What would 3D caves actually do?

[Juvlar 57]

What features would 3D caves offer that 2D ones don't?

[Caduryn 129]

Is this really a serious question....?

[Wilczan 2,048]

For example: you can make spiral corridor going up, where there are tiles one obove each other?

 

You need less space to plan anything in mines.

 

You have borders and can see exact slope.

 

You could (probably in the future) build something on the borders.

 

You can plant lamps on the tile corners : P

 

 

 

 

[akaedis 429]

-No more stupid 90000000000000 slope drop shafts from some tunnel way at the top of a mountain

-Can spiral up over the same tiles(^Post above)

-No more stupid drop shafts

-More ores to locate

-More indepth content focused around mining. (No more just mine a tile and move forward.)

-No more irritating drop shafts

-NO MORE DROP SHAFTS!

-Less chance to hit another players cave or abandoned cave full of dangerous creatures of the deep

-Lastly, NO MRAH DROP SHAFTS

[Kegan 3,926]

I doubt it will ever happen seems like a huge change and i am not sure it would be worth the trouble to be honest. 

[akaedis 429]

2 hours ago, Kegan said:

I doubt it will ever happen seems like a huge change and i am not sure it would be worth the trouble to be honest. 

 

Its not that hard to do, He said he could do it but it would require a cave layer complete reset. Like thats ever gonna happen~

[atazs 965]

19 hours ago, akaedis said:

 

Its not that hard to do, He said he could do it but it would require a cave layer complete reset. Like thats ever gonna happen~

Could just implement it on a fresh map. 

[Warlander 2,730]

19 hours ago, akaedis said:

 

Its not that hard to do, He said he could do it but it would require a cave layer complete reset. Like thats ever gonna happen~

 

Depends on how would this be done, but yes - most reasonable solutions WOULD require complete cave layer reset.

[akaedis 429]

1 hour ago, atazs said:

Could just implement it on a fresh map. 

 

We would have two types of cave layers then which would get confusing. And not to forget that the current playerbase on both games would throw a huge fit about not having the new cave layer on there old maps. Tho i know some WU servers would just reset for the new layers

[Caduryn 129]

I wont really care about a Cave Layer reset....

[Odynn 2,248]

on old maps seeing the amount of caves / cave canals / tunnels / mines being part of a deed design, a complete reset of the underground layer would be awfull.

 

But if it's done and the GMs can help (by instakilling tiles as they already can) to fix the main tunnels (heritage or not), i guess it could be worth it.

 

As usual for many changes, plan it before please and let us have some feedback options.

Edited February 21, 2016 by Odynn
dem fingers can't find a 'tab' or 'a' key ...

[zethreal 582]

21 hours ago, Odynn said:

on old maps seeing the amount of caves / cave canals / tunnels / mines being part of a deed design, a complete reset of the underground layer would be awfull.

 

But if it's done and the GMs can help (by instakilling tiles as they already can) to fix the main tunnels (heritage or not), i guess it could be worth it.

 

As usual for many changes, plan it before please and let us have some feedback options.

 

I'm on Xanadu and there are some huge tunnels that would need to be fixed. Even if GM's just "got the ball rolling" by doing a 1 tile wide tunnel for main public tunnels, it would be a huge help.

 

[asdf 297]

why would a cave layer reset be required for implementing 3d mines

[enoofu 206]

Probably because a lot of caves are already a mess and it would remove a lot of error checking, and bugs in implementing it

 

[akaedis 429]

i imagine ALL the dropshafts would become incompatible with the system and result in a heavy amount of errors since it wouldn't be able to convert a 900 slope into a proper layer tile. Atleast thats what i think anyways, The way i imagine the system working is each X slopes is a layer the player can mine into. 

[zethreal 582]

Just now, akaedis said:

i imagine ALL the dropshafts would become incompatible with the system and result in a heavy amount of errors since it wouldn't be able to convert a 900 slope into a proper layer tile. Atleast thats what i think anyways, The way i imagine the system working is each X slopes is a layer the player can mine into. 

 

The easy way to fix that would be to say "all slopes over X ( lets say 100 ) become solid rock walls."  You would need to re-mine out that one tile on both top & bottom, but it would be a decent fix. The biggest problem would be the amount of CPU it would take to run all the conversions for every tile on every server. I'm guessing it would take hours, if not days. They would either need to take each server fully offline for the duration or put in a ban for all underground use for the time it would take. Also, anything/anyone left underground could be negatively affected IE: stuck/destroyed.

 

I would love to see 3d caves and honestly, I don't have enough time/effort invested in tunneling to care if there's a full reset on it, but I do understand that there's a lot of time/effort/silver invested in a lot of tunnels

 

[akaedis 429]

6 minutes ago, zethreal said:

 

The easy way to fix that would be to say "all slopes over X ( lets say 100 ) become solid rock walls."  You would need to re-mine out that one tile on both top & bottom, but it would be a decent fix. The biggest problem would be the amount of CPU it would take to run all the conversions for every tile on every server. I'm guessing it would take hours, if not days. They would either need to take each server fully offline for the duration or put in a ban for all underground use for the time it would take. Also, anything/anyone left underground could be negatively affected IE: stuck/destroyed.

