Portal Mechanism For Ahra Pahts

[Aloys]

How exactly do the Cyan Ages deal with multiple PRPs in the end?
There is no noticeable 'loading pause' when going from one PRP to the other. Except is some extreme cases like Garrison.. Even then, that's pretty much the only time I can really notice a pause.

[Nadnerb]

Well, most of the time, cyan ages don't actually page out their prps. They just let the entire age sit in memory. Also, a prp page does not correspond to any specific location in an age, so you never travel "between prps" because .. well, you can't, they're just arbitrary separations in the data files. The only time I can think of where they actively page a page in and out of memory is minkata, and there IS a noticeable loading pause, it's just covered by a linking screen. The rainy/sunny cleft also counts, and that is covered by another link (yeesha's holo-book)

What we're trying to do here by dynamically paging files in based on player location has not been done by cyan, ever. They usually let the entire age be memory resident, and just use visibility regions to optimize framerate.

[greendragoon]

Of course Ahra Pahts is larger that any of the ages I can think of made by Cyan. The City might come close, but once the shells fill up, I imagine that it will be left in the dust.

[Quatermain]

Greetings

I have been studying castles and I have learned that one mechanism for defense that they used was this: If an enemy was trying to gain access to the castle they first had to walk through some lengthy tunnel that was dark. The purpose of the lengthiness was to have kept the enemy in the dark long enough so their eyes became accustomed to the dark so that by the time they exited the tunnel into the outer courtyard the bright sunlight would have given them temporary blindness and the defenders could strike back.

This is a story element that possibly can be used while making transitions between districts somehow and also allowing the transition IC and OOC. A shorter dark tunnel leading to the next district in which only a few wall torches can be seen but not in each position. In one or two positions there may be simply darkness and thus allowing the new district to make a transition.

Any questions or comments?

[Robert The Rebuilder]

Welcome to the forums, Quartermain!

That's an interesting note about the tunnels. I think the current favorite system is Nadnerb's subdistrict paging mechanism, so we wouldn't need tunnels to support that.

However, there must be other people writing ages in which tunnels would be useful. And now they have an IC reason for them.

[Goofy]

ummm why not just do it like cyan does the bahro caves. Each one of those can only be linked to by going to there corresponding ages. Basicly theres no book for them. Not sure if Aloys wants to, but you could always make the different districts an age by themselves like the bahro caves.

As quartermain said make a dark tunnel(which is like cyan did for the bahro caves) You walk into the dark tunnel and link to the next district.
That way the only thing thats loaded is the main part of the city(the center section of the map.) Shell owner can create links to thier shells, like cyan created links to teledahn and I'm sure other ages have a few examples.

[Nadnerb]

because an important aspect of Ahra Pahts is that it is a complete city and can be completely traversed on foot, in the open air. The nexus system merely exists to make things faster, and for those who get lost in the admittedly confusing street layout.

[Jojon]

Do we have access to any form of memory management in Plasma? Surely there must, if nothing else, be some error handling; a "failure" return code, for when you can't load a prp, in which case "we" could keep pages in memory until it runs out, causing failure upon load and *then* start paging out the farthest sub-districts, followed by a page-in retry.

As for the need or no-need for levels of detail, in relation to line of sight; now that we do have the option, I for one, would actually like it, if those high walls could be broken up a bit here and there - would take away some of the "bunker labyrinth" feeling and maybe make things a bit more accessible.

(here's one who's grateful of our two active shellers' making the most out their allotted plots, providing much needed landmarks... )

[D'Lanor]

ummm why not just do it like cyan does the bahro caves.

Funny you should mention the Bahro caves. In fact those rely heavily upon paging in and out nodes. At least the LiveBahroCaves do.

[D'Lanor]

Robert, you are still going with the paging? Just so you know here is another problem I found with that.

Do the current shells have any Python code that executes at OnServerInitComplete? That function will never be called if the corresponding prp is not initially loaded. You will have to move your code to OnFirstUpdate. You cannot use __init__ to call SDL variables because at that point they are not yet available which will cause an error.

lol, I just had a laugh. Guess why the Minkata calendar spark wasn't working? Yep, they attached the pythonfilemod that calls xCalendarStar to the hidden Minkata_District_minkExteriorDay.prp. So the OnServerInitComplete in xCalendarStar that should get the local avatar never runs. And no local avatar means no sparkly later on.