Ryandor.com

Okay on osi they have to sides or two maps now i am woundering if there is a sever like sphere or what ever so i can make a bigger map. cause my shard will need it. like on this show the characters travel from planet to plaent for baTTLES. now i am woundering if there is some way to make it so i can make the map bigger or make two maps. or do you know a place so i can make this happen.

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shaun deboe

Ok, first off, lets compare OSI to pretty much any player shard. The sheer number of players on an OSI shard make player shards look like nothing. Figure, on average 5000 people online on an OSI shard. That's probably low. Now figure the largest player shard out there. Figure like maybe 500 max? And that is most likely a rare exception. Keep in mind that's not total players, just max online at once.
Now lets look at the max players total. On a typical OSI server, I'd guess at least 15000 accounts, either active or not, no difference. On a player shard, maybe 2000 to 5000 max?
These numbers may be off, but you get the idea. Also, from what I've seen and read, OSI don't have more than one map because it's running out of room, it's more along the idea to attract more new players. Room for housing may be part of the issue, but taking into consideration the first points above, the standard OSI map could easily handle any player shard for housing purposes.
Next, lets look at actual usable land. The OSI map is at least 60% water. So over half the map isn't really useful. A player shard don't have those limitations, using a custom map you could get closer to 75% land, and still have a good looking map with lots of water.
Next, logistic. It takes, based on experience, about 100 man-hours to make a ndecent map. that equates to about 3 months by yourself, or about a month and a half with one other helping you. Obviously, more people helping is good, but then you start getting overhead for discussion ideas, solving conflict, etc.
This doesn't count scripting, spawns, dynamic decorations, and all that.
Now multiply that by 2, if you have a second map (except the scripts)
Next, from the players point of view: a fully decorated (statics) world map, at best is going to be at least 10MB zipped/rared. While, that's really not that much, now double that, since you have 2 maps. To someone on dialup, that's quite a bit.


So: personally, I would make better use of one map. You could easily have a "main" area on, say, two-thirds of the map, then have the rest of the map as a "secondary" map. The two don't have to connect in "normal" ways if you don't want. One could be a special "war" map where you have your guild wars, special events, whatever, when the only time people can get there is when a gate gets put in. Use your imagination.


Now that I've put that side in, I will tell you that is it possible to have more than one map. I don't keep up with the servers as well as I should but here's what I know:
Sphere has something along a "facet" technique, where it uses the same map, but appears to be more than one. This one I am very vague on, and do not know the details of it.
UOX3 has support for up to (I think) 5 maps. It primarily works through gates only. Those are your options as far as I know.
As for making the map bigger, that is not an option. the only other size map is the Ilsher (sp?) map but it's smaller, and only UOX3 supports it (I think).

I hope that helps, and makes you think about have more than one map. I'm not against multiple maps, but for me, I don't really see a reason for it.

-Ryandor

If you have ever played on an EA (not OSI) shard, you'll notice that there are (last I counted) 32 inhabited towns. Then there are maybe 3 or 4 un-inhabited (un-guarded) towns...

How many of those towns actually have playes in them at any given time?...

Maybe 5.

5 or 6 out of 32 towns actually have any players in them at any given time.

Why? Because even with the 10,000+ players online at any given time, they usually don't stay in town very often, and when they are in town, they like to be in the same town as most of the other players... So what you end up with is 2 or 3 heavilly populated towns, 2 or 3 sparsely populated towns (where anti-social players like me go) and a whole heckuva lot of empty ghost towns.

And that's with over 10,000 online players at any given time.

Your shard probably, at it's peek, might have 100.

Think about that a while.

Originally when OSI still existed and ran the shards, they only had one world and 14 towns, and only 8 that a newbie could get to. On top of all that, they had fewer shards back then, so there was usually a minimum of 30,000+ players online at any given time. What did that mean? PEOPLE ACTUALLY SAW OTHER PEOPLE!!! OMG! CAN YOU EMAGINE THAT?! ... heh... Yeah.

I remember every street of every town had 4 or 5 people on it. It was absolutely wonderfull because it made the towns actually feel like TOWNS and not just ghost towns. Now your lucky to see 4 or 5 people at the banks....

It sure was nice when a town felt like a town even without all the NPCs...

And you want to just amplify that effect emensely!!!!

Do as Ryandor said, if you must have multiple worlds, split the main map up into a bunch of tiny worlds (very possible). You don't need to go and make it even bigger and more sparsely populated than it already is, especailly for a player-ran shard.

Ryandor, some info for you on Sphere's mapplanes (facets)...

There are 255 of them (0 to 254), they all use the same map and statics but can have different dynamic items/spawns/region names. Sphere 99L and higher has removed mapplane 2 and replaced it with map2.mul, so going to mapplane 2 would actually take you to the second (Ilshenar) map. Hope that helps

I always hated facets.

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Rosethorn:
Thanks for that bit of info. I was wondering what Sphere did for that.



-Ryandor