It happened first in single player then test on server as well. That particular server sits about 6 feet from my work station.
As for the graphics engine model you have your own ideas / misconceptions but you are right there are trade offs.
You are obviously quite smart having got this far in your development. You'll choose either to research it on your own or you won't. I spent more time than I should have at this point discussing it.
I took time out of my work to post there is an issue and there are options. It doesn't benefit me in the least other than if the game is improved. Then maybe I get a better experience in playing.
If you are wondering what I mean by misconceptions just look at your reply about surface area. You assume everything needs to be in a nice neat box to make use of it. My guess you probably are also thinking something on the line of a single type of block in that group as well. Those were examples I gave to make it easier to explain the basic concept not the complete system.
It is simply the perspective you are looking at the data from.
Consider this a ship is 3 dimensions. Blocks have different types. If you looked at that by itself. It would look very similar to a 3D bitmap image.
We compress those. Now your ship has other data that goes with those blocks right. Such as damage level, which way it is facing.
Just think of that as another channel like RGBA when it comes to image compression.
When it comes to loading data it is almost always faster to run compression on the data in memory than transfer it back and forth to a hard drive such as when paging occurs. Which is why virtual memory compression is used and now built into Windows 10. The point is that reducing your data will save you on time a single drive access will cost you far far more than any CPU computation.
Some image formats don't just work on channels but break the image into other components as representations of parts of the image. Yes, there are parts of the image that have higher frequencies of change such as transitions from one object or color to another. They don't make a image uncompressable.
In short there are a lot of ways to reduce 3D data. Block system which is similar to chunks, You could reduce by layer, and channel, you can use component/groups, I even seen a sphere tree used the position on the tree determined which color was dominant. If you want to simply see a lot of ways of reducing mixed data look at all the different image formats available. Great book to have encyclopedia of graphic file formats.
In short there are a lot of ways the skin of a ship with the different blocks can be reduced in data size using a group system.
You could effectively store the ship as an mpeg file. Not saying that would be good for the game but it actually is possible.
Just think of layers as images over time. You could use a lossless format like motion png or others.
No need to respond as of the last message I deleted the game and all content. I'm not coming back.
Thanks you for the info.
T1822 isn't showing up for me. Other than taking your direct link.
That is why I figured it was deleted.
It is happening in both local and server. Happened local first which is how I noticed it.
