MLT doesn't work on MalevEnt; that's not a psychological effect but rather possession and uh,
anyone stuck in Mundus who took it is having a normal one right now
...now I'm just thinking about the implications of Frankie's neurohelm talk again.
Like... okay. While we were waiting for the 2.2.3 update, I made this quip, right?
If all else fails, you can probably handwave it by fudging the numbers on exactly how big Chimaera's geographical footprint is ("neurohelms gotta have low pings; anything more than 400 miles from Vegas was totally a separate cluster!
")
But then a couple days later, I had one of those fridge logic moments that, wait, no, the idea doesn't work; when we were talking on boat, Frankie said the servers were
in orbit.
And that puzzled the heck out of me, because... okay. If they're in
low orbit, then any given satellite will be changing its position all the time. Your server might be on the opposite side of the world, 12,000 miles away. If they're in
geostationary orbit, well, at first that sounds better because they're really truly colocated with your game region. Except to get geostationary and stay there, you have to be
22,000 miles
up.
In other words, no matter which way you go, unless you have FTL communication the absolute minimum round-trip ping you have to plan for to an orbital server is 133ms. That's the equivalent of eight frames of lag in a fighting game - noticeable enough that, if games like this were using delay based netcode on your actual ass five senses, it'd be
physically nauseating. And to compensate with rollback-based netcode would require neurohelms to be able to make our
local meat brains somehow run at several times their normal speed (in order to roll forward after a server correction). You need a different strategy for syncing state than today's online games use.
So I figure, that's where this idea of "amphibiousness", as Frankie put it, comes into Neurohelm system design, right? The only way to defeat laws-of-physics based lag is to
colocate computation, right? So if you replicate the client-side data to the server-side and move all the computation there, you get a ping of
0, in exchange for paying the 133ms on senses from the client-side instead. That seems acceptable; they're not the senses you want to experience as "your senses" right now anyway, so a little lag is fine.
But calling that "amphibious" is... well, maybe a gentle way of describing it, but also a big understatement. In order for it to work... in order for the ping to be 0 and to not place the lag barrier either in front of the senses you're perceiving as your body (which you want to be the Mundus ones) or inside your own head (which sounds even less workable)... I don't think you can get away with updating
internal state from both heads at once. You can't have interesting work being done
inside the mind in both places at once. Like, put aside for the moment that we're encoding to gray matter. Imagine a purely computers-based situation. Even there, "dual active" replication - where you have two copies of your program that both support everything the program can do, and which communicate with each other to stay in sync - is notoriously painful, because you can almost always come up with a set of steps that will get the two servers disagreeing with each other in a way you can't untangle without throwing something out.
No, if you want
feasible, you go for one server active, one server in read-only standby, with full colocation of the active side. Which means, okay, maybe DARPA solved for general 3-way merge to get Neurohelms working in the OWTB's Earth. But if they didn't, the
feasible architecture would be that users do their actual thinking and feeling and deciding up in the cloud or in the drone they're driving or whatever, and use their meatspace bodies as a
peripheral. It's got a nervous system to carry sensory input to you. It has a secondary brain to run reflexive and automatic biological stuff, and you can keep a hotswappable copy of your mindstate on there and push updates to it as they occur (so that you can jack out at
all and still remember what you did on Mundus that day). But until you switch that standby brain back to active and wake up in your body...
you are ten thousand miles away.
And the idea that
your mind is running on the server really has implications for a setting that can do mind stuff, now that the gloves have come off and we're getting a fully verisimilar world. Cora was talking about how weird it was to actually be experiencing telempathy, but that's only the beginning. If Malevolent Entity exists in this game, then wouldn't that translate to basically an evil Mundane
headmate? Who maybe now knows about 2040s Earth stuff too, by virtue of where they're perched?
