Architect Archive

With being able to build medium and large Tatooine houses, I've had several people ask if they can place things out on the balcony/portch. You think that since these are "part" of the house - you'd be able to place furniture on them! Likewise we don't have any ture to life patio furniture (less the torch - which is popular in its own right). We need patio furniture! And we should be about to place stuff on our porches and balconies!

Furthermore, what's the deal with no pictures??

Anyone with me on this?

/agree

Would love to have a table with an umbrella sticking out of it... to protect my sensitive Mon Cal skin from those suns.

I was just about to post on this very subject. I built a person a medium house and went over to give him some of the wooden chairs and a table for the deck to host a bar-b-que. It said he could not drop them there. I hope they will let us be able to to place items on the deck for those parties we would love to host.

The answer is simple, actually.

Allowing furniture and torches, et al. outside increases the number of things that have to be drawn for the player.

Ever notice that most houses have long hallways, or that you can't see anything when you're in the doorway of a small house, but once you cross the threshold things become visible? How about how every public structure that is enterable has maze-like entrances where you cannot see directly into the structure's interior?

I think you're getting handed-off to another part of the server cluster when you enter a building.

You think there's lag now in and around some of the more populated player cities? Imagine if each house had an additional 8 pieces of furniture on their balconies.

Forget it, it's never going to happen because of the severe load it would place on the server and the client.

Severe load on the client???

They have all these buildings and NPC's and regular players and spaceships not to mention furniture outside in the cities what in the world is it going to hurt to let you place some outside when noone will be able to see it unless they walk right up next to the house???

I mean there is already plenty of congestion near the primary cities what with all the houses and harvesters and creature lairs and creatures running around, I really dont get why people would want to live so close to a city??

Personally I'd rather have a nice open view of some mountains etc and then I would want to be able to sit in my chair at the top of my large house looking out over the wilderness where I had dropped my house.

I believe the issue with placing items outside the house or on a rooftop (like the PA Halls) probably relates to the program design of buildings being "containers". Just like a back pak, you can only put items 'inside' it. In relationship to a database where all your items are stored inside the container (or database table), these items placed outside the container would require an additional database table, or the design of the structure containers would need to be enlarged to include the outside area of the house.

That's my best theory anyway. Even if they were to implement this, I would bet it would fall under the "wish" list of things the devs might do. Don't think it's going to happen when there is so many other issues with architect that needs to be addressed.

Why are you getting all excited with ME?

I didn't invent the dynamics of how servers and clients track large numbers of objects. It's a fact of life in EVERY game: there is a finite number of things that can exist in a visible area.

Just because YOU can't see it doesn't mean that it doesn't have to be tracked and accounted for.

Now, tell me that you have travelled to a city that is HEAVILY populated and you saw ZERO lag or at least no more lag than you see in the wilderness. Can you honestly tell me that? Unless you have a bleeding edge computer with 1.5GB of RAM you can't. Honestly. Why? Because all of those objects cause LOADS of calculations, especially concerning MOVING things like players and creatures.

The base cities (not the player-made ones) have one advantage: most of the objects are static, in other words they do not move, are not replaceable and never go anywhere. Big deal, right? Well, yes it is, because ALL of that data can be put on the client via software because it's ALWAYS the same. One placeable lawnchair can be moved, therefore everytime it comes into view on your computer (or actually just before) the data for that single lawnchair has to be sent to your computer, along with EVERY other piece of information about EVERY other dynamic object. That lawnchair on your balcony CAN'T be coded into the game's software like those fruit stands in Mos Entha, or the Crafting Stations in Kaadara.

The lag in big base cities comes not from the number of objects, but the number of DYNAMIC objects: people and creatures/droids. If outdoor furniture were allowed then you multiply the number of dynamic objects that must be tracked by 10-fold, and that's not a tiny number when you're talking about a server tracking those objects and getting that information to your computer and then your computer processing that information.

Get mad at me. Call me stupid. Them's the facts, hero.

/sign

Any more variable furniture would be great. If they just added colorization we would have expanded are choices by 20 fold.