Bottle necks and activity hubs

[Pavel]

Discovery Mod General Discussion

[Coin]

Creating interaction requires these two things: money makers and places to be a money taker. All else is dressing on the salad of life.

An oversimplified outlook to the point it becomes woefully inaccurate.

i disagree. within every narrative, there has to be conflict. Here, the conflict is multi-modal: traders are attacked by pirates, who are attacked by lawfuls, who are attacked by other lawfuls,everyone is attacked by terrifying terrorists, and everyone is attacked by nomads.

what we have at present is decreased piracy, meaning less activity for lawful players, meaning that the server is generally empty.

• treasure hunts (spawn a wreck somewhere with a 100m credit card/equipt on it)
  
  Randomly spawned wrecks is an interesting one.
  Noted
  
  
• reduce the number of restarts. (time was, you had to spend a while prepping a character - this created activity. now we can have our cake and eat it too).
  
  I'm afraid lengthy setup process never added for actual activity really. Server rules actually had them as non-combatants, most often they were just left alone and that's it. It may have added to average number players online, but not to meaningful interaction between said players.

adding to player numbers online is my intent. Time was, server was full of people, most of whom were not actually interacting but were repping, and it was a grind. now that there is no grind, the whole activity of the server has suffered. Im not saying DELETE, im saying REDUCE the number, but i take what you say on board. Perhaps instead of reducing the number of restarts, we reduce the amount of rep given, so it gives you 85% of full rep. this way, the repping process is complete with 4 missions, and the server activity is boosted

Bottle neck suggestions:

• Superjumpgates (parked way off the plane, with no npc spawns, that lead from bret - kusari, and rhein kusari)
  
  Abysmal idea as it will create more harm than good. While it's true that choke points can provide a focus for activity the idea of such jump gates is extreme. Good solutions don't sit at the ends of the spectrum.
  
  how is a supergate different to a jumpdrive? should we nerf jumpdrives so that are limited to a 2 system range? - gets you out of trouble, but has 24hr/server restart cooldown
  
  
• delete empty systems like chester
  
  May be, but it's not a buffer system in any paths between points of activity. Removing it would not affect anything.
  except the size of the mod, and the dilution of players wandering off into empty systems
  
  
  
• delete guard systems and insert the assets into the home system, but with increased npc patrols in that area
  
  Most guard systems are rarely visited anyway, so they neither make activity nor take it away from elsewhere.
  see above
  
  
• delete deadend systems
  
  Deadend systems are fine. Some systems have roles other than everyday activity generators. For example far places to discover, serving as a material to provide for their roleplay activity, which in the end benefits overall activity too. Forms of interactions aren't limited to traders, pirates and spacecops.
  see above
  
  
• remove a few jumpholes to limit travel choices
  
  Depends on which ones you'd consider to be removed.
  we could talk about this. skype?
  

i didnt mean to pass water into your porridge, i think that the work done on this mod is amazing. in fact, its too good. disco mod would be a rival for eve, anyday of the week, if only we could get the beschmorging game to run on more than one beschmorgenung core.

in fact...

i think i've had a brilliant idea. how much of the mod could be exported to the unity engine that BSGO uses?

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A Day in the Life of an NPC | Coin | The Journal of Caius Oakley | Build Your Dream Boat

[Coin]

bump. fl on unity engine?

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A Day in the Life of an NPC | Coin | The Journal of Caius Oakley | Build Your Dream Boat

[Korny]

/slaygallia

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[Treewyrm]

Since code formatting got screwed already I'll just quote relevant bits.

Perhaps instead of reducing the number of restarts, we reduce the amount of rep given, so it gives you 85% of full rep. this way, the repping process is complete with 4 missions, and the server activity is boosted

Okay, which ones would get to the chopping block then? Go ahead, make a list, post here.

how is a supergate different to a jumpdrive? should we nerf jumpdrives so that are limited to a 2 system range? - gets you out of trouble, but has 24hr/server restart cooldown

Really? Gates require no resources to pass through, can be used infinitely and by any ship, require no coordinates. Compare that to jumpdrives. Besides all such gates would really do is take away activity from other places and make a giant uncontrollable non-stop clusterf*ck around them, which in turn will have server crash due to being old software unable to scale that sort of stuff. Factions who reside outside will see diminishing activity in their ZoI and they'll simply die, only those adjacent to such gates would exist. Still looks like a good idea to you?

except the size of the mod, and the dilution of players wandering off into empty systems

For size of the mod... I suspect you mean physical size of the mod files taking space at hard drive. In that case it would not affect that much anyway - most space usage comes from assets such as textures, especially duplicated ones, then models and various other stuff. Systems themselves are merely a set of small text files. For example Unknown system is about 14kb uncompressed and 3kb in LZMA compression which is what being used in distribution installer. Comparatively a lousy so old it's no longer funny anymore gif meme image posted here at forums typically starts from 800kb.

