Performance indicators in novaworld...
 

I got a email from Marcus Beer a few weeks ago about this...never actually took the time out to read it until today! Figured I'd share it..

Performance Indicators (PI) - In the interest of hosting larger games and offering the community a better gaming experience we are introducing a set of preliminary PIs which will help gauge what sort of play experience you can expect from a multiplayer game before joining it.

What does the PI tell you? At this point, the PIs measure things such as server speed, average latency of players currently attached to the server and network errors which are usually related to network bandwidth conditions. The Performance Indicator (PI) is displayed as a colored circle next to the server name in the in-game browser. Green means good, Yellow means so-so and Red means bad. Gray means that the PI is not available.

What about the Ping Time readout? For some time we have been displaying the round trip ping time from your computer to the server. This is an indicator that pertains to the relationship between your computer and the server that you are looking at. If the ping time displayed is 170 ms. or below, network latency should not be a problem. Numbers in the 400 to 500 ms. range will definitely result in a noticeably laggy system.

The bottom line – Look for a server that displays a Green PI and a Ping Time of under 170ms. This game should work well for you.

The future – This is just a first pass at creating a better system. We will be adjusting the parameters based on our tests and your comments. We expect to learn a lot from this interactive test including localized server requirements and map layouts. Ultimately we want to provide the community with a better game experience and have larger games based on the performance capabilities of the system rather than on arbitrary maximum numbers.

sweet, ive been wondering what the heck those dots meant :P lol