PlaneShift

Gameplay => Wish list => Topic started by: Kuiper7986 on September 29, 2004, 05:32:27 pm

Title: No zone instancing
Post by: Kuiper7986 on September 29, 2004, 05:32:27 pm

There should not be zone instancing. Zone instancing makes the game become very segmented and I just don\'t like it. To tell you the truth I rather have the game load 2 or 3 or 4 or even 5 minutes longer in the beginning than have zone instancing.

I want to have the world fluid without loading every 5 minutes...

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Post by: PlaneWalker on September 29, 2004, 08:11:00 pm

Or we could have continuous loading.

Kuiper, you\'re talking about map loading in geneal, right?  In that case, a system similar to the following could be implemented.

I\'ll try to use ascii graphics to illustrate my point.


1. Set the number of zones that can be loaded into memory (to prevent PS from eating up ALL the memory).
2. At the start of game, load the zone the player is in and the surrounding zones up to the zone numbers set in step 1.
3. Everytime a player enters a new zone, the surrounding zones are recalculated.
4.  Zones in memory that are no longed in the \"surrounding zone\" is removed.
5. Start loading new surrounding zones into the memory until the zone number limitation in 1 is reached. (This step will use any processor cycle not used up for the game.  Or at least use only a part of the game processing cycle to do it).
6.  If a player enters an unloaded zone, the normal loading sequence occur.

This way the game could load relatively fast.  And the player will only suffer a minor lag when entering a new zone (when part of the CPU cycle is used to cache the surroudning zones).

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Post by: Nanuke on September 29, 2004, 09:20:50 pm

that sounds like a great idea like in RoE you have load everything its soo anoying and sometimes crashs i would like a quick load thing that doesn\'t take 5 mins in game waiting even 10 mins at game start wouldn\'t be to bad as long as i don\'t crash every 5mins :]

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Post by: Monketh on September 29, 2004, 10:11:46 pm

Keep in mind, instancing can be taken to mean having several different versions of a zone, each unique and isolated to a player/group.  That, of course, is justified.  

I\'m liking PlaneWalker\'s idea.  Comps only have so much RAM.  :P

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Post by: Kuiper7986 on September 29, 2004, 11:24:30 pm

but zone instancing doesn\'t help people on dialup because it has to load everything that happened therefore making the load time like 20 minutes.

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Post by: Wedge on September 29, 2004, 11:36:29 pm

The game attempts to progressively load between areas by having smaller passing areas between regions, probably I somewhat like Metroid Prime.  It\'s still possible you may have to load new areas, but there\'s an attempt to make it as seamless as possible.

And zone instancing is something entirely unrelated, so don\'t call it that.  It\'s also something in and of itself that should only be used in certain situations, but that\'s another issue entirely.

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Post by: Kuiper7986 on September 29, 2004, 11:42:05 pm

okay Wedge thanks, I didn\'t know that. But still no loading between sectors, unless they do some how make it streamless like Guild Wars. Unless its unavoidable then I guess we have no choice.

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Post by: Kiva on September 30, 2004, 08:54:33 am

Currently, loading up all of the maps in the hydlaa sector in the CB version (temple, dungeon, sewers, tavern, some of the outer roads) use up -all- of my memory, which is still 512MB. I know quite a few people don\'t have this much, and it is for everyone\'s sake that the game isn\'t set to load all maps at once. It\'s not like they\'re very small maps.

Whenever you enter a new region (big area), it unloads all maps, and reloads only the maps necessary for you to keep on moving.

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Post by: Kuiper7986 on September 30, 2004, 05:10:57 pm

ahh okay thanks...

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Post by: dfryer on October 01, 2004, 01:19:32 am

Note that the majority of the load time does not depend on your connection - most of it is maps/textures which are just being pulled in from your hard drive.

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Post by: Boldstorm on October 01, 2004, 01:52:19 am

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Originally posted by dfryer
Note that the majority of the load time does not depend on your connection - most of it is maps/textures which are just being pulled in from your hard drive.

*starts begging for tria so I can afford some 10,000 rpm drives.
Load times be damned  8o

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Post by: Kuiper7986 on October 01, 2004, 03:57:44 am

dfryer that\'s like music to my damaged ears.

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Post by: Androgos on October 01, 2004, 08:17:08 am

If you still want to load every map at the begining, you can edit a file called zoneinfo.xml that specifies which maps that will be loaded when you enter a new sector.

If you add every map to every sector, you should get no loading times but HUGE mem usage

Hmm.. need to test this when I get home :)

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Post by: Mage of Darkness on October 01, 2004, 11:50:08 am

hmmmm wait so even if you did load all the maps up at once wouldnt there still be a small load time to instance no the map but the movement and activity of players around you?

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Post by: dfryer on October 01, 2004, 08:32:44 pm

There might be a brief flicker of load time, or a short lag as everything gets updated.  I think to have everything in memory at once you\'d need multiple gigabytes of RAM, based on the amount used (even though the raw data isn\'t that big)

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Post by: Xordan on October 02, 2004, 12:28:45 am

Hmm, thanks. :) I\'m one of the people who should have enough ram to load everything in CB.

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Post by: Icefalcon on October 02, 2004, 04:29:47 am

Im all for having no zone loadings, but if the continuous loading is going to cause lag, I would rather have zone loading.

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There might be a brief flicker of load time, or a short lag as everything gets updated.

That is bearable, but if its any worse, I would rather have zones. Not like RoE though where it takes 10-15 min to load.