[loftar]

loftar, suggested a way to have a light map size, having it with high quality but 256 colors.

Well, I just did some basic bandwidth usage profiling, and from it, it seems like HTTP traffic (including minimap transfer, that is) accounts for roughly 2.5% of the total bandwidth used. If that's true (I might, of course, just have captured data during a time of unusual low usage, but I doubt it), then there's no reason to do anything with the minimap for bandwidth reasons. I might do it anyway just to reduce disk space usage, though, but that doesn't really matter a lot.

[Flame]

i wonder why the minimap is so slow then, maibe isn't a problem of bandwith. Anyway you should check how much data the server send, and how much it gain. If it send more than how it gain, ther's something wrong.