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Brainstorming: Curtailing Infinite World Folder Size Growth

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Dizzard:

--- Quote from: x4000 on December 01, 2011, 09:56:52 am ---The central world index stuff contains enough to run the world map, to have NPCs be able to talk about the overlord by name

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Does an npc in one continent need to be able to talk about an overlord in another continent though? Npcs are obsessed enough with the overlords without them talking about ones across the sea too. I see your point though....to some degree npcs and the game in general will need to be aware of things happening in different continents.


--- Quote from: x4000 on December 01, 2011, 09:56:52 am ---2. Additionally, as the world gets progressively larger, it is taking up more disk space.  Mainly in terms of the per-region detail data (mostly chunk files).  This isn't a huge problem, as I noted above, but it is annoying.  If you want to periodically back up your world folder, for instance, it's going to take progressively longer and longer to back up the larger your world gets.  And the most annoying part is that most of the data that it's spending so long backing up is old areas you haven't visited in dozens of hours, and probably never will visit again.

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Even now at around lv 140 it takes a little bit longer to backup then I'd like. (would be nice to maybe see some kind of progress bar at some stage)

As for the problem, I might be far out with this....but what if each region tile had an age associated with it. A region past a certain age (time since last load) wouldn't be seen as necessary or important by the back up process. So if your world has a major error it doesn't matter if these regions are replaced by fresh ones when you back up your game. (Players could also have the ability to mark regions as special so they would stick around even if you don't go near them for a while) Although applying an age to each region and keeping track of it might be more trouble than it's worth.


--- Quote from: x4000 on December 01, 2011, 09:56:52 am ---And there could be some severe limitations in what we can do cross-continent if we ever felt like implementing trade or something, since we can't do anything with settlements that aren't in RAM because they're on a different continent.

Coming back to solo play, when you think about mission time and how that's something that causes new side missions to pop up and disappear, that's another thing that would be somewhat problematic if older continents were not stored in memory at the time.  They'd get left behind in a major way.

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This would be annoying, I'd hate to see things like trade or cross continent relations being excluded because of this. It would be a major shame and make the continents seem more like individual mini worlds.


--- Quote from: x4000 on December 01, 2011, 09:56:52 am ---What I think is that there are some "key locations" that players wind up having longer-term interest in and wanting to maintain, while the rest of the "I was just off doing some scavenging or a minor side mission" kinds of areas can be dumped because the player has already forgotten about their details anyhow (and probably wouldn't recognize them if they returned to them anyway, if it's been long enough).

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There are many regions just sitting there that I have no interest in entering because their level is now so far below mine. I think there are some lv 1 areas I haven't entered even. The only exception to low level areas is if they have a resource of some kind (and if a mob heading for my settlement is hanging out there)


--- Quote from: x4000 on December 01, 2011, 09:56:52 am ---Okay, so this is a post-disaster world, right?  But in a lot of respects the world really still is in the midst of a disaster.  In another thread, Keith and I were talking about having disasters that would strike older continents to up their region levels and basically those would purge whatever had been there.

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I'm behind this, regions that are so below my level are entirely irrelevant and serve no real purpose other than to have something there as background.


--- Quote from: x4000 on December 01, 2011, 09:56:52 am ---Well... what if we took that a lot further than just meteor strikes or flooding or whatever, and made it so that after a certain amount of time had passed that continents became volatile and started to sink into the sea?  Bam, that's a huge purge of data right there. 

Once you have something like 5-6 continents, the oldest one goes into a crisis and will sink into the sea after some amount of mission time.  What do you do in the interim?  Well, you now have the fun of trying to rescue whatever parts of the continent you care about. 

Maybe you can magic the settlement(s) from there to any of the other continents of your choosing to save them and the citybuilding stuff that was going on with them.

Or maybe it's really more of a loss of the settlement itself, and you're just saving the people, but they bring across their know-how and goods and stuff and are able to quickly rebuild an equivalent-but-different-looking settlement in a new place.

Maybe you can choose a couple of other regions to also magically move to safety of another continent, but at the cost of a unit of mission time for each region you're saving.  So if there was some really iconic overlord keep that you want to retain access to, or you've got a near-infinite cave system that you're down 15 caverns into, you could move those to safety before the rest of the continent goes down into the sea.

Or if you're not sentimental, you just let the whole thing sink into oblivion and all those older NPCs die, too.  It's up to you.

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Hmm this interests me and sort of scares me at the same time. For one thing if you're really driving home the whole "survival" aspect the whole need to evacuate npcs from settlements falling into the sea would work really well....but from a civilization point of view it might be in danger of making things look a bit weak and frivolous if not done correctly.

I'd consider myself to be extremely sentimental with things like this. So in some ways it would feel like the game is directly attacking the vision I have amassed over time. I could totally see myself with settlements called "New new new new new Mahbakk" (The capital of my current world :3) You can just see from the ":3" how much I dote on little things like settlements and the people. While other players may be all for the action I do place a lot of value in the people of my civilization and their home. The progression of my civilization and it's people are the main reason I feel motivated to go exploring and defeat the overlords.

