Testing Directive: Premium Conversationalist limit increase

Greetings!

There are two levels of conversationalist in the game:

1. A basic level that is applied to both crafted and Pledge Conversationalists limited to 2000 characters.
2. Premium Conversationalists (purchased in the crown store) limited to 20000 characters.

As players become more creative with their scripting we understand the desire to expand the limits of the premium Inky NPCs. There is an underlying issue; the script is loaded into the player client when the player clicks on the NPC to engage in conversation. The longer the script, the longer the delay before the player sees the text in the conversation window and is able to interact.

Storing the scripts in the client is not viable due to scaling concerns. If the scripts were included by way of client patch, then the players would not be able to update NPCs on the fly. If the scripts were downloaded as part of the scene load procedure, then the scene load times would grow based on the number of NPCs present, and also not be exactly current if the script is updated while a player is still in the scene. One possible aspect to allow larger scripts may be to store the conversations on the server in compressed format to possibly improve transfer times, they would still need to be uncompressed client side as a second step prior to the player seeing the text.

I have increased the Premium Conversationalist character limit to 60,000 as an experiment on QA.
(the basic conversationalist will remain at 2,000 characters)

This testing directive is required to get as much feedback as possible on the latency difference of loading a script at 20,000 characters vs. 60,000 characters. I have put up an NPC with 20K and an NPC with 60K on QA. Since the NPCs are on the same server, no matter what the delay is on 20K the time delta (difference) between the 20K and 60K iterations is what we are looking for.

The concern is that older machines and folks with slow internet connections may be impacted enough to cause an appearance of failed functionality, or general dissatisfaction with these NPCs.

I am looking to collect as many time tests as possible to determine if 60K will work, and/or if I could push it even a bit further without having to develop new tech to improve/optimize our methods.

Testing:



1. Go to the Fishing Expedition scene with the test NPCS on QA.
2. Set a stopwatch (via smartphone or on the computer desktop (windows users can use the built-in clock application for it's stopwatch feature).
3. Start the stopwatch and then double click the 20K NPC. Do your best to stop the counter when the text appears.
4. do the same for the 60K NPC.
5. IMPORTANT! report your findings here in the feedback thread for this directive.

Yes, there will be extra time between clicking the stopwatch app and the NPC if using a PC to track the time as well, but this should be within tolerance for each test if you do it the same way for both tests. Its the difference in time we are looking to track. if both the 20K and 60K appear in less time that it takes to start/stop the clock, then you can report 0. (suspect mainly older PCs will have a delay that will be trackable)

Special Thanks to @Jakkal and @mydentist for the content I "stitched together" for the 60K script. There are a TON of conversation options in there!

Known items:

1. Loading a long long script onto an NPC from inventory may take a while to appear as completed. (this should not take more than 30 seconds, if it does, please let us know in feedback)

2. The script text displayed for scripts longer than 20,000 character may display as shown below. Honestly, since we are not hosting an editor to change scripts in game, displaying the script here is misleading; so it may be removed in favour of a better cleaner UI for managing the scripts. [and, no. please don't ask to add an in game editor]