I reckon a Second Life cornfield-like prison would be great (http://www.secretlair.com/index.php?/clickableculture/entry/hidden_virtual_world_prison_revealed/). Half of Ojaroad is huge empty tracts of lands just waiting to be used for something. This could be it.

Just close off the edges of the plains behind the mountains, send offenders there in another instance, drop a thick fog and constant rain in that map, in that instance, and leave the offenders cool off, respawn there if they /die, and with no comm. This can be implemented easily and cheaply server-side with the existing game mechanics.

EDIT: Other unused sections of maps can be used too, not just the Ojaroad plains. For instance, the "island" behind the Winch area: it's very remote and completely isolated, and yet offers offenders a view of what they're missing out on for being naughty (the back of the Winch city walls). The small green "island" in the tutorial map is a good choice too, but it's not very big. The entire section of hydlaa_plaza map cut-off from the rest of the map by the "canyon" behind Harnquist, and the "river" behind the dispensary. Or the "GM lake" at the far right of bdoorsout. Come to think of it, my choice would be the Winch "island".

I never had a problem with pingo only the muppets that would login one after the other and ping pingo the minute the server went down

Relax Hoki, I never said you were one of Pingo's mortal enemies Only Pingo knows who wronged him, and he is not one to forget easily. Those he has grudges against should fear his wrath! Myself, I hardly dare touch on the subject with him, as years of muppet abuse seem to have left him rather mentally unstable...

If I gave my voice to an NPC, I could never bring myself to talk to that NPC ever again. And I pity the fools who, when all NPC lines are implemented, will submit sound bites for Finara Plund, Remant Tovere, Aldaaren Phostle or any of the NPCs who can't stop yacking when you pass by them: they'll have to hide forever from an angry mob of players who just can't bear to hear "Another lovely day in Hydlaa" several times a day anymore.

Here's what I think would work well: the DR sector should be expanded in size and complexity, but work in a different way according to the character's stats, or the number of times they visit DR. The reasoning stems from the fact that newbies who die can spend a long time finding the exit unassisted, but it quickly becomes trivially easy to get out quickly after a while, and Dakkru's curse isn't really much of a problem if your character stats are high and you keep the load you're carrying under 1/2 of your allowable limit.

Here's how I think it should go:

- Newbie dies: he follows the path to the citadel, eventually finds the jump hole and *poof* he's out.

- Newbie trains a little, has new abilities and dies: this time, the jump hole doesn't lead him out. He has to go to the regular portal. Just like DR today.

- Character gets even more powerful and dies: the regular portal doesn't send him to his race's spawn point anymore, but to an "extended-DR" sector, with hard-to-negociate narrow ledges for instance, arrives at a new portal and exits to the normal world. At this point, you can be fairly sure he's not a newbie anymore, so this makes sense. Also, he's not able to /tell anybody anymore, but he still can talk to players around him.

- Character is very powerful and dies: the first portal in "extended-DR" doesn't work anymore. Instead, the player has to traverse a maze, perhaps with big items spawning randomly here and there at regular intervals, to block the path of the player. Character finds new portal eventually and exits to the normal world.

- Character's stats are maxed out, or nearly so: Now the player also has to complete quests to pass from one portal to the next, or to remove objects hopelessly blocking the path in the maze. At first, one simple quest. Then two, then three, involving decrypting things that are always different, or showing some knowledge of certain books in the library (at which point the character, if he hasn't cared to read any of them until now, is in a right pickle to get out of DR), or retrieving items that may spawn at random, infrequently, anywhere in the two DR and "extended-DR" sectors. For repeat visitors of DR, some of these quests if answered wrong, might also remove some tria out of the character's pockets. At this level, the player also isn't able to communicate with anybody. No /tell, no /say, just /tellnpc to solve the quests. This should be a kind of purgatory after all.

The above scheme has several advantages:

- From the developers' standpoint: there's only one extra map, or extension to add to the current DR, which I understand is something that is going to happen eventually anyway, and there would be a bit of work to make items spawn randomly in the maze and for fetch-this quests, and to craft several extra quests.

- From a player's standpoint: the difficulty is gradual, so there's no frustration. Currently, newbies have a hard time getting out, and seasoned players find it a mere annoyance if they don't go to DR on purpose. With this system, newbies and old-timers have challenges according to their respective levels.

- Players will want to improve their character to visit the new sections of DR. Only maxed-out characters will be truly penalized, because they would have seen it all, but they'll have to complete more and more frustrating quests. But even them will always be able to get out. This should also please those who like to do quests, even if they are pointless and give no reward.

- The darned Dakkru curse, which is really just a hack to prevent players using DR as a shortcut route back home, can be done away with: players who exit DR, at any level, will have earned the privilege of living again. No point in hurting them any further.

