On Sat, 3 Jun 2006, William Balcerski wrote:

>>> 95%+ of current players can display other ships to 32 pos.
>>
>> Where do you get your statistics?
>
> Sending pig call to get client information from players, and noting which
> ones use 32 bitmap sets.

Care to share your findings? How many players clients have you checked and 
during what period of time have you done this?

It doesn't work on continuum anymore, so where have you done this?

>> What's the logic behind that reasoning? The difference between 16 and 32
>> is far less than between 32 and 256 any way you cut it.
>
> Statistically maybe, but not to the human eye.  The difference between 16
> and 32 is far more noticeable than between 32 and 256.

You state this like it's a fact, do you think that it's a fact and if so 
what are your references?

I strongly disagree. Between 16 and 32 there's "only" twice as many 
positions. In the 16 position setup there's four positions in a 90 degree 
turn, in 32 there's eight. That's a big noticable difference, but with 256 
positions there's an amazing 64 positions in a 90 degree turn, so with 256 
positions the ship moves virtually seemless, so all the position fake 
moves are useless. So anyone playing with a client that has 256 ship 
position is unaffected by the, very difficult, position fake move.

One might argue (which you are not) that it's so much prettier with 256 
ship positions and that it's okay to have clients with that many ship 
positions just because it makes the game prettier and therefore draws more 
people, like when we went from 5 to 10 updates per second (which really 
screwed with dogfighting and made it a lot easier for poor dogfighters). 
That's a more legitimate argument, and if that's the way the developers 
want the game to go it's an easy call to make.

--Niclas