Loading Times

[znaiika]

Still a problem with transporting max weight over unlimited # of zones. Just think of later also once the map grows.

What would it change? " item decay " that is, people would still do it, but with limited maximum weight on your back that would take longer.
And death-port is not a time-shift to magically decay items.
HP, energy, food and water, should be at minimum after death, to have some kind of penalty, and maybe -10 to combat statuses and skills for 15 minutes.
That should be enough penalty for death.

[MrDDT]

What would it change? " item decay " that is, people would still do it, but with limited maximum weight on your back that would take longer.
And death-port is not a time-shift to magically decay items.
HP, energy, food and water, should be at minimum after death, to have some kind of penalty, and maybe -10 to combat statuses and skills for 15 minutes.
That should be enough penalty for death.

If you are talking about magic, you shouldn't magically have all your stuff at your totem when you come back from death. Are you really talking about "magically decay" when you are magically coming back to life with all your items magically teleporting with you? Yet you point out that its not a system to magically decay the items that magically were shifted to another area. Did you think about this before you posted it?


I think those are all good those could be used however, if people just use alts to transport goods the goods still get moved unharmed and they could care less the temp decay or stats on alts. This way it prevents people from doing that. I think both penalties should be done, items and player.

If items had perma dura/QL decay, and the player had temp decay of skills/stats plus food water energy/hp it would be great.

Also I think a system with good/neutral/evil would work well with this also.

[Dzarren]

What the OP actuelly wanted is that the loading times get shorter in general.
But the the first question would be why are these so long.
As far is understood it works as follows:
It first loads an basic world and then they load all the made changes over it.
The basic world gets the player changes baked in at an certain moment.
What i expected was when they split up zones in smaller zones the loading times would decrease , this didnt happen so there is something in the loading mechanism i dont understand.
what would improve loading entities, which is the greatest delay, would be an better setup of loading and better rules on this.
For example one can store the basic world on youre computer and only update it after an new imprint has been done.
Also first loading youre subzone and spawn you in the world and then load the rest.
For me they dont have to load als subzones when i spawn in the world, just the one i am in now is fine with me and then the rest.
it would take some smart rules but isnt that hard i think.

[znaiika]

If items had perma dura/QL decay.

Imagine a noob die 5 times, with 20% item decay? he would loose all his gear and weapons, that leaves him with nothing to survive with, I think item decay is too harsh rule when you are a noob.
MrDDT? ever thought deleting your character and start alone in the wilderness? and don't use anything from your alts, that will ruing the challenge, maybe then you will feel what a noob feel.

If you have limit on weight you can carry and temporary decay of skills/stats plus food water energy/hp? then it would be better, for noobs as well, they won't suffer as much, and would still be a challenge.

@Dzarren.
Many games are holding most data on clients pc and only update once a month or so, depends on ho big is the mod.
I understand why Xsyon doing this way, it's easier to make changes and they can update anytime they need, but the way they do it is probably the cause for these lags, since data needs to checked constantly between user and provider.

[Book]

I'm gonna go out on a total limb here, oh, but before I do, thanks for clearing up the death toll thing, makes more sense now... back to my limb

Dumping a lot of information into memory shouldn't necessarily take all that long I don't think. However, considering how malleable the world in xsyon is, I'm thinking it takes a LOT of calculations at the cpu/alu to draw the world and put everything where it is at this moment.
This is leading me to think the optimizations needed are very low level, compiler level, to somehow keep more information / instructions from memory into cpu cache itself so the cpu doesn't have to go to memory for information as often.

Not sure there's enough coffee in the world for me to try and work out how one would even do that but I just wonder to what extent it's something like that.

I think people sometimes say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and that's pretty much where I'm at on this sort of thing but I do find it fascinating and have been trying to learn more about it. Strange things are sometimes afoot at the bit level I tell ya.

[Drevar]

Loading up the zone and even terrain seems to go very swiftly, so a caching/versioning system probably wouldn't give a significant increase in loading speed. What seems to be the bottleneck is the entities. The way they are stored, sent, and processed appears to need a whole hell of a lot of optimizing. Either there is just too much data on each world object, or the server and client are very ineffecient in sending and processing the data. It makes me wonder how things like containers are handled; does the client see all the contents of every container, even if the player doesn't have access, or are the contents only sent upon accessing the container...things like that.

