I'm not worried about the XP it takes to reach level 99 right now that can be adjusted in various ways anyways such as through more solo and group experience rates along with zone xp modifiers.

As far as removing certain portions of the DB I don't see a problem with it it's all quite easy to control I have SQL's for the individual tables and it's easy to grab things and add them back from the source db tables if I actually need to do so for whatever reason at any given point.

The whole point was to remove stuff I won't use or at the very least don't plan on using. If I end up needing some later so be it, but this makes it a lot simpler to work with my server DB by removing the clutter I don't need so I can find what I do need or want more quickly.

There is certain stuff I kept in tact for the time being as I don't know what I'm going to do with them for now, but stuff I know I can remove and won't miss I'm gutting along with stuff I'm certain enough I can start modifying to my overall target goals I have in mind.

I'm learning as I go here and I'm bound to make mistakes in the process that I'll have to look into later and correct, but I've got to start somewhere.

The EQemu server setup guide only takes you so far. In terms of the actual server modifications beyond the base starting template I've pretty much been learning through pure trial and error.

They do have some other areas that are helpful scattered through the website and on the forums that have been helpful, but it's pretty cut and dry in some cases when you've had no first hand experience with any of it.

I'm just doing the best I can with the knowledge I do know about computers and with the information I have been able to find and interpret through trial and error.

It's a lot of work no matter what in a lot of cases regardless from what I can see and gather thus far if your not planning on just utilizing the base source server setup mostly unaltered and I haven't even gotten into much of the real nitty gritty aspects yet.

Decided to remove East Karana zone because it didn't make sense w/o North Karana also which slipped my mind and don't want to have both I might have more maps as it is than I intend for the time being.

Paineel zone was removed as well for the same similar reason don't feel like adding the Hole and can't think a practical way to fill that crater zone line void with another zone in place of it just generally not worth the aggravation I figure.

In other news I used the #zone command just to check and ensure if I could zone load to all the different zones my dynamic zones seems to be working properly in testing.

I'll have to figure out how to fix the zone_points though as a lot of the zone lines will bring you into a infinite loading loop for the time being fun right...not exactly, but if I can figure out how to alter the zone_points that should be pretty fixable.






I just finished working my static_zones conversion for my Launcher_Zones. Now all 109 zones I'm using on server should be static_zones. Unfortunately it pretty much maxes out all my server ram it went up to around 3.84GB roughly by the time every zone had loaded with 0 clients connected.

The tables for anything that directly correlates with the zones spawns, quests, doors, ect all seems to impact the ram usage in practice though from my quick testing of it by dropping said databases. So the size could shrink with careful coding I guess you could say with extreme examples table dropping of few different things like mentioned I shaved off about a solid 1GB so there is defiantly wiggle room in terms of static_zone count and overall content within said zones.

Now of course the easier route is just to use less static zones overall in favor of more dynamic zones so you can save on some of the ram usage and in turn have more room for content within each zone, but then that has it's own tradeoffs I imagine. Basically as I suspected minimalism has it's merits and wins at the end of the day as usual from a technical standpoint.

I kind of wanted less zones anyway for a variety of different reasons though so I think I'll first look into shrinking my zone count total further. It just makes more logical sense to me and builds a better closer knit community which is a good thing. Plus with less overall zones each zone that is in game should theoretically be better or at the very least have the potential to be because you have more time to devote to developing content tied to the zones so condense further I shall I think.

Another side benefit is I absolutely loath too much unnecessary travel in MMO's one of the things the first MMO I had the pleasure of experiencing UO did nicely was allowing you to mark runes to port/gate to and it was a splendid feature to have it gave the overall game a much faster pace feel because you could go through 5 or 6 dungeons in a relatively short time period as opposed to walking to each first which would probably take you a whole day to accomplish the same thing.

I'm thinking of taking my zone layout in a entirely different direction to start with to make the whole process more sensible and easy, but more importantly actually feel more proper rather than too out of place certain parts of my zone setup wouldn't have meshed seamlessly in a good way. My new concept shouldn't feel so out of place to the players themselves if I can get it all to work and have a plan in place on what zone connect to where ahead of time.

I feel I'd be betting off using using the entire continent of Antonica and then making more subtle changes like replacing Splitpaw Lair with Black Burrow for example and using it a quicker travel connect to Everfrost from Karana area for example like the warp whistle in mario 3 kind of, but this time I'm planning the whole map and zone to/from locations ahead before doing any work on my tables so I'll have a concrete guide to go by and work toward as oppose to just winging it on the whole idea.

Anyway that's what I'm going to try to figure out tomorrow if I can I want to try and figure out if I can connect the entrance point of black burrow to the entrance point in Karana's that normally zones into split paw. I think this idea is for the better ultimately. Luckily I've learned a bit from this experience to do with different parts of the DB though the last few days and nights should really bit a fair bit easier this time around.

I've decided on the server name "Aswaria Sul'vor" I think it's got a name sound to it used a few fantasy name generators to come up with the name.

This thread can be deleted I guess I'm going to make a General::Server Discussion post for the server and my overall hopes and plans for it.