Bugs in Houses
 

It's been on my mind for a really long time.


Why can't I put any bugs in my house??? I really liked having bugs around my house. So can anyone please explain what happened

Due to excess strain on the server, the bugs were removed from our houses. You can now buy them cute little bug boxes and bottles for keeping them at your house.

Also an attempt at giving you another reason to buy gralat packs.

2500g for each jar or box?? nty lol

It's dumb, Personally I feel we should be allowed to have bugs roam in our house, Even if it is only 3, I never seen how it caused stress on the server ever, I never seen it ever cause lag or of the short, Especially when you was limited to how many bugs you could place in your house..In my opinion I feel it is nothing more than a poor excuse to make something players got to pay for. Extremely poor excuse. I mean seriously who in god's name wants to just put their bug in a jar or cage? The bugs roaming gave a cool detail to houses and made them more lively,

Honestly players probably don't want to put their bug they caught in a cage or bottle. And probably EVEN less likely to pay a whole 2500 for it. Like the other comment said. No thank you

Maybe having one player with 15 bugs being tracked for movement inside their house doesn't cause a lot of issues... But when you have 2000 or more players with the same 15 bugs (multiplied by the number of levels each fills with bugs), it causes an issue.
Next thing you'll be complaining about is how hard it is to get the flippers :/

The bugs was hardly a issue with any lag, the limit each player could have was I believe 7-10, even if it was 15 it still wouldn't be a issue, Bugs are extremely small gifs moving around. Gif head uploads are probably easily much much bigger And More memory consuming on the server side, Plus you could probably easily put 30 or so bugs in a house and not experience a noticeable lag issue. There are house items that easily would outdo simple extremely tiny bug animations, For instance Fire works, Pets, Weather effects, Ect. For how small and tiny bugs are especially when looking at how much data they consume and ect they shouldn't of ever caused server lag issues

Hey kid, you're new to the forums so I'll give you this one. We've talked about it already. This and every topic you've brought up since you started your account. Every one.
You might not have been around to notice, but there were changes made to pets. Fireworks and weather effects are not server side, so they don't contribute to server lag.

As I previously stated, one house with a couple dozen bug animations makes little difference. Tracking the location and randomizing movement of some 50 or 60,000 interactive bug NPCs, however, makes a difference.

Alright, Let me mathematically show you why and how the bug excuse is obviously a bunch of bogas and a poor excuse to make players pay for a dumb jar and how there is no way at all it could have been a problem.

The BIGGEST data consuming bug is the Mantis, At exactly 5.81kb amount of data per Mantis. Butterflies are around 4kb to 4.24kb of data per butterfly. To put in perspective, These bugs are GIF file which is more consuming than a regular PNG format. A average graalian's GIF head is around 40kb to 100kb in data. Sometimes a bit more or less depending on the animation and colors and so on. And a regular PNG is around 10-25 KB of data, sometimes less or more as I stated before.

So if we do the math, Using the LOWEST amount of data on average for a regular gif head, It is close to almost being 7X more, being 6.8 times as much for exact measures. That means if we took ONLY the head of a Graalian(No body, hat, accessory, shield, sword which also packs way more each than a bug) we could have 1 gif Graalian head is still be a slight bit more than 6 whole Mantis which is also the biggest data consuming of any of the bugs. And remember this is a 40kb gif head, the lowest and smallest data consuming on average, If it was 80kb it would be close or more than 14X as much data

Even if there is was 500 mantis in everyone's house, that is only 2.9 MB, still extremely small, and also unlikely because your was limited to how many bugs you can place in your house to like 10, and not many people would put a mantis in their house as it would likely disappear if there is no bushes, 500 butterflies though of average 4.24kb is only 2.1 MB which is even smaller

So no, There is no logical and realistic way bugs can or even could be issues. 2.9MB should be no where AT ALL close to being a big enough issue to lag a server, 2.9 MB is less data than 1 song to which on average being around 4 to 8 MB. Which should still be no where at all close to lagging a server, It isn't a big file, And doesn't consume any space and to track location also doesn't take much data at all either.

Tl dr, congratulations, I'm ignoring your posts from now on. You've attained a level of arrogance that few manage.

I did read your post and this is what I think can solve the problem. I think, it best to place a limit on how many free roaming bugs you can place in your house. According what you say, this shouldn't take too much space mb or whatever. About 5 -10 bugs per player/house couldn't be that bad.

Correct me if im wrong but mantis don't disappear inside a house. They sit on top of each other.

It's sad to see this idea gone. I really liked the idea of having bugs in my house. It made me want to find the rarest bugs and place them in my house.


Where can I find these jars?

They can be found in Adam's Treehouse at Mod Town.

Your welcome for doing the simple math for you and helping you see how really cheap of a excuse it is for the bugs to have to be placed in a bottle

We did have a limit, I know because I hit the limit before. I also don't think the limit was 10, I'm actually pretty sure it was lower than that actually because I never recall having a large amount of bugs. Just a few butterflies.

And no, People usually didn't put Mantis in their house, Typically they only put butterflies or maybe Beatles and so on. I used Mantis as a example because they are the most data consuming, they are 5.81kb , the Butterflies being around 4.0 kb to 4.24kb... so , Mantis was close to getting about 50% more data , prob around 35-40% more than a butterfly Which is why I used it to show a "What it we had a lot of bugs of the most data consuming ".

