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by
7 years ago
I have a few technical suggestions: First, could we have view distance be a slider? This would allow for greater control. Second have 3 default settings that adjust all the quality settings to improve performance/battery life or provide better quality (low/power-save, Normal/balanced, High, Ultra and Insane). Insane is primarily intended for screenshots and high-end desktop computers, and should even pop up a warning saying this on the mobile version. Then there is "Customized" of course which will show up if you've changed other settings. Third, I notice a lot of things are using lots of individual files in the settings and cache. This can really slow things down. A good option is to use some form of wrapped archive instead. A good old fashion compressed monolithic disk heap would work well for the chunk cache. Some form of chunk cache cleanup routine should be good as well. Since it's just cache, I think using "lazy" disk write operations are preferable, so that low disk priority is used. The cache doesn't even have to be forced to be written out so long as chunk checksums are checked against the server-side version. For compression of chunk cache ultra-light compression like LZO, light-GZip or light-LZMA should be used. This will provide an optimal overhead/required storage ratio. Some form of compression could be used on the terain height map caches to reduce size as well. This would be either some form of texture block compression (such as ASTC) or some form of mildly lossy compression such as lossy-PNG or lossless image compression as PNG. Choosing a lossy algorithm of course means all the terrains will be changed slightly to adjust, and some players may be startled to find they need to clear a little dirt in front of their front door. I'd recommend a single XML file for settings, divided into subsections. As long as the settings file remains small, there is no need to compress it. Finally, there should be a setting only activated on devices with large storage, to turn on "use large cache" obviously this won't be an option for most mobile players, but it will give laptop and desktop players a way to accelerate their game, and reduce server load.
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