Placing items on the ground in the world

This would be great when a party is setting out on adventure. For example; placing a bunch of food and potions on a table. I can see this happening within a part/solo scene, player lot or a PoT, but in a story town of adventure scene...littering and... littering and..

trying to get people to leave combat mode for trades, like placing marbles on a hill

 

I love this. It makes the world feel more real. Just put in a reasonable decay timer for the dropped items. POTs could have longer delay timers to assist with Player Generated Quests while adventure zones, NPC cities, etc could have a shorter decay timer to prevent them from being littered as easily.

 

How long have to been playing?

The game used to be a lag festival, until they started limiting things in game, including NPC 'citizens' who did nothing but walk around.

 

Thanks @majoria70 and @2112Starman for your responses, but if this is true, then these are not really technical limitations but design choices.

Then, like I said earlier, pre-cache it or decrease the resolution or limit the range until it becomes visible. Shift the problem in either time or space to within the capabilities of the memory/cpu/bandwidth available.

In the very worst case, it doesn't even have to be visible and could just be text in your chat window stating "You found something". Or the object could be represented as a generic "pile" of something. Then you could open a transaction window to examine it and decide if you want to pick it up... Or you could hold off on rendering the objects until you stop and rest for a few seconds, at which time they are populated, and then they disappear when you move.

Even a slow broadband connection at 3 Mbps would allow over 300,000 bytes per second, more if compressed, which would allow over 150,000 items from a pool of over 65,000 different items (assuming 2-bytes per object).

If this is what the devs told you, then I understand the problem--it is very common in both writing and programming but has nothing to do with technical limitations. It is common to re-factor or even rewrite when it becomes clear that the underlying design is poor and when something gets so unwieldy that changing it causes ripple effects in the dependencies that also need to be changed. If you asked George Lucas to add wizards and wands, for example, to Return of the Jedi, he would have a big problem. It's not that he can't make Harry Potter, that it is technically impossible to make such a film, but it would be too difficult in his current design without a complete rewrite or a major refactoring (I did wonder about why he added those midichlorians, though...). I can also understand how a game that allowed community input and was heavily designed from the outside-in (role-playing assets added first, game mechanics second) would reveal such issues later. But what surprises me is that such a simple and old mechanic wasn't seen as important from the start.

That said, even if what you said is accurate, it is still possible to tack on a dropping game mechanic without impacting performance.

 

For a while I called BMC the Bread Message Company because of their Owl's Head lot in R20-R22.

I still don't know what TT stands for, but now I understand what P stands for.

The tech could be troublesome to implement in adventure scenes because they are not synchronized and have no persistence. Dropping items is one thing, expecting them to stay around all day is another.

In non-adventure scenes you could drop junk outside someone else's lot, as a form of griefing, possibly by spelling out rude words or pictures. Sure, then anyone else could pick them up, but they will stay there until someone does.

 

lol Ahhhh no fun. As a new player in UO it was so fun to pick up garbage on the ground to sell to help get you started in the game. It was just a part of the world and the way it was. It was a very interactive game with actual dye tubs of each color and so much more, but perhaps you know this already. It does not mean it will be like this here, but perhaps on a limited scale it will be possible to place things. That was always the plan from the beginning.

 

Time To Penis - basically how long it takes for someone to make a penis in a game using objects, or otherwise..

 

I agree. Even litter can be a fun mechanic, especially if there are rewards for disposing of it (salvaging, burying, etc). I don't like the idea of littering fines in the wilderness, but perhaps town guards could do something like enforce a penalty if they see it occur near them in towns. Item decay for dropped things exposed to nature/weather for long periods, as others mentioned, can take care of disposal of items that are left unattended too long. It would be nice is there was also a full decomposition system, too.

 

Hope that no one will put many big objects and block all the entrances to a town.

 

When we discussed this idea before, @redfish had the idea that NPCs would come along and take the stuff if not picked up by a player after a certain time limit. You could even insert a 'street sweeper' NPC into the game that would clean up cities.

 

The USA has it in the bottom right corner.