I've never played an mmo, where you see lot of loading screens like in STO and have to wait so long for a map transfer. Maybe one reason is the small size fo maps and intances.
A long time ago i've read about one big sector space? Whats happened with this great plan? When we can fly trough one big galaxy?
Why does the map transfer take a long time, so taht i can go in the citchen to take a cup of coffee?
Why are a lot of maps so small, like the space maps e.g. arround planets? Whats happened with the big solar systems in our galaxy? Why dont put for example Bajor and DS9 in one big system?
Why is the Quarks and the promenade on DS9 on different maps? Why not open the Quarks to the promenade like in the tv show with a bar and chairs and tables and that you here the noises from the bar on the promenade? The promenade in STO remember me on a pipe, but not on that promenade from the tv show.
Another problem is the limit of players in one instance. If you want meet with small groups of fleet members on a map like DS9 its hard to find an instance. Or you are alone with your fleet on that map.
Please reduce the loading screens in that game, because its disturb the atmosphere, especially if you have to wait minutes for a map transfer.
If you change the Patch On Demand feature in your Launcher you will download another couple of gigs of data, and you'll have bigger patches each week, but it can greatly reduce your zoning time because then the map only needs to place the PCs and NPCs rather then create everything you're zoning into.
STO is about my Liberated Borg Federation Captain with his Breen 1st Officer, Jem'Hadar Tactical Officer, Liberated Borg Engineering Officer, Android Ops Officer, Photonic Science Officer, Gorn Science Officer, and Reman Medical Officer jumping into their Jem'Hadar Carrier and flying off to do missions for the new Romulan Empire. But for some players allowing a T5 Connie to be used breaks the canon in the game.
Maybe the longevity of the map transfer is the result of the STO database and their bad performance.
On many situation there are lags in the game. Like map transfer or if you open your fleet window. Sometimes your fleet holdings appear late. In the last weeks their never got load for a lot of times.
Also a transfer of items from your bank or inventory to your character, your ship or your bridge officers takes very long. Sometimes an item displayed twice in your inventory and in the character slot.
If you change the Patch On Demand feature in your Launcher you will download another couple of gigs of data, and you'll have bigger patches each week, but it can greatly reduce your zoning time because then the map only needs to place the PCs and NPCs rather then create everything you're zoning into.
in the wise words of CCP "instancing is the devil" understandable we need some sort of transition to different areas/missions but especially in space id rather have something like THIS its pretty much a seamless transition, it wouldn't be hard to modify it to look like your in warp from star trek since there is only one instance where star trek would use a wormhole transition lol.
lol....so true...heh. That game does load a bit longer than most.
STO I have very little load time. zones load within seconds from I enter them, has always been that way for me, been here since beta too, same with CO and NW. Games work very efficiently IMO.
maybe its a client to client, processing speed or connection issue rather than just STO's end for your issues OP ?
thought this as well the other day when somebody posted a thread that the PWE websites are not functioning fast enough.
who knows.....
_______________________
---- FIRE EVERYTHING ! ----
Its not on every map transfer. ESD takes longer, the own bridge too and some other transfers. STFs and fleet alerts are faster. But the duration isn't the only reason for this topic (don't know why a Mod has merged my database thread with this one, because it's an own topic).
The topic is, why are so many loadings screens and such a fragmented world in STO. Maybe loading screens like in EVE are not so destructive to the atmosphere of this game. But it's not the solution for the small instances and the small worlds.
Maybe the old Cryptic engine is just wrong for this game.
Its not on every map transfer. ESD takes longer, the own bridge too and some other transfers. STFs and fleet alerts are faster. But the duration isn't the only reason for this topic (don't know why a Mod has merged my database thread with this one, because it's an own topic).
The topic is, why are so many loadings screens and such a fragmented world in STO. Maybe loading screens like in EVE are not so destructive to the atmosphere of this game. But it's not the solution for the small instances and the small worlds.
Maybe the old Cryptic engine is just wrong for this game.
