Instead of forcing every station to render everything… why is the engine not utilizing every PC connected to a server to “stream” the level?
This way you would need to do more baking like light from every angle and different lengths of shadows resulting in a insane size game firsthand, but you would have less calculationworks on the servers and the levels could contain much more variation.
This way you probably wouldn’t even need to give a ■■■■ for overdraw.
I’m not in the technical specifics but I believe that should be somewhat managable?
I’m not sure what your saying, as far as building lighting, you can connect multiple computers to speed up that process using Swarm. As for playing a game, using other computers for rendering isn’t something anyone is looking to do since it has limited situations where people would use it.
While I am no expert on this field it would create an insane amount of input lag to get your game streamed from somewhere else. In some games this will not be a problem however in most popular games which are already online you would steal important bandwidth that could be used on replicating more things in the game. Also streaming is often done at 30-60 fps and you will have to lose some fidelity to speed up the compression time.
tldr. You are essentially just pushing the problem to the network while sacrificing fidelity and responsiveness.
Not sure exactly what you’re referring to, but if you mean having the network do the rendering then you’re unlikely to see any gains, with only drawbacks. If you have 10 players on a server that means you have 10 views to render with only 11 machines (each client + server) to do any rendering with, so each client will mostly end up responsible for rendering their own frames anyway. Then you have the issue of how to stream the rendered frames to each client.
OnLive and Playstation Now have tried streaming games in this way, and as GarnerP57 mentioned above, input latency usually lies somewhere in the 100ms - 300ms range depending on the quality of the service provided and the speed of your connection. Then you also have image quality issues: it kind of ends up looking like you’re playing a YouTube video set to 720p. It looks OK on small screens but on a big screen it doesn’t look great, with compression artifacts noticeable since the server is having to encode and compress the video in real-time at 30/60fps.