Dev Notes #19 - Item Dropping Changes

[h=2]Dev Notes #19 - Item Dropping Changes[/h]

The recent VU 15.18.0 release notes included the following:


This change sparked a lot of discussion in community channels, along with much speculation (some of it wild yet entertaining) as to the reasons for the change.

The main purpose of removing the ability of dropping items on the ground in "public" places was to improve performance. Having a large number of low-value items scattered across busy servers was negatively impacting performance for everyone on the server. On some busy servers the effect of "item art" and random litter was very detrimental to performance.

Another concern was security, since we receive quite a few support cases each month where participants (especially new ones) inadvertently drop items on the ground (despite the warning dialog).

We are of course open to creating exceptions for special cases where placing items in the universe is desirable and unlikely to be abused, and we welcome your feedback.


Originally Posted Here

Thank you for explaining.

It's an undesirable change, but it's good that it's not a mystery.

Bertha Bot said:

[h=2]Dev Notes #19 - Item Dropping Changes[/h]

The recent VU 15.18.0 release notes included the following:

It is now only possible to drop items in your own estates​

This change sparked a lot of discussion in community channels, along with much speculation (some of it wild yet entertaining) as to the reasons for the change.

The main purpose of removing the ability of dropping items on the ground in "public" places was to improve performance. Having a large number of low-value items scattered across busy servers was negatively impacting performance for everyone on the server. On some busy servers the effect of "item art" and random litter was very detrimental to performance.

Another concern was security, since we receive quite a few support cases each month where participants (especially new ones) inadvertently drop items on the ground (despite the warning dialog).

We are of course open to creating exceptions for special cases where placing items in the universe is desirable and unlikely to be abused, and we welcome your feedback.


Originally Posted Here

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ADD a ticker at the claim marker of landareas, that the landarea owner can set to "can drop items"
That way a landarea owner can still organise treasure hunts.

Spawn said:

ADD a ticker at the claim marker of landareas, that the landarea owner can set to "can drop items"
That way a landarea owner can still organise treasure hunts.

Click to expand...

Event areas also, please.

its a great change MindArk, only ones who are crying about it are the sweaters

Didnt post in the thread because have no opinion on it but I have never dropped an item on the ground and welcome the change if it improves performance, and prevents a new player dropping his stuff on floor at icarus by accident and getting robbed. im sure those negatively impacted can find other ways to do good deeds if they wish.

Atrax said:

Thank you for explaining.

Click to expand...

COMMUNICATION, MindArk! you get it?

Excellent that there was an explanation about it. Hoping this trend of open communication continues

Personally I liked to be able to once in a while drop random things to be found by other players and to occasionally find little surprises.

I can appreciate the move to increase performance but how much is this really a problem? Are people dropping thousands of 1 pec items somewhere I don't know about? lol

Here's a couple possible solutions:

1) Add a recall timer much like vehicles where if something is on the ground for X amount of time it will automatically go back to the avatars storage. Much like when you leave a vehicle spawned and then log out. This would prevent long term trash from piling up in places. Preferably this could be something that automatically happens once a week during the weekly maintenance. All dropped items recall back to the owners storage. Though it could be more strict like on avatar log out or something...

2) Why not have an option in the settings to enable dropping of items? By default it's locked to prevent avatars from dropping items inadvertently (especially new players). If an avatar chooses to accept the risks they can enable the ability to drop stuff (of course with the warning pop up still).

Not as much fun as my big crime-fighting theory, but it's good to have a straight answer:

Improved server performance (we should all appreciate that) and cutting out a a source of time-sucking support cases, which should improve overall support.

That's all good, but it's clear that solutions are needed to enable exceptions, and so I really liked that they are open to such solutions, and they're sprouting here already.

Peace, Miles

Nice to get feedback, thanks for the clarification

The thing I have always loved and admired about EU compared to other games is that the game play is not fixed and that players have in the past been able to even encouraged to enhance the game by their own actions.

You (MA) may see dropped items as a nuisance and I have no doubt it gives some minor accounting issues with tracking their whereabouts. Lag...really I very much doubt it unless silly amounts are dropped in a small area, and that tbh is unlikely as I am sure we have better things to do with our ped than throw it on the ground in large quantities. Though easily fixed, make it a no drop zone if it is a busy server, same as no vehicle zones.

Now please flip the coin and look at the other side... player interaction is a massive part of EU and in many ways has been it's greatest asset. Players have fun and form friendships from these additional activities (treasure trails, foraging hunts, hidden surprises for players in locations planet wide). For many it is the strength of those friendships that have quelled the wish to rage quit when things go wrong. For others it is simply the feel-good factor of giving a helping hand to someone, making their day a little brighter when they find the surprise you left.

