Thanks for the information you provided, John, I appreciate it.
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My best understanding is that this is like hibernating Windows XP - saves the current state of NPCs, spawns, positions, everything, when you properly DOWN a zone - so when you bring it back up, it's in the same state as before (you do not need to re-spawn the mob you fought for). I have never tried this...
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I ran an experiment on this today. It seems to do what you wrote, however I noticed that it only restored mob locations. Corpses on the ground disappeared and I've also noticed that when this was turned on, zones that never had a state saved before would be devoid of NPCs until I manually #repop it. Prolly best left off, since it could really cause complications with trains being zoned and then just hanging around the zoneline.
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Yes. Static zones are up, active, living and breathing, with NPCs going about their normal day even with no one in them. Corpses will timeout even if the zone is not static, and conditional mob spawns will happen regardless as well based on timers. The only advantage I see to static vs dynamic is access time (load time) and an ability to assign a zone a specific IP/Port.
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The reason I was asking this is because I noticed that I could boot up 40 zones or so and once they were up and running, I'd still have practically no CPU usage from it. Only when a player enters a zone it starts using a considerable amount of CPU time. Hence I wasn't sure whether the static zones were actually doing anything when nobody was in them.
Other than that, my observation is that dynamic zones load a bit slower, particularly with the persistantstate flag on.
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Depends on your world, really. Are your home cities most active (new players a lot)? I made all 28 home city zones static, and left only 10 dynamic zones for the rest of the game. However, if I saw my population mostly hanging out in Dawnshroud for instance, I might consider making that static as well.
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The problem I have with the dynamic zones is that rare mobs seem to be always up. Let's take SolB, Fire Giants always up, Nagafen always up. Although that's nice for testing, I'd think it's not particularly good for a public server.
Currently I am considering making all dungeons and raid zones static. I can see the merit of having the starting cities and newbie zones static for a new server as well. That's a good point you have there, loading times for static zones is a lot better than dynamic ones.
Cheers
-Chris