Also, can objects be combined, sent, and processed in batches? For example, send all local trees as one package of data and process them together instead of basket 3358968, tent 4449585, tree 3938376, wall 22898287, tree 2938898, gate 883838, grass bundle 6668387, etc. Actions that affect the objects on the client side can be queued while loading (someone chopping down a tree while you are still loading trees or picking up a basket while loading the list of container objects) as they are not time critical.

I also suspect the long loading screen is hiding the ugliness of the world "popping in" as the items are streamed. I know we are already in the game long before entities is done, as evidenced by chat already being displayed, ambient sounds playing, etc. while still loading. Moving around and possibly requesting new world objects before the initial objects have even completed loading can cause all kinds of problems..I've seen it in other games where they allow you to disable the load screen.

Some optimization, I am sure, would come from new architecture "composites" that currently take multiple small parts to achieve the same effect. If you are doing a long run of granite walls, you don't need 50 small segments if you could have 25 or even 10 larger segments.

It is too bad this is all conjecture since noone but Jordi and maybe one or two others can answer any of this, if they even had the time to do so.

[MrDDT]

What the OP actuelly wanted is that the loading times get shorter in general.
But the the first question would be why are these so long.
As far is understood it works as follows:
It first loads an basic world and then they load all the made changes over it.
The basic world gets the player changes baked in at an certain moment.
What i expected was when they split up zones in smaller zones the loading times would decrease , this didnt happen so there is something in the loading mechanism i dont understand.
what would improve loading entities, which is the greatest delay, would be an better setup of loading and better rules on this.
For example one can store the basic world on youre computer and only update it after an new imprint has been done.
Also first loading youre subzone and spawn you in the world and then load the rest.
For me they dont have to load als subzones when i spawn in the world, just the one i am in now is fine with me and then the rest.
it would take some smart rules but isnt that hard i think.

He was talking about IF they cant lower the time (which they already cut it by over 1/2 already just FYI) then maybe we should think of how its effecting people and try to limit the loading times while still keeping play the same or better.

Imagine a noob die 5 times, with 20% item decay? he would loose all his gear and weapons, that leaves him with nothing to survive with, I think item decay is too harsh rule when you are a noob.
MrDDT? ever thought deleting your character and start alone in the wilderness? and don't use anything from your alts, that will ruing the challenge, maybe then you will feel what a noob feel.

If you have limit on weight you can carry and temporary decay of skills/stats plus food water energy/hp? then it would be better, for noobs as well, they won't suffer as much, and would still be a challenge.

@Dzarren.
Many games are holding most data on clients pc and only update once a month or so, depends on ho big is the mod.
I understand why Xsyon doing this way, it's easier to make changes and they can update anytime they need, but the way they do it is probably the cause for these lags, since data needs to checked constantly between user and provider.

If a noob dies 5 times, then and say the QL was supreme, then it would be 80% of 100 (supreme = 100 btw) = 80 for death 1. Death 2 = 80% of 80 which is 64, Death 3 = 51.2, Death 4 = 41, Death 5 = 37.8.

As you can see they can do this MANY times, before being without a item.

Znaiika, Ive already done it. Its really easy for a vet like me who understands how to play and fight to do these things. You act like I dont deal with noobs everyday. I run the largest tribe in the game right now and we cater to new players. Most of the problems with a new player isnt how hard it is to get something but understanding HOW to do things. Just basic things like making grass twine is hard when you have no idea how to do it. Making or getting the items in Xsyon is really really really easy.

I'm gonna go out on a total limb here, oh, but before I do, thanks for clearing up the death toll thing, makes more sense now... back to my limb

Dumping a lot of information into memory shouldn't necessarily take all that long I don't think. However, considering how malleable the world in xsyon is, I'm thinking it takes a LOT of calculations at the cpu/alu to draw the world and put everything where it is at this moment.
This is leading me to think the optimizations needed are very low level, compiler level, to somehow keep more information / instructions from memory into cpu cache itself so the cpu doesn't have to go to memory for information as often.

Not sure there's enough coffee in the world for me to try and work out how one would even do that but I just wonder to what extent it's something like that.

I think people sometimes say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and that's pretty much where I'm at on this sort of thing but I do find it fascinating and have been trying to learn more about it. Strange things are sometimes afoot at the bit level I tell ya.

