Allow, Allow, Allow

[Hirnsausen]

- Allow Elevator Usage during Build Mode to make it possible to reach anywhere
- Allow Special Core Blueprint for Purchased Ships so we can rebuild them after reset 1x
- Allow blueprints to display the date and time of creation, so if we made multiple core BPs of a ship, we now can easily destroy older, previous versions

[Wyndle]

8 hours ago, Hirnsausen said:

Allow Special Core Blueprint for Purchased Ships so we can rebuild them after reset 1x

I'm certain that one will not happen.  Just check to see if that player returned and is willing to sell/trade/give you a BP.  I have seen a few builders outright telling their customers to come see them after the reset for free* BP copies (*cover copying cost only), but that is an individual choice.

 

8 hours ago, Hirnsausen said:

- Allow blueprints to display the date and time of creation, so if we made multiple core BPs of a ship, we now can easily destroy older, previous versions

This too will not happen.  It would too heavy on server resources to add that to every BP.  The compromise is to change/update your construct name before each backup BP.  Some change the whole name but it seems more common to see an iterative notation (ex. Mk IV).  I have also seen someone put the date in the name of the construct just for the Core BP and then revert the name.

[Yoarii]

12 hours ago, Wyndle said:

This too will not happen.  It would too heavy on server resources to add that to every BP.

With all due respect, do you think the servers are using tape drives to store information or are you just trolling? If adding a date/time to a blue print would be too much, then adding another element would be too much too.

[Wyndle]

I spent a couple of decades working among servers and mainframes in a technical capacity.  The majority of the impact would be to database bandwidth and storage costs. A few bytes in a single instance is negligible but add that few bytes for the dozens of BP I alone have and it could cause a little more latency for the servers.  There are players with hundreds of Core BPs in their inventory.  It adds up faster than it would seem on the surface. 

[Hirnsausen]

On 9/2/2022 at 6:01 AM, Wyndle said:

There are players with hundreds of Core BPs in their inventory. 

Yes, and I am one of them. And I ended up having so many, because I do not know, which ones are the latest version, and which many more ones are those that are obsolete and could be deleted if only I knew for sure.

An entire blueprint is so much bigger than just the few bytes for the date/time number. I think, it is far better for the server to have a number more for each BP and far fewer BPs altogether, than to end up with tens of thousands more BPs in the game by all players just because the lack of creation date makes it impossible to safely know which BPs could be deleted without loss. I believe, NQ might(should have a big interest in that, too. Maybe even going as far as pro-actively display a small Conflict window if more than one BP of the same ship are in the same inventory and suggesting (based on creation date) to delete now all older versions. I hope, the NQ staff is reading this comment as this can indeed reduce the burden on the server.

Edited September 5, 2022 by Hirnsausen

[Taelessael]

A date on a print won't break things any more than a new decorative bit of voxel or an extra element. I wouldn't call this a highly important feature to add, and I don't expect it any time soon, but it would be nice to have...

 

...except for the "keep your beta-stuff after lauch" bp, that isn't happening no matter how much we want it.

[Wyndle]

If we are talking about "at some point in the future" when the hardware and software has improved then sure.  This idea box forum is in the Beta section and I don't see a leap of technology happening before the end of the month though.  Under the current circumstances it would be a death by a thousand papercuts for a QoL feature but it is reasonable to assume the technology will improve eventually.

 

I have and will again admit that I could be entirely wrong since I haven't seen the internals of how the servers are set up and working.  I've only had experience working with multi-Terabyte and multi-Petabyte databases on top of the line commercial hardware (we won't talk about running private WoW servers), so I could be wrong about database bandwidth causing latency in the game as well.

[Taelessael]

2 hours ago, Wyndle said:

... I've only had experience working with multi-Terabyte and multi-Petabyte databases on top of the line commercial hardware (we won't talk about running private WoW servers)...

I appreciate the attempt, but you should probably stop now. Anyone can claim to have run/managed all of that, and nobody can actually prove it in any reasonable manner.

 

On top of that you are arguing that a simple time-stamp (that seems to already be a thing, though hidden) will break things in a way that somehow isn't happening several times over with each and every print storing information on each and every elements' type, position in 3d space, orientation in 3d space, and links for hundreds of elements. If it doesn't happen, it will be because other things are more important, not because we are going to break a massive mmo with an extra 6 bytes of data.

 

 

 

Also, for anyone wondering: ~6 bytes (time and date, depending on formatting) x 100 prints x 1,000,000,000 people (if DU suddenly became more popular than some major religions) = 600 Gigabytes, or approximately 1.2 higher-end thumb-drives (half-terabyte thumb drives go for about 100$ where I live). 

[Wyndle]

I never said the data did not have time and date information attached.  In a digital system it is impossible to have data that isn't time stamped in some way.  Passing (or validating) that information back and forth between the direct and tangentially related servers and the client every time a player opens their inventory or changes their sort method or starts a search... that is where database bandwidth becomes a bottleneck.  There are ways to mitigate the bandwidth used here and not providing that information to the player was part of the solution NQ chose.

 

600 GB of storage for a consumer system does not equate to 600 GB of storage for a data center.  First and foremost is redundancy, meaning that 600 GB of data will live in at least 2 places at the same time for at least double the storage and storage servers required, each with at least two power supplies.  Also, commercial grade storage costs way more than consumer storage because it is made to a much higher standard with more expensive sub-components.

