The Housing Situation

[DragonFlyy]

If storage space is the issue, then instancing the house won't fix anything, you will still run out of storage space.

[Renik]

Whether it's an apartment in a building or landed property, it probably doesn't really make a difference to the servers.

The server primarily has to store the items (and their location) in the housing area, tables, chairs, plants ... etc. What the housing area actually looks like, be it a room or a wide open field, probably doesn't impact the server much if at all.

If storage space is the issue, then instancing the house won't fix anything, you will still run out of storage space.

This, in 2 threads at least i have explained this, but people keep supporting the ignorant idea of instanced housing, which would only serve to have an inferior quality housing system, without solving the lack of plots. Yoshi have also answered to the idea of instanced housing explaining that it would not solve the issue.

This is a server issue and they are working on it, give them time, if you want to give constructive feedback ask them to place more wards on populated servers and make some plots reserved for FC housing only.

[Bishop81]

If storage space is the issue, then instancing the house won't fix anything, you will still run out of storage space.

This, in 2 threads at least i have explained this, but people keep supporting the ignorant idea of instanced housing, which would only serve to have an inferior quality housing system, without solving the lack of plots. Yoshi have also answered to the idea of instanced housing explaining that it would not solve the issue.

This is a server issue and they are working on it, give them time, if you want to give constructive feedback ask them to place more wards on populated servers and make some plots reserved for FC housing only.

Well, instance housing worked just fine in FFXI from what I heard.

Also I don't think it's a storage space issue. FFXI is nearly 10 years old, it's from the era where PCs had 64MiB of RAM and 1GiB hard drives. We have 8GiB of RAM now and multi-TiB hard drives. Technology has improved a ton.

[Renik]

Well, instance housing worked just fine in FFXI from what I heard.

Also I don't think it's a storage space issue. FFXI is nearly 10 years old, it's from the era where PCs had 64MiB of RAM and 1GiB hard drives. We have 8GiB of RAM now and multi-TiB hard drives. Technology has improved a ton.

It's not about the system itself, it's about the whole game, this game stores more data than any other, specially the housing system, we have a very large range of options, customization and contents related to housing.

When it comes to housing, it doesn't matter where you place the house as long as you keep the same number of option it will take the same memory, the reason it worked in XI is the same reason most people never cared about it back then, it was very limited and served only as storage, and the game in general saved a lot less data than this one.

There's only one solution, adding more physical memory (HDDs).

[Bishop81]

It's not about the system itself, it's about the whole game, this game stores more data than any other, specially the housing system, we have a very large range of options, customization and contents related to housing.

When it comes to housing, it doesn't matter where you place the house as long as you keep the same number of option it will take the same memory, the reason it worked in XI is the same reason most people never cared about it back then, it was very limited and served only as storage, and the game in general saved a lot less data than this one.

There's only one solution, adding more physical memory (HDDs).

I can't say I know exactly what is going on at SE's data centers but computing power and memory has increased several fold over the last decade.

The way I see it, based on what I know about how computers function - as limited as it is - the server only has to store,

1. item ID
2. location and orientation of said items

That doesn't take up all that much space. Assuming, conservatively, a 64 bit item ID, 64 bit per axis, we have 3*64 for position, and 3*64 for orientation, for a total of 448 bits = 56 bytes per item. That's a drop in the ocean with GiBs of RAM and TiBs of hard drive space.

[Renik]

I can't say I know exactly what is going on at SE's data centers but computing power and memory has increased several fold over the last decade.

The way I see it, based on what I know about how computers function - as limited as it is - the server only has to store,

1. item ID
2. location and orientation of said items

That doesn't take up all that much space. Assuming, conservatively, a 64 bit item ID, 64 bit per axis, we have 3*64 for position, and 3*64 for orientation, for a total of 448 bits = 56 bytes per item. That's a drop in the ocean with GiBs of RAM and TiBs of hard drive space.

The problem here it's not only housing, but the whole game as i said. You know enough to understand that it's all about stored data and nothing else, wards don't take much memory, as they are all shared data across servers, you should be able to understand why instancing housing wouldn't solve it, and don't forget we were told where the problem was, it's in 2 of the live letters.

We can't know what kind of machines are they using, or the server structure, but we know it's a memory problem, and if we can't believe the devs... well, who knows.

Even if we weren't told about what the problem was, i can't think in any other explanation, i'm not a game developer, but it's kind of my hobby, including server development, i know what i'm talking about, it's not made up stuff, and i can say for sure that instancing housing we would not solve it.

For sources, you have 2 of the live letters between the XIV and the XVIII, i don't remember which ones, and i think they answered to the instanced housing idea in one of the live letters from the last e3.

snip

Please, stop posting this idea, because it's false, as i said instancing houses is not going to magically create more memory, unless this instanced houses are just presets without stables and gardens, and of course very minimal to no furniture allocation.

[Bluevann]

Please, stop posting this idea, because it's false, as i said instancing houses is not going to magically create more memory, unless this instanced houses are just presets without stables and gardens, and of course very minimal to no furniture allocation.

First of all, ideas cannot be "false", at most they can be impractical or near impossible to realize, both of which I do not know if they would apply to ARR since I'm not a developer and I'll keep offering my suggestion till one of them tells me why it cannot be done.

But either way, wouldn't it be much like how Personal Rooms are handled? An FC house can have up to 512 of rooms, and there's 900-ish possible slots for FC houses in every server. That is enough memory space for 450,000 personal room instances. An housing instance wouldn't take that much more space to make it impossible to give an instanced plot to everyone.

[Bishop81]

The problem here it's not only housing, but the whole game as i said. You know enough to understand that it's all about stored data and nothing else, wards don't take much memory, as they are all shared data across servers, you should be able to understand why instancing housing wouldn't solve it, and don't forget we were told where the problem was, it's in 2 of the live letters.

...

For sources, you have 2 of the live letters between the XIV and the XVIII, i don't remember which ones, and i think they answered to the instanced housing idea in one of the live letters from the last e3.

Link to the letters?

Personally I find unlikely that memory is the problem. I have already explained why.

What is the problem? Beats me. But instancing might be a way around it. It worked for FFXI. Also oddly enough, there are no limits for FC rooms (instanced?) ...

[Chasely]

Well, instance housing worked just fine in FFXI from what I heard.

Also I don't think it's a storage space issue. FFXI is nearly 10 years old, it's from the era where PCs had 64MiB of RAM and 1GiB hard drives. We have 8GiB of RAM now and multi-TiB hard drives. Technology has improved a ton.

FFXI is 13 years old.