Roaming Zone slipped in?

[potatotr0ll]

Just wondering if the roaming zone code was put int he game during GU#35?  Reason i ask is becasue ever since that update (not 36, but 35) things inside zones dont spawn.  Walls, ground, ceilings, entire backdrops, NPCs, doors, you name it it dont spawn.  My internet connection is the same as it always was.  My computer is the same.  I actually tested it once.  took 15 min for a door to spawn from WFP to EFP.  Just stood there and waited for it to show up.  Anyone else having an issue with this or am i crazy, or do inanimate objects yell, scream, and hide from me?

I asked about the roaming zone stufgf is because i heard something about the expansion is going to have that sort of zone.  Where it loads as you go.  Which i must add is a bad bad bad bad bad idea.  Especially with the severe amount of memory leaks the game already has.  im pretty sure the game will forget to unload an area you were at 3 hours ago.  it doesnt even do that now.  Takes me 15 min of waiting for a door to spawn now, so im thinking that my issue is testing of this roaming zone stuff on live server.  WFP has never given me an issue.  Now that neriak is in game not as many people live there, so thats no issue.  I have to stand around and wait for the Inn in WFp (that i try to live at) spawns.  have waitied up to 10 min for this place to "exist".  There is just a big whole in the world in the places that these are supposed to be.  Jumped into them a few times, respawned me in Commonlands.  So whats the deal?

[Kellin]

No, no, Burned Woods is in Lavastorm this week.

Sorry, had to say it.

I don't know about this "roaming zone" thing you're talking about, but my baby troub fell through the world three times last night trying to get to the broker in NQ.  She'd open the door, and the floor of the building was just open sky with stars.  Jumped right into the universe.  Had to be just me, since there was someone else in the building next to the broker.

Didn't try to zone out and back, as I had to log.  But it was an interesting glitch.  Nice view.

[liveja]

That's all very odd ... I've had the occasional rendering troubles -- mostly with brokers & mail boxes -- but nothing as whack as the OP describes.

[Leucippus]

The same things happen to me, all too often. It is quite odd. One can camp and come back faster than the zone loads! It does happen with npcs. mailboxes, other players, terrain, etc. Sometimes, hitting "Print Screen" makes stuff load, go figure. If I am 2-boxing it is worse than if I am playing on a single computer. I 2-box with two seperate computers. One much slower than the other. The situation happens on both machines. I am wondering if the situation is a result of some maximum connection to server limit, dropped packets, tcp/ip timeouts, or the like. -Leucippus

[Valdaglerion]

I have noticed this all too often lately, especially when flying on the griffons and carpets. You land standing on nothing. If you stay still long enough, everything will spawn. If you move you fall through the world. It is very frustrating to land at the griffon tower and the npc there wont spawn, even after the rest of the tower has spawned. Its often faster to jump off the tower and run to where you are going rather than wait for the NPC to spawn which has taken up to 12 minutes for me - got bored one night and wanted to see.

[potatotr0ll]

this is taken from from an interview at http://eq2.allakhazam.com/db/guides.html?guide=986

"Scott:   That actually brings up something that we're doing differently this time.  Previously what you would have seen when we do an expansion is we tell you we have blah exactly many zones and we have blah exactly many quests and weapons and all that stuff.  We're kind of going about the way we do zones a little differently.  Short answer is yes.  You're going to see a lot of familiar things.  What you're also going to see is an expansion on what we did for Echoes of Faydwer.  Where you know the overall outdoor region size got just a little bit bigger.  You take Butcherblock and compare it to like Enchanted Lands and it's like Butcherblock is [Removed for Content] ginormous, you could fit three zones in there.  So what we're doing is, we're actually expanding on that theme even further.   Instead of just making our outdoor areas single zones, we're making them bigger and making them full on regions of the continent.  So the continent is broken up into a number of these regions and within each of these regions you're going to find very distinct zones that will have some familiarity.  Yes the environment is going to change, the lighting will change, the sky changes, you get a little pop up on screen that says: Now entering the Burning Wood, but you didn't have to zone to do that. There will still be zoning between these big huge regions, but the zoning shouldn't be any worse a user experience than it was in Echoes of Faydwer.  So you'll be able to see a whole lot of areas that you did see in the past.  We're actually really really excited about that, one of the things that we've always wanted to do was making zoning less of a factor when it comes to gameplay. Tamat:  More seamless. Scott:  Exactly.  And you can ever really take one of these zoned worlds and make them fully seamless, at least not on the scale that our world is, but we can do stuff with these ginormous regions that we have now that we're a few years in and the engine is optimized a whole lot better than it ever has been before so we're able to do stuff like have a Field of Bone and have Dreadlands and Burning Wood.  We can have a lot of these areas that you're familiar with but you'll actually be playing in a larger region and so... But there's the standard compliment of dungeons and instances that will be around too.  And it isn't going to be 100% copied from Kunark either.  It's going to be very similar to Echoes of Faydwer.  There are going to be some things that make you go: Okay this is cool, I know this, this is awesome.  But by the same token there are new places both overland and in dungeons that either creations of the Shattering or, especially in the case of one dungeon, was a long lost area that unearthed by and access was gained because of the Shattering and the fact that the planet shifted.  "

The way thats described it sounds like DAoC and the way they did zones, called roaming zones.  this is where you have less "Zoning" techniclly, but actually you are zoning constantly.  You PC has to load tyhe zone as you run around.  So the zones are frickin huge and instead of forcing you stop for 15 sec and load the zone, it makes your PC try to load everything while its processing the game data and rendering the screen and all.  Seems alot more cumbersome on your client PC than it is for the server.  basiclly dumping more processes on our machines.  And when we complain things are laggy or chunky, they will state you should upgrade your PC, its not our fault.

[Allisia]

Neither my wife or myself have had these problems. I do have certain spots where the engine stops rendering in the exact same place every time. It looks like I'm running into a great void -- with sporadic patches of grass in it. But as soon as I cross the threshold of this line the problem vanishes. It happens in the same spots every time. That's the only rendering problem I've had, and it's as old as the game itself. Even when I two box on one machine I don't have problems like you mention. So it's not a universal problem.

[potatotr0ll]

Arrex@Kithicor wrote:

Neither my wife or myself have had these problems. I do have certain spots where the engine stops rendering in the exact same place every time. It looks like I'm running into a great void -- with sporadic patches of grass in it. But as soon as I cross the threshold of this line the problem vanishes. It happens in the same spots every time. That's the only rendering problem I've had, and it's as old as the game itself. Even when I two box on one machine I don't have problems like you mention. So it's not a universal problem.

Nah, thats not the problem I mean.  i know what you speak of though.  The main 2 i can think of is halfway through nektulos right before you get to Nmarr's Ascent and at the end of the first hallway in CoV.  Where if you turn your camera at a certain angle everything in front of you is a void.

That is not the issue i mean.  i mean entire buildings, walls, ground, doors, clickable items, NPCs, and other stuff not loading at all.  Never happened to me before GU#35.  Now it happens constantly.  Like i said ive waited 15 min for a door to appear so i can click it.  Just fyi, there is a blank wall behind the clickable doors in WFP .  Kind of barren, same texture as the rest of the stone.  Freaked me out a bit the first time it happened.  Thought it would be a common bug and would get fixed, but apparently not, waited over a month it seems.

[Sinful One]

the door in SQ to the broker dident spawn for me, i could run through the space back and forth and i said stuff in /say but nobody said anything hehe so eerrr yeah some things dont spawn since last update