Adding more item with no extra server lag

[sinkatze 52]

I know the development team has a lot of work on adding more zombies, adding more items to the world, and later probably more stuff like tents and buildings. But at the same time trying to keep this from stressing out the servers with more stuff to add.

 

So my simple idea of adding more items to the world without stressing out the server was something like this.

 

All items in game now are visually put into the game world for you to see. But what about if you could add items not physically into the world but more like as a menu or just for you to see on the UI.

An example: If you are looting a house and crouch under the tables, prone under the beds and after getting everything you see, you head out. This could probably take 20-40 seconds, depending on the house and loot you find.

 

Lets say you find a dresser with some drawers and give an option to open the drawer, this would pop up your Inventory and instead of saying "VICINITY" on your left, it would say "DRAWER" and you would be able to see what items are inside the drawer. No need to add any animation to the drawer opening because you are not physically looking into the model of the drawer, you are just looking at the UI. This could probably increase the looting time by a minute minimum just depending how many little action menus you add per house and on how picky you are feeling.

 

The reason I mention the looting time is because this would make looting a small town take much longer than a simple run through. And taking a bit more time to loot would equal making the world feel bigger.
This would not affect people that don't feel like taking longer, because that would be up to you how much dedication you would put into looting a town or house you run by.
 

How I also see this being useful is because right now the first people to loot the coast after a reset are the ones taking most of everything, so giving people that start playing at the end of the reset not finding much.
But if my idea would be implemented, then you would let the player that logged in later to have a chance of looking a bit harder for stuff other people didn't even bother looking to. Like the drawer.

 

And the best thing of all is that it would be easy to implement for the developers as it doesn't seem to be a lot of work. I'm not a programmer or anything, so I apology if this may sounds something easy to do when it maybe isn't. I just thought it would work like any accessible code you could use for other things already.

 

 

So thanks for reading and please let me know the pro's and con's about this interesting idea. Also let me know if it would be something hard to implement.

And if it does sound like a good thing to do, I hope it gets to the devs so they can add it and I can be happy with my $0.02

 

And here 2 pictures of this, just because everything is nicer with a pic :D

 

Thanks!

 

 

 

 

[creature 1189]

I'm not a programmer either but with my limited knowledge I'd have to guess that your idea would only be helpful (if at all) client side.

 

The server still has to keep track of all the items that are in the world. It's your pc that's responsible for rendering the image, not the server.

[Timmymachine109 (DayZ) 235]

I'd say this would actually put a lot of extra strain on the server. At the moment I imagine all the drawers etc are just part of the building model. They'd have to be created as extra objects within the server. That's a lot of extra information for the server to handle without adding loot in to them

Edited January 16, 2014 by Timmymachine109

[Problematic 71]

Above posters are correct, the server can handle a total of <insert random number> dynamic objects (Loot/Zombies/etc) on each server (it's somewhat explained by Rocket somewhere on the forums), with your solution the server would still have to hold the items somewhere in it's 'cache' (I am not a game-developer, just a webprogrammer so I can't be too sure on the terms).

 

Easy explanation; the server doesn't have to handle the physical objects, it just sort of has to have the item information so it cán be rendered by your PC when you get close.

 

I'm afraid the more items / zombies / whatever issue is one for the developers, they have to optimize server performance so they can handle a lot more objects later on.

Edited January 16, 2014 by Problematic

[Gekkonidae 270]

I'll give the guy some beans on account of him having the idea, though I would guess you're right in terms of the server still having to hold the information. I wonder if going this route would be a nice shortcut for them in any sense down the road though. I dunno.

[sinkatze 52]

Looks like they are adding this after all! :D

[Mullraugh 1151]

They just need animations for opening the damn things.

[sinkatze 52]

They just need animations for opening the damn things.

Watch the latest devblog they show it working just like in this thread

http://youtu.be/19ehC8kwoWE?t=4m3s

Edited February 25, 2014 by Sinkatze

[Wolfguarde 108]

The idea's been brought up before, with much the same arguments. To be honest, if not for the extra demand on the server, I would prefer looting to be this way, with the existing system as a minority loot spawn; you might find stuff lying around occasionally, but most of the things you find are in places people aren't going to check in a hurry.