Building limit to improve server performance

I saw this review on steam and I agree, im sharing it with you!

"There is no limit in how many bases or construction blocks you can produce so the server probably are over tasked or become unresponsive therefore downgrading the player experience to rubbish.

To fix this:
1: Limit the number of blocks per player in a clan he can build.; and put center block which will have a center of influence.
2: make sure the laws of gravity are respected, sandstone would be limited to 4 high, next tier 6 high, next tier 8 high, there is a reason why in medieval times they were no skyscrapers, structural integrity…
There is probably other fix but I think the number of instance of objects per server should be limited."

4 Likes

This would be great for Pvp maybe, but Pve or single player it wouldn’t make any sense. I think it would make Pvp more upsetting because you cannot reinforce your base. There needs to be other ways to fix the performance. It’s a building game too and limiting what you can do is annoying. Having a land-claim block to start with and you build off of that all you want, would make more sense as you couldn’t spam crap all over the map. Maybe you have 3 land-claims or bases, but you should be able to build as big and wide as you want.

It would be nice if when loading in, all pieces were drawn once and then they didn’t have to be loaded again, not sure if that’s possible. Or the draw distance larger so you can go away and come back without the game drawing it all back in so much.

The building seems to be the best part of the game atm even with the performance issues.

2 Likes

Hmm, na. There is a patch on testlive right now that directly addresses performance with player buildings. It’s a pretty major improvement too.

3 Likes

Yes, no building restrictions for solo players! CE is “Minecraft with realistic graphics” for me, don’t dare to spoil my game!!! :face_with_symbols_over_mouth:

1 Like

Nobody wanted to climb that many stairs just to get to bed? :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

5 Likes

8 foundations stacked in height? Damn, my pillar base will be truly unraidable then :smile:

Instead of limiting, why not change the way a building decays.
Take away the time limit, and have a dmg per minute hour decay. Realistic, and would require some resources to repair. Would eliminate the refreshers, as they would have to farm mats to repair the natural decay, instead of just logging on for 5 minutes at their bases every week.

To make the math work, would only have to use .15% of hp per hour for the damage rate. Only for building pieces (foundations, walls, etc.) placeables, craft stations and other item with under 10,000 hp would have current decay timer set up, and have 28 days. This would make everything get a 28 day decay timer after being placed. Just an idea. If you want a huge base, one of the things needed is upkeep. Be tied to a slider for SP games. Default is off except on Officials.

1 Like

And to add a little ease, have a masons/builders bench. Has a radius, and can put mats in to repair automatically. Higher tier Thrall reduces costs. The idea is not to add more time by manually repairing, but maintaining by farming the mats to up keep your castle/fortresses.

1 Like

Shouldn’t need to limit what players can build as once the testlive patch goes live, we shoudl have these changes:

Building Optimizations

  • We have been working on improving the loading times and general optimizations for buildings. Conan Exiles doesn’t have any limits for how big you can build and we want you to put these changes through their paces. *Please note that this is for structural buildings only, and not placeables such as torches, campfires, crafting * stations and doors.

Loading in buildings has gone from this:

To this:

As Funcom have said in the latest Testlive patchnotes.

So even with the testlive, a good pvp defence would be building spamming your base, so when the enemy comes into the area, they get a bunch of lag, while you get to go chop them up.

Online CE really should have some sort of restriction. More in PvP than PvE, but PvE has issues from griefers, so they need some kind of restriction, in my opinion.

but when you think about it, they are already. Because of performance issues, they have to limit how many people can play on a server, right? I’m not sure what would be ideal for PvP and PvE servers on player count, but it seems like the really small numbers I see now are not healthy. If you want some really good PvP, you need a lot of people, spread across multiple clans. In PvE, it just gets really lonely when nobody else is on the server, because the server can’t handle the load of 3 players.

So let me ask this… on a PvE world, if I were to build 50 bases with 100k pieces each and have 400 npc guards at each one, would that be considered ok? Would the server be even playable for anyone, including myself? It may seem excessive, but I plan another game, where the servers are over 10 years old now and you would not believe what a single person can build in 10+ years. When I enter the local region of some of these mega craftsmen, my FPS drops to single digits, even at the lowest settings of graphics.

