Droid Engineer Archive

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Blatz wrote:

- The BLL would then be capable of moving items from one Identical house to another Identical house on the same or different planet, both houses being ownedby the droid's master.

- Items moved would be left in the identical locationthey originally where picked up from.

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• How does the server track item placement inside a house? If item placement is bound specifically to the house, and is assigned a location coordinate (X,Y,Z,) within the house, then this may not be a factor. If item placement is bound to a world wide location coordinate, such as being bound to a specific world coordinate, then this would more then likely not be possible without converting everything over to a different system.


• How does the server track vendor placement? Same issue as above, with item placement. There is also the issue of items listed on the vendor being 'lost' in a similar fashion as the long standing 'crossing a server border' issue with goods disappearing from your inventory after purchase. I think that the only way around this one would be to not allow movement of a house with an active vendor.


• What kind of strain would it put on the server to move that volume of items from one server zone to another? This one has a large potential for error, unless all of the items could be moved instantaneously to the new location, without causing zoning issues.


• What about the issue of exploitation? This would have the potential to cause major issues for CSR, in the case of the owner of a building up and moving the entire structure, without informing the people who are on the admin list. This may be a minor issue, since the same person could simple grab everything out of the house and run, but it still is an issue to think about.


• How would the transition occur? This would need to be set up in a way that it could not be exploited. If the identical house method was used, then the droid owner would need to designate the house to be moved, travel to the new house, and then assign the droid to move the items. Any other way would leave too much room for a person to load the droid up, delete the original house, and then leave the items in 'limbo' allowing for storage of the items without taking up any 'physical' room besides the use of the droid.

I've got a few others, but I think that you can see the point that I am trying to get accross. Its one of those suggestions that would make the lives of many players much more simple, but would be extremely complex from a development stand point.

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Drashk wrote:

This is one of those features that we all would love to see added to the BLL, however I think that there might be a lot of technical issues with it, such as -

• How does the server track item placement inside a house? If item placement is bound specifically to the house, and is assigned a location coordinate (X,Y,Z,) within the house, then this may not be a factor. If item placement is bound to a world wide location coordinate, such as being bound to a specific world coordinate, then this would more then likely not be possible without converting everything over to a different system.


• I would think it works with the position inside the house as a) items get loaded sperate from the rest of the game world and b) the option to move items to the maintenance terminal


• How does the server track vendor placement? Same issue as above, with item placement. There is also the issue of items listed on the vendor being 'lost' in a similar fashion as the long standing 'crossing a server border' issue with goods disappearing from your inventory after purchase. I think that the only way around this one would be to not allow movement of a house with an active vendor.


• Vendor placement is something entirely different than the item tracking i guess, otherwise moving vendors would not be such a big problem, maybe it could be restriced to private only buildings, or somthing like it


• What kind of strain would it put on the server to move that volume of items from one server zone to another? This one has a large potential for error, unless all of the items could be moved instantaneously to the new location, without causing zoning issues.


• propably to much to make it instant, without vendors it would be 400 Items and with potential 400 * 4000 (400 Full Master merchant vendor)


• What about the issue of exploitation? This would have the potential to cause major issues for CSR, in the case of the owner of a building up and moving the entire structure, without informing the people who are on the admin list. This may be a minor issue, since the same person could simple grab everything out of the house and run, but it still is an issue to think about.


• How would the transition occur? This would need to be set up in a way that it could not be exploited. If the identical house method was used, then the droid owner would need to designate the house to be moved, travel to the new house, and then assign the droid to move the items. Any other way would leave too much room for a person to load the droid up, delete the original house, and then leave the items in 'limbo' allowing for storage of the items without taking up any 'physical' room besides the use of the droid.

I've got a few others, but I think that you can see the point that I am trying to get accross. Its one of those suggestions that would make the lives of many players much more simple, but would be extremely complex from a development stand point.

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I know this idea has been brought up before, though its been quite a while. I really like it myself, and anything that adds some inherent functions in droids (and gives BLL's a use) even better.

Greetings,

This is an excellent idea to add functions to the Binary Load Lifter. A suggestion though to help resolve some of the inherent problems with having the droid move one's house.

