And the mask comes off.

[Super Firebug]

That was freaking wonderful, thank you so much!

YES! I just found that song off of the link you pointed to, and heard it for the first time. I LOVE IT! Some people's spelling, grammar, syntax, punctuation, etc., these days just drive me up a wall. In looking for information online, I've actually given up on trying to find it on some search-hit web pages where the composition is so bloody awful that it's almost painful to try to read them. It's really not that difficult. If some folks would just listen to themselves saying, "I could care less", they'd hear themselves saying that they COULD, in fact, care less. And it's easy to remember that "too" is only used for emphasis or to mean "also", "two" is only used as a number, and "to" is never used as either. "It's" is used only a contraction; after all, we don't use apostrophes in any other possessive pronoun (a lot of people seem to use extra apostrophes before a word-ending "s" - just in case, I guess). And I totally agree with the video's comment about the fact that it's people who KNOW stuff like this that are being called "stupid". Unfortunately, trying to correct this kind of thing is like trying to hold back the tide with a fork.

Sorry; had to get that off my chest, or I might've exploded. Rant mode cancelled. Carry on.

[Sinistar]

[Dreamy eyed look] Private server... Heaven...[/Dreamy eyed look]

Homer Simpson..... "Mmmmmmm.........Private server......"

[Ankhammon]

Homer Simpson..... "Mmmmmmm.........Private server......"

And the day that happens... There goes I23.

[Arcana]

I had a friend with 87 billion inf and a base full of high quality purples. what are the chance he would get restored?

I'd say zero, as 2 billion influence was the max a character could hold.

I would say you are wrong. there were ways to hold it in 20 billion chunks. I saw him pay the guy that built his base for him with a full set of armageddons

Well, technically speaking it wasn't possible to hold more than 2 billion inf on an individual character.  If only characters were restored, its unlikely anyone holding 87 billion was holding it in 48 characters, and wouldn't get that influence back with character restores.

The only way to hold more than 2 billion in inf per character was to hold it using auction house bids.  You bid for something that you know the order will never be filled, and you bid 1-2billion in for that item or items.  That bid "ties up" influence in the auction house, and theoretically speaking you can retrieve it by logging into that character and cancelling the bid.  With enough auction house slots in use by enough characters, its possible to hold extremely large amounts of actual influence, separate from bases holding valuable items.

But unless bases themselves are restored, the valuable stuff wouldn't come back.  And unless the auction houses come back with actual order data, the largest repository of influence in the game would also be vaporized.  At shutdown I had over a hundred billion inf (I'm not even certain without looking at logs how much more than that) in more than one account.  But I probably had only about 10 billion on various characters, and even that was only because I started retrieving inf from auction house storage and giving it away after the shutdown announcement.

I am also unaware of any way to hold influence in a single 20 billion chunk.  And if I knew of someone that would build an elaborate base for just the price of a full set of armageddons, I would have had him build one on every server I played on.  Even before Freedom I had more of the things than I knew what to do with, because my "acquisition rate" exceeded the rate at which I could level alts.

That's what happens when you spend years triple and quadruple boxing test after test after test of the game mechanics, and then one day in I19 you decide to just put all of them on automatic farming pilot.

[Shadowe]

You'd only lose them [grandfathered character names] if you were slow getting back into the game and re-creating them.

Not true, unfortunately.

My wife, Pix, had two character names historically that can never be recovered in i23 CoH: Lu (her original Kat/Regen scrapper) and Ow (a sonic blaster, but I forget the secondary).

Why? Because at one point the game was updated to require a minimum of 3 characters to a toon's name.

So unless CW can work some serious magic...

[Scendera]

There were many different concerns the dev team had to balance with regard to character slots, but I believe the only really important one for a maintenance mode server (or servers) is disk space to hold the character information.  And disk space is not today what it was when CoH released, or even when it shut down

It's not about disk space and never was, at least in remotely modern times. It wasn't even about disk space by the time Ultima Online came around. It's about the size at which the database becomes unmanageably unwieldy and slow.

[kierthos]

Hell, I didn't have that many characters. I'd be happy with 16 character slots, as long as we get to play again.

[kierthos]

Hell, I didn't have that many characters. I'd be happy with 16 character slots, as long as we get to play again.

Geez, you aren't kidding. At work, I'm trying to do some database cleanup on a set of tables that are probably two-thirds cruft.

[Minotaur]

Hell, I didn't have that many characters. I'd be happy with 16 character slots, as long as we get to play again.

I sentinel+'d 130 or so characters and that was about half of them, 48 slots used on Victory and numerous free transfers used to move lesser played 50s to other servers

That said I'd only recreate a few then remake some in CoT.

[Codewalker]

It's not about disk space and never was, at least in remotely modern times. It wasn't even about disk space by the time Ultima Online came around. It's about the size at which the database becomes unmanageably unwieldy and slow.

If your database chokes at a few million small records, I'd suggest not using a terrible database. 

[Relitner]

If your database chokes at a few million small records, I'd suggest not using a terrible database. 

It does beg the question, though... I'd imagine I/O would probably be the biggest bottleneck for an MMO database cluster. Do characters and all their related data get shunted off to a specific instance of the game db, with some appliance managing the load balancing for new characters? And which would be a better design ...normalized, or more of a flat schema?

[thunderforce]

It does beg the question, though... I'd imagine I/O would probably be the biggest bottleneck for an MMO database cluster.

