Zone Instancing

[rojadruid]

I would have to agree witht he LDONs not being instanced on live in the beginning. Thats why they created all the copies of the ldons with a "a", "b" and so forth. I also remember not being able to get an adventure at times on the live server that I used to play on. I also think that the way that Rocker8956 is looking to implement it, as thats looking pretty much like the way that it was on live.

[Rocker8956]

If I recall correctly when LDoNs first came out there were lines to get into them. I think this had to do with Sony putting a cap on how many instanced zones could be running at the same time. This may be a good idea for us to implement after we get instance zones running. Since having 50 instance zones running at one time could really hinder what most of us are using for a server.

On a different note,

I must be blind, can someone point me to the section of code that deals with loading zones?

Hopefully after looking at it I can answer my question below.

Using the current code for loading zones and assuming we could get two instances of a zone running at once.

If PlayerA is in BoThunder and kills a mob a respawn timer starts?
So if PlayerB then zones into a different instance of BoThunder that mob would not be up?

Basically I am wondering if the server writes any information to the database when a mob is killed or is it all handled in memory? Mobs being up or down are my main concern here.

Hopefully that made sense.

[So_1337]

Check the spawn2 table. Respawntime and timeleft are the things you're looking for.

For any given spawn point, there can be different mobs that spawn at it, but only ever one at a time. When whichever is up is killed, a value is written to timeleft equal to the respawntime value. It'll look different, since it's in milliseconds. It'll count down until it reaches 0, at which point a new mob will spawn.

[ChaosSlayer]

yeah I am prety sure. note that its more like 10 groups per Theme rather than 5.
which means total of 300 peopel could be in ldon at same time, and whiel servers did had rathly 2k-3k people, you need consider hwo many were on line at the same time (no more than 1k), drop all under 20s, skip all who did not had the expansion ( i didn't until like 6 month later for exmaple), and how many were actualy inetersted in ldon, and you will see that 300 players is PLENTY of room, except very ocasinal times

[Congdar]

As I remember the LDON's it was set up with the Wayfarers such that there would be limited types of adventures you could choose from.

Collect 30 of these
Kill the Boss
Kill 30 of those
Rescue the victims

And they were level based and had timers as well. I remember waiting with my group until a Collection adventure was offered. This makes me think that they weren't instanced at all. Just that say the collection adventures would use say zone ruja, rujb, rujc and the victim adventure would use rujd, ruje etc.

[Rocker8956]

Hmm, it looks like the easiest way to handle zone instancing would be to have multiple database entries for the same zone. By easiest I mean least code and least server intensive.

Using the RajA zone as an example, we could do something like this in the database.
(I am at work so the table, field, and map names are made up)

ZoneName, MapName
RajA01, RajA
RajA02, RajA
RajA03, RajA

We would also need to setup the spawns, along with other things, for each zone - RajA01, RajA02, RajA03
The spawns would essentially be the same for each zone excluding uniqueIDs, respawntime, timeleft, etc.
This would take a lot of database entries but most of it would be copy and paste.
This method puts a cap on the number of times a zone can be instanced but I highly doubt any of our servers will hit that cap. If one ever does we would just need to add another database entry.
Any thoughts?

[Rocker8956]

The other method I can think of is for the server code to create database tables for each instance as needed. It would need to copy/paste static zone info, mainly spawn timers, into the newly created table. This seems overly complicated and probably not necessary for the population of most servers.