Quote:
Originally Posted by Ellsworth
Way to articulate what I was saying Hiram.

This is where I came from with VG.

I was very skeptical of 'no instance' stance they took. I personally like instances, and think there are many positive things gained by using them in a limited way. But, since VG was supposed to be so advanced, and in many ways had features that interested me [tons of classes, huge world, early mounts, *seamless world*] I thought I'd give it a try.

Without even really getting to play much, the *seamless* world idea is destroyed. I know exactly where the seams are, and they jack my gameplay up. Zoning in WoW is a little journey [incredibly short, compared to the retarded long travel times in VG. I don't mind travel times once or twice, but to run back and forth between the same two areas over and over again is not 'immersive' its just tedious, but I digress] I was saying that zoning in WoW is just a short journey from zone to zone and then voila, you're in the new zone. A little note on the screen and a change of 'general' channel to the new zone, and you're done.

I dreaded 'chunking' in VG, possibly because it was far more clumsy than WoW's implementation of zoning [it is a step up from EQ obviously] and possibly because they claimed no such zoning would take place.

I'm pretty sure I posted quite a while ago that there would be some pausing when you chunk, depending on your system specs. So you're right, and we've been honest about this, that the whole world isn't loaded in and so there can be some pauses.

The entire world is seamless in the sense that it's one huge contiguous world. It's divided into grids that are 2km x 2km. There's really no other way to do it. EQoA on the PS/2 was similar except that the hardware on the PS/2 allowed for constant reading of the DVD as a separate process (something the PC still cannot do, sigh). So there was less of a 'chunking' issue with EQoA because of the PS/2's hardware. But the world was the same way, divided into a grid.

This also works well for server architecture. Region servers (or really processes) are responsible for each chunk. Depending on what is in that chunk (how many NPCs, what they are doing, how many art assets, etc.) determines how much memory each region process takes up and how much CPU it uses. If nobody is near a chunk, the servers can also hibernate. It's really a pretty cool server architecture, especially given the size of the world. We were initially worried as to how many computers/servers it would take to run a shard, but it turns out to not be any worse (maybe slightly better) than a game like EQ 2, etc.

Anyway, I'm sorry if any of you got the impression that no matter what you wouldn't notice any performance hit or any other anomaly when moving from one chunk to another. At the very least, give the size of the chunks, it doesn't happen that often. It's also some pretty advanced programming that handles moving NPCs from one chunk to another (they are passed off from one region process to another).

For me the exciting part is that the whole world is literally there. It's not zoned like EQ 1, for example, where the world was a bunch of rectangles stuck together. You had invisible barriers, or we would try to create mountains and such to try to hide the nature of the world. WoW did the same thing but with better planning. But you are still in a limited world where you can't go anywhere you see. And, unlike EQ 1 with the loading please wait, WoW does a much better job when you transfer from one region to another.

So, yes, depending on the region server's load as well as your computer (how much RAM you have, how fast your hard drive is, etc.) there can indeed be some pausing when you chunk. There are also optimizations and some work to be done on the passing of NPCs, etc. from one region server to another. This is the downside of create such a large, seamless word. The good news is that as this gets optimized and as people get faster machines, the issues around 'chunking' will be more and more minimized.

IMHO, the upside though is well worth it (the list is in no particular order):

1. Immersion -- the whole world is really there. You're not limited in where you go unless we specifically need to block something for gameplay reasons -- but we don't need to block off part of the world for technical reasons.

2. View Distance -- even though you are in a 2k x 2k chunk, the programmers did major surgery to the Unreal engine and the chunks all around you are loaded up. So you can see 4-6km. This creates fantastic view distances which again helps with the immersion -- you really feel like you're part of a world.

3. Future View Distance -- Because the engine has been architected for the future, one of things we'll be able to do is when there is a 64bit client, you'll be able to load even more chunks into memory and see even farther. This will help a great deal when flying mounts become more and more key to higher level gameplay.

4. Advanced level of detail and portal technology. Because of the view distances, how level of detail (where there are several models of, say, a house, each less detailed, such that the farther away an art asset is, the lower detail model is displayed so your computer isn't crunching polygons that you can't even see). One of the things that needs to be done is, like WoW, LODs as well as any object that is coming into view needs to fade in and not pop in -- this is something that will be done when time permits. In any case we knew from the beginning that we wanted a world where you could not only see far, but where you could fly up above a major city and still have a framerate. This required, as I mentioned, a complete and extremely advanced portal and LOD system. This is why you can fly anywhere (unless blocked by framerate) and have been able to do so since before beta. Contrast this to WoW, where you can only fly in the new expansion areas.

