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Lower entities count
NormallyClosedSwitch
Registered Posts: 137
I was trying to get my fighter up the air the other day, and, I just couldnt fight! Why? Cuz people where battling with 10 rocket launchers, 15 homing torpedo launchers, and a millions other guns, and they fire everything at once....
So here I am, in front of my computer, with a little armed, fast ship which is supposed to have the only advantage to be fast, lagged out, for like, 10 sec, only to find myself floating into space...
ARGHHHH well, if you ask me, people can't auto discipline themself...
I don't pretend to know exactly what to do, but I would simply lower entities allowed per shipcore, meaning like, 4 autocannons, 2 rocket pods, 1 battery, 1 fusion, 1 homing torpedo something, 1 .....
Just like that, and lower props count per ship core... there are ways to make a good looking ship, without slapping a million props on it, just think outside the box!
Or I dunno, maybe have a script to change the rules once in a while, so like "hey, today is the low poly, low entities&weapon day!" run script, reboot and voila
So here I am, in front of my computer, with a little armed, fast ship which is supposed to have the only advantage to be fast, lagged out, for like, 10 sec, only to find myself floating into space...
ARGHHHH well, if you ask me, people can't auto discipline themself...
I don't pretend to know exactly what to do, but I would simply lower entities allowed per shipcore, meaning like, 4 autocannons, 2 rocket pods, 1 battery, 1 fusion, 1 homing torpedo something, 1 .....
Just like that, and lower props count per ship core... there are ways to make a good looking ship, without slapping a million props on it, just think outside the box!
Or I dunno, maybe have a script to change the rules once in a while, so like "hey, today is the low poly, low entities&weapon day!" run script, reboot and voila
"...wait, this IS rocket science!!!"
Comments
I say we do something about this very soon. Devs, Admins, Community, any ideas on how this can be accomplished? Parenting can only go so far.
As for the weapons, it's been in the plans for a long time to meld them into the core systems. I'm thinking some sort of extra slot in the Fittings menu for "Utilities" or "Components" or some crap that would assign points to everything substantial attached to a core. This would mean that weapons, storage, LS, and such would fit in the same slot (points instead of count, most likely), meaning that builders would have to decide between lots of storage or lots of weapons, somehow coming to a happy medium.
The only technical problem I see with this is for resource stations, which need a lot of resource stacking. The major problem I foresee, though, is that major changes in system are almost always widely opposed, so we will have to figure out how to switch to this while minimizing the damage to the userbase.
I can't say I agree that things get hard to make at 150. I've made quite a few ships that, in terms of props, have only around 30 of them, with about 20 entities. It flies fine, runs great, looks pretty good, and adds very little ent traffic to the server.
I think a limit to the weapons is also very good. The people who will have trouble adjusting are probably the ones who spam weapons anyways.
Oh please. :P
Anyway, I think the prop count is fine as it is, but there needs to be a stricter limit upon weapons.
Most of my ships have less than 8 weapon entities, which is a pretty damn low quantity in comparison to some of the other crap that people have on smaller vessels.
The plans to tie in weapons to the ship cores have been floating around for years...
For the time being, I think that weapons, not resources, need to be tied to ship cores.
Tying resources to ship cores becomes a pretty tricky problem. What happens when you want to build a colony ship or a terraforming ship that requires huge resource caches? Is forcing the player to construct a large ship a solution to this? What about uncored drones?
Not to mention the resource hubs that Steev mentioned above.
It was 400. Get your facts right and stop suppressing my creativity dammit!!
Nothing is more exciting than seeing your new community center attract a large crowd..nothing is more annoying than the fire marshall shutting it down for too much occupancy.
Telling the people that they can only do certain things runs off your new clients.
Gmod is about freedom and creativity taking that away and limiting people just makes people move on.
the answer might be as simple as another good working server and a way for hours to be reflected between the two.
In addition with the integration of a faction system that includes a faction that pays a monthly fee and gets a nice bonus of sorts for doing so suddenly 11 a month for an extra mammoth server becomes doable.
The plan was to tie both into the same slot, so the builder would have to choose between weapon spam or storage spam; leaning completely one way or the other would make it so you'd have a LOT of that type - like 20 weapons, but no storage to fire it with, or 75 million storage, but no weapons or generators to refill it.
