- JasmineWarrior
- |
- Exalted Member
For those people constantly providing arguments about "lag" becoming to difficult to manage, I would like to point out a few minor issues.
First, lag is dependent upon two things, either your hardware cannot support the amount of objects being rendered or there are considerable networking issues. For the latter, this is more or less irrelevant, because if you posses a network connection that cannot support online game play, and yet still choose to play online then your point becomes moot, as you do not meet the specified requirements the game designers intended. As for the former, one must realize that it would make little sense for Bungie to place such an amount of objects and entities on a map that the game would become unplayable, therefore I doubt that they would do this.
Now I believe multiple individuals are concerned about the hardware issue, that is the fact that the Xbox (like any other computer) can only support a certain amount of detail and objects in any real time environment. The primary issue here seems to be that people believe the Xbox would be unable to handle AI units in addition to regular players without suffering a considerable performance hit. I would like to point out the fact that, were one to say place a thousand fully pathed and animated AI units on any map on the game at one time then the entire game would likely become wholly frozen. However, even assuming a full sixteen players (with respectable internet connections) on a map, using the current Halo 3 engine, there would still be room for, at the minimum, perhaps an additional sixteen AI units. I have based this off the fact that while playing campaign such numbers are easily supported, in addition to experience working with other game engines.
Finally, these AI units would have very little effect on network conditions, as the only reason these units would appear to "lag" is because the hosts connection is not up to par. Transferring relevant data about unit placement to other players in game should be easy enough to accomplish with most modern day internet connections, and should have no adverse effect upon performance. Remember that lag often occurs when people have trouble connecting to the game host, either because their connection is not adequate (in which case they are dropped) or due to a poor connection from the host themselves (in which case a new host is selected.)