Architect Archive

I agree with this one. I'd put it in my own top 5 wishlist items.

This was discussed very early in the peace when SWG first came out (the posts should still be there but buried way back in June/July/August of last year if you care to look).

From memory its one of those changes thats not able to be made owing to the way the game itself handles static player objects such as harvestors and non-public houses, and those objects' relationship to the game environment. Essentially, the harvestors themselves do not exist in the game when you are logged out. What you see when you travel around the planets are just a static image that the game engines renders based on a database entry (this also explains in part why the animation is busted at the moment as the data required to show animation for all those harvestors is more than what the devs first anticipated and resulted in huge amounts of lag early on ingame).

In practical terms then (and Im definitely going from memory here), once you log into the game, the harvestor details are extracted from the database and all the relevant entries regarding that harvestor are loaded (you own this harvestor at this location, etc). I'm not sure if the actual running details of the harvs themselves (current hopper contents, status, etc)are all updated straight away, by have a feeling that the relevant calculations aren't actually made until such time as you are physically in front of a harvestor and select the appropriate radial button. This is primarily to cut down on processor time and allows the server to worry about things other than the contents and status of thetwenty or thirty thousand harvestors that may exist in that galaxy.

It would be a really neat idea to have these emails - but its not doable and is not practical (imagine getting a couple of hundred emails every day from all your harvs telling you their current status?)Any large-scale miner worth his or her salt will have these things spreadsheeted and organised (there are some very well made sheets out there - www.swgcraft.com and www.allakhazam.com are two sites that I think have these tools available for free download).

When a shift occurs it would not be impossible for them to run a function to look at the harvester settings and then send out a mail based on the harvester settings. This could be ran when you log in and/or when the shift occurs. The maximum number of harvesters is 10 x characters in the server. This is not something that would have to sit in the background eating up resources but only something that would need to be ran when we get a shift and/or when you login.

Yes, 100's of mails would be annoying but it could be an on/off toggle per harvester with the default as off as suggested in the original post.

I really don't see how this is infeasible. It might be difficult but I don't buy that it is impossible.

Message Edited by PhazeDistortion on 02-03-2004 10:41 AM

As to the possibilities, in regards to the 'here is why it cannot be done', I see no reason why the emails must be generated when the resources shift out, maint gets used up or the power runs dry. Why not generate the email(s) at login whenyour data gets loaded up? It makes no conceivable difference if the email is generated when you are offline or as you login. The only thing you might not get datawise is the time of when the event actually happened... not a huge deal. And certainly not worth scrapping the entire idea over.

If all the data is loaded or available when you are logged on, why not have a harvester management console so you can see the status of your harvs? List their name, location, what they are harvesting, that resource's percentage, and of course maint, power and hopper info. Would it not be nice to be able to change the harvester's resource without having to travel across the galaxy all the time. It would let architectsspend time enjoying some of the game otherthan run harvester routes. Now I would notbe in favor of letting you retrieve the resources without visiting the harvester to pick them up.That would keep it realistic in modern terms of having pumpers like on oil wells.

But with every inconvienence, there would evolve a solution. Maybe we could add a binary load lifter droid to a harvester schematic to allow automated resource delivey possible. This would certainly take a maintenance cost, power/droid batteries, and of course droids. What a boost to the Droid Engineer profession! There should also be some furniture piece that the resources get deposited into... another item that people would want to buy from us. It would also make itanother wayto remove credits from a rapidly inflating economy. Not to mention making the play time more fun and less grunt work for those that opt to not run the routes daily. It would also make another round of harvesters for people to buy if they want to upgrade. But I am getting ahead of myself here... back to the point. Just being able to know the status of your harvs without having to travel to them would be great... a management device/console would eliminate the need for emails as we could check at any given time.