In any case, I'm viscerally opposed to permanent death or stats cutting for any reason. I want the many hours I put into improving my character to be a definitive investment. Planeshift is a game, and if I want to be permanently hurt or frustrated, real life provides plenty of opportunities for that. Games are supposed to allow you to escape reality for a moment, so I don't want my character to suffer permanently from unfortunate things that may happen in the game. I have no problem with having to spend hours to get out of DR because my character's stats are maxed out, so long as (1) I'm guaranteed to be able to get out eventually and (2) I'm good as new when I'm out. But if it takes me that long and I can't talk to my in-game friends during that time, I'll think twice before doing reckless things again, which supposedly is the point of DR.

Just my $0.02...

It's not an I/O problem, and it's also not when objects appear on screen, but when they get registered (so, sometimes way before you can see them). I've got a piece of code that watches the list entities known to the client, and hiccups almost always occur when the list suddenly grows. For instance, when you go from the tower to the plaza, somewhere near the small staircase with an arch on top of it, all 40 apples around Harnquist, along with a number of object/actors that hang around there get registered, and the game hiccups. On a fast machine, it's just a bit jerkier; on a slow machine, it's a major fun killer.

Hello everybody,

I'm checking out PS again for the first time since 0.3.20 on my measly computer, and I'm finding it more and more unplayable. Let me explain: the rendering speed is sub-par, but that's okay, my computer just doesn't cut it. But even so, the game would be playable if it wasn't for the terrible lag.

What I mean by lag is, when I arrive in an area with a lot of objects (NPCs, objects, other clients, ALs), then the game becomes jerky, and often simply freezes for several seconds while it does things. So essentially, the game is unplayable around the Hydlaa plaza, and not very nice elsewhere anyway.

I know the lag issue has something to do with GEMClientActor and GEMClientItem objects being created, i.e., when lots of them come into range, the engine mass-creates them and everything freezes while it's doing that. In the past, the biggest culprit code was the label creation code, and I had a patch to disable it and make the game okay. With 0.4.03 however, it's not even that anymore: something else creates the lag somewhere around pscelclient.cpp, but I haven't figured out what quite yet.

I figured my computer was just not good enough, so out of curiosity, I installed PS on my work machine and gave it a spin (shhh, don't tel the boss ). The machine in question is a Intel Core2 Quad 2.66MHz with 8 gigs of ram and a Nvidia quadro FX 1500 video card. Sure enough, everything was fast and smooth on empty maps, but in Hydlaa with stuff and clients all over the place, it's still noticeably jerky and slow and generally unpleasant.

This brings three questions:

- Aren't any of you guys ever bothered by PS' poor performances? or have you gotten used to them over the years? Because quite frankly, my work machine isn't exactly an underachiever, and even heavy 3D applications I use for work like SolidWorks or Pro/ENGINEER work a lot better than PlaneShift. That should tell you something is very wrong in the PS codebase. I have trouble believing everybody in the dev team is oblivious to the speed and lag issues.

- Anybody knows what specific areas of the code may cause the pauses and jerkiness? I must admit, I have a nagging urge to play PS every now and then, but I can't because it's plain nasty on my home computer, and it's frustrating. I sort of had the idea of getting a better computer, but I have no need for a fast machine apart from playing PS, and the experience of running PS as it is today on my work machine tells me I definitely should keep my hard-earned cash for something else. However, if there are things that I could do to improve things in the code that you guys are aware of, I might just convince myself to try and fix them.

- Last question, not really related but still: anybody knows if it's possible to disable lighting in CS? lighter2 just kills performances on older machines. I'd be happy enough with the old fullbright rendering if it made things faster.

Before everybody jumps on me, please understand that this is not a rant. I just want to know if I'm the only person in the world who finds PS just not very nice to play, or if it's officially expected that one should plop down hundreds of euros for a nice computer and get used to the quirks, or if I'm too demanding or something. And yes, I know, it's officially alpha, it's community-supported project, nobody gets paid, developers don't have time, there aren't enough developers, it's free so I shouldn't complain, or that I must recompile using this-or-that fix, or do code profiling, yada-yada. But I'm not complaining: if you guys thinks I make unreasonable remarks, I'll forget PS for now and I'll try it out again in a year or two. If not, is there something I can do to the code to make it enjoyable on an honest home computer?

Take care y'all!

Hello everybody,

I've always found the PS maps to be too dark since the switch to lighter2, especially since the server always restarts at midnight game-time each time it crashes, so I've grown tired enough of the darkness to do a quick-and-dirty something about it. I figured other people would find it useful as well, so I'm posting it here.

It's a patch to the PS client that adds controls to adjust the brightness of the lights in the current scenery. With this, you can turn night into day, and day into a Cote-d'Azur-sunny sort of day. It's not optimized or anything, but it works well enough for the purpose. You can grab it here:

http://myspace.voo.be/pcoupard/planeshift/planeshift_brightness_correction_patch.tar.gz

I hope you'll like it.
Take care y'all.