Live Letter News

[Shibi]

On housing shortage:

Yoshi: "We're working on adding new housing plots, but we can't say much about that yet as we haven't finalised the schedule"

On housing on the new NA datacentre:


And on Islands:

Yoshi: "We are trying to allow players to place garden housing items on their island, we don't have a release schedule for this feature yet, but we are trying"

[ICountFrom0]

And on Islands:
Yoshi: "We are trying to allow players to place garden housing items on their island, we don't have a release schedule for this feature yet, but we are trying"

Okay, I'm happy now. This is the last thing I really wanted from this. Maybe it'll have to be an entire landmark, but I can deal with that.

[Jojoya]

Okay, I'm happy now. This is the last thing I really wanted from this. Maybe it'll have to be an entire landmark, but I can deal with that.

May want to check your expectations for now. "Garden" refers to the yard of the house and not gardening specifically. We can't be certain the garden patches and crossbreeding will work as they do in the wards (though we can hope).

[Brygd]

May want to check your expectations for now. "Garden" refers to the yard of the house and not gardening specifically. We can't be certain the garden patches and crossbreeding will work as they do in the wards (though we can hope).

I have noticed an abnormally high correlation between the weather on my island and the weather in my Goblet Ward. I'm now curious to see if all housing districts (or at least the OG 3) share the same weather system.

As for the other news, I'm excited to see that they'll be adding more housing to current servers. My personal guess though is that it the earliest we see it will be late 23, more likely mid-late 24. Then of course, with my luck in the lottery system, I'll just lose the bid for the new house. Again.

[Shibi]

Now I can go back and listen to his words on the islands:

What he said is more in line with (paraphrasing)

A lot of people have wanted to customise their islands and make them look more unique. He always considered that as more landmarks were added with each patch people would be able to differentiate their islands more, placement, and new objects, some landmarks with flowers for example. But people want more.

He still doesn't want islands to replace housing, he still sees apartments and houses as a different thing to the island, which he envisaged as an uninhabited place to let the minions run free. He is interested in allowing this greater differentiation to happen, but "it is very difficult to do" (which is a standard yoshi-ism), and he can't give indication of a target patch right now.

"I think it would be nice if we could enjoy the differentiation even more, so I'd appreciate it if you could please continue to give us that feedback"

And that's likely worthwhile to do, keep saying what you want to help guide his direction.

[Iscah]

the island, which he envisaged as an uninhabited place to let the minions run free.

I wonder what his thoughts are on the high-vis mammet infestation we ended up with.

[dspguy]

SE doesn't necessarily need to make Island Sanctuary have the nearly infinite permutations that housing has (X,Y,Z placement, rotation, dye of 400 items). If they could add something to the island that essentially lets players use the outdoor furnishings, that would probably tick the box for enough of the playerbase.

[Shibi]

SE doesn't necessarily need to make Island Sanctuary have the nearly infinite permutations that housing has (X,Y,Z placement, rotation, dye of 400 items). If they could add something to the island that essentially lets players use the outdoor furnishings, that would probably tick the box for enough of the playerbase.

A common complaint is that there is nowhere to display the event furniture. So it would make quite a few people happy I think to be able to set up a few stacks of pumpkins. Or come December a SnowHroth.

Datawise (in theory from what game dev I've done) it's not that much to store 1Object UUID/1Owner UUID/position (3 floats)/rotation (3 floats)/dye (1 byte) if it were tied to a landmark. But is a landmark a 1:1? Would SE need to deal with those to handle say 10 or 20 objects? (a small house is 20), and of course, what their janky netcode has to do.

But it would be great. yes yes.

[dspguy]

I always felt the storage wasn't necessarily the problem. It is about the server having to provide this information to a player (not just the owner) in the zone. I suppose I left out my point from my previous post.

Zone into a ward somewhere. Dozens of plots have exterior furnishings. What is it? 15-20 furnishings per house? I walked around my ward and could still see my house from halfway across the zone. Which means, the server has to provide this information for essentially the entire zone to every player that enters the zone. To be fair, it was just the house (the 8 slots that make up the house's exterior, its optional fixtures and the color). I had to be about 1/4 across the zone to make out the furnishings. Depending on where I'm standing, that's roughly half the plots in the zone at any one time.

So now we are talking roughly 8*30 objects (location, color, etc) plus another 15*30ish objects (precise x,y,z location, rotation, color, etc).

This is different than your standard zones. We can't control the non-housing zones in the same manner. Every time we go into...say... Central Shroud - the layout of the zone is identical. Every time. It is preloaded on our end. Mob placement is sent as they are within draw distance. However, we don't commonly see ~700 dynamic objects simultaneously.

In my estimation, there is a correlation between how much the server can send for this data. We've all seen what happens around an S-rank when there are 500 players in zone. Hell, sometimes the mob does an AOE that clearly hits everyone but the server just "gives up" and doesn't bother registering the damage on all 500 characters jammed into that zone. On our end, either it appears that the server throttles these updates or it purposefully throttles it on their end to not overwhelm the server.

[Eraden]

Was there any news about new wards being added to districts on current servers?