Here's a tough one for you guys. I have some code which spawns a decal to figure out which texture is on a particular surface. Everything works as it should except for one (extremely huge) problem: dedicated servers don't load map textures so the value always returns none. I have 3 options from what I can see.
1: Leave it incompatible with dedicated servers. It would still work offline or in client hosted online games but not on dedicated servers so this is obviously not the preferred solution.
2: Clientside texture detection. This would work but isn't perfect. Security isn't an issue because I can compare the texture each client returns and check that they all match but what is a problem is the lag. What does the server do with my projectile as it waits the quarter second for the clients to tell it what texture it hit. The client and server would fall out of sync and there would be terrible lag.
3: Somehow get the dedicated server to load the textures for the map or figure out some way to let a dedicated server detect the texture of a particular surface that doesn't involve the clients in any way. This is obviously the best solution except that it's damned hard and I have no idea where to even start for something like this, if it is at all possible to begin with.
Does anyone have ANY ideas on how to get the third solution working, or even any ideas on how to get the second solution working with the least amount of problems?
1: Leave it incompatible with dedicated servers. It would still work offline or in client hosted online games but not on dedicated servers so this is obviously not the preferred solution.
2: Clientside texture detection. This would work but isn't perfect. Security isn't an issue because I can compare the texture each client returns and check that they all match but what is a problem is the lag. What does the server do with my projectile as it waits the quarter second for the clients to tell it what texture it hit. The client and server would fall out of sync and there would be terrible lag.
3: Somehow get the dedicated server to load the textures for the map or figure out some way to let a dedicated server detect the texture of a particular surface that doesn't involve the clients in any way. This is obviously the best solution except that it's damned hard and I have no idea where to even start for something like this, if it is at all possible to begin with.
Does anyone have ANY ideas on how to get the third solution working, or even any ideas on how to get the second solution working with the least amount of problems?