A world without area-loading

[Konogan]

Hello there,
I am working on a new landscape for PS, (I will subject it when it is finished), for the moment I work on a demo area, and a guys submit to me to use an algorithm to make a world like in Lineage => A world without area-loading

what do you think about this?
(I hope my english isn\'t to bad...)

[stfrn]

Hm, I can\'t say anything about new landscapes- you\'ll have to send those directly to the top, to Talad of course. More maps are always nice.
As for this algorithm, I\'d have to look at it, or hear more about what it does to say wether we could use it or not. Likely not, as most of the map loading features are from crystalspace, and there is only so much we can do in planehsift. Different methods of storing files might have an effect, like one big map without sectors, but that doesn\'t make things faster. There are already a few features in development that will make things load in the background, as well as cull only objects you need, so better loading is being worked on.

[darkw00t]

We need more maps for the game obvisously for the skills in the future update though we don\'t need it that much now also go to pssetup and keep maps loaded helps a lot but yeh maybe they should keep maps loaded before you change though they tell you about it

[Madouc]

Originally posted by darkw00t
We need more maps for the game obvisously for the skills in the future update though we don\'t need it that much now also go to pssetup and keep maps loaded helps a lot but yeh maybe they should keep maps loaded before you change though they tell you about it

[offtopic]
ghe, took me three reads to extract the meaning from the sentence above.
[/offtopic]

[odd2k]

Hm, just slightly off topic I was wondering if PS already uses level of detail, where things become blobs when you get far away (because they are too far away to notice anyway). If not, then this, combined with much larger map areas, would be one way to do this. And use some sort of dynamic loading, if possible.

[Seytra]

Originally posted by Konogan
a guys submit to me to use an algorithm to make a world like in Lineage => A world without area-loading

I think this would be a really good thing, as it would completely overcome the problems the current system poses. Not just the obvious ones like interim loading times, but also the fact that it\'s very hard to have a coherent world that looks like it even near the boundaries. This problem is made even more troublesome by the fact that there will be several forms of flight available to everyone, and the map system ATM barely manages to look consistent from floor level.

If this algorithm actually is usable, then it would surely make a great addition, not only to PS, but to CS as well.

Do you have that algorithm or are you merely proposing to make one?

[Suno_Regin]

Actually, I think the world should be without sectors...At least until they experiment with music more

Every time you enter a new sector with the sound on, you crash, simple as that...They don\'t get to it at all, so there should be a no sector server, just for people who like to listen to music when they play...

But no areas is a good idea too, since it lowers FPS every time you enter a new area, especially with keep maps loaded on *shivers*

[stfrn]

Erm, no suno Maps and sectors and regions are pretty technical, and making them better is very hard to do. As I said before, changes are being worked on in many ways, hopefully all of this will be better in time. And yes, I mean even being able to see landscapes from a distance, I personally want the game to look as seeamless as possible, and there are amny techniques for that, that I will try to make possible, if I can understand them

[darkw00t]

The world without nothing loaded will work alright though you will have to tell the player when the region has changed. The music should change for every region though you should be able to pick what music you want to listen to and stuff

[Hirato]

i\'ve got an idea that migth fix the buggy sound system.

do we all know of a music player called winamp.
well if you don\'t it has the ability to play many media files including .ogg and for linux they can use XMMS.

basically i\'m thinking how bout the devs mnake a plugin for it that tells the music players which background music to play. sicne the ingame media system is too bugged t use when changing regions. or when regions are changed and the soind is reactivated it crashes most likely. i can\'t giv any code since all i know of programming is printf in C.
or they can try and fix up

and as for the loading system

the best idea i have is to do one that is somehow like this.

when the game starts to load it should load all the monsters skins and player skins and all the map tiles and objects and effects. and just load the the whole world partially to save memory. (just the graphics not boundaries) and perhpas make the solid distance that of /shout. i knwo if this is done so it will be pretty buggy in the beginning. but i recon after a lot of work and effort, and possible  a few cases of regina burn and headaches. you should eb able to traverse with litle loaded in the memory.
hey did anyone in hydlaa bug the flying system. did you notice if yuo go really high and can see quite far. did you notice you can\'t see what is on the other side of the bush if yuo are in the air. and if you decdie to go in that direction you fall off the end of the world if you ae not under the trees.
i thknk with this loading system we can go all the way from east hydlaa to ojaveda by only leaviong the ground  a efw times. with nio walking. and along with this did anyone think they could jump over a wall in east hydlaa and be back in west. well you also fall to your doom. i think if this loadign system is implemented it could have a lot of more capabilities in the PS world

Originally posted by darkw00t
The world without nothing loaded will work alright though you will have to tell the player when the region has changed. The music should change for every region though you should be able to pick what music you want to listen to and stuff

sounds like runescape. they allow you to either have automatic sound meaning it will change by it self as you change regions. or manual meaning you can choose which ione you want to listen to. but for this option you need to have unlocked the sound.