You say 'We are of course open to creating exceptions for special cases' please explain how this would work with scavenger hunts, treasure trails etc...where is the fun if we know it is all in that 4 x 4 square at a specified location...really...c'mon think outside the box for a moment.

Lag is not caused by a few additional items dropped...that is BS, those items would still exist and have to be drawn and accounted for even if I placed them in my inventory /storage / shop / apartment.

Better to look see if you are drawing things that are unseen. Water under buildings makes for more lag than hard terrain (for that matter why is anything under the surface or building drawn at all? we know it is cos most of us have fallen through the surface and swum there. Waterfalls nearby but unseen inside buildings , items in nearby shops and apartments all contribute to lag yet they are usually unseen.

Stop blaming the players and start looking at your basic programming before you have the place all to yourselves but totally lag free

Thank you for the Dev Notes, they are most welcome. As suggested above, a Land Area option for it would be most welcome and as seen in another thread, the old Memorial Island Statues area would also be a perfect fit

just make any pvp zone a place you can drop, and non pvp zones non-drop spots...

mastermesh said:

just make any pvp zone a place you can drop, and non pvp zones non-drop spots...

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Exactly what I was going to suggest. How else am I going to screw with people at the rig by dropping 1 oil at a time randomly to see riggers run for it?

Hijacker27 said:

Exactly what I was going to suggest. How else am I going to screw with people at the rig by dropping 1 oil at a time randomly to see riggers run for it?

Click to expand...

At one point I thought this might have something to do with rigs, considering 'Pick Up' is gone from Action Library.

But then I noticed 'Attempt Tame' is desaparecido, too, and realized it's business as usual.

jambon said:

Here's a couple possible solutions:[/B]

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One thing I thought about (when someone mentioned newbie alt armies for the purpose of farming freebies) was that having a limit of, say,30 agility needed to drop something in public. That would also stop beginners from dropping items publicly by mistake. Also maybe a limit of say 1 item per additional agility Point or max 10 items/player. Auto-storage at certain time intervals, let's say once/year a global (universal) cleanup, and an action "recall all World items to storage" (and why not "recall all estate items to storage" in the case you have some item in your apartment that you can't pick up for some reason).

Other ideas could be items like dance floors and party tents as a one-piece that would behave like a vehicle (non-pickupable by others, but auto storaged if left unattended), and that can't be dropped where it could cause abuse (oil rig, lootable pvp etc).

aia said:

Other ideas could be items like dance floors and party tents as a one-piece that would behave like a vehicle (non-pickupable by others, but auto storaged if left unattended), and that can't be dropped where it could cause abuse (oil rig, lootable pvp etc).

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I was so disappointed when I found out that tent was "droppable" not "spawnable".

This would be great, for items like camp fires, and furniture, too.

I don't buy the performance excuse because in the same breath you add higher quality textures (which is a great thing), which potentially are more detrimental to performance than a handful of hidden items in an area with a hundred of avatars bouncing around.

Refining of experience through the removal of excess features is fair, but there is a fine line between streamlining and simplification. "How far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?"

Svarog said:

I don't buy the performance excuse because in the same breath you add higher quality textures (which is a great thing), which potentially are more detrimental to performance than a handful of hidden items in an area with a hundred of avatars bouncing around.

Refining of experience through the removal of excess features is fair, but there is a fine line between streamlining and simplification. "How far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?"

Click to expand...

Textures and static items = clientside, Interactive objects =serverside, and no this is not about rendering but handling of objects. Everything is obvious rendered by the client...

Bertha Bot said:

[h=2]Dev Notes #19 - Item Dropping Changes[/h]
....

It is now only possible to drop items in your own estates​

....
The main purpose of removing the ability of dropping items on the ground in "public" places was to improve performance. Having a large number of low-value items scattered across busy servers was negatively impacting performance for everyone on the server. On some busy servers the effect of "item art" and random litter was very detrimental to performance.
....
Originally Posted Here

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On a positive, thank you for a fairly quick response to the discussion going on as a result of the new "no item left behind" policy.
However, I really don't accept the performance part. Time and time again you (MA) appear to tackle any apparent problem with a minimum of thinking, but then, we don't really know at our end, do we?

For example, let's say we have an area with quite a few avatars present and dropped items scattered around. Quite a few years ago you introduced an additional armour piece slot - surely that's an extra database entry for every avatar right there which needs to be kept track of and relayed to everybody else in range. AND, these worn items move around. This could, I realise, be a reason why you might want more avatars wearing one-piece clothing like the various jump suits - except that I have never heard anybody think it might be a reason. But it might be.