 

I would love to see 3d caves and honestly, I don't have enough time/effort invested in tunneling to care if there's a full reset on it, but I do understand that there's a lot of time/effort/silver invested in a lot of tunnels

 

 

Theres not just drop shafts that would have to be calculated, You'd also need to introduce how each layer is determined aswell how to move about each of the cave layers. Also you'd have to introduce a new "Floor" in caves since some people mine roofs/floors to increase the height in a cave, So you'd need to increase or decrease those types of area's to fit into a "Layer". 

 

Yes like you said this would probably take several days or greater to do per server. Tho the better way to do it would be to reset the cave layer and disable mining/surface mining and take a copy of the map, process the changes then merge it into the current live map a week or two later.

[asdf 297]

Days? Haha. There's only on the order of several million tiles, you'd be hard pressed to make an algorithm that takes more than 10 seconds to run

 

As for dropshafts, i'm not sure why do you think they'd be incompatible or hard to transfer

[KaiH 1,126]

every grid corner of the map has height values, both upper and lower.

a 3D mine would just add multiple height values to the grid corners, not an issue at all.

(i am not a coder, but this seems to be quite easy to me)

 

a full reset of the cave layer would just resolve some other issues, the Devs would need to decide what they want to achieve and how they want to go about implementing this.

[akaedis 429]

1 hour ago, asdf said:

Days? Haha. There's only on the order of several million tiles, you'd be hard pressed to make an algorithm that takes more than 10 seconds to run

 

As for dropshafts, i'm not sure why do you think they'd be incompatible or hard to transfer

 

Any computer can process millions of "tiles". However it wouldnt just look at it and save it back to disk, It would have to change all the corners, re-arrange everything to the new format and figure out what goes where and how it would go there. Converting a whole database isn't something anyone can just do over-night. 

 

tl;dr Its a database, not some flimsy text document you can modify without error

Edited February 22, 2016 by akaedis

[asdf 297]

I don't think you're aware just how fast databases are

[zethreal 582]

4 minutes ago, akaedis said:

 

Any computer can process millions of "tiles". However it wouldnt just look at it and save it back to disk, It would have to change all the corners, re-arrange everything to the new format and figure out what goes where and how it would go there. Converting a whole database isn't something anyone can just do over-night. 

 

tl;dr Its a database, not some flimsy text document you can modify without error

 

This. I have a database at work that is not as complex as this one surely is. We converted it for a newer version of software. It took the entire weekend to fully convert and get ready for use.

 

The bigger problem is now there is "floor" and "ceiling" level for each corner of a cave tile. If there were 3d caves, you would have 30 dirt high "tiles" ( if they stuck with each tile being a cube and used wall tiles as a basis for height ) that would each have a "rock/ore type" or "air" setting. If they went with a more "realistic" way like they have for surface and everything is in "dirts", they would have to have a rock/ore/air setting for every dirt in height.

[zethreal 582]

1 minute ago, asdf said:

I don't think you're aware just how fast databases are

Databases are fast when it comes to standard read/writes. Converting from one type of database to another takes a lot of processing power.

 

x = 1 is easy to move to another location as x = 1, but what if you need to take x = 1 and put it into a large formula and process it? If it takes .001 seconds to do the original and .1 seconds to run the formula and store it, that doesn't seem like much of a change until you realize that each tile in Wurm would need to have it done. Xanadu is 67,000,000 tiles. That's 67,000,000 file reads, calculations and writes that would need to be made. Oh, that also doesn't take into account the backup of the file as well as testing it for accuracy, any crash-inducing errors and such.

 

Where I work, we have a database with ~1,000,000 total records. It takes 2 hours to run a full system backup.  That backup does zero calculations.

[asdf 297]

And running a backup on some table with 1.9M records on my desktop pc takes about 7 seconds. With stock settings, not even an optimized config (on postgres)

 

67 million REALLY isn't that much. That would easily fit in RAM on my smartphone, lol.

 

Btw, wurm's layers aren't really stored in a database, it uses the mesh files thing instead

Edited February 22, 2016 by asdf

[zethreal 582]

7 minutes ago, asdf said:

And running a backup on some table with 1.9M records on my desktop pc takes about 7 seconds. With stock settings, not even an optimized config (on postgres)

 

67 million REALLY isn't that much. That would easily fit in RAM on my smartphone, lol.

 

Btw, wurm's layers aren't really stored in a database, it uses the mesh files thing instead

 

"some table" is different than "some database". Databases have references from one table to another than need to be verified to make sure that the reference is not lost/messed up.