For World of Walking, maybe, but CoX can only have had a few tens of thousands of characters online (ie, with information about them being needed frequently) simultaneously at most. At launch time I was working for... well, let's just say a very large database vendor in California... and seriously, if that was a problem with CoX-launch-era hardware, get a better database.

[Codewalker]

It does beg the question, though... I'd imagine I/O would probably be the biggest bottleneck for an MMO database cluster. Do characters and all their related data get shunted off to a specific instance of the game db, with some appliance managing the load balancing for new characters? And which would be a better design ...normalized, or more of a flat schema?

Not really. In my experience RAM is the biggest limiting factor, because MMOs like to keep all of their active state in memory, which includes characters that are logged on. They only get flushed to the database when they log off, or at certain key points like zoning. Most MMOs, even if they use something structured like SQL, treat it as dumb bulk storage. Some of the later Cryptic MMOs like STO and Neverwinter don't even bother with that and just keep character records as text files in a file system.

This was obviously the case in COH design as well, as had been seen plenty of times when characters went "back in time" after a crash or unexpected server shutdown. Their active state never got saved back to the db.

So number of offline characters is not really much of an issue. Again, if your database can't handle occasionally looking up an indexed record out of a few million that rarely get touched, your database is awful and should be replaced.

[Relitner]

Not really. In my experience RAM is the biggest limiting factor, because MMOs like to keep all of their active state in memory, which includes characters that are logged on. They only get flushed to the database when they log off, or at certain key points like zoning. Most MMOs, even if they use something structured like SQL, treat it as dumb bulk storage. Some of the later Cryptic MMOs like STO and Neverwinter don't even bother with that and just keep character records as text files in a file system.

This actually reminds me of a project I worked on back in the Microsoft DNA days, where the architect of a classic asp website had built a monstrosity of custom nested vb6 objects, "hydrated" it from the db, then stuffed it into the IIS session for each user. Changes were made back to the db only after the user logged off or the session ended. Ahhh... the bad ol' days.

[FloatingFatMan]

So number of offline characters is not really much of an issue. Again, if your database can't handle occasionally looking up an indexed record out of a few million that rarely get touched, your database is awful and should be replaced.

So, you've hinted several times that CoH didn't use SQL Server, and that you've seen the DB in the past... So what DID they use for it? Something custom? Delimited text files? Oracle? MySQL? ....... dBase III?

[Scendera]

You know, Codewalker...I'm starting to get the feeling you don't like databases. *grin*

Seconding FFM's question...you've hinted in the past at what they didn't do, mind giving us a little info about what they did?

[blacksly]

There might be hard coded slot limits in the code, but I'm sure CW could just patch those away if I randomly posted that I thought he couldn't do it.

And that IS what you think, right? Right? :p

[chasearcanum]

Not really. In my experience RAM is the biggest limiting factor, because MMOs like to keep all of their active state in memory, which includes characters that are logged on. They only get flushed to the database when they log off, or at certain key points like zoning. Most MMOs, even if they use something structured like SQL, treat it as dumb bulk storage. Some of the later Cryptic MMOs like STO and Neverwinter don't even bother with that and just keep character records as text files in a file system.

This was obviously the case in COH design as well, as had been seen plenty of times when characters went "back in time" after a crash or unexpected server shutdown. Their active state never got saved back to the db.

So number of offline characters is not really much of an issue. Again, if your database can't handle occasionally looking up an indexed record out of a few million that rarely get touched, your database is awful and should be replaced.

Prior to the CoH/WoW/EQ2 era, most developers established expectations that 10,000 concurrent users was the cap.  When WoW releaseed, it capped out at 2,500 per server (remember the long waiting queues?) because of performance issues, and even after optimization, last I heard, the max was not over 7,000.  IIRC, CoH's cap during some tests were around that.

SWG learned very late in development that their db vendor had been off on its capabilities (by a factor of 100), and this was particularly painful for them with how their assets were created and tracked (rather than having a 'weaponid' pointing to a specific weapon type, which stored that weapon's data, every weapon, armor, etc was unique with its own stats). 

EVE online built what was at the time the world's largest solid state drive to manage its massive datasets at launch and still had incredible latency issues.

There's often conceit that "getting better hardware" will solve these woes, but the reality is that "more, better hardware" only gets you so far, and many game developers re-learn this lesson every few years after spending boatloads on the "better database/hardware/middleware."

[Relitner]

So, you've hinted several times that CoH didn't use SQL Server, and that you've seen the DB in the past... So what DID they use for it? Something custom? Delimited text files? Oracle? MySQL? ....... dBase III?

...Progress? *shudder*

[Remaugen]

So, you've hinted several times that CoH didn't use SQL Server, and that you've seen the DB in the past... So what DID they use for it? Something custom? Delimited text files? Oracle? MySQL? ....... dBase III?

A Kajillion years ago, I was in the military stationed in Korea when they were transitioning to Wang PCs with 286 processors and from dos to Win 3. Our server had a (Then) massive 150MB HD which it needed every bit of to handle the Bicycle/Vehicle/Valuable Property database that I had to learn dBase III+ and FoxBase to write. We were required to have the DB but there was none existing to plug in. Many of the other bases in Korea ended up plugging in mine. That's the grand sum total of my programing experience. . .

*Sigh*

Would that I had stuck with it, I might be able to comprehend some of what's involved with the port to UE4. I still build PCs, but I have no skills at all in programming.

*Sigh*


We're almost there!