Politician Archive

Thread: Player Cities.. What we really need:

ZenMaster
Wed Jan 21, 2004 7:46 pm
#1
This is something of a general problem that I have with the way that housing has been implemented in this game. It effects our cities in a big way. It's got to do with a feel of player houses and the entire player housing system. It just feels artificial and separate from the world we live in.


Take a look at Bestine, for example:

http://www.imagedump.com/index.cgi?pick=setandget&tp=31390&poll_id=0&category_id=19&warned=y


Now isn't that just the coolest thing you've seen? Wouldn't you love to be able to sit on a nearby ridge and overlook your city? From where I am in that picture to the other side of Bestine is about 800m.


For player housing, you're lucky to have buildings appear right as you're about to enter the space they inhabit. Then they go away if you get further than 100-200m from them for more than about 5 seconds. You don't get this feel of a real city.. Just some sort of lantern effect. You can only see what's in your immediate vicinity.


Another thing about player cities is that when you use the ctrl+m map, you can see players inside structures. If I'm in bestine and hit ctrl+m, I can see white NPCs and blue/purple/red PCs all over the city. I can see a group of little triangles indicating people are inside the cantina or in the starport. It allows me to see where the activity is in the city and to join it.


With player buildings, it takes forever for the houses, themselves to load... But none of the contents load until 5 seconds to 1 minute after you enter into them. Only then do you get to see if someone's home. Same goes for player run city structures like the city hall and cantina. This forces gathering areas into the streets and away from things like the local cantinas. It makes it harder for local merchants to do buisness unless they're registered with the planetary map... and if there's more than one vendor, the names overlap and become incomprehensible.


Side notes on things like this are gardens and other such things. If you remember the teasers that the devs gave us:

http://starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com/content.jsp?page=Player%20City%20Gardens%20Tatooine


See if that looks any different to you than what is currently in place? I remember being all excited about these gardens for my city. But instead... we have these nasty things that have clunky terraced bases made of stone, or something. They only partially resemble the images in the above link...


Honestly... I think this should be our prime goal. To push for the devs to change the way that the game system and the servers and the client handle loading of buildings and things within them. As far as the ability to resign, and whatnot.. well... I don't see why people worry... They can just drop all their skills if they want the points back. If people are upset by this, then they can get together and get a new mayor. If not.. then the guy/gal just gets a few extra emails every week. A large portion of what makes this a problem is cross server swap ghost towns. But all of that will settle out.


Some of these things are so crucial to the functioning of a PLAYER city.


I'll make a list:


  1. Houses load at a larger distance.. This will solve the problem of people on bikes simply blowing right through a town and having it all load behind them. I want to be able to stand on a nearby ridge and take in my town from a distance. I'm sure we all share this desire.

  2. Load contents of houses. In some manner, I think it's important to load at least SOME of the contents houses in a town. Things like NPCs and PCs are crucial. Items can still load on demand as I just don't think there's any way around this... Though I would like the system to respond faster with item loads when people enter houses.

  3. Fix gardens and add in more static player city content such as walls and more diverse building types. There's been plenty of threads on this topic... roads.. walls.. etc... But without the above additions, I really feel that adding walls and roads won't help us much. We'll still have this disjointed feel to a city as stuff pops in and out of your view screen when it's obviously withing your line of site.

I realize there are technical limitations on these things... But I believe that a clever solution can be reached by the developers. Look at the magnificence of that above image of bestine and you can clearly see that the devs really know how to put a city together and make it look cool.. both within it and from afar.


I want to be able to stand on a hill overlooking my city and say "Tel Tertius... You will never find a more rechid hive of scum and vilany."


Know what I mean?


-Og'din, Mayor of some town on lok.....

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