New building pieces to reduce performance issues and/or create efficiency

Conan Exiles General Discussion
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There have been some survival-builder games that have introduced clustered building pieces, and even some pre-fab type structures (like fallout 76, or Ark) that allow a player to create a single-piece large structure like a cabin or mansion (bath house would be nice), or a cluster of building pieces such as 4-high walls or 5x5 foundations to reduce the amount of pieces a server has to render and keep track of. Potential PVP buggery aside, i’d think building options like that could potentially help with performance as it did for those games.

In regards to PvP, people will always find a weakness or strength in these things, but i’d suggest not using those building pieces on the outer layers of your structure. For balance purposes the 3-high walls for example could be given significantly less HP than the total HP of 3 walls combined so that people won’t benefit too greatly from the combined HP of 1 building piece.

Essentially this would incentivize players to still build regular walls as they do now for PvP (walls filled with foundations i’d imagine on one block) for the outer layer, but allow the option to build faster, and potentially create some tougher inner structures that are still roomy but can, if toppled take whole sections while also allowing for a smoother experience in and around the built upon area.

Any thoughts? I might be overseeing some obvious issues, but i’d think implementing building pieces such as those could help performance and efficiency-wise like it did for those games.

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Hard pass. I’ve never been a fan of prefabs, and I don’t think the effect on server performance would be of any consequence.

Conan has a much more polished and enjoyable building system than either Ark or Fallout. Much rather them spend time giving us more pieces to play with than just saying here, have a box.

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My understanding it’s more of an issue of placeables then blocks.

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It will benefit the server performance, but by how much not sure. For example, when I build a home, I always build 2-wall-high for each floor. So, in my case, for every foundation tile that has a wall piece over it, if I build 2 loose wall, one over another, the server will have to record 1. on which side of this foundation I placed a wall of which type with how much HP left and facing which direction, 2. on top of this wall, the other wall I placed was of which type with how much HP left and facing which direction. But if I could build one single 2in1 wall over this foundation tile, the server will only have to record the things mentioned above one time only. And then when destruction of a building piece happens, the chain reaction checks for server would be lesser as well.

Probably not. Players will have to go through a much longer list of available pieces to locate the one that was needed. This could be the biggest issue here.

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And I think the benefit to server performance will be so negligible to be non-existent.

But that’s not my main lack of interest. I prefer customization. I have built fantastic structures in Conan many times over. I have built ugly boxes and similarly ugly platforms in Ark and Fallout respectively. CE build system is so much better than either of those, the only one I’ve seen that is on par is 7DtD. I simply have no interest in a prefab.

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Okay, now can you explain why?

Since everyone is always sharing their opinions on the impact of buildings on server performance with such confidence and certainty, I thought I would like to hear some explanations on how people imagine these things work.

And no, cargo-culting a solution from other games doesn’t count as an explanation :wink:

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Agree. I don’t know about Ark nor Fallout 76, but I do enjoy that every time I build a home, it looks different than the others I had.

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Not necessarily a useful thing to say, but:

In the case of Fallout 76 for example the reason given by the devs/community managers for allowing lower camp-budget cost large prefabs and the like is to alleviate strain on what has to be rendered client side and kept tabs on by the server. Only having one large object to render in, calculate lighting effects and incoming damage for. Though, that is for thát game and i have no technical know-how on the workings for either Conan Exiles or any online game with seemingly similar features but different engines and such.

So, TLDR; “i see those guys doing it, why not these guys”, basically. More of a question along with how i perceive the situation currently, than an actual suggestion for improvement.

Warning, incoming wall of text:

To add, my current experience which more or less lead me to creating this post, is the performance drops i’m experiencing after having built a large swath of foundations and 3 gates (on a private server) on the water on Riversend starting somewhat near the waterfall (at the circle of swords) near up to where the apparition drowns with a chest at the bottom, using the full breadth of the river. This is still with large foundations gaps, having filled roughly half of it out.
‘Near’ in this case meaning at least 20ish foundations in length away.

I’m already noticing frequent stutterings and the occasional rubber banding where on my finished build near Sepermeru i have with the works, decorations, lighting, thralls, every bench type/stations, utility items and all i seem to be having no issues.

The regular build i have fills up the empty body of water for about 75%+ in The Oasis of Nekhet that has a kneeling Relic Hunter Slavetaker overlooking it. The finished build is much less deep, requiring significantly less foundations (though it is a circular build) and has a lot more different (world and player-made) objects and entities crammed within rendering range in more or less a single large circle w/ up to max. 13 high walls+roofings above water. Where my work in progress largely has foundations at least twice as deep, and is long enough to not all be rendered smoothly in one go when standing on one end of the stretch of foundations.

So the way i experienced it, is that just having a large amount of foundations at the moment is already affecting performance in that location significantly. Though i wouldn’t know whether or not clustered building blocks would really make much of a difference, even in this specific case. Or perhaps if even just that specific part of the map may be more demanding when it comes to performance with the Unnamed City structures/towers and weather effects in the area.

My apologies for the half-baked measurements and wall of text, i can’t hop on to make a semi-accurate estimate of foundation length, breadth and depth or make screenshots at the moment.
Also, i understand if you don’t read it all past the warning lol. I just felt like clarification was in order on my end as to my personal reason for creating this post.

This is on an (mostly) empty private server on Xbox Series X, if that is an important to add detail.

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I can tell you Fallout handles bases differently than Conan. I don’t have the technical understanding of how, but bases pop in and out based on who is playing. Or even what bases the player has chosen to activate.

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