Heading in the wrong direction when it comes to building size and decor

Conan Exiles General Discussion Feedback
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I understand that everyone in game forums in an expert on game design, but you misunderstand the client-server paradigm.

The server plays absolutely no part in animating a torch at all. It does not do anything except send the information that there is a torch object there. The client does all the animation and lighting. It might as well be a static item as far as the server is concerned. At the most the server could be aware of the lighting (extremely extremely unlikely) but the animation? Absolutely not!

You said “animated station” separately:

animated work stations cause lag, animated thralls cause lag.

So I wasn’t sure what you meant by animated work stations.

There is no reason for the server to have anything at all to do with animations of a thrall at a station, and I would be extremely surprised if the game were designed that way.

  • In the case of the torches I am 100% sure the server does not do any part of animating the torch. Even if it did, it would simply synchronize the animation between clients, which would take a trivial amount of resources, and which there would be no reason to do because different clients don’t need the torch animations synchronized. The client does the torch animation.

  • As for thralls at stations I am 80% sure the server plays no part (there’s not even collision detection on them) and if it does play any part it’s trivial and takes almost no resources.

  • Idle animations on thralls not at stations? It’s possible the server synchronizes these so all people see the same thing. Like telling the client what dance a dancer is doing. This would not take much in the way of server resources. The overwhelming bulk of the work as far as doing the animation is done in the client.

In a game, client-server communication is optimized to be the absolute bare minimum. The client is trusted to an extent even in server-authoritative games. I don’t think Conan Exiles is even server-authoritative for most things. Conan is an older game which has to optimize how little is sent from the server to the client to work at all. It doesn’t send each frame of an animation. In fact, no 3D game has ever worked that way I’m pretty confident to say.

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I’ll try to make an example.

Server sends [item number for animated lighted torch] at x, y, z (in world coordinates not screen coordinates - the client will handle looking around etc)

So let’s assume you wanted 1) every player to see the same torch flicker at the same time (no reason for this but let’s assume) 2) all torches to be slightly different from each other in their flickering

You could add a random number 0 through [number of frames-1] to each object when it is created and send this number to the client as well.

So assuming 10 frames, then the client could play frame 0 when the game timer/clock is ending in 0 on a default torch (marked 0) and play frame 9 when the timer is ending in 0 on torches marked 9.

So to achieve all that the only additional thing you have to send is the [magic number] of which flickering it has.

(sorry a little drunk I hope there are no mistakes, just trying to explain)

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Then how do torches lag the server?
You can crash a server using enough torches.
You can lag a server with ornamental trees, or sacrificial stones.

Which would only happen if they had identical rigs.

Because of different GPUs. But your GPU is just rendering the scene your game is painting based on the numbers fed to it by the server.

The server keeps track of all placeables, not just yours, or what your rig is rendering. So it’s keeping track of every flicking torch, animated work bench, animated thrall, animated ornament, NPCs ect on the entire server. Bob not at his base? No? Server still has to track all his stuff in his keeps. Is it rendering that flickering torch? No. But it is keeping track that there is a torch, it is on, it will have an animation, it has a color.

The game is running on the server sending your game the info it needs to send the info your GPU needs to render the scene. Your GPU may render the flickering flame, but the server has to give your game the info about the torch to tell your GPU how to render it. .

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I’m no expert on this stuff but I know when someone logs in who has a large and placeable heavy base. The whole server feels the lag from them rendering everything thing in.

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I am all the way with what @Kapoteeni said once.

“survive, build, decorate”

But let’s take it from the beginning, shall we?
Why people build big?
I can see 2 reasons in it.
1st the game has a magnificent building system and a challenging terrain, so it’s really logical that no matter the needs, building is a big part and very pleasant in this game, there for we cannot blame people for playing the game.
2nd Long live in a server. When a player has spend literally thousands of hours in the same server 2 options exist. Build more and train more thralls. Again you cannot blame a player for acting this way.

These above are the root of all the problems that follow. For both of these problems the player has minimum responsibility, the greatest is on devs when it comes to official gaming.

So establishing building limitation is not the answer, neither punishing players who play the game.

Devs must scratch their head and find a fair balance. Simply you cannot sell more building items and more decoratives and punish players for using them.

I would like this community, if possible, when a member opens a topic that’s really important for discussion, to remember what’s been discussed in here. @Kikigirl please upload your topic about the importance of official servers on game designing. Because this topic is addressed again to official servers lack of designing.

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I believe you’re referring to this? Official Servers - What do you think?

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Thanks @Kikigirl . That’s another example, another complaint on the hundreds we have read so far about the official servers. From pve to pvp multiple complaints exist and the plurality is “building”. The greatest problem that follows building is “performance” . These 2 are vastly balancing together, but sucrifice the one to have the other is the only “solution” we had so far. Surely the building aspect can be catastrophic, since too many players in the past were creating highways on official servers, so the Zendesk system did a good job in this part, but this solution no matter how promising started, players find the way to bring this solution to the grounds as well. Multiple false reports lead to multiple unfair bans and i don’t believe anyone had a benefit from this.
Official servers are a pilot model of servers, not how servers should act, everyone who rent a server have multiple options, but i believe that so far i haven’t played in a private server that balanced the game better. So this pilot must be upgraded somehow and balance the chasm that’s creating between building and performance. Don’t get me wrong, i don’t turn my back to the cheating plague that pvp has, but the chasm between building and performance must be solved “yesterday”.
The rules? Although i agree to the plurality, i believe they lack as well, to some they are strict and to some other parts not clear enough. I am not against the Grey zone, but i find it bigger than it should.
A player now on official servers will play only with fear and fear is no fun!

