Local Hosted Graphic Sets

It would be cool to be able to download a graphics pack and have it hosted on the users machine.

Then when the game wants graphics it will grab the local images, rather than off the server.

The advantages are:
1. Reduced Bandwidth
2. Faster page load times

Not all grphics need to be in the graphics pack, but certainly many of them.

I would expect that there would be a config form somewhere to give the path to the local machine.

Good thinking - sometimes mine load slowly and this would be a nice solution. 

The graphics are normally cached by your browser and already do not require loading with every page, so there's really no bandwidth to save.  Illyriad is a little unusual in that it specifies a rather short cache period and uses a high number of different subdomains to host the images (which may be interfering with cache consistency/fragmentation as well as making your browser think one image is actually several different ones).

The short cache time is because the graphics are not "final" and the devs feel browsers should check for new versions more often (and by the way, those checks do not require actual transmission of the images unless they have changed as well).  As for the other issues, I have no idea why things are managed the way they are, but the performance issues we experience are fixable without such drastic measures as installation of client-side stuff on every browser/computer you use.

If you find graphics stalling page loads, or other issues like borked layout (as some members of my alliance have experienced), I find it helps to press ctrl+f5 (a hard refresh that force-reloads the graphics and other static files).  For myself on Firefox at least, the problem seems to be with browser cache performance more often than network performance (though it is often both).

At the very least, a forced reload on a full town city view and a few graphic-heavy pages at least retrieves most of the images at the same time so the browser is not dealing with a steady drip of single images expiring in cache.  Then, barring other issues, the next few hours of page loads will be perfectly snappy.  You can also try using a different browser, as many of the issues seem to be exclusive to the Illyriad-Firefox combination.


Edited by HonoredMule - 16 Jun 2010 at 04:23

They appear to be changed since I last checked..."expires" and "Cache-Control" headers both say one year.  They are likely getting pushed out of disk cache by the high volume of other browsing I do, as they do still have to be regularly retrieved.  However, I also regularly see "304 not modified" meaning checks are occurring yet cache is still primed.  I'm not enough of an HTTP guru to know why this is happening or if it's proper.

I suppose I should have noted that that "steady drip of single images expiring in cache" could be also caused by hitting cache limits (disk or memory), which would expire whatever is either oldest or least-frequently/recently accessed (depending on how the browser manages things), resulting in the removal of game images from memory and/or disk cache regardless of how long until they expire.  This did not cross my mind at the time of original posting.


Edited by HonoredMule - 16 Jun 2010 at 23:12