Have you ever wondered where all of the normal townsfolk are? Wouldnt you think that in the human, hobbit, dwarf and elf towns, that there would be more hustle & bustle as ordinary citizens lived their daily lives?
Well, I assume the reason theyre absent is because NPCs generally require server overhead. More NPCs means more tracking for the server and more dynamic loading of objects as you move through Middle Earth. Obviously, this is not something we want unless the NPCs add something to the game (quests, vendor, etc).
However, I had a thought about how townsfolk could be added without that effort. Why cant they be treated as static scenery, loaded only one time to your PC just like the graphic models for things like trees? In this scenario, players could experience a full town of residents without any additional server load. And since they have no game functionality associated with them, they could easily be turned off for players that prefer a more abandoned look in their towns.
Example: townperson #1 walks from vendor A to vendor B, perhaps emoting some text to each vendor. She then eventually heads back to Vendor A and repeats this cycle. The player can click on her and get a canned text response, but he cannot interrupt her as she is technically non-interactive. And since all of this is controlled on the LOTRO client, it doesnt add any server overhead and can even be turned off if the player chooses like any other graphic setting.
Another example could simply be children playing in an area, tossing a ball around.
Is this making any sense? Does anyone else think it would be cool to have populated towns?
Well, I assume the reason theyre absent is because NPCs generally require server overhead. More NPCs means more tracking for the server and more dynamic loading of objects as you move through Middle Earth. Obviously, this is not something we want unless the NPCs add something to the game (quests, vendor, etc).
However, I had a thought about how townsfolk could be added without that effort. Why cant they be treated as static scenery, loaded only one time to your PC just like the graphic models for things like trees? In this scenario, players could experience a full town of residents without any additional server load. And since they have no game functionality associated with them, they could easily be turned off for players that prefer a more abandoned look in their towns.
Example: townperson #1 walks from vendor A to vendor B, perhaps emoting some text to each vendor. She then eventually heads back to Vendor A and repeats this cycle. The player can click on her and get a canned text response, but he cannot interrupt her as she is technically non-interactive. And since all of this is controlled on the LOTRO client, it doesnt add any server overhead and can even be turned off if the player chooses like any other graphic setting.
Another example could simply be children playing in an area, tossing a ball around.
Is this making any sense? Does anyone else think it would be cool to have populated towns?