Most likely their poor programmers can't develop a smoother transition between instances, so we are stuck with fragmented areas like they are. My load times are decent, but there are times where it takes longer than needed imo if I enter an area not previously visited during the day or has too many people in certain instances causing it to figure where in the hell it's going to put me.
You know.. this is a somewhat non-sto specific quandary, but I've always been curious why MMOs don't keep the chat up when you enter a loading screen. I get that things are getting loaded and unloaded to/from memory, but for games of a social nature, it seems like something that should be "standard" for the genre.
the small areas on the map especially make the slipstream drive feel pointless cause you can get from one end of the map to the other and have slipstream to spare for when you load up the other area but it automatically gets turned off, it should just be one large area of sector space not tiny tiny blocks. i use transwarp drive more for the fact i will avoid more loading screens than actually just getting somewhere faster. its amazing how this game makes space feel so small.
You know.. this is a somewhat non-sto specific quandary, but I've always been curious why MMOs don't keep the chat up when you enter a loading screen. I get that things are getting loaded and unloaded to/from memory, but for games of a social nature, it seems like something that should be "standard" for the genre.
I noticed FFXIV does this and it surprised me. It shouldn't be a surprise because as you say, these are supposedly social games.
the small areas on the map especially make the slipstream drive feel pointless cause you can get from one end of the map to the other and have slipstream to spare for when you load up the other area but it automatically gets turned off, it should just be one large area of sector space not tiny tiny blocks. i use transwarp drive more for the fact i will avoid more loading screens than actually just getting somewhere faster. its amazing how this game makes space feel so small.
Is that a map/instance problem or is it a problem with the fact that ship routinely go warp 30+ in this game now?
STO is about my Liberated Borg Federation Captain with his Breen 1st Officer, Jem'Hadar Tactical Officer, Liberated Borg Engineering Officer, Android Ops Officer, Photonic Science Officer, Gorn Science Officer, and Reman Medical Officer jumping into their Jem'Hadar Carrier and flying off to do missions for the new Romulan Empire. But for some players allowing a T5 Connie to be used breaks the canon in the game.
While we're talking about loading screens. Is there any reason the Foundry missions sometimes take forever to load?
I really would like to play more Foundry missions but the ones that have numerous changes of location seem to take forever to play through. No disrespect to the authors of those missions I just find the long loading times tedious.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
"You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon, taH pagh, taH be"
Is that a map/instance problem or is it a problem with the fact that ship routinely go warp 30+ in this game now?
erm... i guess a little of column A and a little of column B :-P but yea. and also for the romlan flotilla at the start of the romulans game the instance size is 5.... that's retardedly small
While we're talking about loading screens. Is there any reason the Foundry missions sometimes take forever to load?
I assume the Foundry is on a separate databate - which is why Foundry missions can't just be ported onto the Holodeck. We know there's a lot of bugs in the Foundry system, and Dan has stated they will get worked on when Cryptic's Foundry Team - this team has nothing to do with STO - is done working on NWN's Foundry.
STO is about my Liberated Borg Federation Captain with his Breen 1st Officer, Jem'Hadar Tactical Officer, Liberated Borg Engineering Officer, Android Ops Officer, Photonic Science Officer, Gorn Science Officer, and Reman Medical Officer jumping into their Jem'Hadar Carrier and flying off to do missions for the new Romulan Empire. But for some players allowing a T5 Connie to be used breaks the canon in the game.
The ones that seem to take the longest are the missions you would get on a quest like "Explore Strange New Worlds" These are sort of random generated missions when you enter each anomaly the mission is chosen and it is one of several different mission...
Scan 5 anomalies
Help the distressed ship
Search for wreaked freighters, scan them and report findings to local aliens
Assault the underground base or the variation on that, access the computers in that base to determine what the base was for...
There are probably a few more but you get the idea, it is choosing a mission randomly from a list of premade missions, so why does it take so long to load? I think it must be randomly generating the mission content and if they are premades why bother with that? Just use same content and make it load faster!...