The uncored stuff also bothers me, since making everything REQUIRE a core makes the gameplay stupid (since you'd need a tower of props just to let a simple resource station run), and ignoring non-cored stuff would just make players not want to put cores on their ships. Perhaps having only weapons disable on non-cored ships, and then doing all the RD3 checking only when a core is applied, should work.
Yes, freedom to break the EVER LOVING SHIT out of the gameplay balance, driving off the OTHER people who want to fight but decide not to when seeing DREADNOUGHT WEAPONS ON A FIGHTER. Very few people actually use the combat system because of a few people that abuse it.
Also, the other parts of your post made very little sense. The main topic is not about lag or server load or user count, it's about abusing the system to make things not fun.
While yes, Gmod is about creativity, it's still a game engine that has to follow certain limits. If it doesn't, we get lagstorms.
At a very minimum, I believe we should tie weapons to ship cores. Both to help with balancing, and to prevent hundred of little entities flying through space.
We already have two servers. One on the East Coast, one on the West. However, the one on the west is a Dev server. If this were converted to a Main, we might be able to support everyone.
However, this brings up the hours issue. I know that UTime uses SQL to write to a .db file with everyone's hours. Would this be possible to do remotely? Write to a .db file hosted somewhere? If so, then we could simply do that to have both servers write to this file when the hours are changed. As far as I know, people can't be in multiple servers at once, so I don't think it would cause conflicts.
I am pretty sure it's possible using normal SQL, but I have no idea how sqlLite (Gmod's version) works, and I hear things about external DLL modules and crap.
Damn. Hrm.. Well, I have an idea. We can access .txt files from external places. If we had one of those to work with, we could do something along the lines of saving each session to this .txt file, and opening it in each server every so often to write to the .db file, and then erase it.
Every time someone joined, it would build the hours for the session. Then, when they leave, crash, or disconnect in some way, it would grab the session time and write it to this .txt file. When a certain amount of time passes, or when the person joins the server, it could grab the necessary time data from the .txt file, and write it to the .db file.
This is just an idea for how it would work. Dunno if it's entirely do-able.
Yea that would be a valid image if you were seeing and moving at a 5sec interval in your community center...
Don't get me wrong here, I love big ship with lotsa props, I think it doesn't get any better than Dark ship or yours Jolly... but it's only good for display! I've abandon some nice ship design because of high props count.
It sucks but, what good is there to have the biggest bad ass ship, if you simply press the button, and wait, and then "oh hey" I had the biggest shield and weapons so I won, without doing nothing else.
And another thing here, what if everybody would have at least 1 ship obeying to some rules we would have established as "reasonable"?
Can we do that? Establish a thumbs up blue print of a non laggy ship? Then it's up to you to manage it properly and make your skill win you the battle? No hard coded rules, just an agreement of some sort of ship archetype.
My big ship the Krakken requires 3 hands to operate and is typically attacked by 3 devies at a time.
my cruiser the Viper was declaired OP after it killed two ships in 2 vs 1 with nothing but beam cannons.
My fighter has been declaired OP due to its success rate. noone will credit me with doing the one thing that makes all these designs successful being good at spacecombat.. ive gone out of my way and designed 2 ships to appease members of the community and they still find cause to moan when they loose.
please provide a valid accusal next time as this one has no merit based upon the above information.
thanks,
Jolly
your ships sound fun to fight.......
Perhaps an alternate solution that doesn't make all my WIP drone systems entirely useless? Maybe fire rate suppression on missile launchers that also detect more than one launcher on the same contraption?
Then again common sense says if you fire so many f*cking missiles you can't move in the lag and will thus die.
Dunno. It's hosting a few other things, and apparently doesn't even use up all of the CPU resources it has. With two other game servers being hosted, it uses up about 60 percent of it's CPU. Which means that Source Dedicated servers really do have a limit in what the program can do at once. So it wouldn't matter much anyways.
I had suspected this from the beginning, since virtually all servers seem to be brought down by the same exact type of events within said game server.
It can be an act of God to keep a gmod server alive for a lengthy period of time with any space combat going on anyways.