An updating encyclopedia?

[Akrion]

I think I've only ever seen a concept like this in one game; X3: Terran Conflict, but it could become a very useful feature to both new and old players alike while at the same time be something stored client side (meaning no need for an increasing database size).

The idea, in Terran Conflict, works as follows:

You encounter a certain space ship of a certain race. After this, it gets added to your encyclopedia under Ships -> Race -> Ship Type and you will forever be able to bring up the details (Attributes and such) of that ship.

I think a concept like this could be extremely valuable to players. I'm imagining the following for Istaria's case:

As a new Dragon player goes through the New Trismus quest line, they get additions to their encyclopedia (from NPCs, triggered events, killing a mob, what have you). These additions could be:

--- NPC example ---
((NPCs could be added from talking to them, one NPC could add another through a quest "Go to -this- guy *gives information*", etc.))

• NPC -> New Trismus -> Kerian / Avariatus / Milicent

Kerian:
- Dragon Craft Trainer
- Found at: *Coordinates*
Avariatus:
- Dragon Adventure Trainer
- Found at: *Coordinates*
Milicent:
- Consigner
- Found at: *Coordinates*

• NPC -> Kion -> Gerix

Gerix:
- Dragon Adventure Trainer
- Found at: *Coordinates*
-----End NPC-----

--- Mob example ---
((Mobs could be added after killing one))

• Mobs -> Tier 1 -> Tiny Grass Beetles / Wild Grulet / Weaker Saris Skeleton / Sand Pygmy

Tiny Grass Beetles:
- Found at: *List of coordinates*
Wild Grulet:
- Found at: *List of coordinates*
- Tech Components: Grulet Bristles
Weaker Saris Skeleton:
- Found at: *List of coordinates*
- Tech Components: Weaker Skeleton Skull, Blighted Bone
Sand Pygmy:
- Found at: *List of coordinates*
- Tech Components: Sand Pygmy Ear
----- End Mob -----

--- Item example ---
((Could be added after viewing an item's details))

• Items -> Tech Components -> Tier 1 -> Grulet Bristles / Weaker Skeleton Skull / Blighted Bone / Sand Pygmy Ear

Grulet Bristles:
== Used in ==
- Adventure: Spirit I
- Crafting: Salvaging I
- Defense: Primal Ward I
- Spell: Scorn I
Weaker Skeleton Skull:
== Used in ==
*List*
Blighted Bone:
== Used in ==
*List*
Sand Pygmy Ear:
== Used in ==
*List*
----- End Item -----

(Tried to make the above as readable as possible with the colors while trying not to go overboard with them)

Something like this could give players an ever growing list of information they could reference at any time. And it wouldn't get in the way of Istaria's mentality of wanting a player to find something on their own, like a certain beetle, because they have to find and kill this beetle before it would get added to their encyclopedia.

The amount of information you could provide the players though an updating encyclopedia like this would almost be unlimited and they can all be filed down under their own category tree.


-Mob-
|||||\ Tier 1 __Aegis
|||||xxxxxxxxx\_Golem
||||\_ Tier 2 __Aegis
||||xxxxxxxxxx\_Golem
|||\__ Tier 3 __Aegis
|||xxxxxxxxxxx\_Golem
||\___ Tier 4 (You get the idea.)
||
|\____ Tier 5
|
\_____ Tier 6


It would be a fair bit of work to account for everything and create a structure for it, but in terms of how user-friendly it could be, you could have the tutorial point a player to the encyclopedia early on and it would be a source of information that they could access whenever they want.

An idea, in any case. I'd been considering if I should make a post about this or not for a while now, but I guess I might as well.

[Raptress]

This could be helpful, especially for situations where a player puts a quest on hold for months and afterwards cannot remember where a certain NPC is or something. It could also sort of replace the mappacks for those who don't want to use them by giving them some reference of where they found something before.

Probably not something that would be done quickly or easily, but I can see it being useful to just about everybody if the time ever becomes available for something like this to be developed.

[Chasing]

I've seen something like that before, in Morrowind I think (or Lands of Lore) can't remember which one

[Akrion]

I've seen something like that before, in Morrowind I think (or Lands of Lore) can't remember which one

I believe Morrowind just had a journal, I don't recall an encyclopedia like feature. It might be the other game you're thinking of, I couldn't say because I've only played Morrowind.

