Architect Archive

Some thoughts on keeping architecture a viable skill: Building Installation durability.

Now I think politically it would be more difficult to introduce 'decay' with player housing and PA structures but let us consider the [i]working[/i] structures like harvestors and factories.

Why not have these buildings wear out over time? Perhaps it is the generator, or the fluidic pump or some other piece. These components as they wear out could effectively reduce the performance of equipment to the point of requiring repair OR replacement. As the machine is used the variable wear actually would affect the effective yield or chance for production failure.

Architects could repair by replacing worn parts (like identical factory-built generators) or they could have an ongoing business replacing equipment tht was not well maintained.

You could even go so far as to increase the wear of equipment based on the quality of materials being harvested or components being manufactured. Poor quality materials would accelerate the rate of decay on harvestors, high quality materials would accelerate the rate of failure on factories (due to very stringent manufacturing specifications - Six Sigma anyone?).

If it did variable decay, it would help establish more specific pricing levels for higher or lower grade materials as well as limit the opportunity for very high end weapons with out alot of care and maintenance on the crafter's part during the manufacturing process.

In any event, with fixed populations (based on server caps) there must be a way for structures to decay or have a need to be replaced over time else 6 months from now there will be 10x more buildings than people and no need to build anything else!

Thoughts?

A point of clarification the repair/maintenance would be above and beyond the credit/hour cost of running this equipment. I imagine these existing costs relating to lubricants, simple replaceable parts (e.g. filters) and such.

I think there should be a time-decay in effect for all structures, including furniture. It wouldn't effect anything, but when it ran out, the item would disappear. I remember reading in the pre-release Q&A that all items would decay and need to be replaced over time, but apparently this isn't so. Maybe the developers had that as the plan, but it wasn't implemented the right way.

Reduction in effectiveness sounds cool and realistic, but is probably too complex and part of what makes structure decay controversial. Weapons don't go down in effectiveness as they wear out. If my pistol is at 92/100 or 1/20, it still works normally (until it disappears at least). I know they are going to implement the same thing for clothing (which is more realistic)--why not structures and installations as well?

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Sunakk wrote:

I think there should be a time-decay in effect for all structures, including furniture. It wouldn't effect anything, but when it ran out, the item would disappear. I remember reading in the pre-release Q&A that all items would decay and need to be replaced over time, but apparently this isn't so. Maybe the developers had that as the plan, but it wasn't implemented the right way.

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I could be wrong, but I seem to remember reading somewhere that the problem here was adding yet another field to the database for all items: creation date/time. For time based decay to be instituted they would have to store the creation date for each object, easy or not? I don't know.

Actually doesn't seem to bad to me as there must be quitea lot of fields already so one more can't hurt too much and certainly they wouldn't have to put a creation date field in every item, only structures. Comments?

I won't give my opinion on decay here, its been argued many times on these boards. But you asked if it could be much room.

Well, I believe there is a max per server of 2000 people. So, lets assume that only 3/4's have a house. Thats 1500 additional entries per server. Now, lets look at harvesters. I'll use probably a low number and say only 200 people per server use their lots for harvesters and they only use 5 harvesters each to keep it simple, thats an additional 1000 harvester running on the server. Ok, lets add furniture. the average home has lets say 25? items of furniture? Probably a lot higher again, but we'll be conservative, so thats 1500 homes x 25 which is an additional 37,500 entries.

So, you add them up. 1500 + 1000 + 37,500 = 40,000 entries that are being tracked at any given time... and i really think this is a low number. At first thought it doesn't seem like much but when you start adding it up it gets pretty large, especially considering they are already having database storage issues. And this doesn't take into account some peoples suggestion that the furniture or houses or harvesters take on a different appearance at different levels of decay.

Just some numbers to throw out there for you.

40,000 new entries out of maybe 4,000,000 currently, which is probably a conservative estimate.

The guideline isn't really how many new entries, it is what would the % increase of entries be?

For example every single weapon already has: min, max, speed, health, action, mind, sliced y/n, condition, max condition, creator, serial number, name, damage type, etc. So at least 13 fields for a weapon and probably the same for armour.

Structures, furniture and clothes have probably between 5-6 fields, it is quite likely that adding one more field (creation time) wouldn't cause a database meltdown as the % increase in overall data in a galaxy might not be significant.

Quite likely though (knowing SOE's way of patching) adding that field might just turn Rancor's blue and pink, make houses float 30 feet off the ground and weapons always fire on their user instead of target but hey you can't ask for perfection.

3things:

You still have the fact they are already having database storage problems.

Don't houses already float 30 feet off the ground? oh wait, no, they just get buried by the local camp of gungans popping up next to them.

Hmmm... I might like a pink rancor myself......

IMO database concerns have no bearing on whether some aspect of game play should be added or left out. Ifdatabase spacebecomes the bottleneck of game improvement it's up to SOE and LucasArts to increase capacity, not us to reduce our expectations. Would you accept the line "We couldfix Droid Engineersbut it would eat up too much space so we're leaving it out."? Player cities, mounts/vehicles, and additional planets (the first two of which were formerly promised at launch) haven't even been added and if they're having problems already then they severely underestimated their db needs and need to rectify it.

imho they don't have a problem of datastorage size but they have troubles with indexes

When logging 12 hours after a reboot, you connect to the server quite instantly (1/4 of the loggin bar and 'connected'), when to try to connect just after a reboot, you need to wait for 20 passes or so...

Part of a 'single account' choice was about DB storage space.

And remember that if the average number of people is 2000, they should have planned on a maximum of 4000 created characters (don't forget the FS slot, as even if people won't use / succeed in improving), they will at least try to create one...

Sargie, I'm not disagreeing with you, but the fact of the matter is that right now they have an issue and a problem that they're trying to deal with. You can't expect them to implement something because they "should do it" when their system simply can't handle it.

Now, I'll briefly state that I think implementing decay into the game is the completely wrong thing to do anyway so I hope it never happens. by doing this you lower the demand for the items and upset the player community who already think we're a bunch of greedy people out to rip them off to begin with.

You could use the effectiveness field that I am sure is probably there on most of these items but not displayed and rename the field to creationtime.

Plenty of fields that could be pruned I am sure: hopper size (from experimental hopper size), extraction rate (similar), effectiveness, quality. Those appear on some of the above mentioned items but have zero effect curently.

Trade them in for a new creationtime field and in the same motion make decay rate an actual useful field. When condition drops to zero a harvestor stops running, extract the hopper and then destroy the building unless a repair function/tool is imlemented.