Some systems are made for exploration activities, not every system is meant to be activity hub. Problem ain't with those, problem is with oversized buffer systems between activity hubs and thus making it a long chore to go from one to another.

see above

See above and my previous post again.

we could talk about this. skype?

It's easy to find me on skype, but I see no issue with you here listing jumpholes you'd consider deleting.

[Coin]

Since code formatting got screwed already I'll just quote relevant bits.

Perhaps instead of reducing the number of restarts, we reduce the amount of rep given, so it gives you 85% of full rep. this way, the repping process is complete with 4 missions, and the server activity is boosted

Okay, which ones would get to the chopping block then? Go ahead, make a list, post here.

For a start, remove the duplicated restarts (bw/core). discovery mod. go discover, etc. in fact, i'd remove the maps from the restarts altogether.

i'd also remove the restarts from the factions with sufficient activity (lib navy im looking at you), and give preference to factions that do not have an associated official faction, like most of kusari, etc.

finally, i'd give 0.85 rep, not full rep. this way, they have to go out and behave like their character - shooting some enemies or even doing some missions. they get the feel for the roleplay before the training wheels come off.

how is a supergate different to a jumpdrive? should we nerf jumpdrives so that are limited to a 2 system range? - gets you out of trouble, but has 24hr/server restart cooldown

Really? Gates require no resources to pass through, can be used infinitely and by any ship, require no coordinates. Compare that to jumpdrives. Besides all such gates would really do is take away activity from other places and make a giant uncontrollable non-stop clusterf*ck around them, which in turn will have server crash due to being old software unable to scale that sort of stuff. Factions who reside outside will see diminishing activity in their ZoI and they'll simply die, only those adjacent to such gates would exist. Still looks like a good idea to you?

nevertheless, this was a post about creating those selfsame clusters. I'm not putting any idea up here as "tah dahhh, i know everything", but they're ALL for discussion. The supergates can be turned on and off at will through dsace - they don't need to be a permanent feature: jumpdrives are now a fact of life - i can take my freelancer smuggler, and jump from crete to manhatten, dock, pick up some fuel and jump back again. during which time, I see no other players, and i can jump in above/below the plane and make a run for the mooring point, and it's really hard to stop me, especially if i use the turret-zoom scanning trick.

however, jd's take up space; the supergates might be more attractive to someone who was thinking about running at max profit

except the size of the mod, and the dilution of players wandering off into empty systems

For size of the mod... I suspect you mean physical size of the mod files taking space at hard drive. In that case it would not affect that much anyway - most space usage comes from assets such as textures, especially duplicated ones, then models and various other stuff. Systems themselves are merely a set of small text files. For example Unknown system is about 14kb uncompressed and 3kb in LZMA compression which is what being used in distribution installer. Comparatively a lousy so old it's no longer funny anymore gif meme image posted here at forums typically starts from 800kb.

not physical size of number of megabytes, but the size of the sandbox we play in.

Some systems are made for exploration activities, not every system is meant to be activity hub. Problem ain't with those, problem is with oversized buffer systems between activity hubs and thus making it a long chore to go from one to another.

this. i'd shrink them down, or perhaps expand the next system and add the bases into there, so instead of two large systems, we can have the option of one large one, or two smaller ones, or a combination of the choices, rather than the situation at the moment, where i can enter cruise and make coffee and return to the pc before i've reached the jumphole.

see above

See above and my previous post again.

we could talk about this. skype?

It's easy to find me on skype, but I see no issue with you here listing jumpholes you'd consider deleting.

i've no problem with discussing a list of jumpholes; i wanted to give you the option of not revealing any future developments to the mod by accident:

me: what about this hole?
you: nah, that's getting deleted later
Community:arghargh arhg argh hate hate hate etc.



Key: Red = delete, blue = create

not sure about deleting the om minor-om92 link - not been in om100 for a while, so cant remember how dangermouse it is.


Aside from that, do you think that the unity engine would be compatible with disco mod? unity runs on all four cores, and has twitch based ship movement.

