No zone instancing

[Kuiper7986]

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...

[PlaneWalker]

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).

[Nanuke]

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 :]

[Monketh]

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.  

[Kuiper7986]

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.

[Wedge]

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.

[Kuiper7986]

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.

[Kiva]

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.

[Kuiper7986]

ahh okay thanks...

[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.

[Boldstorm]

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

[Kuiper7986]

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

[Androgos]

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

[Mage of Darkness]

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?

[dfryer]

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)