Acceptable load time

[indio]

What delay are ALFAns happy to live with when leaving an interior area to rejoin a city area?

Is 30 seconds too much?

What is typical of ALFA servers currently?

And if you are of a technical bent, what method do you apply with spawns? Do you despawn immediately the city zone is empty, or do you keep the default 5 minute delay before despawning your city? Is there an appreciable difference in load times between a non-spawned and fully spawned area when re-entering the zone?

Just curious.

[Zelknolf]

What delay are ALFAns happy to live with when leaving an interior area to rejoin a city area?

Is 30 seconds too much?

People tend to complain of a nebulous "lag" problems at 30 seconds, and generally aren't aware of/can't distinguish between causes. 15ish is about the turning point between non-complainey and complainey wait times when there's some kind of feedback, and people generally only wait a couple seconds before getting grumpy when waiting for something to respond to a click.

What is typical of ALFA servers currently?

It's hard to define a "typical" with current ALFA. Wide variety is the norm.

And if you are of a technical bent, what method do you apply with spawns? Do you despawn immediately the city zone is empty, or do you keep the default 5 minute delay before despawning your city? Is there an appreciable difference in load times between a non-spawned and fully spawned area when re-entering the zone?

Most people don't realize that it's configurable, and ALFA tends to use the default despawn timers (which is twice as long for man-made exteriors, which we tend to assume are cities or towns with many interiors that lend themselves to short visits before the player comes back out). There is of course a measurable performance cost to despawning, but when it floats in a sea of client load times and typical time required to send information across internets, people tend to not notice it specifically.

And of course, running 50 heartbeats before despawning isn't free either. The question to ask is how expensive that heartbeat is (it shouldn't be very expensive; if it is, I'd bet that you're running stuff in Heartbeat that we want in OnSpawn or OnCombatRoundEnd) and how likely it is that someone will be back in a few minutes. Despawning an area and then respawning it because someone walked into and then out of a shop is a net loss for the server.

[Ronan]

I wrote the spawn system partially as a reaction to NESS's slowness and the lag it caused back in the NWN1 days. Its pretty much the fastest thing I could come up with given the tools we had at the time, and I wouldn't worry at all about CPU time in its scripts (I don't think its ever anywhere near the top of a profile). CreateObject is the slowest bit by an order of magnitude (despawning/destroying is much quicker), so part of the reason we keep areas spawned is so we don't have to re-spawn them again later. To prevent things spawning on top of PCs, we "cache" areas ahead of time, spawning OnAreaExit. So I wouldn't think you'd gain any drop in AT times by not having an area spawned as it would be re-spawned while a PC was ATing into it.

Assuming we still deactivate AI when an area isn't inhabited by a PC or DM, I wouldn't think you'd really gain any CPU cycles either.

If you're willing to perform an experiment? Copy an area with lots of spawns. Delete all the spawn points from one, and note AT times into each area. I'd be curious to hear the results.

I'm on a 3.8Ghz i7 Ivy Bridge with 32gb of RAM, the latest SSD, practically no swap space, and I AT extremely slowly compared to others I play with. No idea why; I don't get in-game much anymore anyway.

I think long AT times are worse for a DM than player, because it makes cross-area continuity harder. I've heard "I was a lot closer to the guy I'm chasing / further away from the guy who's chasing me" a number of times. Were the players right? Who knows.

[Rumple C]

My load times have always been sloooow. I suspect this is because i usually play from my phone. My (alienware) laptop easily meets the hardware demands of the game.

[FoamBats4All]

You're measuring your load time in seconds instead of minutes, and therefor I hate you.

[Swift]

The old ones, they always come back.

They always come back.

[Veilan]

I move we put some of ALFA's best cyb0r into the loading screens to make the load time more entertaining.

[indio]

I'm enjoying the new ALFA load screens actually.

Ok, tests are complete and I find myself needing some new ideas.

