AodhanW;707116 said:Creating patches of 'land' that players can get to place homes, or that owners of cities can 'purchase' to add on to their towns as instanced neighborhoods.
You are aware that most MMO's that HAVE homes (UO being the sole exception of which I am aware) have those homes instanced? See EQII.Rocko Wang;707265 said:The typical reason for doing instance in MMO is so that there is less conflict in competing for the dungeon resources on a shard with a lot of players. Creating copies of the same dungeon for different players/groups makes sense. Why would you want to create patches of land as instance just so people can place homes?
For that purpose, there are plenty of space on the regular maps, why not just do it on a regular map? It is much easier that way.
Kamron;707348 said:Yes and no.
You would have to instance the whole map, but you can use blocker items to prevent people from walking outside of that area. You can also limit the size of the map starting from 0,0 to wherever you want the map to stop, and the server will not let them walk outside of the map perimeter.
I suggest using the (los)blocker items.
Rocko Wang;707383 said:It is not the size of the instance that matters for CPU load, but the items/spawns in that instance. So if you instance the whole trammel and only have one player placing a house inside, compare to you instance Tokuno but have 20 players placing houses inside, the latter costs more server resource. Of course if you want to decor/spawn the instance, a smaller map would cosume less decor/spawn to be playable.
Rocko Wang;707407 said:Multi is an invisible item controlling a group of items not much different from the static items you used to build static towns. If you don't freeze the static town into the map, you got almost the same number of item counts. If you use Knive's townhouse to make the static towns dwellable, then the difference is very minimal.
It is different though if you freeze the static town into the map. That would save you a lot of item counts. But in case you are doing instance, you may not be able to freeze them since you expect they are different for each instance (unless you want the house to look identical in each instance minus the decor).
That's why I think of the following preference of building house in terms of lowering server load:
build static house on static map, use knive's townhouse, freeze house into map > build static house on static map, use knive's townhouse, not freeze them = player build house on static map >= build static house on instanced map, no freeze = player build house on instanced map
The latter two will have overhead due to you can not use the default saving/loading routine. But if you really have to go the instance route, then that's what you have to deal with with care. Though to be honest, if you don't want the instance to expire (so players' house will not poof), somewhere on the static map still sounds like a better choice to me.
RegisterMap( 5, 1, 1, 7168, 4096, 0, "TrammelDupe", MapRules.TrammelRules );
public static Map TrammelDupe { get { return m_Maps[5]; } }
Rocko Wang;707518 said:I can't stop thinking about the practical question though: is the player base really crowded to a point you really need more layers of maps, while the need could have been satisfied by somewhere on the 5 existing maps?
To not expire an instance (save everything in it, and upon server restart, reinitialize the map, and load stuff back into it), just makes the instance no difference to one of the 5 static maps. Sure you got more copies of the same map, as many as the code allows you.
Of course technically all that you wanted to try are feasible. There is no limit to how fancy or creative you want to make it.
AodhanW;707576 said:The idea is for areas like the players home to not initialize until they go *INTO* it. So until its occupied, it doesn't exist.
AodhanW;707576 said:Don't want houses on the primary map.. At all.
Rocko Wang;707592 said:... when you instance (technical term is, register a copy of) that particular portion ...