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Author Topic: Suggestion: creating "danger" and "house" servers  (Read 646 times)

SteveMaurer

Suggestion: creating "danger" and "house" servers
« on: April 17, 2009, 01:27:23 pm »
After reviewing a number of topics on the nuts and bolts of keeping Layonara up, I've come to the conclusion that what needs to be done behind the scenes is for the Administrators to create a house and danger server.

Let me explain.   At present, the Leanthar has several design goals for his baby.   These are:
  • Make the server RP friendly, including adding many placables that add flavor to the world
  • Allow people to see each other, so that RP can occur
  • Keep the server lag down, so people don't die inappropriately
Unfortunately, these goals are often brought into conflict by the underlying code, which makes it so that you can't see someone on a different server, and (even more importantly) makes even the simple act of logging in cause a whole bunch of placables to come into existence, which can cause someone else in the middle of combat to die.

Putting on my IT architect hat for a second, I see the solution to be very simple: add additional servers that aren't specific to a particular region, but rather for a specific purpose.

And so, I'd like to propose a "house" server: house.layonara.com.   When anyone enters a private house, they get booted off of west or central, and must log onto house.layonara.com.   House could have all sorts of pretty things in it, without affecting the performance of the RP areas of the other servers.  The guilds could stuff chests to the brim with no issues.   And from an RP point of view, it makes perfect sense that when one is in one's house (sleeping, etc), there is a certain degree of expected privacy.

The same thing could be done for dungeons and areas of danger: danger.layonara.com.     Again, when you're deep in a catacomb, by definition you're cut off from the world.   And because entering such areas do not happen on an extremely regular basis, there would be no substantial lag to deal with.   All that would be really required is that there be some staging area that a party could assemble in during the boot/relog process.

I understand that this is a long term project, but I think it would actually be pretty easy to implement, and is the way to deal with a lot of the design issues the development team constantly has to deal with.
 

Dorganath

Re: Suggestion: creating "danger" and "house" servers
« Reply #1 on: April 17, 2009, 01:47:50 pm »
You are correct...it is a long-term project, and I'm pretty confident it will not happen.  We just don't have the resources for such a massive overhaul.

A few of your assumptions are incorrect, specifically the one about when people log into the server.

There aren't, in fact, a bunch of placeables that automatically spawn in when someone logs in.  If that person does own a house, those placeables only appear if someone knocks on the door to his/her house or if someone who has a key uses that key inside the house itself.  The loading of these placeables has recently been adjusted and spread out over a period of up to 40 seconds, so the "impulse" lag from this is actually quite low.

What causes the most problems with people logging in is over-full personal inventories, and your concept would actually make that worse, as people enter and leave their homes more frequently than they log in or out of a server, likewise to entering and leaving areas of "danger". You'd be multiplying the number of logins and since personal character inventories tend to be the prime issue in login lag, it would really hurt those you are trying to help.

And then there's the financial impact of doing such a thing.

It's an interesting idea, but I think for NWN Layonara, it creates more problems than it solves.
 

SteveMaurer

Re: Suggestion: creating "danger" and "house" servers
« Reply #2 on: April 17, 2009, 02:22:53 pm »
Well that's interesting.  Obviously, I don't have any real familiarity with the layonara codebase.   If the real issue is personal inventories, you might consider making boxes have a lazy initialization scheme (assuming you have enough control over the code to do such a thing), and put in a 10 second delay as you open one up.   That even works well RP wise, because you could simply put in the message "You begin to rummage through the contents of your bag".
 

Dorganath

Re: Suggestion: creating "danger" and "house" servers
« Reply #3 on: April 17, 2009, 02:29:41 pm »
I think to do that, we'd have to replace all standard containers with a system of our own making.
 

Hellblazer

Re: Suggestion: creating "danger" and "house" servers
« Reply #4 on: April 17, 2009, 04:18:43 pm »
Although I really liked the fact that quest could be done on a different server in the past, and I think that actually helped somewhat with the lag, when creating the placables and special spawn for that quest, that we are now seeing today. Aslo, my question is. Can it be possible to stop the lodaing of the placeables upon knocking on a door? Now this would pause a problem for those free portals out there, but then again maybe a new option could be put on a door to manually load an area, the same way you did with the keys?

miltonyorkcastle

Re: Suggestion: creating "danger" and "house" servers
« Reply #5 on: April 17, 2009, 04:40:53 pm »
The Quest server was a luxory indeed.

Steve, you may note that we have a donations tracker. This is a fairly recent development, and, in fact, the servers being paid for almost entirely by the users instead of by the admin is also a new thing. We used to have (at least) five servers for NWN Layo. If you dig around, I'm sure you'll find the posts explaining when we had to switch to a new host because the former host increased all their costs by a drastic amount which the admin could no longer afford. In fact, we worried we would not be able to bring back NWN Layo, but the community stepped up and the admin found a new host, and here we are, "taking care of business." All that said, the advantage of only maintaining the two servers is lower running costs. If we add any new servers, we as a community would need to come up with a way to cover the difference in operational costs for NWN Layo.

But lordie, I would love to get the Quest server back.
 

Dorganath

Re: Suggestion: creating "danger" and "house" servers
« Reply #6 on: April 17, 2009, 05:40:27 pm »
Quote from: Hellblazer
Aslo, my question is. Can it be possible to stop the lodaing of the placeables upon knocking on a door? Now this would pause a problem for those free portals out there, but then again maybe a new option could be put on a door to manually load an area, the same way you did with the keys?

I'm not seeing how that would change anything.  Whether you load on knock, open, some special conversation option or key use, it still causes the same amount of lag.

Perhaps you are thinking that every time someone knocks it loads?  If so, this is not the case.  The housing placeables for a given house are loaded only once.
 

Hellblazer

Re: Suggestion: creating "danger" and "house" servers
« Reply #7 on: April 18, 2009, 01:23:42 am »
Quote from: Dorganath
Y  If that person does own a house, those placeables only appear if someone knocks on the door to his/her house or if someone who has a key uses that key inside the house itself.

That's what Made me think that, but I must not have seen that it applied only to the person that owns the house. i thought it was for anyone that knock on the door.  And actually, unless there is a special coding, I can tell you it is anyone. When the Orc bashers shop or the weary travelers placeable are not loaded after a server reset, since their main doors are always left unlocked. If you close the door and go to the side door and knock on the door, it loads the placeables inside those two areas. Now unless that is a special coding, I would think it does the same to all houses.

Dorganath

Re: Suggestion: creating "danger" and "house" servers
« Reply #8 on: April 18, 2009, 01:32:08 am »
It does work for anyone knocking or anyone with a valid key to the house.

My point though is that it only loads the furniture once through any means, so whether that is through the key, the door or some other mechanism simply won't make a lag difference.  And as I said, it's spread out much more, over up to 40 seconds.
 

Hellblazer

Re: Suggestion: creating "danger" and "house" servers
« Reply #9 on: April 18, 2009, 01:45:33 am »
Roigth, just saying that with this option available, it could further reduce the load.

 

anything