It took 30 seconds to do the following:
- spawn 50 NPCs into a city area
- spawn 20 NPCs into a city area (that's right...same time)
- load city area in which 20 NPCs were placed
- load city area in which 10 NPCs were placed

The same area took 15 seconds to load with no NPCs.

The game crashed when I tried to get sexy and modify all 50 spawns to ACR_SPAWN_IN_PC_SIGHT.

30 seconds minimum seems to be the best I can do. Not bad for 50 NPCs, but twice as long as desireable.

Any ideas welcome.

[indio]

Here's another question, for players in particular.

How about a few central interiors are designed...taverns and such...but most specialty stores are located in an Open Market in the exterior? This has a downsides, of course, primary among them not being able to show off interior design.

But if I limit the nunber of times a player needs to leave the central hub, load times diminish in importance. Would this suit ALFAs current player mindset?

[Adanu]

Speaking for myself, interior and exterior don't matter to me as much as FPS and ability to get what I need within reason with some pretty surrounds for roleplaying.

[Veilan]

But if I limit the nunber of times a player needs to leave the central hub, load times diminish in importance. Would this suit ALFAs current player mindset?

In my opinion, every loadscreen, no matter how smooth or quick it loads, is an intrusion into the gameflow and reminds us that we're playing a game. It's a relatively minor break in immersion if it goes fast and you've grown used to it, but the less loading screens, the better. This, of course, has to be weighed against other considerations, such as realism of the set-up or creating nightmarishly huge lag areas that are impossible to maneuver.

Cheers,

[t-ice]

I'm on horrible internet currently, but the issue still is not loadtimes. The issue is it takes several seconds to respond to a click. Or to show me events as they happen (like combat rounds). I can barely DM like this, but I wouldn't even dream of trying to play. Actually come to think of it ... Is the creature AI ran off the server machine, so if I have 5 second latency, it doesn't make my spawns impotent, does it?

[Ronan]

It took 30 seconds to do the following:
- spawn 50 NPCs into a city area
- spawn 20 NPCs into a city area (that's right...same time)
- load city area in which 20 NPCs were placed
- load city area in which 10 NPCs were placed

The same area took 15 seconds to load with no NPCs.

Were they all the same, or similar, NPCs? I would think using a variety of appearances might increase load times, but taking TWICE the amount of time is kind of crazy. Is this number repeatable? As I'm sure you know the first load should always be the slowest.

The game crashed when I tried to get sexy and modify all 50 spawns to ACR_SPAWN_IN_PC_SIGHT.

Thats odd, given that flag turns off functionality (a call which checks of nearby players). Is the crash repeatable?

[MaskedIllusion]

Here's another question, for players in particular.

How about a few central interiors are designed...taverns and such...but most specialty stores are located in an Open Market in the exterior? This has a downsides, of course, primary among them not being able to show off interior design.

But if I limit the nunber of times a player needs to leave the central hub, load times diminish in importance. Would this suit ALFAs current player mindset?

My only issue with this, is I think it screws with immersion even more then a loading screen does. Just because, most towns arnt set up like this. Bg does have its own small open market (the wide) but it would be just weird and to me unappealing to have every shop (or most shops) outside. "Oh hey I need to go to the magic shop, which for some reason isn't in a secure building full of runes and other magical things, but, in the upper right corner of the market". As I said, that to me, just breaks immersion even more then a load screen.

My other issue as it gives players less area's to rp. Now it may not be a huge number of people that do actual rp in shops. But I know I have seen players like Galadorn spend a LOT of time sitting in the interior of the herbalist, because it is IC. or in the interior of the magic shop when he is crafting. I also know I have spend a lot of time sitting IC in the sundries when I was trying to learn a language from a npc. Granted these are not huge things, but, they are things that if there is cause to be done, it breaks immersion that it can't be done.

[Dorn]

In my opinion, every loadscreen, no matter how smooth or quick it loads, is an intrusion into the gameflow ....
Cheers,

...but essential to allow us to get a new beer.