Slow loading of Storages

[dale "dalewj" ofj]

I would say the loading time of storages is about 3 or 4 times longer then it was in Alpha.  To load my personal sar storage takes near a minute.  I havent crafted yet, so not sure how this will effect crafting.

btw i have 478.3T in my personal storage.

[Andrei "Andrei" Popov]

I have about 250t in sar storage and it takes me about 1-2 minunts to load it first time.

Next times the loading is about 5-10 sec or even 1 sec sometimes.

[Janis "Givy" Ipatenko]

Well my 1000t loads like 3-4min. When we craft we use like 10% of box what we have in storage. When i open storage starts timer and as counter use ton measure.

Maybe better that boxes would load only when you open them.

[Old "Snowy" Leopard]

I know the initial delay is bad, but at least it only happens once.   I think I prefer that to having a delay every time I open a new container.

[Event "Janе" Horizon]

The lag between opening of storage and being able to browse is rather annoying - particularly when you need to search through multiple storages to find an item (i.e using the PDA) ... and need to wait for each one.

I have noticed there are two phases:

• Phase 1: load the items
• Phase 2: update the total weight (occurs simultaneously with Phase 1)

I presume part of the issue is that the

As the total weight of Storage has little impact on game play - I wonder if Phase 2 is actually required to complete before you can access to items.


Perhaps it can be a in-the-background task?
This would decrease the waiting time for the Storage will become accessible.


Is total weight always relevant?
Would a button that, when clicked, calculates total weight and displays it to you be sufficient?

[dale "dalewj" ofj]

is it the calculation of wieght or jsut a counter being produced by whatever lookup opening a storage unit takes.  I mean if we are simply counting items, i could care less how much and how big they are.  make a button for the lookup.

but if we have to go thru every item in every box before opening the store... ouch.  How about going thru every item at the top level and say the last 3 opened boxes.  Open those last 3 boxes please.   Then do the remainder of the boxes in the background or when we open them.

[AW "Dr.Butler" SSB Officer]

The main "problem" with loading storage is network.
All items should be loaded on server first (takes about few seconds depending on the amount of items in storage), and than its being transmitted to the game client over the network. That's the slowest part. The more items in storage, more time it takes before everything gets transmitted.

Changing the way it works will take significant amount of work and time, and it doesn't mean it will be better than it is now.

Re: containers
Atm server loads everything at once, including attachments (like ammo or scope on a weapon) and stuff inside containers (which treated same way as attachments btw).
By taking off loading containers' content will give lots of problems, as no attachments will be loaded too, and you will not know if the gun has ammo on it without "preloading" data in it.
The inventory works the same way as storage, so... If you have containers with you, after relogging the weight will not be counted until you load the contents. Imagine running with a few boxes (tons of stuff inside) without being overloaded, just because after re-login your weight is small. Load containers and you are now limited by weight carried.

Re: weight calculation
Weight calculated at the background and doesn't affect the loading speed at all. We can remove the "weight" label from the storages (incl calculation of the weight) and it will not give any gain, just the missing label.

P.S. The issue is logged anyway, and we will think what is possible, but we don't give any time-frame on when (or at all) any work will be done on this topic.

[Event "Janе" Horizon]

Many thanks Dr Butler.


Sounds a tricky issue.


If you do decide to look into this (distant future) - perhaps having a copy of the storage on the players PC will help (storage items are likely to be rather static) with some sort of time stamping so the client /server can keep these up to date. Then improvements like searching for items could be implemented without impact to the server when we have 1000's of players.


Players:
A little reminder that you can have an offline list of Storage Items if you follow want to use this utility: http://talk.afterworld.ru/index.php?showtopic=5620&view=findpost&p=39925.
You can search for items using the *text* wild card

[Hugo "Lossehelin" Santos]

why not have the server load on the background the contents to the user pc as soon he/she logins?

[Asterion "Zort" Wrynn]

HI to Dev and Everyone

Perhaps an idea : increase the number of Kilo by  Stack or the amount unit by Stack.

In my storage , I have many stacks of the same stone , and if the system accept more Kilo / Count in the stack , storage will have less stack , then quicker to transfer to client.

And also less record in the database.

Another Idea is to accept stack for some items .
 - ASP / MFP with the same condition ( state ).
 - More ammo in one stack
 - Items used ( empty ) can be stack.

--> always less record in the database , less data to transfer to client.

Thanks, Give me your ideas if the Devs are interesseted by this.

[Jarod "Brickwit" McBrickerton]

Am I right in guessing that the server doesn't actually transfer anything more than the quantities, conditions, and positions of the items in storage rather than the items themselves? If not, maybe working towards this will reduce the strain on the servers and reduce storage load times quite a bit too.

If there's no way to reduce the amount of data to be transferred any further, I think the idea of increasing stack sizes is the only way to make improvements.