I spent five years or more hosting Half-Life and Source servers, and there are some things that those engines allow in terms of client performance tuning that I would love to see in UO. The biggest of these are the ability to set limits on the bandwidth that the client uses, and even more important the update rates both too and from the server.
One of the issues in pvp right now is that there are certain players that are able to create lag for other players in the game. Now bandwidth is not the issue here, any broadband connection, even a very inexpensive one, can handle anything that the UO clients and servers can throw at it in terms of bandwidth - assuming of course that the client isn't doing something else that is hogging their internet service's bandwidth (such as uploading or downloading large files, or file sharing). Client patches and publishes are another issue, but actually playing the game of UO takes very little bandwidth relative to your typical broadband service connection, even in game contexts where there is heavy congestion.
What I think may be happening with these players that are causing other players to experience lag is that they are using some form of script or third party application that breaks up the packets they send to the server as much as possible, which may cause problems for those with older computers and lower end processors. One simple fix for this is to allow clients to set rates for bandwidth used, both up and down, and more importantly client and server packet send rates (update rates).
For those who don't want to deal with something so technical it would be simple enough to set reasonable defaults for these settings. And even if the exploitive scenario I have suggested is not occurring the ability to performance tune your client in this manner would provide great benefits, both for servers and clients, as long as the caps on these rates are reasonable. This could potentially solve performance issues such as the extreme lag experienced at large events by many, as well as lowering the threshold for hardware requirements and allowing older computers to run either client much more smoothly than they currently do.
One of the issues in pvp right now is that there are certain players that are able to create lag for other players in the game. Now bandwidth is not the issue here, any broadband connection, even a very inexpensive one, can handle anything that the UO clients and servers can throw at it in terms of bandwidth - assuming of course that the client isn't doing something else that is hogging their internet service's bandwidth (such as uploading or downloading large files, or file sharing). Client patches and publishes are another issue, but actually playing the game of UO takes very little bandwidth relative to your typical broadband service connection, even in game contexts where there is heavy congestion.
What I think may be happening with these players that are causing other players to experience lag is that they are using some form of script or third party application that breaks up the packets they send to the server as much as possible, which may cause problems for those with older computers and lower end processors. One simple fix for this is to allow clients to set rates for bandwidth used, both up and down, and more importantly client and server packet send rates (update rates).
For those who don't want to deal with something so technical it would be simple enough to set reasonable defaults for these settings. And even if the exploitive scenario I have suggested is not occurring the ability to performance tune your client in this manner would provide great benefits, both for servers and clients, as long as the caps on these rates are reasonable. This could potentially solve performance issues such as the extreme lag experienced at large events by many, as well as lowering the threshold for hardware requirements and allowing older computers to run either client much more smoothly than they currently do.
