Post 12 Jan 2013, 01:02 by Lewin
I split this discussion off into a new topic.
I really don't think we should remove zoom from multiplayer, it's very useful. We could put a maximum zoom out level, but I don't really like that idea either because you might like to take a screenshot of the entire map.
Hopefully with the FPS being shown for each player it will be easy to identify who is causing lag and tell them to zoom in/play on a smaller resolution. I guess we could make it flash up a warning "your framerate is too low, please adjust your zoom/graphics settings", but that means you can't take screenshots without seeing that warning. Maybe the warning could have an Ignore button to make it go away while you take a screenshot?
Long term the best solution would be to put game updating in a separate thread from the main thread used for rendering/GUI, since most of the framerate lag is just the CPU waiting for the GPU to finish rendering the frame, so there's probably no reason why one thread can't be updating the game while the other thread waits for the GPU to finish rendering.
But this will be a lot of work to implement and probably make bugs more complicated to identify/solve.