[stfrn]

As for sound, there are a number of changes going on right now on the sound front. CS is changing a bunch of stuff (that I don\'t really understand ) to sound. This should fix that crashing bug, but it wasn\'t actullay the code at fault. Somehow it was a problem with the was binaries were packaged for release.

Loading maps, well everything I said I still stand by you don\'t always go to the right place when you jump a wall because the maps use portals. So if you are supposed to cross from one map to another, the maps need to allow that. It sounds like a limitation in this case, but later on that can be used to simplify a few things, namely the loading of only thing on one side of the portal at a time.

Chosing from musics might be possible later when there are many differnt ones. For now you can chose to turn off ones you are bored of and play winamp or XMMS. You could also move around files to play your own songs, but there is no ingame support for that.

[Xordan]

Try selecting the \'load all maps\' option in pssetup... everything will be loaded at the start of the game so you never have area-loading. To have loading where the maps are loaded in the background bit by bit as you move around is quite difficult to do and isn\'t supported in CS yet, although it\'s being looked at.

[ramlambmoo]

   

Originally posted by Konogan
    a guys submit to me to use an algorithm to make a world like in Lineage => A world without area-loading

I think this would be a really good thing, as it would completely overcome the problems the current system poses. Not just the obvious ones like interim loading times, but also the fact that it\'s very hard to have a coherent world that looks like it even near the boundaries. This problem is made even more troublesome by the fact that there will be several forms of flight available to everyone, and the map system ATM barely manages to look consistent from floor level.

If this algorithm actually is usable, then it would surely make a great addition, not only to PS, but to CS as well.

Do you have that algorithm or are you merely proposing to make one?

Its always a nice ideal to have a world without loading, but there are obvious and not so obvious technical difficulties.  The first one being its almost always harder on people\'s computer- Even if you dont \"load all maps\" but load bits of maps as you go, the strain is more often than not larger.  I\'d rather wait 10 seconds in one place and have seamless play then have unexpected Lags when the game needs to load new bits (as happens in other \"seamless\" games).  The lag isnt as much as 10 seconds, but It gets annoying, and its more annoying when you dont know its coming.
The perhaps less obvious technical problem is what happens when the game gets larger and more people come on the server.  There are limits to how many people you can fit onto one server.  However, if you split the map up into regions, you can have players in different regions on different servers, but on the same \"world\", and have limited communication between servers (for global /tell\'s and the like).  However If you have seamless landscape, you need 1 server, and thus you have an inherent limit to how many people you can fit on it at one time.  This then means once you get too many players, you have to have seperate worlds, that dont interact, fragmenting the community.

[Pip]

Originally posted by odd2k
Hm, just slightly off topic I was wondering if PS already uses level of detail, where things become blobs when you get far away (because they are too far away to notice anyway). If not, then this, combined with much larger map areas, would be one way to do this. And use some sort of dynamic loading, if possible.

Change your adaptive distance in Options-Graphics-Details

[GeorgeD]

Originally posted by Hirato

Originally posted by darkw00t
The world without nothing loaded will work alright though you will have to tell the player when the region has changed. The music should change for every region though you should be able to pick what music you want to listen to and stuff

sounds like runescape. they allow you to either have automatic sound meaning it will change by it self as you change regions. or manual meaning you can choose which ione you want to listen to. but for this option you need to have unlocked the sound.

Urk..
Please, this is no runescape, neither it is NFS:Underground. I\'d prefer if the PS soundtrack was as atmospheric as possible. Music has to underline your game experience, not go against it, let alone play all the time. Expect the main focus to be on the ambience, with occasional musical cues popping in here and there. A long way to go yet, but we\'ll get there one of these days.

Of course people can play a different music while playing PS, create their own PS playlist, they can even turn the music off completely. But PS musicians will do their best to keep their number to an absolute minimum.

As for the crashes, a new more sturdy sound engine is being implemeted. Please bear with us.