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A Day in the Life of an NPC | Coin | The Journal of Caius Oakley | Build Your Dream Boat

[Treewyrm]

For a start, remove the duplicated restarts (bw/core). discovery mod. go discover, etc. in fact, i'd remove the maps from the restarts altogether.

Bounty hunter and Guild Core, although related, are a bit differently handled. BHG operating in Omicrons are having problems with activity, so keeping that start option is good.

i'd also remove the restarts from the factions with sufficient activity (lib navy im looking at you), and give preference to factions that do not have an associated official faction, like most of kusari, etc.

Having official faction and having activity are two things, sometimes having one adds to the other, but that's not always the case.

finally, i'd give 0.85 rep, not full rep. this way, they have to go out and behave like their character - shooting some enemies or even doing some missions. they get the feel for the roleplay before the training wheels come off.

Well, accomplishing any generic missions doesn't really give any feeling of roleplay. If those were sort of story missions, scripted stuff, then may be (but those would be impossible to do here, sadly). But they ain't and do not differ from missions of any other faction.

nevertheless, this was a post about creating those selfsame clusters. I'm not putting any idea up here as "tah dahhh, i know everything", but they're ALL for discussion. The supergates can be turned on and off at will through dsace - they don't need to be a permanent feature: jumpdrives are now a fact of life - i can take my freelancer smuggler, and jump from crete to manhatten, dock, pick up some fuel and jump back again. during which time, I see no other players, and i can jump in above/below the plane and make a run for the mooring point, and it's really hard to stop me, especially if i use the turret-zoom scanning trick.

And what exactly would you accomplish with your freelancer smuggler equipped with jump drive? Due to fuel usage you wouldn't really smuggle anything in particular. The one issue jd has is that there is no way to disrupt charging. Either way how's that relevant to supergates? How would you address the issues I've raised with supergate concept you have suggested?

not physical size of number of megabytes, but the size of the sandbox we play in.

Make a list of systems you consider should be deleted and put explanation for each one addressing rationale behind deletion.

this. i'd shrink them down, or perhaps expand the next system and add the bases into there, so instead of two large systems, we can have the option of one large one, or two smaller ones, or a combination of the choices, rather than the situation at the moment, where i can enter cruise and make coffee and return to the pc before i've reached the jumphole.

We'll see how things will work with Omicrons first. If they do well and will be received well - similar approach could be applied in other parts.

i've no problem with discussing a list of jumpholes; i wanted to give you the option of not revealing any future developments to the mod by accident:

Understandable, feel free to drop into PM box. But be sure to provide reasonable rationale for every single jumphole deleted or added, it matters too.

me: what about this hole?
you: nah, that's getting deleted later
Community:arghargh arhg argh hate hate hate etc.

Not sure if I care really about 'arghargh' and 'hate hate hate'. Genuine and constructive feedback - sure, always welcome, but hysterical bitching derived from oversaturated sense of self-entitlement and silly personal agendas and feuds, as well as attempts to force into some purely ideological approach >> /dev/null. Think we've seen excessive amounts of that lately and what good had it done? None really. So everyone can have opinion, but not every opinion deserves a response, strictly imo.

Aside from that, do you think that the unity engine would be compatible with disco mod? unity runs on all four cores, and has twitch based ship movement.

Problem with FL isn't with its client running single core, it's the server being single-threaded and does not scale horizontally at all (no multicore support, no clustering). Unity engine would offer you nice client with support of newer OpenGL/DirectX versions and thus fancier shaders (nomad ships with tessellation shader animation, oh my!), effects and stuff related to visuals, that's sure, but not the server part - what it has out of the box wouldn't work well for this type of game.

[Coin]

For a start, remove the duplicated restarts (bw/core). discovery mod. go discover, etc. in fact, i'd remove the maps from the restarts altogether.

Bounty hunter and Guild Core, although related, are a bit differently handled. BHG operating in Omicrons are having problems with activity, so keeping that start option is good.

by core i mean the restart, not the faction. why do the sairs need to have two restarts?

i'd also remove the restarts from the factions with sufficient activity (lib navy im looking at you), and give preference to factions that do not have an associated official faction, like most of kusari, etc.

Having official faction and having activity are two things, sometimes having one adds to the other, but that's not always the case.

well, if the restarts for liberty are nerfed a bit, then you'll see people choosing other parts of the sandbox to play in, as they can set up real fast, as opposed to the LN restart which would give them 0.55 rep. This would also be a valid measure of how serious a player was about that char - cos they'd put in some time to develop it.

finally, i'd give 0.85 rep, not full rep. this way, they have to go out and behave like their character - shooting some enemies or even doing some missions. they get the feel for the roleplay before the training wheels come off.

