(05-16-2016, 03:57 PM)Setoh Aliapoh Wrote:(05-15-2016, 08:35 PM)McBeef© Wrote: Also for the record, something like a 50k of data for a room seems like a low number, until you consider that it has to be accessed several times a second.Â
Then you zoom out and you have 1000 groups of people all accessing their own 50k of data several times per second. I don't think it's as trivial of an engineering problem as you're suggesting.
I was estimating 50k for a *house*, not a room.
In any case, this data wouldn't have to be sent several times a second. It can be sent once per person in the room house, and then the players local client can take care of rendering everything. Remember: that data doesn't change unless someone is actively redecorating the house.
Honestly, bandwidth isn't the issue at all. FF XIV does fine for raids with highly complex environments. It does fine with populated areas filled with people who all have their own gear sets (with dyes and glamours and the like). The problem is pretty much solely storage space and technical debt. I think you're right that they made some bad architectural decisions, and it's limiting things right now. Personally? I don't care. It's not my problem. I'm a paying customer and I want better housing.
EverQuest 2 had *far* more complex housing back in 2004. This is *not* rocket science.
You know player position is polled every 100-300 milliseconds, right? That has to be sent to the server and broadcasted to the entire zone. For every player. When there's a server issue, it's usually bandwidth-related or something done to prevent a bandwidth issue. The whole reason instances are well, fast and instanced is for that exact purpose.
Player housing was intended to be a gil sink in this game. It also is likely limited by SE's trend to not do big long scrolling lists for everything, which is how the buggy 1.0 client worked, and from what I've seen, how FFXI worked. If it can't be displayed on a flat window, it's probably going against their user interface specifications, hence why we get subdivisions and not just a bigger list of normal ones.
Should they stop treating all servers the same in regards to the amount of houses? Yeah, probably. But they probably also use the same database template across them all and there's no system in place for dynamic allocation. Destroying old houses that aren't in use could have been a step in that direction though. The development team is pretty small and that's not going to change no matter how much people ask or whine or beg. If resources are put to housing, they'll be taken from other areas which keep the game running. That's just how software engineering works in a product like this.
If you need sources on the packet system, there's loads of research done on 1.0, courtesy of the Seventh Umbral and FFXIV Classic server development projects. While the architecture has surely changed, the database likely didn't as many of the 1.0 tables were directly copied over into 2.0. They probably still use a similar packet broadcasting mechanism.
Source on shitty resource management: the Comcast-owned company I work for, which goes through the same bullshit.
