Quote Originally Posted by TwistedTea View Post
But yet you think fully instanced housing would cause more server stress than limited ward housing?
Instanced housing has 1 issue. What if you want to see houses of others? For inspiration, or just to sometimes take a look, being able to view go into other houses is a welcome feature. If you spent effort making it look nice, you might also want to show that off to others.

But still, if instanced housing would only show a few extra houses that are nearby (like for example 4 houses, which are semi random selected), it might already be a decent alternative. The semi-random part then simply can mean that someone who is working on his house was loaded in, or a house that was also loaded in for someone else. or it simply loads in another random house. This should allow some compression to take place as only a few houses need to be loaded in for ward rendering (server wide this might still be 100 houses, for 200 players). However, you will never see the other players actively walking (although maybe there are even ways to do this).

Instanced housing should take less resources, but it shouldnt be a 1:1 ratio either. I want to see other houses, that is part of the housing system! And instead of complete randomizing and just teleporting to a house, the house facade is something that matters, and usualy is visible enough from a distance. Being able to see multiple at once is on that more efficient than just hopping from house to house.

There are ways, but they are complex. Islands on that at least are a bit more simplistic in design. And hopefully some knowledge from that can be used for housing as well. Because i suspect that those actualy will take more resources per house than wards would (because wards technicaly have more restrictions).