Bio Engineer Archive

Well DNA storage is a big issue for me. Like Arthur, my vendors haven't been used for any reasons other than to sell products. I do, however, have a cluster of medium houses (named HERO Bio Research Campus) with DNA stocked in all of them. One of them, however, is filled with production quality organics. If they could implement some sort of BE lab, craftable by master architects and placed only by MBE's (like cantinas and theatres are for dancers/musicians), I'd be all for it. I envision a lab that has a front entry for vendors. A door to the back room (Research Lab) would be locked to visitors (restricted area, authorized personnel only). The BE would add guildies or other BE's as admins or whatever, thus opening the rest of the building to them. In the back would be a room you can decorate (the look would have a sterile feel, like big white tiles on the floor). The 'DNA Freezer' would be likened to one you'd see in a real Bio lab. However, you double click the freezer and it opens like a bank deposit box. Except, it would hold 1000 items. This concept would have backpacks for each type of creature (much like how I organize my DNA in the storage houses).

Now, I've seen posts regarding database limitations and how DNA has many stats to store. That's all fine and dandy provided there are many BE's in the game. However, it is the third least mastered profession (beat only by BH and Politician) in the game, so I don't think it would be the source of a database storage issue.

There are many good ideas out there that could mitigate our storage issues. Anything other than what we have now would improve my personal gameplay.

I mean if your really serious about storage, you could drop 3-4 small houses, that's 450-600 units of storage plus your Saftey Deposit Box 100, plus another 150 in inventory space. so you could theorectically store 700-850 dna samples. If you put them in back packs as catagories maybe 50 catagories? that's still alot of storage, it is not convenient I agree, but storage non the less.

I have a small house for collecting my trinkets and "living". I have another for clothes (yes I do need that many ). I have a third for my shop, which is decorated and has more trinkets as well as miscellaneous storage. I have four lots for harvesters that I am constantly rotating.

My bank holds precious items like crystals, holocrons, paintings, etc. My inventory and backpack has my essentials and things I don't want to run to a house every time I need.

I am renting two small houses for storage. One has all my resources which I have been weeding out. My second is for DNA. I rent another couple of lots for my factories.

I do have DNA scattered throughout all of these. The problem is, my life doesn't revolve around DNA. I still need it, but I have collected a ton of things after a year of play. I take my decorating and RP seriously, so I'm not willing to live in a house or run a shop that consists of bare walls and a couple of packs in the back.

On top of this, I'm having to pare my three vendors down, and when the player wipes come, find a spot to store my PAs junk in until we can find someone willing to spare nine lots.

I can safely say I don't have any storage space. I am in the process of reducing it, although the ability to condense all future DNA samples would help this immensely.

I think we will loose with the blood samples, I am not sure why, but I think we will loose in the long run. Unless we could really figure out exact specifics.

Both versions of the blood sample have been pretty much reduced as far as we can as players. Except for one thing...

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I did have one disturbing realization about the blood sample version I support -- How will it handle clones? Possible ideas:

1) Clones only give DNA. There is no template creature to refer back to for a blood sample. This is the easiest to implement as it uses the existing system.

2) Clones can give blood. These generational blood samples have all the data in them like the current pet deeds or the alternate blood sample idea. A few samples might stack, but mostly it doesn't matter. It requires the blood sample to be able to have these fields, so more data usage which defeats the purpose.

3) No second generation cloning. This would take away a lot of the fun of multi-generational cloning. I don't like it, but I'm throwing it out as an option. However, it might solve some balance issues.

For generational cloning, I don't think stacking is as important. Being able to condense my 50 Bark Mite samples is far more important than my three from a clone.

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Seiryuu wrote:
I did have one disturbing realization about the blood sample version I support -- How will it handle clones?

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Yes, I mentioned this before earlier up in this thread. This is definitely a drawback of this solution, and all the solutions mentioned so far have drawbacks. If some BE's keep a significant amount of dna samples around that they obtain from sampling clones, then this solution is not a good one for them. Although the "stacking samples" proposalwould also be bad for storing 2nd-gen samples for the same reason.

The other drawback that I can see is that for me, when I'm collecting dna for their "specials" I only collect vhq dna and ditch the rest, and I'm not done sampling until I aquire the certain number of VHQ samples that I require. So obviously for that usage, blood is actually no better than the current implementation, and actually a little worse cause it would require 2 steps instead of 1 for me to even see if the dna sample is VHQ or not, and ditch it if it's not. Still though, I think at least for me, the blood thing would offer the best "compaction" of the proposals, so it's the one I would choose, although the "droid/freezer" idea looks a little more appealing on further inspection, then perhaps it did originally, but if that is "off the table" due to database constraints, then... oh well.

Message Edited by ArthurDentOnBria on 08-11-2004 02:33 PM

As I envision it, blood will be just the same as having a pet deed in your inventory, it basically just has a different name and icon. Both can be used to extract DNA in exactly the same way as we do now. So theres no need for anything to change there.

By the way, I harp on the database being such an issue because one of the rules of MMORPGs is if you give players the inventory space, they will fill it. We need to assume that.

Taking that into account, while the original blood proposal might solve our needs, it doesn't solve the data-size problem. Therefore it doesn't make it as attractive to the devs who are going to be more interested in the technical fallout of any changes.

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Seiryuu wrote:
Yes, as you envision it that is true Nancy.

Honestly though, I don't like your version of blood sampling as well as the one I support. I want it to stack and I want to know what DNA I am using. With yours I get a random sample even with what I bring back to the lab. If I need VHQ, I may never actually be able to get VHQ.