[Starstilanxs]

I say this is a wonderful idea.

Even if it may take some time to develop I am sure it would be thoroughly worth it. It would help old and new players alike and also give people reasons to hunt (whole thing about being OCD ) I would love to go out and work on getting an encyclopedia filled with creatures and other sorts of things!

[Dhalin]

I believe Morrowind just had a journal, I don't recall an encyclopedia like feature. It might be the other game you're thinking of, I couldn't say because I've only played Morrowind.

Yeah, Morrowwind had the atrocious journal system that was actually fairly useless. It is the #1 reason I couldn't even play the game.

The only Lands of Lore I ever played, was the one where Patrick Stewart did the voice of the king (assuming there's only one he did such -- it was a DOS game if that helps), I forget which one that is, so I can't really say anything on that subject either.

It Would be nice to have a self-updating encyclopedia, but to be honest, how much would it start lagging the game down when you get a character who's been through all 5 tiers, when the game has to start parsing that information every time it updates, and/or every time you go to read it?

If this could be done with minimal lag, hey, that'd be cool. I'd love to be able to look junk up without having to rely on a half-done wiki or some other 3rd party website (especially since the game Always crashes when trying to restore fullscreen).

[Akrion]

I couldn't say much about the lag, because I have no idea how Istaria works internally. The only time where I see any lag happening is the moment your encyclopedia is updated, as for opening it? I definitely don't see it being worse than the Map Pack.

Depending on how the devs went about it, the only thing server side that could be required is a string of code to unlock a part of the encyclopedia. All the information could be there and ready client side, undisplayed until an instance is sent across from the server to make a specific bit visible.

[Dhalin]

I couldn't say much about the lag, because I have no idea how Istaria works internally. The only time where I see any lag happening is the moment your encyclopedia is updated, as for opening it? I definitely don't see it being worse than the Map Pack.

I'm running a Quad-Core with 8GB of RAM.

The entire game freezes for 2-3 seconds when I open the map, or if I have the map open when transitioning from Town to Istaria when I had Map Pack installed. I can fly over Tazoon and get 45 FPS+ easy.

Hence one of the reasons I no longer have Map Pack installed.

Depending on how the devs went about it, the only thing server side that could be required is a string of code to unlock a part of the encyclopedia. All the information could be there and ready client side, undisplayed until an instance is sent across from the server to make a specific bit visible.

When I mentioned lag, I should have specified CPU lag, not Network Latency. My apologies.

[Akrion]

I'm running a Quad-Core with 8GB of RAM.

The entire game freezes for 2-3 seconds when I open the map, or if I have the map open when transitioning from Town to Istaria when I had Map Pack installed. I can fly over Tazoon and get 45 FPS+ easy.

Hence one of the reasons I no longer have Map Pack installed.

When I mentioned lag, I should have specified CPU lag, not Network Latency. My apologies.

I don't think Istaria is coded to use multiple cores, what a huge improvement that could be to its operations, though also what a huge task that would be to make it happen as well.

What I believe makes the map pack take so long to load is all the markers. Something like this should be avoidable by changing how the encyclopedia is loaded. If you were to try and load the entire encyclopedia like you would your formula book, it would probably take a number of seconds to open. However the encyclopedia could just load what it needs as its called.

You might imagine an example like this:

*You open your encyclopedia*
((The Main Index is loaded))
== Main Index ==
NPCs
Mobs
Items
Locations

*You click on NPCs*
((NPC Index is loaded))
== NPC Index ==
Aughundell
Chiconis
Dalimond
Dralk
Feladan
Kion
Kirasanct
Mahagra
New Rachival
New Trismus
Sslanis
Tazoon
Note: This list would get somewhat long if you accounted for every location, I havn't yet thought of a cleaner solution for it.

*You click on New Trismus*
((New Trismus NPC Index is loaded))
== New Trismus NPC Index ==
-NPCs go here-



Now, with the above solution being said, it would solve one problem and create another.
- The advantage of loading everything up at once is that you'll get much faster transitions from page to page, since you don't have to call that page function to load it, because it's already there. But ofcourse in Istaria's case, that could take a bit to load.
- The advantage of loading one page at a time is that you won't get that initial 'lag spike' when opening the encyclopedia (Not to the same degree, in any case), however each page might be noticeably slower to load if you compared it with a pre-loaded version.

