Loaded sector limit management

[Samfucious]

Firstly, I'm REALLY digging this game! So much so that I've switched my in-house hosting server over to Avorion (on openSUSE 15.1) from Minecraft!

 

That's right. You've managed to peel me off of Minecraft!

 

Great work!

 

Now that I've been playing for a little while with friends, I have a few ideas related to the loaded sectors limit on the server (which I upped from 5 to 20, as it's a private server with only four players).

 

[Note: I'm a software engineer with no idea what the code for this game looks like, but have some ideas as to what might be happening under the covers]

 

Suggestions for improving the loaded sectors limit:

 

- Allow the player to prioritize sectors that they want to have loaded.

Use Case: The player to have a mining operation continue with a couple of miners bouncing between the resource sector and the resource processing sector while out exploring and founding mines. Once the leaded sector limit has been exceeded, sometimes a sector will "sleep". Being able to set a few sectors as prioritized will give the user some control over what remains operational throughout the game.

 

- A virtual sector for all mines

Use Case: Also related to the sectors going to sleep, to increase the limit on activities that are ongoing in the players empire, there could be a "virtual sector" associated with the player that each founded mine is added to, as currently the mines produce resources regularly, but don't generate encounters. In the case that there are future plans to generate encounters (pirates and aliens) for founded mines when the player isn't present, the encounter generation system could operate on the player's "virtual sector", select the target of the encounter, and load the "real sector" for that target for that encounter.

 

These are just a couple of ideas to help increase the availability of in-game resources while putting minimal strain on the server.

 

Thanks again for making this game! I'm looking forward to seeing how it develops.

 

[Samfucious]

Another thought I had concerns managing ships that are in sleeping sectors. As you know, currently, attempting to give commands to a ship in a sleeping sector will result in an error message. This is particularly irritating when I'm in the middle of consolidating my mining operations and one of the sectors involved gets unloaded with one of my miners in it.

 

As a user, I would prefer a warning, and for the cursor to become a spinner indicating the sector is loading and may take a few seconds, while the sector is loaded to allow me to interact with it.

[Warrax]

Another thought I had concerns managing ships that are in sleeping sectors. As you know, currently, attempting to give commands to a ship in a sleeping sector will result in an error message. This is particularly irritating when I'm in the middle of consolidating my mining operations and one of the sectors involved gets unloaded with one of my miners in it.

 

As a user, I would prefer a warning, and for the cursor to become a spinner indicating the sector is loading and may take a few seconds, while the sector is loaded to allow me to interact with it.

 

I encounter the same error message.

To alleviate this, I click away from the ship and re-issue the desired order.

The second try always works.  Sure, its a bit annoying, but so long as it works, I am happy.

 

I hope this applies to what you described.

 

Cheers