What I don't buy is that statically dropped objects are causing your servers so much hassle compared to the enjoyment which players have 'silently' had for so long.
Does this same problem occur with trees which are not harvested, or fruit and stones that you spawn? Is this the next step towards having a sterile world. Is having fewer players a problem solved too for MA, or is it a question of their distribution?
Finally on this, if it's more about your servers and not ours as clients, how do you manage to get such high mob densities in several places?

You say our comments are welcome, but even the best of us need to know certain things to be perform good (and free?) consultancy services to you. Not loot dynamics or that sort of secret thing, but performance, features, etc.

Now that you have changed something nobody asked you for, this is now an additional thing we are asking you to reverse. The list is not exactly getting shorter, is it?

jetsina said:

On a positive, thank you for a fairly quick response to the discussion going on as a result of the new "no item left behind" policy.
However, I really don't accept the performance part. Time and time again you (MA) appear to tackle any apparent problem with a minimum of thinking, but then, we don't really know at our end, do we?

For example, let's say we have an area with quite a few avatars present and dropped items scattered around. Quite a few years ago you introduced an additional armour piece slot - surely that's an extra database entry for every avatar right there which needs to be kept track of and relayed to everybody else in range. AND, these worn items move around. This could, I realise, be a reason why you might want more avatars wearing one-piece clothing like the various jump suits - except that I have never heard anybody think it might be a reason. But it might be.

What I don't buy is that statically dropped objects are causing your servers so much hassle compared to the enjoyment which players have 'silently' had for so long.
Does this same problem occur with trees which are not harvested, or fruit and stones that you spawn? Is this the next step towards having a sterile world. Is having fewer players a problem solved too for MA, or is it a question of their distribution?
Finally on this, if it's more about your servers and not ours as clients, how do you manage to get such high mob densities in several places?

You say our comments are welcome, but even the best of us need to know certain things to be perform good (and free?) consultancy services to you. Not loot dynamics or that sort of secret thing, but performance, features, etc.

Now that you have changed something nobody asked you for, this is now an additional thing we are asking you to reverse. The list is not exactly getting shorter, is it?

Click to expand...

Things you drop are not static objects, they are interactive. Static objects are controlled by the client,
not the server.
Info for interactive objects need to be updated by the server and back, static objects are loaded directly
from your HDD.
A lot of objects are replicators from a main object so system don't have to handle each object seperatly,
but instead can just redraw all from that main object.
Thats why you can load a LOT of same objects as long as your own PC can handle that amount of work.
If main object is faulty though, well I guess all around will be the same.

Trees, rocks, houses, well anything that isn't interactive is static. No need to remove those.
Trees that we harvest seems to be static too in a way, MA seem to have solved it with a node that
controll visability and collision on that object. So when the node is "used up" and start to reload it
turns off visability and takes away collison, which doesn't work 100% since you can get stucked to
trees that seems to be gone, but in reality still are there, just that they can't be seen.
Fruits and stones are interactive, but they also disapear when we exit their spawnarea. If dropped
they get a status same as any other interactive object.

If we have a lot of objects dropped, we must also understand they just end up in the pile of info of
objects that are interactive in that area. So anything that is interactive must be handled same way,
client-server-client and not client only.

Joat said:

Things you drop are not static objects, they are interactive.

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What I meant by static is that they don't move, so a database entry is added and then removed at some point. The data itself isn't mobile. What I was doubting is the relative work being done compared to other performance-related tasks, such as changing a harvestable tree visibility/collision setting. These things have to be handled server-client for every harvestable tree there is in an ongoing way.
Maybe it's continued database reorganisation which MA doesn't like, but they don't say that.

Anyway, thanks, I'm open for discussion if this stays on-topic as to what item dropping actually affects etc.

facepalm

who the hell complained about droping items lol ?



by the way if you try to do stuff, atleast do it right and remove already dropped items in the sky ... ffs...

I have slept over the problem and now I have an idea how to solve it.

Set a limit per server how many items can be dropped on this server.

For crowded servers with huge number of mobs and high trafic, make it a fairly low number f.e. max 50
On less crowded servers there could be higher max number like 100 while on empty servers (no mob spawns, mining areas), the limit could be 500

The limit is linked to the server, not to an individual, so that everyone can drop as much items he wants as long the server limit isn´t reached.

If server limit is reached, tell the player: You can´t drop anymore items in this area!

That way people could still organice treasure hunts and stuff and even the drop arts would be possible at empty servers (maybe a few artworks I have seen would exceed the 500 items limit, but its still possible to do smaller ones).

Adding a counter of total dropped items in a server, should be easy to code, not much work for MA.

What you think about that idea?

There is a lot more lag recently so maybe look at something you've changed recently rather than something that has been happening for 15 years.

jetsina said:

What I meant by static is that they don't move, so a database entry is added and then removed at some point. The data itself isn't mobile. What I was doubting is the relative work being done compared to other performance-related tasks, such as changing a harvestable tree visibility/collision setting. These things have to be handled server-client for every harvestable tree there is in an ongoing way.
Maybe it's continued database reorganisation which MA doesn't like, but they don't say that.