[Chasing]

Just to clarify what I said earlier, I worked out it was Lands of Lore 2 which I used to play (which was DOS or Win95) I think what I remembered was the automap function within the game (so not really an encyclopedia). I tried to download a copy of the original manual to have a look at what the functionality was but not had much luck finding a copy that isn't corrupted. Also I've played so many games over the years it could well have been a different game.

As for the map pack (my understanding of it)

The map pack for the large map areas is split into segments (main istaria map, new trimus etc) and these segments are all separate files. When you access the main Istaria map it has to find, load and recombine all the segments to get a seamless map. Then after the map has loaded the layers are loaded. If I remember correctly the map pack can support up to 15 different layers. Each layer has certain markers in it so again there is a time delay as these markers are loaded. Then you have the custom made markers which are loaded.

Katscratch has been working on some optimisations for the map pack for the next release he is going to do, which will help a bit with loading, but really what you would need to do to speed it up is to get rid of the segments and just make it load a single graphic. Reducing the number of layers will also help a certain amount.

I think, but not sure, there is a relation between the segments and the heightmaps/world cache sectors. And I don't know how feasible it is to reduce the number of segments without spending time investigating how it works.

BTW PPL such as Fridlekh, Ranqthas and Katscratch would be able to explain in more detail how it works.

[Akrion]

I can see some advantages with the map being loaded as a grid of individual images. To change a portion of a map would mean to change the grids that need to be and send those changes over in a patch, it would be more efficient than sending the entire map if you just updated a few areas.

A full formula book can take a good while to load as well, can almost rival the map pack. I'm not sure if the formula book has to make a bunch of server calls, however, but I would assume it would have to make at least one, so that could add to its load time.

Luckily the encyclopedia could be almost entirely text based and client side save for a server checksum to make sure the encyclopedia is displaying what it should be for what that character should be able to refrence , so its load time should be relatively short in comparison. All your formulas have functions of their own they would need to bring with them as well as small icons, so they'd be more than just text where the encyclopedia could essentially be nothing but text.

If the encyclopedia had pictures to go along with it, those could be loaded as they're individually called while the encyclopedia, text wise, could be loaded all at once.

Edit: A big problem I've been struggling to think of any decent solution for would be keeping the encyclopedia from being tampered with. (Tweeking it to just display everything without actually working to fill it)

If it's entirely client side, that would keep the information required to be stored in a database low and not require an unknown amount of space to be used up server side, but it would be modifiable.

You could split them, make the encyclopedia its self client side but the data for what it should display for your character server side. This would require a database entry for every character, the size of which I'm not entirely sure of. It -should- only need to do 1 check with the server though, and not be very laggy, but again I'm not entirely sure.

[Dhalin]

When I spoke of lag, I was speaking of CPU processing issues.

The Map Pack is entirely client-side, yet can cause even the best computers to come to an absolute grinding halt (_zero_ FPS) for 2-3 seconds.

I assume, this is because it must load hundreds (thousands?) of map markers, each with their coordinates and their layer keyword. This is an assumption, but still.

This isn't about client-server networking lag (though if you have, say, 100 people on simultaneously, constantly updating their encyclopedias, it could maybe be an issue), this is more about using up more RAM, more CPU cycles, and causing even more CPU strain, when the game already runs fairly poorly even on newer machines, due to lack of optimizations, and the fact we're running ancient (in the computer world) code.

I don't blame the devs for any of it, but facts are facts; we're running old, archaic code, and I think they do a fairly good job in giving us what they have given us, despite the lack of manpower and what kind of tools and resources they have to work with.

I wouldn't be too overly concerned about people having full encyclopedias; in fact it should come full anyways. Do we really need it to fill as we go? Why not have it full to start with, when there's things like wikis and such, that a player can look up using a 2nd computer, or, window the game and look it up. Those things don't require you to write them as you discover them in-game, so why should we restrict this in that manner, when the information can be found elsewhere?

