MMORPG question

Does anyone have a good way to update the client when say a npc walks onto their screen or even another player? Currently I have it send a out of date packet to the client to kick it into the refresh loop but this is horribly slow. The other idea is to keep everyone informed about what everyone is doing - this makes the amount of data to be sent fairly large which still bogs the game down since the maps are fairly large and the amount of players will be large enough to really lagg the place down. I know half life uses a "This is what is near you" kind of packet send, but I was wondering if there was a better way that someone knows of. Thanks in advance.

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Originally Posted by ~Kyo~

The other idea is to keep everyone informed about what everyone is doing - this makes the amount of data to be sent fairly large which still bogs the game down since the maps are fairly large and the amount of players will be large enough to really lagg the place down. I know half life uses a "This is what is near you" kind of packet send, but I was wondering if there was a better way that someone knows of. Thanks in advance.

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Keep informing the player what erveryone is doing who is near the player. Your player dosen't need to know what somone who is in an area of the map that he cannot see or interact with is doing.

It depends how big your maps are. If they are really big this won't work but with small enough maps what I would do is just track what map every user is on either by number(int) or name(string/char). and when your server recieves an action from a user forward that information to only users on the same map.

If the map(s) are too big for that then you could store the x,y, and z axis then do a radius check like the other guys was talking about.