Timothy Lochner

We’ve stumbled upon my favorite problem I can’t talk about. :-(

I can't tell if "favorite problem" should be read literally or more like "most headache inducing problem I have personal experience with". Lol.

We’ve talked publicly about how WoW split its world sim among shards back when it was based on a grid, and we’ve talked about how we don’t do that anymore, but we haven’t talked about what we actually do now.

To leave WoW behind for a second and talk about the massively multiplayer world sim problem for a second, though; you’re absolutely right - geography alone is pretty terrible.

Like, completely abstractly, the question we *should* be trying to answer is how to weigh the trade off of latency/complexity/visibility? Let’s take movement for example: a desired solution must be low latency and high visibility. Complex systems are out.

Can you take complexity out by interpolating between fixed positions instead of playing back movement streams? Can you reduce the number of positions as you get further away from the mover?

I feel like the “right” way to solve the problem is to break up a simulation using k-clustering (with interaction, not geographic weights) and move players among the clusters and their interactions shift.

But the problem rapidly becomes the Kevin Bacon game: where do you actually cut long interaction chains?