On the other hand I can definitely see the entertainment value with all the evacuating npcs and trying to save peoples lives from impending doom. Surviving with your npcs could make those npcs all the more special.

c4sc4:
What about just deleting data for any regions that are 20+ levels below the current civ level? There really is little need to ever go back to those levels, especially because any tiered items in those levels would be worthless. It could fit in with the cataclysm where those tiles would be destroyed, and on the world map they could have a special tile, like a glowing red cracks or something. That tile would essentially be un-enterable and just allow for ways to cross on the world map. Special things like settlements and overlords could be saved from this and perhaps a 3x3 square of tiles around each settlement so you could fight of rampaging monsters.

x4000:

--- Quote from: Dizzard on December 01, 2011, 02:27:26 pm ---As for the problem, I might be far out with this....but what if each region tile had an age associated with it. A region past a certain age (time since last load) wouldn't be seen as necessary or important by the back up process. So if your world has a major error it doesn't matter if these regions are replaced by fresh ones when you back up your game. (Players could also have the ability to mark regions as special so they would stick around even if you don't go near them for a while) Although applying an age to each region and keeping track of it might be more trouble than it's worth.
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Well, that would help with backup speed but not much beyond that really.


--- Quote from: Dizzard on December 01, 2011, 02:27:26 pm ---Hmm this interests me and sort of scares me at the same time. For one thing if you're really driving home the whole "survival" aspect the whole need to evacuate npcs from settlements falling into the sea would work really well....but from a civilization point of view it might be in danger of making things look a bit weak and frivolous if not done correctly.

I'd consider myself to be extremely sentimental with things like this. So in some ways it would feel like the game is directly attacking the vision I have amassed over time. I could totally see myself with settlements called "New new new new new Mahbakk" (The capital of my current world :3) You can just see from the ":3" how much I dote on little things like settlements and the people. While other players may be all for the action I do place a lot of value in the people of my civilization and their home. The progression of my civilization and it's people are the main reason I feel motivated to go exploring and defeat the overlords.

On the other hand I can definitely see the entertainment value with all the evacuating npcs and trying to save peoples lives from impending doom. Surviving with your npcs could make those npcs all the more special.

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The sentiment of exactly that civilization is part of why I was suggesting just transplanting the entire region.  It's also possible that old regions that "sink into the sea" could actually work a little differently than I was proposing.  They could literally sink into the sea except for the key locations (settlements, maybe a few other things), which stay on the surface and then there's some mud flats that is level-less and that you can't venture into, which takes the place of the actual land that had been there.  It still lets us dump the old regions, and the metadata would be very small, but it wouldn't completely remove the old landmass.

So there are several ways we could go.  I figure that actually transplanting the region onto a new continent with higher-level stuff around it would be the most interesting way to do it because then you could actually keep doing side missions that would help that settlement, so that you could grow it further.  Frankly, maybe a way to do a "settlement swap" so that your best settlement carries forward and then you have to rescue the few strangers from the new settlement that is about to sink into the sea, would be good. ;)

FallingStar:
Wanted to post a few thoughts here.  Ahhh the issues with infinite worlds and finite systems.

First off, a few alternatives that went swimming through my mind.  The first one was what I first thought of when I even heard of continents, before hearing about the cleanup need.  I was thinking that perhaps old continents would get abstracted in some form, rather like in AOE3 or Civ Colonization, where a European city exists, but you don't actually actively play there.  Its there for trade or trophies, but not actually a place that you go and adventure.  Probably only for the "oldest" civilizations (ie 5-6 continents ago), but at least it would keep them in a way, for attached players.

Another thought as I read through was a mutable world system.  The chunks/ regions on old continents would slowly be changed/ transformed/ altered by the saved settlement there.  So you could still go there and check things out, but it would be new regions on the old landmass.  I think the trick would be saving the regions players cared about (like if there was one that players had used the shrink/ enlarge spell to add trophies).  Or the settlements themselves.  I'm not sure if this would retain enough of the flavor of a "legacy" continent to justify the effort, and it wouldn't save as much on the world.dat probably.

If it does go to a more cataclysm based system, I think it would be a bit sad to lose those old cities /settlements /whatnot.  It is a more "well why did I save you and why save these people if the same happens to them" thing that impinges on the infinite world satisfaction.  A player does ultimately want to save the princess, even if we are told she's in another castle a number of times.

Bluddy's twist helps on that, though I'd chip in a few things.  First it seems a bit odd for the Overlord to do something like this, as they're stockpiling and the like, seems like they're more robber barons than trying to wipe out humanity by drowning us.  Also would make them seem a bit more like puppets of some other over-overlord to get them all to do this to various continents.  I guess rewording lores and the like would help.  An alternate twist might be that overlords were maintaining the continent, in their oppressive way, and in killing them the continent now decays.  Kind of blur the line between what is good or evil.

Either way if there is permanent continent loss, and the idea is seeking out a valley without wind . . I think that its important that it actually exists.  Not as something eternally dangled in front of us, but perhaps as an epic sidequest or whatever after killing an overlord, being able to seek out and claim that trophy continent.  Perhaps you could garden the regions to particular chunk types (mentioned that idea before but seems to work here, and would help refresh old regions/chunks on an otherwise unchanging place without feeling like you were destroying them for the player).  The player might also be able to move the populations or entire settlements over, etc.  In this case, even if there was an area that was permanent, it is at least finite, so is less of a long term issue.  And it has a player satisfaction of grabbing that long term goal, even if there's still things they can change to it /move to it/ help or hinder other parts of the world to grow your own chunk.  But in essence transferring over the emotional attachment to a limited space that can stay eternally, and grabbing the chunks of old sentiment to save as well.

Anyways, so a boatload of brainstorming thoughts, hope some help somewhere.

TNSe:
Mudsquares, maybe settlements after a while when civ level becomes significantly higher, simply take control of these squares in a way such that everything hostile in there is removed, and things that can be gathered is gathered.

If anything, these generic tiles have less information tied to them, and will improve compression.

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