Loading up the zone and even terrain seems to go very swiftly, so a caching/versioning system probably wouldn't give a significant increase in loading speed. What seems to be the bottleneck is the entities. The way they are stored, sent, and processed appears to need a whole hell of a lot of optimizing. Either there is just too much data on each world object, or the server and client are very ineffecient in sending and processing the data. It makes me wonder how things like containers are handled; does the client see all the contents of every container, even if the player doesn't have access, or are the contents only sent upon accessing the container...things like that.

Also, can objects be combined, sent, and processed in batches? For example, send all local trees as one package of data and process them together instead of basket 3358968, tent 4449585, tree 3938376, wall 22898287, tree 2938898, gate 883838, grass bundle 6668387, etc. Actions that affect the objects on the client side can be queued while loading (someone chopping down a tree while you are still loading trees or picking up a basket while loading the list of container objects) as they are not time critical.

I also suspect the long loading screen is hiding the ugliness of the world "popping in" as the items are streamed. I know we are already in the game long before entities is done, as evidenced by chat already being displayed, ambient sounds playing, etc. while still loading. Moving around and possibly requesting new world objects before the initial objects have even completed loading can cause all kinds of problems..I've seen it in other games where they allow you to disable the load screen.

Some optimization, I am sure, would come from new architecture "composites" that currently take multiple small parts to achieve the same effect. If you are doing a long run of granite walls, you don't need 50 small segments if you could have 25 or even 10 larger segments.

It is too bad this is all conjecture since noone but Jordi and maybe one or two others can answer any of this, if they even had the time to do so.

All 3 of you guys really guessing at the coding side is really futile as we have no real idea how they are doing things. We can guess all day and be wrong, debating wrong guesses or not.

Like the OP said IF they cant reduce the time maybe its time to see other aspects to cutting down the reasons to get to the loading screen.
I think these things should be in, and I believe the OP is saying to push it up on the priorities list. Before expecting a ton of new players.

[Book]

All 3 of you guys really guessing at the coding side is really futile as we have no real idea how they are doing things. We can guess all day and be wrong, debating wrong guesses or not.

Well of course it's a guess, and I didn't think of it as a debate really, thought of it as more of a discussion. Drevar pointed out it's conjecture, I said I was out on a limb, Dzarren prefaced by saying it was "as far as he understood." The 3 of us you referred to knew we were guessing It's just really fun stuff to think about and really fun (to me anyway) to bounce ideas around.

Fun's allowed right?

Anyway, don't know about everyone else but kinda feels like what could have been a good discussion just got bonked over the head. Disperse people, nothing to see here

[znaiika]

All 3 of you guys really guessing at the coding side is really futile as we have no real idea how they are doing things. We can guess all day and be wrong, debating wrong guesses or not.

For example Fallen Earth has a world like this and really don't have a loading problems as in Xsyon, since most of its content on client side.
I am not sure if that is the problem or not, but if you have most of the content on client pc? it would take a lot less to stream the rest of the content.
Every time you get in the game, you have to wait until all of its content loads for display on client side, only then you can play.
This is my point of view I may be wrong.

[fotuenti]

i'm replying to this more in the spirit of the "for fun" discussion of computer systems.

This is leading me to think the optimizations needed are very low level, compiler level, to somehow keep more information / instructions from memory into cpu cache itself so the cpu doesn't have to go to memory for information as often.

Although it may be true that the needed improvements are "low level", I doubt they are compiler level optimizations and more likely it has to do with the way the data is being distributed to the clients and then the clients to process the data into something that gets put on the screen. This would point to an optimization in the Xsyon code base, but not the compiler. At a guess Notorious Games is already compiling the Xsyon executables with all compiler optimization turned on.

Also, most cpu cores have less than 15MB of cache memory. So while you are correct in the assertion that getting more things into cpu cache memory will improve speed, I doubt that the problems with loading entities have to do with not enough data getting into the cpu caches. It is possible that the algorithms used for loading the entities are large enough, or thrashes enough, that they frequently get displaced from the cpu cache, I highly doubt this is the cause of the problem.

Also please note, MrDDT I'm looking at you, that I am not speculating about what is wrong with Xsyon.exe, I just like talking about computer stuffs.