I also don't think yours really solves the database issue as each one of your samples still takes up the same space as our current samples/clones.

150 blood (yours) = 150 DNA under the current system
150 blood (alternate) << 150 DNA under the current system

And it gives us more control over what sample we use, because once we have the blood, it will be what we want within a few points. The only drawback would be with sampling clones, and to me at least, that is mostly a non-issue. I brought it up only because I want all bases covered.

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In the system I proposed 150 blood is not equal to 150 DNA.

As far as I can see in the proposed and the alternate systems the only difference is whther the blood samples stacka dn give a 1:1 ratio or they dont stack and there is a random chance of sample numbers from 1-7.
Both methods have their pro's and cons, but both DO save on database space because they store less samples AND less data per sample.

As to whether the blood should be separated into different quality stacks, for me I'd prefer to have just one stack per creature but its really neither here nor there since regardless of whether the quality is determined when I sample from the blood in my pack or whether its determined and split into different quality stacks when I'm out in the field, I'm still going to destroy the samples I dont want, to save space.
It just comes down to personal preference.

Message Edited by NancyJ on 08-12-2004 12:13 AM

In the system I proposed 150 blood is not equal to 150 DNA.

How so? You said the blood is basically a (non-tamable) pet deed. Pet deeds include all the information a DNA sample does. Not all of it is displayed, but it has to be there or we couldn't pull samples with 450 fortitude or 600 dependability, or with -37 resistance. It is all there.

Granted that one sample might represent three DNA samples to us, but the amount of data for either one will be about the same. The alternate idea has a pointer, a quantity, possibly quality, and one or two other variables at most needed. There is a huge difference.

I would say that deeds would only give DNA. Usually when you are sampling deeds, you plan on using the DNA right then with more DNA that you have in order to make your generational clone (well, at least that is what I do). And with either system you could add a new command which leaves the option to sample DNA normally open for those going after a specific quality of DNA for a specific use. I didn't like the idea of quality on the stackable blood samples at first, now I think it would be a good idea on either system since we often go out needing a specific type of DNA. And even if we have a use for all the quality types in one recipe or another, we may decide to make a clone that needs a certain quality and end up pulling half a dozen DNA samples out that end up having to be stored before we get the quality we want.

So, my system would be this.

1. A new command called something like /drawblood. It would have the exact same success/failure rate, agro/kill rate, and HAM usage as sampling DNA.

2. The blood would simply be called "quality" "creature name" blood. example: Very High Quality Merek Harvester Blood. And blood from the same creatue and of the same quality would be stackable.

3. When you are ready, DNA would be extracted from the stack at a one to one ratio, preferable with no HAM usage since HAM was used to draw the blood (this means no changes in DNA sampling risk vs reward). The quality of the DNA would be the same as the quality of the blood. So Very High Quality Merek Harvester Blood would give a Very High Quality Merek Harvester DNA sample.

4. DNA sampling as it is now could remain in place for those going after high health creatures and for extracting DNA samples from clones. Clones wouldn't give blood, just DNA.

This covers most bases I think. It gives us much more storage and saves lots of database space. It allows people to go after certain quality samples and still have it stack as blood. It leaves the current style of DNA sampling in place so people can go after high health animals. It doesn't change the risk vs reward of current DNA sampling. And it adds only one item to the game that stacks so it takes up very little backpack or database space. And heck, it might even open up a small market for blood since you could sell off all your hq and aa samples if you are out just going after vhq samples and someone else might be able to put them to use (doubt it would ever be a large market, but you never know).

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Seiryuu wrote:
In the system I proposed 150 blood is not equal to 150 DNA.

How so? You said the blood is basically a (non-tamable) pet deed. Pet deeds include all the information a DNA sample does. Not all of it is displayed, but it has to be there or we couldn't pull samples with 450 fortitude or 600 dependability, or with -37 resistance. It is all there.

Granted that one sample might represent three DNA samples to us, but the amount of data for either one will be about the same. The alternate idea has a pointer, a quantity, possibly quality, and one or two other variables at most needed. There is a huge difference.

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Well 150 blood samples is not equal to 150 DNA, 150 blood samples would be at least equal to 150 DNA samples up to 1050 (at the max of 7 DNA pet blood sample). Both proposals offer space storage for us BE's and database conservation for the Devs, just to different degrees.

Message Edited by Kevm on 08-11-2004 09:04 PM

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droid327 wrote:

well as far as data intensity I dont see why there would have to be any unique data variables on the blood except the original HAM of the animal it was taken from - thats the only unique variable for the target creature that factors into DNA, the resists and CL and stuff are all alike for any given creature type and are "templated". You'd only need to know what creature template to use and the HAM of the creature to get the DNA sample, and the system could call the template info to generate the DNA's data when you're actually extracting the DNA. You could even stack blood samples from the same creature, giving us more storage while reducing database strain - the win-win scenario we're looking for =)

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If you go with stackable style blood, you don't need any information contained in the blood samples except for the creature it came from and maybe the quality (which would be nice to know). You also don't have to tinker with sampling balance since you can make taking blood exactly as hard as sampling DNA and then just have that blood convert to DNA on a one to one basis. The only problem with storing the HAM information from the animal sampled is that the blood samples couldn't stack then because each animal has a slightly different HAM.

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Spazzers wrote:

Imagine 1000 killer eopies jumping out of a factory ready to take over the world.

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Message Edited by GMANHNC on 08-12-2004 04:05 PM