Anyway, thanks, I'm open for discussion if this stays on-topic as to what item dropping actually affects etc.

Click to expand...

The term static object is often used when we build maps and so on in games, thats why I answered
as I did. Static objects are those that are placed on map and handled on the clientside.
Doesn't really matter what that interactive object does, when you enter its peromiter the server
tells the client to load and render it. If you interact with it the server do an update of current status.
Server still have to have this object active so that anyone can interact with it, question here is how
much this impact performance in the area, since every other interactive object also takes up resources.

When it comes to the harvesting tree, my guess is as I mentioned a node that do client-server work,
and then handle settings for that static tree on the clientside with a minimum of info needed.
That way all server do is to handle the node and not the actuall tree object.

Angel O2 Mercer said:

Maybe disabling item drop is only step one of a multi-step process. If I had to solve this problem the first thing would be disabling item drop, then comes optimization or mitigation of the negative effects.

Maybe, in a few months, they enable it again but all drops outside your estate have a 24h expiration and are returned to your inventory unless someone else picks em up.

I'm ok with this change personally but totally undestand the points raised against it.

Part of the problem is MA's opacity towards us, why not just ask beforehand and let us choose a solution?

Click to expand...

I love this idea... lets put more to them on this topic.....

Another concern was security, since we receive quite a few support cases each month where participants (especially new ones) inadvertently drop items on the ground (despite the warning dialog).

Click to expand...

I do have issue with this...
Lets not baby everyone for the stupid few... they are warned, if they did not head or read the warning, that is their problem. not yours MA just close those support cases... Its why you have the warning message in the first place.

I do like the idea basing the ability to drop items after say 30 Agility? that makes a lot of sense

Joat said:

When it comes to the harvesting tree, my guess is as I mentioned a node that do client-server work,
and then handle settings for that static tree on the clientside with a minimum of info needed.
That way all server do is to handle the node and not the actuall tree object.

Click to expand...

Thats hard to beat, as its just 1 damn bit data that needs to go from server to client.

For dropped items its a little more, but still not that much that it should cause to much lag, as long its not some hundret items in the same place.

What does the server need to sent to client?

ItemID, ItemType, ItemQuantity - thats 3 numbers, for stackables
ItemID, ItemType, ItemCondition - same for non stackables (guns/armor)

All other data for items can be stored clientside aswell.

It may get a little more when it comes to customizable items.

So the traffic caused by dropped items, is very marginal if you ask me.

A single player entering the zone, who wears complete set of customized clothes, surely causes a lot more traffic (maybe lag), than 20 items dropped in that place.

I don´t buy the performance argument given by MA.


Edit:
Forgot the position for items is need aswell, so 3 more numbers /item, makes a total of 6

GoNi said:

Thats hard to beat, as its just 1 damn bit data that needs to go from server to client.

For dropped items its a little more, but still not that much that it should cause to much lag, as long its not some hundret items in the same place.

What does the server need to sent to client?

ItemID, ItemType, ItemQuantity - thats 3 numbers, for stackables
ItemID, ItemType, ItemCondition - same for non stackables (guns/armor)

All other data for items can be stored clientside aswell.

It may get a little more when it comes to customizable items.

So the traffic caused by dropped items, is very marginal if you ask me.

A single player entering the zone, who wears complete set of customized clothes, surely causes a lot more traffic (maybe lag), than 20 items dropped in that place.

I don´t buy the performance argument given by MA.

Click to expand...

I don't think the main issue is lag or traffic server-client only, it's also a question how it handles
objects on the server and how much resources needed to have these objects active.

GoNi said:

Thats hard to beat, as its just 1 damn bit data that needs to go from server to client.

For dropped items its a little more, but still not that much that it should cause to much lag, as long its not some hundret items in the same place.

What does the server need to sent to client?

ItemID, ItemType, ItemQuantity - thats 3 numbers, for stackables
ItemID, ItemType, ItemCondition - same for non stackables (guns/armor)

All other data for items can be stored clientside aswell.

It may get a little more when it comes to customizable items.

So the traffic caused by dropped items, is very marginal if you ask me.

A single player entering the zone, who wears complete set of customized clothes, surely causes a lot more traffic (maybe lag), than 20 items dropped in that place.

I don´t buy the performance argument given by MA.


Edit:
Forgot the position for items is need aswell, so 3 more numbers /item, makes a total of 6

Click to expand...

I think there is more data than just that. Considering the nature of the game I imagine each item has a unique identifier applied to it and possibly other auditable data to prevent item duping.