The only two roadblocks I see in implementing this idea is:

1). CPU/RAM as I mentioned above.
2). Actually coding and implementing it.

If they could figure out #2 so that it doesn't cause #1, I think we'd be golden. It really would be a nice idea. I hate running around blind, not knowing where anything is. That's why things like Map Packs are so tempting. It is nice to hear they are trying to optimize it the best they can, but I wonder just how much can really be done with the engine we're currently running...

[Akrion]

When I spoke of lag, I was speaking of CPU processing issues.

The Map Pack is entirely client-side, yet can cause even the best computers to come to an absolute grinding halt (_zero_ FPS) for 2-3 seconds.

I assume, this is because it must load hundreds (thousands?) of map markers, each with their coordinates and their layer keyword. This is an assumption, but still.

This isn't about client-server networking lag (though if you have, say, 100 people on simultaneously, constantly updating their encyclopedias, it could maybe be an issue), this is more about using up more RAM, more CPU cycles, and causing even more CPU strain, when the game already runs fairly poorly even on newer machines, due to lack of optimizations, and the fact we're running ancient (in the computer world) code.

Well keep in mind that server calls are just another bit of code. When you reach a spot where you need to call a server and wait for an answer, the code waits on that point until it gets an answer. There likely being another bit of code acting as a timer so the code isn't left frozen there indefinitely.

The more server calls you have, the more your client needs to wait for the reply. I'm simply saying that server calls will add to the time it takes for code to execute, ultimately helping to make client side CPU lag worse.

I wouldn't be too overly concerned about people having full encyclopedias; in fact it should come full anyways. Do we really need it to fill as we go? Why not have it full to start with, when there's things like wikis and such, that a player can look up using a 2nd computer, or, window the game and look it up. Those things don't require you to write them as you discover them in-game, so why should we restrict this in that manner, when the information can be found elsewhere?

I have two reasons in mind for making the encyclopedia something you would need to fill.
- Reason One: It could give players something else to do; explore and gather information about the world of Istaria.
- Reason Two: I've been told a couple months back that the Devs prefer that you figure out where you need to go through the quest dialog, rather than just pointing you to your location. The quest to seek out Sand Pygmy's, for example, on New Trismus could be spoiled if the mob's location were disclosed in the encyclopedia before they were found. The idea of filling your book -after- you find things, should better comply with what the Devs envision.

Of course this might annoy some older players, having to fill out the encyclopedia, but there always must be some compromising one way or another with additions like this. At the very least, it would be there to fill.

The only two roadblocks I see in implementing this idea is:

1). CPU/RAM as I mentioned above.
2). Actually coding and implementing it.

If they could figure out #2 so that it doesn't cause #1, I think we'd be golden. It really would be a nice idea. I hate running around blind, not knowing where anything is. That's why things like Map Packs are so tempting. It is nice to hear they are trying to optimize it the best they can, but I wonder just how much can really be done with the engine we're currently running...

Coding it to simply work wouldn't be that much of a task, not as far as technical stuff goes in any case. Coding it to work efficiently and well would take more time.

Of course I know little of the internal operations of Istaria, but as a concept the encyclopedia is a rather simple project as far as code is concerned. What ever conflicts there might be with making it work internally with Istaria, on the other hand, might not be so simple.

[Krinharth]

I have two reasons in mind for making the encyclopedia something you would need to fill.
- Reason One: It could give players something else to do; explore and gather information about the world of Istaria.
- Reason Two: I've been told a couple months back that the Devs prefer that you figure out where you need to go through the quest dialog, rather than just pointing you to your location. The quest to seek out Sand Pygmy's, for example, on New Trismus could be spoiled if the mob's location were disclosed in the encyclopedia before they were found. The idea of filling your book -after- you find things, should better comply with what the Devs envision.

Of course this might annoy some older players, having to fill out the encyclopedia, but there always must be some compromising one way or another with additions like this. At the very least, it would be there to fill.
.

in my opinion - good compromise - make it optional - if you wana - clic and fill full enciclopedy, if no, fill with exploring.

I agree, great minus of every outer enciclodedy - spoiling for yourself something, you still do not explore. unfortunatly, I've spoil for myself some things, thus I decide make such sugestion, to prevent it for me and other, who like to explore by himself