5. Lots of room to expand the existing world. While expansions will be made (and are also easy to add -- we just create more chunks and attach them logically to existing chunks) and new islands and continents will pop up, the other advantage of a seamless world is that every square foot is there. It has always been very important to us that we keep the 'old world' updated and fresh even as expansions are added. This was a goal early on, as we messed up and allowed expansions in EQ 1 to make the old world obsolete. Not only didn't we update the content in the old world, we made it such that there was little to no reason to visit the old world because the items and such that you could obtain in expansions rendered the old world obsolete as well. Our commitment with Vanguard is to have a Live Team that keeps the old world up to date and interesting. And having a seamless world makes that easier in the sense that the Live Team won't only be updating and revising content in existing areas of the old world, but there is plenty of room to add complete new areas to the existing old world. When we laid out the world early on we made the choice to make things big. At the same time, we were aware of the dangers of a huge world becoming boring (ala SWG) because it's virtually impossible to fill every bit of the world with something interesting (a point of interest, a dungeon, a city, a village, etc.). So what we did is lay out the world with cities, dungeons, and POIs and then created corridors of content connecting them (often roads or other logical pathways for players to traverse). If you leave these corridors of content, there's still stuff to see, wandering NPCs, etc. But the detail isn't there. I've seen criticisms of this, but the alternative again is to go zone based and just have nothing there as opposed to land with less focused and custom content. In any case, the Live Team will be able to slowly but surely add POIs, dungeons, camps, and other interesting areas to those parts of the world that are more plain without having to deal with a zone based world and figure out what is going to connect to what. So they'll add more custom content and then create new corridors of content connecting the new or updated area to what is already there.

6. In the future (probably some time away) we do have the ability to add a z coordinate to chunks. Right now you can fly very high up into the sky, and you can also create an underground dungeon that goes deep into the ground. But if necessary, and I think it will eventually happen, we could add chunks under the world, creating an 'Underdark', and then we could also add chunks above the world, creating cities in the sky, or flying into these chunks could lead to alternate planes. I think of the MUD I used to play and they had the Norse Tree Yggdrasil that you could climb to reach places like Jotunheim. Something analogous could be done. Pretty cool, IMHO.

7. Because it's a seamless world, we need to be able to load up any art asset *anywhere*. By art asset I mean anything: an NPC, a PC, a building, a part of a dungeon, a statue, etc, etc. With a zone based world, take EQ 1, there was a global file that always loaded in (for example, for PCs since they could pop up anywhere). But there was also files with art assets unique to that zone. It would include buildings, NPCs, etc. In fact, if we wanted to use an NPC in more than one zone, we would either add it to both zone files or if it was used a lot, we'd put it in the global file. But the global file had to be kept small (especially back in those days when servers and PCs had much less memory, slower hard drives, etc). In fact, when loading a zone in EQ 1 (at least when I was there) you loaded *everything* into memory. When you zoned, you deleted all of the zone specific data and loaded in the specific data for the new zone (hence the 'loading please wait'). With Vanguard the architecture and the fact that PCs and servers have become that much more powerful, anything can be loaded anywhere. We don't have to worry about a local and global file. This has many advantages. One is that we can assign an item to refer to any art asset. That means if you were in southern Qalia in the depths of a dungeon and killed a rare NPC or just found an object laying around, as long as an item in the database referenced it, you could pick it up, put it in your inventory, take it all the way to the other side of the world (say an island for housing, or northern Thestra) and place it in your house. So that cool statue of a djinn from the City of Brass could be placed in your house on the other side of the world as a trophy. Pretty cool. And that's just the beginning. When player housing turns into player cities, players will be able to decorate their villages or cities with objects from anywhere in the world.

Anyway, I'm long winded as is my wont, but you get the idea. I could go on and on, but the seamless architecture of the Vanguard engine and the way Telon is put together I think is already very cool and has many advantages other MMOGs don't have and simply cannot do. And then in the future, we can take advantage of this architecture all the more and do some really crazy things. Just for example, our portal technology will allow us to create non-Euclidean dungeons that cannot be mapped, creating quite an adventure and some time to get used to the area and not get lost. Really, the possibilities are tremendous. The engine was really architected with hooks into it that will allow us to do some really crazy things in the future for years to come.

So, yes, there is some downside and some pauses when you chunk. Again, this will become less and less of an issue as PCs become more powerful, as things move to 64bit, as our NPC AI improves, etc. So the downsides will become less and less of an issue and the advantages more and more apparent than they already are. I already strongly believe what we have now is worth it, and that again will become more and more apparent over time. So many aspects of Vanguard were planned from the beginning thinking about the shape and layout of the world for literally years to come. I really think the future is very bright. It's really so much more than long views and being able to go to just about anywhere you can see, being able to fly far above the world, etc. If you are going from point a to point b it doesn't take *that* long, but at the same time with every square foot being there, adding to the existing world is sooo much easier.

'nuff said for now.

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