Cities And Housing Archive
Thread: why cant player cities not be leveled out ????
Errikgoogle for "swg player city roads" and you can prob find it.
The flat terrain of NPC cities are hard-coded into the landscape. Flattening the land, in the manner that bases and spawns do, actually overwrites the existing landscape code on a temporary basis. Basically it superimposes the new landscape over the hard-coded one. What this does is create big pockets of lag since it becomes necessary to load both the hard-coded one and the temporary one.
Giving Player Cities, which are intended to be more permanent "structures", the ability to use this type of flattening would be a laggy nightmare. Using my own system as an example (which is average), it's very easy for me to tell when I'm coming up on a faction base if I'm driving around. My fps drops to about 3, everything freezes up for a moment, the landscape flickers and then *poof!* there's a base off in the distance as everything returns to normal. Now multiply that by a 450m area of land....
It's not that it's impossible to do, it's just that it would cause so much of a strain to load it would make things unplayable for many.
GlargTheKelfn wrote:
dev's posted that it takes too much processing to flatten out the land. that's why we won't get roads for player cities.
google for "swg player city roads" and you can prob find it.
Actually this is called "we are to lazy to actually do this."
Pusling wrote:I still cant see why its so hard to flatten the 450 m radius around citycenter, and remove rocks and trees...Actually im pretty sure that a flat landscape will create lesser Lag then hills, rocks and trees..Like XwingRogue3 sayed..... Actually this is called "we are to lazy to actually do this."
Acctually, almost all lag in SWG is because of client/server communication issues and isnt acutal hardware lag.
Belive it or not, unless you increase your screen resolution or other details there is the exact same number of pixels on your screen. Dosnt matter if your in the middle of a feild or in coronet with 500 otehr players, same amount of pixels being drawn on your screen.
That being said, if they were to flatten landscapes in player cities, if they did it the way they do lairs and faction bases, it would cause HUGE amounts of lag because the server would have to send two packages of terrain detail for the city area, and then your client would have to load the two of them. It wouldnt work, it would be horrible. Some planets *cough* Dantooine *cough* are all ready gigantic lag zones because of all the faction bases, and mission lairs that people place on there. (And if your remember before player cities, Dantooine was not laggy before everyone and their brother started grinding and ploping down bases)
Now, if they were to actually change the terrain files server side to be flat when a city is placed, that would solve the huge lag issues because of the terrain. However, once a city goes under, it would be very hard to return that landscape to orginal condition, because even if they backup the orginal terrain files (which they should of course) it would be hard to just return the area where the city went away to the orginal condition. Personally I dont want planets being full of huge flat areas where cities use to be.
You nailed it on the head, Oriz.
Let's ignore the fact that some cities like the irregular terrain of their cities for a moment, and that a completely flat area would make river and lake banks hideous looking. Yes they could make it so that when a Player City is placed it levels out the terrain of the city radius, but it would *still* require that flat layer to be superimposed over the hard-coded landscape which is the same regardless of server. Your computer would have to load both the hard-coded terrain *and* the superimposed terrain, even if it is the same number of pixels, because both layers would be in existence even if you couldn't see one of them.
Besides, roads are texture jobs. One solution I find is doing a super imposed road texture within the city radius limits. This would cause an extra bit of texture to be loaded and constantly written by the engine, though, which would also slow down the game experience (for example, I'm playing with low quality textures).
And when you come next to a faction base, you can usually see trees and rocks standing in the air. The debris is still there, but the land is temporarily hidden.
well, when we did our city, it did just the opposite. For some reason our city now has a huge cliff (corellia mind u) that appeared after placing a few structures right around the city hall. This not only makes our city not look like a city, but also causes alot of limitation on where our houses can be placed because on the up side of the cliff nothing can be placed cause its slopeing down gradually to rejoin the terrain level it was originally at.
Not to mention all those darn 'condemned structures' that are blocking good portions of our city. The purge needs to happen, and they need to giv us the ability to temporarily modify the land to place a structure imo.