By design, loading a system map or a planet surface/starbase map cannot be done without loading screens. It just can't. There is no actual real way that the loading screens can be skipped when entering a system or a planet's atmosphere. Unless anyone wants the game to demand more resources in order to seemingly load an entire galactic map - thus drastically increasing the minimum system requirements.
However, the devs have specifically stated that they want to revamp sector space, to make it one big map, instead of maps of specific sectors. That sounds good enough, however it is not an easy thing to do, given that they have to modify and adapt the engine for such a big change. At least we know it's on its way.
Saying that no other mmos have so many loading screens is not quite fair considering that, at the moment, there is no mmo out there on the market like STO, which allows both ground and space combat/movement in the same game. I say that, given the nature of the gameplay, they did pretty well so far. It could have been far worse.
Ignum CampaignNWS-DBBV2EY9G "The quest for the Book of Ignum"
The small maps, boxed-up galaxy, diced up by loading screens containing images that have nothing to do with the current space you're trying to travel through, are immersion breaking.
Comments
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!
On many situation there are lags in the game. Like map transfer or if you open your fleet window. Sometimes your fleet holdings appear late. In the last weeks their never got load for a lot of times.
Also a transfer of items from your bank or inventory to your character, your ship or your bridge officers takes very long. Sometimes an item displayed twice in your inventory and in the character slot.
It feels, like the database gets slower and slower every day or with the words of James T. Kirk: "Space docking procedure is getting longer and longer every time!"
Patch on demand is allready disabled.
lol....so true...heh. That game does load a bit longer than most.
STO I have very little load time. zones load within seconds from I enter them, has always been that way for me, been here since beta too, same with CO and NW. Games work very efficiently IMO.
maybe its a client to client, processing speed or connection issue rather than just STO's end for your issues OP ?
thought this as well the other day when somebody posted a thread that the PWE websites are not functioning fast enough.
who knows.....
---- FIRE EVERYTHING ! ----
The topic is, why are so many loadings screens and such a fragmented world in STO. Maybe loading screens like in EVE are not so destructive to the atmosphere of this game. But it's not the solution for the small instances and the small worlds.
Maybe the old Cryptic engine is just wrong for this game.
Most likely their poor programmers can't develop a smoother transition between instances, so we are stuck with fragmented areas like they are. My load times are decent, but there are times where it takes longer than needed imo if I enter an area not previously visited during the day or has too many people in certain instances causing it to figure where in the hell it's going to put me.
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!
I noticed FFXIV does this and it surprised me. It shouldn't be a surprise because as you say, these are supposedly social games.
I really would like to play more Foundry missions but the ones that have numerous changes of location seem to take forever to play through. No disrespect to the authors of those missions I just find the long loading times tedious.
"You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon, taH pagh, taH be"
Scan 5 anomalies
Help the distressed ship
Search for wreaked freighters, scan them and report findings to local aliens
Assault the underground base or the variation on that, access the computers in that base to determine what the base was for...
There are probably a few more but you get the idea, it is choosing a mission randomly from a list of premade missions, so why does it take so long to load? I think it must be randomly generating the mission content and if they are premades why bother with that? Just use same content and make it load faster!...
However, the devs have specifically stated that they want to revamp sector space, to make it one big map, instead of maps of specific sectors. That sounds good enough, however it is not an easy thing to do, given that they have to modify and adapt the engine for such a big change. At least we know it's on its way.
Saying that no other mmos have so many loading screens is not quite fair considering that, at the moment, there is no mmo out there on the market like STO, which allows both ground and space combat/movement in the same game. I say that, given the nature of the gameplay, they did pretty well so far. It could have been far worse.
"The quest for the Book of Ignum"
"I have seen your future. I have seen your end"
Because Necromancers have to keep out ! :P
Here's an old thread on the topic: "Fix open sector space with 4 tiny changes" http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=124487
Other MMORPGs manage smoother transitions and much larger maps, keeping one absorbed in the universe.
If PWE only cares for metrics, I am sure that by not constantly breaking the game flow results in more time gaming, more enjoyment, and more spending.