by loftar » Wed Aug 01, 2012 6:17 pm
I have wanted to do something like it, but the issue is more complex than it at first may seem.
In particular, I can't just send "tile updates", because such a protocol would an ACKing scheme of its own. It could be possible, instead, to send differential updates to clients re-requesting previous mapcuts, but since clients may have missed some diffs in a stream of updates, such a thing would require the server to keep pair-wise diffs between a history of some size of previous versions of the same mapcuts, and that's when I start to think the complexity of it seems absurd. :)
Also, even more importantly than preserving bandwidth I think would be the client's ability to recalculate map meshes from data asynchronously, so it doesn't have to freeze up all the time during digging. That part would be my first priority.