Aion Amarra
Minmatar
Real Nice And Laidback Corporation
Black Core Alliance
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Posted - 2010.07.29 00:48:00 -
[1]
Thinking about the problem of piloting large 'station-alike' vessels, that can possibly contain players...
Incognito already mentioned the idea of placing a navigational beacon on a wormhole (requiring station management roles) as the 'simple' way of implementing things.
But going a bit further, how about a station interface that allows indirect control of the ship? It wouldn't be actively piloted, but anyone with the appropiate role (for lack of a seperate one, station management probably does the job) and maybe the appropiate skill (if required), could open the panel and give commands that the ship follows on it's own until completed. This could be relatively rudimentary, or as sophisticated as some sort of system map RTS-alike control, whatever, but should at no point give direct doubleclick-into-space control of it. (Of course, there could be problems with collision avoidance when doing it like this, but enforcing safety margins to celestial objects should probably do the job. Much like the Titan navigational restrictions mentioned in the fluff.)
I'm assuming that the mentioned node-caching issues are a problem with a station-alike object changing systems (and hence moving between nodes), not a problem of the position of the object (and hence the undock ports) being un-stationary in-system. If there's a problem with 'moving stations' in system, too, of course the entire idea is sorta moot. But I like the thought of a 'mothership' that actually behaves somewhat shiplike, even if it isn't directly capsuleer-piloted, and as result doesn't disappear when all people with pilot-roles log out, either.
I don't really see the undocking issue, either. From the gameplay point of view, I mean. Just normal movement (given it'd likely move slow as lard) should just eject the ship into space as one would expect and being in-warp or some other shenanigans should toss a message not unlike the session timers. ("The mothership is currently in warp transit, please wait 1 minute and 25 seconds and try again.", "The mothership is currently in interstellar transit, please wait until the hamsters from the two involved nodes regain consciousness." and so on...)
Technical issues are an entirely different ballpark, of course. I'm kinda interested in what sort of information would need to be flushed/rebuilt from the caches of the involved nodes to make online movement of a 'station' work out. Assuming 'storage' of players is somewhat similar to how I assume items remember their locations (as in, they only know their direct parent, creating a tree structure?), I'd think the only directly resulting transaction database-side would be to change the location of the station itself from one system to another. If players are more complex in that regard than items are, well, I guess every player on the station (both logged on and off) would need some database calls there, as well. Of course, this is mostly the offline side of things. The nodes themselves would have to pass the station object, with all related attributes, along as well, and every player that is inside and logged on would require a session change to the new system. (Which, with larger playercounts, could probably be a hamsterkiller?). Then there's those node-side data caches that Incognito mentioned that I am pretty curious about. I can imagine a few things (Market orders hopping along with the station?), but I'd still totally love to know what else is problematic there.
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