Create a new item/schematic called the cargo pallet and make them creatable by architects. Make them one use/time limited items that are destroyed after the use, with perhaps a 24 to 28 hour life span. Then, give them the capacity to hold 100 items. If you want your items moved from location A. to location B. you drop one or more pallets outside your house. You would then empty your house into the pallet(s). Once any items are in the pallet they can only be moved by the BLL. After the pallets have been filled you call the BLL and you should get a radial menu option to order the droid to move a pallet. You should then be prompted for a WP for the destination for the pallet. After the command is given the droid and pallet vanish like a droid with a maintenance module does. In about 20 to 30 minutes you receive a system message reporting the completion of the task.

This eliminates the need to worry about positioning of items in the house since the system would not have to keep track of that. It limits the possibility of being exploited for extra storage, how many people are going to risk putting items in something that WILL go poof in 24 hours? It also makes sense, the BLL is a walking forklift, how in the world is it going to pick up lamps, rugs, etc. without crushing/destroying them.

This also has some interesting possibilities for merchants. I can see a merchant using a pallet to move stock from their home or factory farm to their shop, then meeting the droid there and unloading the items into the vendor. There are actually all sorts of possible uses for the pallet BLL combination. Delivery services come to mind as well, to have a BLL drop off a pallet to a customer from the crafter's workshop full of that order he/she asked for.

Just some ideas...

/kowtow
Typheon

• How does the server track item placement inside a house? If item placement is bound specifically to the house, and is assigned a location coordinate (X,Y,Z,) within the house, then this may not be a factor. If item placement is bound to a world wide location coordinate, such as being bound to a specific world coordinate, then this would more then likely not be possible without converting everything over to a different system. I would hazard a guess that placement is bound specifically to the house, but you are correct there may be a technical issue with this. I also had a requirement for identical houses at each end, so the coordinates from the source house could be reused with modications.
  
• How does the server track vendor placement? Same issue as above, with item placement. There is also the issue of items listed on the vendor being 'lost' in a similar fashion as the long standing 'crossing a server border' issue with goods disappearing from your inventory after purchase. I think that the only way around this one would be to not allow movement of a house with an active vendor.Vendors would I think not be moved,too many issues with map registration etc. In my initial proposal thesource house is not taken down,part of the reason that you need to have two houses up for this to be able to work without a lot of code changes. Since the original house still stands the vendor would remain in place after the move and it would be up to the owner/admin to take care of moving it.
  
• What kind of strain would it put on the server to move that volume of items from one server zone to another? This one has a large potential for error, unless all of the items could be moved instantaneously to the new location, without causing zoning issues. I had thought something like 24 hours for the move to happen, during which time both source and destination house are locked and cannot be entered/moved/taken down etc. This should allow more than enough server time I would hope.
  
• What about the issue of exploitation? This would have the potential to cause major issues for CSR, in the case of the owner of a building up and moving the entire structure, without informing the people who are on the admin list. This may be a minor issue, since the same person could simple grab everything out of the house and run, but it still is an issue to think about. Again the fact that both houses are in a locked state should prevent this. We are really only talking about moving contents from one place to another, not the houses themselves.
  
• How would the transition occur? This would need to be set up in a way that it could not be exploited. If the identical house method was used, then the droid owner would need to designate the house to be moved, travel to the new house, and then assign the droid to move the items. Any other way would leave too much room for a person to load the droid up, delete the original house, and then leave the items in 'limbo' allowing for storage of the items without taking up any 'physical' room besides the use of the droid. Yes you pretty much have it down as I had envisioned, where you designate both source and destination houses, and then give the order to move the contents. Then both houses are frozen and you must wait until the email comes saying the move is done. From a coding perspective, assuming the item location is tied to the house I would imagine it would be a simple task of moving one table to another database table but I'm sure this is oversimplification.

I have tried to come up with a proposal in whichthe devs concerns would be addressed, exploits would not be possible, and the code monkeys would be able to accomplish such a change without undo hardships. Thanks to all who have responded to this thread there are some good ideas being put forth here.

I am one of those people who puts a fair bit of effort into decorating my houses and postioning things just right. It darn near breaks my heart when I have to move someplace else because the guild moved, etc. The devs are always incouraging us to be creative, so perhaps we can have this aid to make our virtual lives a little easier.