And I agree with you, I feel if bugs some magically how was a problem a limit should've maybe been lowered instead, To maybe 2 or 3 per house, Instead of just flat out putting them in a jar for a price of 2500

https://www.graalians.com/forums/sho...highlight=bugs
https://www.graalians.com/forums/sho...highlight=bugs

Forums leading to topics about bugs, for forced compensation and when they pulled the bs move and made the excuse bugs was lagging the server. Nice

Want to know the real reason? The feature will be added back in a couple of months (after everyone forgets it was ever a thing) as a purchasable feature for your house and cost you 20k. Unixmad has gotta buy all that bread somehow you know.

Is there any links or proof to that claim? The only legitimate reasons I could ever think of are
1. It was removed because having to recatch bugs in your house was a hassle at times.
2. a possibility of a glitch that allowed people to get multiple bugs perhaps

But actual it "Caused server lag by that at most 3mb of data" is a little bit of a poor excuse. Even for making money because not many people are at all willing to pay for a 2500 cage for their 50g worth bug. Unless maybe a rare pillbug but even that isn't really worth it unless you got a well known house

Damn

Mind explaining how extremely low data consuming bugs somehow lag the server then?

Bugs move around and their positions need to be updated every single time so each player can see them in the same position(coordinate) they're at.
With this in mind you can sort of see that handling 10.000 bugs might put stress on the server by a huge amount.

This is just what I think the reason is though, not sure if it's correct and there's probably more going on

Because data has nothing to do with it? That's like saying "oh, my Pentium 3 computer can run GTA5 fine because I have a 1TB hard drive!" Data != processing power. While bandwidth(how much data is being sent/received) is always a concern when it comes to online that's not a major problem for Graal.

Concerns come in the form of processing power. Each bug has a script, a script that tells it what to do. The NPC-Server needs to parse/interpret this script, which means it has to convert the gscript to the lower level code that Graal runs in(c++). So while most games are already running natively in c++(or some other low-level language), Graal needs to perform an extra step of converting the entirety of most of the server into c++. Interpretive languages take a lot of processing power by themselves. Then you have the script itself. Each bug, running its own script telling it how to move. These run in something called loops, basically where an event is called, actions are done(in this case moving) and then they start over repeating the actions again and again. Otherwise the bugs would take one step and never move again. Loops are very intensive because it means the script has to run constantly, over and over. Every time this is done, the CPU needs to process this information and make calculations.

Right now there are ~4000 players on. Nearly 850 are in houses, meaning over 800 house levels are currently in memory and actively running scripts:
https://i.imgur.com/4uZAEdk.png
Let's assume half the players have bugs in their houses, after all it's free to catch bugs and it was free to release them into their houses before. They were practically free furniture. Let's assume they have 10-20 bugs in their houses. That's 4000-8000 bugs running their looping code to move around at the same time. Now they don't always run on the same tick, some only move every second or so but it was a problem because they were free. Don't believe me? One of the biggest mistakes that was made in the past was selling pets on Oasis for 25 gralats. I wasn't around for it, but now there are some houses with hundreds of pets moving around constantly. Because it was really cheap to do so. Their prices have since been changed and pets now move less frequently.

I can't 'mathematically show you why' because we have limited information when it comes to server cpu usage. All we can see are the top 10 NPCs(individual) that are consuming CPU, and if a furniture piece shows up in that list it's bad because it can easily snowball out of control since that can easily multiply out by hundreds depending on how many are in active houses.

TL:DR? Scripts matter as far as CPU usage goes on the serverside, not how large their image file is.

If this is such a big issue, why not just move the bugs movement to clientside WHEN they're inside houses.. ? Problem solved, no?

Ah, interesting, but wouldn't that be a problem anyway in the long run? I'd imagine graal will eventually grow, So pets and do on and accordingly tracking movements and probably among everything else. I didn't exactly take any server side CPU into account.

That's what I originally thought, I figured that would probably help would prob help bug catching as well since you don't have to fight 5 or 10 other people for 1 bug in the open world

There's a rule when it comes to online game design, and that is, never trust the client. If bug movement was moved to the clientside, people could potentially cheat using memory editors to make bug catching a lot easier.

No, I just like coming up with conspiracy theories to get a reaction out of people.

Thanks for the information. So it's settled.... No more bugs in our houses.

I hope your enjoying your millions of bread Unixmad :)

Well I obviously know bug movement in general shouldn't be trusted under the client, as in when it's being used for players to catch them. But, I fail to see how there would be any issues if they made it move on the client ONLY when they've already caught the bug and choose that they want to release it into their home for decoration. Simply make it use clientsided movement when it's released into their home and it would ultimately remove the option of being able to catch it again, unless you want to remove it from your home, which would ultimately just destroy the bug instead, making the bug almost like a "consumable" furniture item.

Because players would see bugs in different locations.

Keep in mind you could probably get pretty close in terms of sychronising clients via specifying a vector on the serverside every random x seconds for the bug's direction and duration to travel (could be stored in an attribute?), store the last x,y in other attributes and let the client handle the interpolation easing the load considerably compared to having to execute the script every frame or whatever the execution rate is on the server. Also I realise I've left out of a few details here in terms of players entering at different times, but surely such a scheme is achievable to offload a lot of work the server does on to the clients.

I only had one of every bug in my house. Now I need to buy one jar or showcase for all those bugs and they cost 2500-3000 gralats. No thank you.

It always just ends up being off-sync. Not to mention that quite a few players lag quite a bit, which would cause issues when the bugs are attempted to be caught on the serverside. There may be ways around it but it's not worth the time put into it, especially when quite a few houses are already taxing on players devices anyways. I have already developed a synchronized clientside-based seeding system but it's not really designed for something as constant as NPC movement.