ArcanaTime

[Saiyajinzoningen]

sup all long time player here

what this arcanatime stuff?

please explain like I'm a kindergartener 

cause I'm kinda dumb

sorry for the trouble

thanks

[Snakebit]

https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/ArcanaTime

[Saiyajinzoningen]

thanks snakebit

uh guess ill add this to the list of things I don't understand lol

was there "arcanatime" during launch?

I honestly don't remember there being such a thing back then

if not, when was it introduced?

and why?

[ScrewlooseCohh]

The game has always worked like that.

The term exists to describe how all the game engine mechanics combine to produce the time that you see it taking for powers to activate, particularly when you are activating them one after another.

[Luminara]

Arcanatime is the time it takes for the server to process things.  Everything you do in the game is based on input into the game client, the part of the game you directly interact with.  That's what's installed on your computer.  But the client doesn't do everything, there's also a server (several, actually, but they collectively act as a single server for the purpose of this explanation).  When you do something in the client, the client talks to the server.  The server says, "Yeah, go ahead" or "No, don't do that".  That's where Arcanatime comes in.

 

Stepping back a few years, @arcanaville was one of the BIG testers back in the day.  She did things like use an attack 10,000 times against an enemy, to figure out everything that was happening and how it all worked (we call this quantification).  She noticed a discrepancy between the expected animation of powers and the actual animation time, and she started doing that 10,000 thing to try to figure out why it was happening and what was causing it.  She determined that every client-server communication had an unaccounted 0.132s attached, and with more testing, learned that it was because the server processed information in 0.132s "chunks" of time.  When she shared that information with the community, we began referring to that 0.132s as Arcanatime, because @arcanaville was the one who quantified it.

 

So back to the first paragraph, when you press 1 to queue up the power in that slot, the client tells the server, then the server processes it, and when the next 0.132s interval comes, it gives the Yay or Nay to the client.

 

That's what Arcanatime is.  Yes, it's always been in the game.  It's how the server-side part of the game was designed.

[Troo]

 

computers servers and networks all can introduce lag. that's different than arcanatime.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120904191140/http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?p=810428

 

how to explain in one sentence..

arcanatime attempts to account for server task execution time especially where a power might miss a server click and has to wait for the next one to execute adding a fractional amount of time to the power activation.

[Lockely]

 

1 hour ago, Troo said:

 

computers servers and networks all can introduce lag. that's different than arcanatime.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120904191140/http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?p=810428

 

how to explain in one sentence..

arcanatime attempts to account for server task execution time especially where a power might miss a server click and has to wait for the next one to execute adding a fractional amount of time to the power activation.

 

If you've played it, it appears similar to the hidden animation lock in FFXIV (0.5s). When an attack 'should' start but it's waiting for the server to acknowledge the last one and you're stuck in the animation lock (it doesn't begin until the server responds to the client), we call that "clipping." What's interesting is there are actually third party tools for XIV that tell the client "Yeah bro you're good." after an estimated 10ms of latency instead of waiting for the actual server reply because, at least in FFXIV, it's all dependent on latency. So if you have 250ms, you have to wait 250ms for the client to get the go ahead from the server to let you attack again. 

[Saiyajinzoningen]

understood

thanks y'all

sorry for the trouble

[ZemX]

3 hours ago, Saiyajinzoningen said:

thanks snakebit

uh guess ill add this to the list of things I don't understand lol

 

It is not terribly important unless you are interested in really accurately calculating how much damage per second you are doing with a sequence of attack powers and making sure this is an "optimal" sequence.  Min/Maxers who want to be sure they are doing the most damage possible care greatly about this but most can ignore it.

 

This is otherwise a pretty relaxed game and game community.  If you just want to run around using whatever powers seem cool to you whenever they are available... you'll do just fine.

[Marshal_General]

You should have seen how bad defense sets were before Arcanaville explained the math on how it works vs how it should work.