[Taelessael]

18 minutes ago, Wyndle said:

...Passing (or validating) that information back and forth between the direct and tangentially related servers and the client every time a player opens their inventory or changes their sort method or starts a search... that is where database bandwidth becomes a bottleneck.  There are ways to mitigate the bandwidth used here and not providing that information to the player was part of the solution NQ chose...

Given that it isn't hard to see how things are already being sorted by date every single time, I'm going to suspect that they don't show time-stamps less because of data-cost and more because they are less visually appealing than keeping them hidden for the average player during the 99% of the time they don't need to know when it was created.

 

23 minutes ago, Wyndle said:

...

600 GB of storage for a consumer system does not equate to 600 GB of storage for a data center.  First and foremost is redundancy, meaning that 600 GB of data will live in at least 2 places at the same time for at least double the storage and storage servers required, each with at least two power supplies.  Also, commercial grade storage costs way more than consumer storage because it is made to a much higher standard with more expensive sub-components.

You seem to have missed the point in the math where I did things for a few orders of magnitude more players than any single mmo has probably ever had...

[Wyndle]

11 minutes ago, Taelessael said:

Given that it isn't hard to see how things are already being sorted by date every single time, I'm going to suspect that they don't show time-stamps less because of data-cost and more because they are less visually appealing than keeping them hidden for the average player during the 99% of the time they don't need to know when it was created.

 

You seem to have missed the point in the math where I did things for a few orders of magnitude more players than any single mmo has probably ever had...

The default sort in the game client is probably a reflection of how that database is constructed rather than actual timestamps and may be subject to change.  There may have been a component of visuals taken into consideration when they were deciding if they should give players time stamps in game but the info could be tucked away in a sub-menu to address visuals.

 

Even if it is 500 MB, NQ is still on the hook to store 1000 MB + RAID overhead across 2 or more servers that have to be actively monitored and maintained.   That adds up fast.

[Taelessael]

31 minutes ago, Wyndle said:

The default sort in the game client is probably a reflection of how that database is constructed rather than actual timestamps and may be subject to change.  There may have been a component of visuals taken into consideration when they were deciding if they should give players time stamps in game but the info could be tucked away in a sub-menu to address visuals.

 

Even if it is 500 MB, NQ is still on the hook to store 1000 MB + RAID overhead across 2 or more servers that have to be actively monitored and maintained.   That adds up fast.

Time-stamp: 6 bytes
Construct name (5 English-alphabet characters): 6 bytes
Construct name (12 English alpha-numeric characters): 13 bytes

My avatar's name in the DRM: 10 bytes

 

So, are you worried that if I go give all my constructs 12-character names before I make bpo out of them that the game will crash? I think I have 2 or 3 bpo of my FAE Wolf Mk2 already in my pack. Is everything on fire yet? How ever will it manage to handle the two sets of x, y, and z needed to find the position and orientation of each of the twelve of that ship's off-axis engines? CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE HOW MANY PUNCH-CARDS I'M GOING TO NEED?! DO NUMBERS EVEN GO THAT HIGH?! HOW WILL I CARRY THEM ALL?!!!

Seriously though, I appreciate the point you're trying to make, but the tech needed to handle displaying time-stamps to everyone that wants to see them in an mmo has been a thing for quite a bit longer than DU has.

[Wyndle]

I'm not talking about the game failing to work but rather in terms of nanoseconds of latency being added for each direction of communication for each layer of each polling of the database.  For a solo player it would not make a lick of difference but in a fleet battle every nanosecond of latency saved can be felt in real time.  Without the fleet battle being possible we may as well play minecraft.

[Taelessael]

16 hours ago, Wyndle said:

I'm not talking about the game failing to work but rather in terms of nanoseconds of latency being added for each direction of communication for each layer of each polling of the database.  For a solo player it would not make a lick of difference but in a fleet battle every nanosecond of latency saved can be felt in real time.  Without the fleet battle being possible we may as well play minecraft.

The game can't be all about fleet combat. It is important but it isn't the whole game, and seeing as my name is causing more latency than the time-stamp is, I think we can spare a few bytes for the builders that get you your ships to blow up.

[Wyndle]

You admit that 99% of the time players don't require BP timestamp (workarounds already exist too) and that fleet battle is an important feature for the game even if not what everyone wants.  I am describing tradeoffs and shaving costs; as any for profit business running an MMO would internally.  I  could be off base with some or even all of my descriptions but still be on the right track.

 

Further, in 5 years the tech could advance enough to void all of my points at which time I would be championing to get timestamps added in.  Until then, thanks for keeping me from boredom.

[Taelessael]

10 hours ago, Wyndle said:

...

Further, in 5 years the tech could advance enough to void all of my points at which time I would be championing to get timestamps added in.  Until then, thanks for keeping me from boredom.

You seem to be missing the point I have been trying to make over the last several posts. We don't need to wait 5 years for tech to improve, the tech has been able to handle timestamps just fine longer than it has been able to handle almost everything else that happens in DU.

[Wyndle]

I'm flattered by the continued attention.  It seems we're missing each others points but we're more in agreement than it may appear.