Well, accomplishing any generic missions doesn't really give any feeling of roleplay. If those were sort of story missions, scripted stuff, then may be (but those would be impossible to do here, sadly). But they ain't and do not differ from missions of any other faction.

how about if the missions were divided into 'money' missions that give a tiny increase in rep, and 'rep missions' that give no money at all, and are labelled as '<FACTION> Flight School Evaluation Exercises' that are much much harder to do, but drop a lot of reputation on you. We have bluemsgs arrive when players kill each other/themselves, can we have msgs from the mission commission? '<Player> has just completed Flight school evaluation level 4'
'<player> has died trying to complete flight school evaluation level 1'

nevertheless, this was a post about creating those selfsame clusters. I'm not putting any idea up here as "tah dahhh, i know everything", but they're ALL for discussion. The supergates can be turned on and off at will through dsace - they don't need to be a permanent feature: jumpdrives are now a fact of life - i can take my freelancer smuggler, and jump from crete to manhatten, dock, pick up some fuel and jump back again. during which time, I see no other players, and i can jump in above/below the plane and make a run for the mooring point, and it's really hard to stop me, especially if i use the turret-zoom scanning trick.

And what exactly would you accomplish with your freelancer smuggler equipped with jump drive? Due to fuel usage you wouldn't really smuggle anything in particular. The one issue jd has is that there is no way to disrupt charging. Either way how's that relevant to supergates? How would you address the issues I've raised with supergate concept you have suggested?

with this 1337 smuggler i'd be acheiving nothing - no interaction with any other player... i'd be completely safe from piracy, and the predations of the lawful factions who view cardamine/artifacts/whatever as illegal. I'd not make as much money each trip as a 5ker rolling down the lanes, but i'd make it a lot faster, and not 'lose time' by interacting with people. and if no-one sees me, then who can tell if im obeying the cargo size rulings?


The supergates can be just jumpholes or they could even be nomad gates - and when someone activates the gate, they can jump through, but this means that nomads spawn - at both ends, which would put paid to any campers, and also be a nasty surprise for anyone approaching the gate - pop, 5 nommie assassins spawn, and they can either fight it out, knowing that the next person coming through could add to the number of nomads, they can dive for the gate, or they can retreat and try in a few minutes.

i'd also have the gates on a timer. They activate for an hour, maybe three times a day, and in turn, so that if one gate is active, then the others are not. this would mean that you can cruise all the way up to the gate, dock with it, and it just returns you to the same system, but with a crapload of nommies around you.


thinking about it some more - we have nomad gates in various random places. do they work for nomad players, cos for my sair char they only dumped me back into the same system.

What if the nomad gates were random gates - they can drop you back into the same system, or at another system with a nommie gate. Its a fast way to travel to nowhere in particular, and its bloody dangerous.

not physical size of number of megabytes, but the size of the sandbox we play in.

Make a list of systems you consider should be deleted and put explanation for each one addressing rationale behind deletion.

list compiling at the moment. will pm with a map

i've no problem with discussing a list of jumpholes; i wanted to give you the option of not revealing any future developments to the mod by accident:

Understandable, feel free to drop into PM box. But be sure to provide reasonable rationale for every single jumphole deleted or added, it matters too.

just realised that the maps above isn't the latest. will send suggestions via pm.

me: what about this hole?
you: nah, that's getting deleted later
Community:arghargh arhg argh hate hate hate etc.

Not sure if I care really about 'arghargh' and 'hate hate hate'. Genuine and constructive feedback - sure, always welcome, but hysterical ***** derived from oversaturated sense of self-entitlement and silly personal agendas and feuds, as well as attempts to force into some purely ideological approach >> /dev/null. Think we've seen excessive amounts of that lately and what good had it done? None really. So everyone can have opinion, but not every opinion deserves a response, strictly imo.

i just didnt want the hate in the thread. sensible discussions are good. trollwars and flamefests are draining to read.

Aside from that, do you think that the unity engine would be compatible with disco mod? unity runs on all four cores, and has twitch based ship movement.