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Is it possible to split the official PvE servers in biomes, each biome acting as an independant server? Wouldn’t it make things less laggy this way, if we only load one biome and their constructions at a time?

I cannot imagine it would work for the PvP servers (people would camp beyond the borders to kill the players while they load, plus in PvP they regulate themselves by raiding others).

I am not talking of server meshing either, that technology is still being developped. I was thinking of a real split of the map by biomes, like they do in games of pirates in which you have to navigate huge oceans.

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I cannot give answers. Most of you people are professionals and understand how things work. I am just a gamer and my replies comes only from gaming experience but zero knowledge of programming. So i can speak of needs, not solutions.

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you would need a separate server per biome, ie separate costs to FC to provide those servers via GPortal, and then everyone hosting their own server would have to pay/provide the same server amplification.

so technically yes, realistically no

There is already a process in UE4 to mitigate what you are kind of talking about tho; it’s called level streaming. At certain distances, different areas of different sizes stream in to the client/server. If one “level” (area) is overburdened with data, that data flow can slow things down on a system depending on its capabilities. FC can control this for what they put in the game, but a player blows this up when they put too much in already heavy areas.

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Ok, thank you for your answer.

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was embellishing when you replied :slight_smile:

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I have to disagree my dear friend :slight_smile:
In Denmark we have a saying that goes something like this:
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should!

I see it like this, the game gives you options to choose from.
Just because you have a lot of different building materials and placeables doesn’t mean you should use pretty much everything at once, especially not on official servers.
Common sense is the key word, not everyone have it and different degree and understanding of it, some won’t even acknowledge that servers are a shared space, so the solution is to have rules and limitations to ensure that things don’t get out of hand.
It is just too easy to say that players have minimum responsibility and Funcom has a huge responsibility, especially since we want as much freedom as possible without them making strict rules and limitations, I am just having a hard time seeing this work well in the long run, and especially the Exiled Lands servers are a good example of how much the official servers degrade over time :grin:

That leaves out a lot of possibilities other than server wipes once in a while.

I would love to see an upkeep cost system with less strict rules, but I have lot faith in that ever happening.

Applying limitations isn’t the best thing, but it does prevent people from going totally overboard, who doesn’t remember the insane zoo parks around bases with hundreds of pets, I definitely do not want to see a return of such, I think having building and placement limits on official server isn’t ideal, but I think it is the closest we will ever come to get more stable servers.
Regular server wipes can do a lot, but Funcom “accidentally” promised to never wipe their official servers, so players can use them as their personal vault of old memories and legacy items.

On top of everything, there needs to be rules and some sort of punishment for not following them, that is just how a society works, else it would just turn into anarchy.

Personally I think something has to be done sooner rather than later, official servers are constantly getting worse and it is their biggest window for new players.

I have lost hope in ever seeing an upkeep system or even server wipes, so I only see hardcoded limitations on buildings and placeables with off course some rules to follow as an option, not the best solution, but at least it is something :slight_smile:

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Well, that edit is teaching me things lol.
I am interested in the server meshing evolution (multiple mini servers next to each other, with animated items/characters crossing the servers… a player can see what is happening in the other server as if they were in one, but is actually in an other, hence no supposed lag), but I did not know about level streaming. Since the player blows it up when they put too much in an heavy area, is there no way to implement a cap (restriction) forbidding to build more when the system is overburdened with data? It would activate or deactivate automatically depending on the data, or something?

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Having separate servers would mean nothing could be seen till transferred to that server so thats why level streaming is important for open world games.

As to number of piece count limits, the way you describe it would he kind of cool; ie its capped when the drag is too much rather than a raw count. I’m just not sure how the drag could be monitored and/or separated from other factors. If it could be done that way, that would be more meaningful as a method since number is not the issue exactly, but combination of player items and overall performance. That gets sticky when you consider client and server have their own dependencies and a better server can handle more stuff, but at least that kind of system would address the real problem.

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With the current technology, indeed (with the server meshing, it is possible hue hue, thank you Robert :money_mouth_face:). That is why I said that it would not work for PvP. I played an other game in which there was PvP and separate servers. People truly were camping at their borders. It was a mess for the players, a shame for the PvP, a source of lag because the battles would happen upon loading screens.

If the level streaming process you described can resolve our lag issues, then I am rooting for it for the next Age. The Age of Smoothness.

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I wouldn’t rule this out but I bet it does face a big hurdle; if implemented it would have the ability to be turned off by server admins (or the rhee against will be greater than the rhee for) and then you have to ask yourself, is coding it worth the number of users who would actually want/use it? I don’t know that the answer to that is clear.

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well level streaming is part of UE4 and necessary for the game as is, and just how it works. Optimizing level streaming is the hard part, and I suspect what was optimum before the encounters were introduced is likely no longer optimum. It probably needs constant massaging.

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They are constantly getting worse because new players build by examples on the server, not by the TOC.

Funny in America it’s “there are no rules till you get caught”.

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