Development Cycle Archive
Thread: Test Center Update Notes Mar 5, 2004
I have to echo what everyone else is saying here. This seems a quite ridiculous change that will only make the role of a merchant far more difficult. This should never reach the live servers, it is a very bad way of solving a very minor issue. I for one have never been misled as to a bags contents. This change should only be made when items can be placed on a vendor with the option to have only a specified person able to collect them.
aibo220 Wrote:
Oh, thats another bug... Yellow dots turn to red? Extremely annoying.
yeah, that was obviously a quick fix gone wrong. I think they intended it to stop the creatures from aggroing speeder riders and knocking them off their bikes. It happened several times on places like Endor...
Tailors coloring the item is fine too.
I'm just going by how it was done on UO.
Earlier I was thinking it would be neat if the Architect could paint and install carpet in the homes. Them generics are so plain inside, and the white walls with the ctrl-l, and then the lamps... too much!
Mohr wrote:
Kevm wrote:
Do you have any idea the database capacity that would be needed if there weren't limits placed on storage? I'm against not being able to sell loaded bags on my own vendors, but there are needs to limit the amount of things everyone can horde.This wasn't addressed to me but lets put some math to this....and assumptions of course which might be wrong but its an approximation anyway right?
300,000 Registered Users....lets assume 10,000 active accounts on a given galaxy. Each item is described by a set of properties that are all typically numeric. Lets say each "item" has a max of 50 numeric properties, an ID to a picture, database ID, OwnerID, LocationOwner & Coords (if in a house), item name (50 characters maybe...never checked this). So estimating high...each item we work with is maybe 500bytes. Lets say an "average" user might have 500 items....a mega-crafter might have 5000 items? So lets assume an average of 1000 items per active account. So average item storage in database is going to be 1000 * 500bytes = 500KBytes. OK...so 10,000 users * 500Kbytes = 5Gbytes per Galaxy for item storage. So...even if I'm off in any of the above by a factor of 10 we are still talking 50Gbyte and I would hazard to say most of us have a hard drive in our personal computers that are at least this size.
I don't know what SOE is using in their server clusters but 5Gbytes is not "BIG" as far as commercial databases go. Please feel free to comment or point out where I might be mis-estimating.
I realize vendors and factories could throw a wrench in some of my numbers but having been a crafter (WS) for a while I can't imagine I ever had over 5000 items including all my houses, vendors, factory inventories, etc. I also think most "casual" non-crafters have a lot less than this (even if they kept everything they ever touched).
You forgot the fact that item names are probably unicode. Also, items probably a creator name (this is redundant, but for performance reasons and since accounts may be deleted I'd venture they store the creator name with each item instead of having a relation between item and character, which would be at least 2*4 bytes for the bridging table anyways), also in unicode. In fact, I think it would be wise to stay fairly far from third normal form in a MMORPG database, just to get extremely quick lookup. Insert and update times are probably less of an issue than selection, so some redundancy is probably in there, too. There is also the issue of relations between item and owner tables, links between items and where they are stored, and so on. It is even possible that 64 bit integers are used for id:s and serial numbers, that makes 8 bytes per id. Without making a more elaborate calculation, I'd guess each item takes at least 1k of space.
But space is probably not really an issue in itself. It's the throughput of all operations done on the fairly massive amounts of data that is the problem. This is not your everyday large corporate web site database with few inserts and perhaps a couple of hundred thousands of lookups per day. Each time somebody opens a bazaar window a select is done on all objects and calculations on time-left-on-sale is done. There's probably a join on bids to see who is the highest bidder, since some items on the bazaar are on auction. Lookups and updates are also constantly made when characters move around. Scheduled jobs do selects and updates on all objects at tick intervals. Object and character locations informations is updated on every shuttle trip and every server boundary crossing. XP gain is stored for every character as soon as it happens. At the same time, weapons dacay, their damage ranges are recalculated and stored. The list goes on, I'm sure, and all the time these things are done in transactions, sanity checks are made and things are logged. Disk activity is probably along the lines of that in a major NNTP hub that carries all newsgroups -- the disks are never ever idle.
Rogue_5 wrote:
Commodities Market/Vendors: Added error messages for attempting to sell items in trade windows, non-empty bags, and un-tradeable items like goggles and light sabres.
It has 25 % Kinetic and 15% rest
And it has no helm only bracers, chest and pants !
No helm? Bah. The helm is what we needed the most.
Is the first mission of the quest still broken and not rewarding the helm?
Can you wear a smock over the armor?
Can you wear other clothes with the armor?
Never had armor before.
Ewrrl
Take this idea back to concept please. It is excessively limiting to Merchants and our customers.
PlayeroftheDay wrote:
Rogue_5 wrote:Corellian Corvette: Fixed the case where party members would sometimes end up at 0,0,0 on the first transport after a server restart.Well SE debaters there you go, due to this information it is obvious that the Space Expansion will have an active Z axis.
The Z axis is already "active" in the game. And it's existence is well known, since developers tend to give coordinates in the x,z,y (yep, not a typo) format.
--Leshyn