So I guess my goal here is to prevent this kind of extreme object spam, which prevents the game from being fun. It also prevent Funcom from fixing minor bugs and adding new content, because all their efforts will get thrown into optimizations. Just look at the last 2 DLCs. The opted out of making any new placables, because of the extra load it will make on the servers/clients. So not throttling up front causes a back end throttle anyway.

With the decay system as is, one could. You only need to run by and “touch” the claim area of all bases. Running the map on PVE/PVE-C takes 1 hour tops, not even using obbies. So once a week one could “maintain” those bases. Dropping Honey in the feeding bins would take care of thrall timers. PVP, may be hard as people would have multiple targets. But his post is specific to PVE, so it is doable.

For the record, i am against limitations as well. But changing the “mechanics” of structures is to me something that should be on the table. Decay HP instead of timer, stability weight when towering upwards, etc…

Buildindg do not couse lag. Drop fps or load time yes but lag no

Florin, When I run into the local area of my largest base, my computer does indeed lag. Jerky movement, rubberbanding kind of thing, until the base finishes drawing. This is after the improvements they made for building performance on testlive. It was much worse before those improvements.

When FPS drops enough, that in itself is lag.

For decay, having hitpoints drop is one way to handle it. I have to say though… it is a painful thing to keep up on, if every building piece has it’s own individual decay. If all connected pieces had a collective “structure HP”, which could be maintained, that would work better. Otherwise, you have many hidden pieces you could never repair.

My other game: Wurm Online. Back in the day, we used to have to repair each building piece. It was maddening. Now we have these deeded chunks of land that we pay for, based on the size of the land we claim. You pay ingame coins to keep the deed current. If you fail to pay, all of your buildings and stuff on that land starts to decay… If you catch it in time, before the deed expires, you can pay the deed fees, then run around repairing every wall, floor, ceiling, etc.

The ingame coin cost is hard to maintain without buying coins with real life cash. It is possible, but you have to really grind to make it work. We generally just consider it our monthly dues to play the game.

People that want really big bases and lots of them end up helping to fund the game’s future development :slight_smile:

Not saying I want pay deeds here. Just describing that other game a bit for context, since I reference it frequently.

In that game, there are 4 things that really impact performance, in order of severity, from most to least:

  1. How many player characters group up in a local region, generally for major events, like a world boss hunt. When we hit 100+, it gets really rough on older computers, but most new gaming rigs power through it on decent level graphics settings.

  2. Lighting. When someone places hundreds of dynamic light sources around their deed, it will bring your client to it’s knees, if you don’t use a setting int he client to limit the number of dynamic lights it will render.

  3. Building objects

  4. Animals. We can capture and breed virtually every animal in the game. Having hundreds clustered together in a small area makes an impact, but not as bad as the above.

I know they are two different games and on vastly different game engines (Java vs UE4), but having experienced things in Wurm that were rough on performance just leads me to try avoiding some of the same things here. We probably just have to go through all the same struggles as a way for the devs to learn what works best here. But one thing that was very evident there was that constant poor performance was killing the player base.

Wurm is the game Notch co-developed, before leaving to go create Minecraft.

I agree, which is why there should be a mason work bench, that works like a thrall pot. Any resources that need fixed would "draw from this daily right after server restarts on official. Maybe the decay is done by day. IE, every restart, if a piece existed, it will lose x% of the HP.
T3 6%,T2 4%, t1 2%. Maybe create a mason repair items as well, that combines 1 iron ore,3 stone, and 2 wood gives you 5 repair items. This repairs consuming 1 for every 2% needed on items. And it would be tied to only the most core building items (foundations,pillars, fence foundations, and even vaults). Those are always needed to build a base if i am not mistaken. Anything else that can be placed without these core items (craft stations, pens, wheel’s, some decor) would have the current set up we have now with decay timer. All other items that require a structure to attach to need no decay, as they vanish if the core structures vanish due to stability. Just spit balling :confused:

Pvp needs limits on the number of building pieces per player and per tribe. The tribe amount could be triple for example. Tribes of 1 person would still be limited to the number allowed per individual. Same limits go for thralls and pets. I’m on a server that has massive area criss-crossed with t1 foundations, while massive HERDS of pets stand guard outside massive bases. C’mon funcom devs, how could you not foresee the problem? The animals once roamed the lands in great numbers lagging the server, now pets do the same. And btw, allowing players to pull a king rhino out of their pocket to fight is just disturbing.

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