Problem with FL isn't with its client running single core, it's the server being single-threaded and does not scale horizontally at all (no multicore support, no clustering). Unity engine would offer you nice client with support of newer OpenGL/DirectX versions and thus fancier shaders (nomad ships with tessellation shader animation, oh my!), effects and stuff related to visuals, that's sure, but not the server part - what it has out of the box wouldn't work well for this type of game.

darn. can we mod miner wars? their source code was released in march last year. we strip out the always online component, and dump a load of disco content (player bases im thinking of here), we could have ourselves a stable 6dof space sandbox.

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A Day in the Life of an NPC | Coin | The Journal of Caius Oakley | Build Your Dream Boat

[Luis]

interesting debate on this topic - very constructive! Keep debating, i want to read more of this...

[Treewyrm]

by core i mean the restart, not the faction. why do the sairs need to have two restarts?

I meant restart as well, Core needs activity and so its restart command will remain and there is no reason to remove it. As for why corsairs have two restarts - I don't know.

well, if the restarts for liberty are nerfed a bit, then you'll see people choosing other parts of the sandbox to play in, as they can set up real fast, as opposed to the LN restart which would give them 0.55 rep. This would also be a valid measure of how serious a player was about that char - cos they'd put in some time to develop it.

Having to do two-three missions and then have full rep ain't going to hinder that at all.

how about if the missions were divided into 'money' missions that give a tiny increase in rep, and 'rep missions' that give no money at all, and are labelled as '<FACTION> Flight School Evaluation Exercises' that are much much harder to do, but drop a lot of reputation on you. We have bluemsgs arrive when players kill each other/themselves, can we have msgs from the mission commission? '<Player> has just completed Flight school evaluation level 4'
'<player> has died trying to complete flight school evaluation level 1'

Missions are generated, you can't have some missions of same type named this and some missions named that, they all share same lines. Besides what would that change? I doubt anyone going to look into catching mission completion event server-side to hook a message that would piss and annoy everyone around (as login/logout messages were endlessly spamming). What would that really do? Missions are just missions, farming for rep and money, not much else about them, while roleplay interaction goes between players.

with this 1337 smuggler i'd be acheiving nothing - no interaction with any other player... i'd be completely safe from piracy, and the predations of the lawful factions who view cardamine/artifacts/whatever as illegal. I'd not make as much money each trip as a 5ker rolling down the lanes, but i'd make it a lot faster, and not 'lose time' by interacting with people. and if no-one sees me, then who can tell if im obeying the cargo size rulings?

Well, good job on accomplishing exactly nothing with that. Not to mention you'd still need to buy fuel for your jump drive each time. Enjoy your wafer thin profit margins, I suppose.

The supergates can be just jumpholes or they could even be nomad gates - and when someone activates the gate, they can jump through, but this means that nomads spawn - at both ends, which would put paid to any campers, and also be a nasty surprise for anyone approaching the gate - pop, 5 nommie assassins spawn, and they can either fight it out, knowing that the next person coming through could add to the number of nomads, they can dive for the gate, or they can retreat and try in a few minutes.

Nomad gates don't spawn NPCs, never could in the first place. Even so how could some easy to kill NPCs prevent a player in almost any ship, including starflier, from docking with the gate? Honestly, I'm struggling to find any sense in what you're trying to suggest here. Please give your ideas a whole lot more thorough thought before posting them away. I'm not going to sort various pseudo-randomly generated ones that have very little anything to do with the subject, unsurprisingly offering no solutions and addressing none of the issues I had raised previously.

i'd also have the gates on a timer. They activate for an hour, maybe three times a day, and in turn, so that if one gate is active, then the others are not. this would mean that you can cruise all the way up to the gate, dock with it, and it just returns you to the same system, but with a crapload of nommies around you.

While technically possible to lock gates server-side it would require a whole new plugin with scheduling mechanism. I don't think anyone going to do that just to test the idea of yours. Right now it's an idea of questionable beneficence. If there'd be really good and solid reasons why it is necessary, how it would improve things around, and so on and so forth - it might be considered.

thinking about it some more - we have nomad gates in various random places. do they work for nomad players, cos for my sair char they only dumped me back into the same system.

They're not at random places and there aren't many of them to begin with. Nomad gates work just like normal bidirectional gates, and only two exceptions exist: the ones in iota/99 have a circular sequence, and the one in kansas->unknown is unidirectional gate. Anyone can use them.

darn. can we mod miner wars? their source code was released in march last year. we strip out the always online component, and dump a load of disco content (player bases im thinking of here), we could have ourselves a stable 6dof space sandbox.

Don't know, I haven't seen its engine to see what it is capable of or not.