Idea: Better zoning

[Metaing]

How about some kind of elevator which move you to/from the zoning itself. Eg. you activate the grid, but instead of just zone where you stand, you take an elevator below gound, away from the growd, and then automatically zone. This could be done with all grids/city gates. The same applies to when you zone into a place, you zone in far away from the growd and are automatically elevated to the right place, grid/city gate.

[Rugger807]

sooo...you want zoning to take longer?

[Metaing]

No, but if it can prevent zoning issues, like crashing etc, then I dont mind the 1 extra second it normally takes to use an elevator.

[__________Wraith God]

I'm unclear how your idea would prevent zoning crashes. If they were lag related, perhaps, moving people into a low lag area to zone would help, but I don't think zoning crashes are lag related. If you got disconnected, then I'd buy that lag was a factor. Crashes, on the other hand, are coding problems. Maybe a race condtion, but still a coding problem.

[Metaing]

Me too, but as far as I know most crashes happens when zoning/loging to growded places. But since they havent solved the coding problem (and all the other coding problems) they probably cant find the right way to do it, and they could probably use a suggestion how to work around the problem

[Rulex]

Hello I was reading on the internet about harddrives, and I came across Solid State drive(real cool). They have an Access time of around 0.1 ms to 40ns. The drives them self can get up to 155Gegs. But the only problem with this is. Is the connection to the servers fast enough, and well they cost alot too. It would be a nice idea but I don't want to pay $500 per month to make up for it (drives anywhere from $28000- $110000 each).

But it would be way faster

[________________Cado]

One of the best ways to enhanche zoning speed, would be an option to preload all character models and textures into memory at game startup and keep them there - Then you would not have to access the harddrive each time another character came into your view.

Apart from that, zoning works just fine.

Go make a character on the german server and see how fast zoning is in non-crowded areas ... very nice.

[Metaing]

That is probably only possible for people with 1G+ RAM. The database is 560M in the latest version. And then people will complain about the startup time.

[xyberviri]

oh thats only the items and stuff in blobs.

I extract the item database strait to my Hd like 3-4 times a week....

its only about 118MB with white space included.
Thats only the item links and the data that goes in them....

really your talking about loading Textures to Video memory that has about 16-128MB to go in.

Run the Resource Basher on your datbase and it will extract all the textures and images from the item database and that is basically what your gonna have to preload.

[________________Cado]

yeah ... and I was only thinking about preloading textures and meshes related to character models and weapons .. not buildings and zones, since they actually stream just nicely from the HD if there's no characters to stream from the Harddrive.

Yes ... it is possible to run trough Omni-Trade without the slightest lag if there was no players in it.

Oh .. and even cheap GeForce 3 cards have 64 MB of local RAM on them these days, just for Textures.