Comments on: Speaking of Furniture Slots…

By: John C. Ardussi

John C. Ardussi — Tue, 18 Feb 2014 07:49:58 +0000

I am pretty sure I suggested that and they shot it down. I don’t remember why.

At this point I would focus on putting pressure on the devs to have lower slot counts on their furniture. That can happen today.

I hope they change the way memory is handled, but it seems so unlikely at this point.

By: Danger_Dad

Danger_Dad — Thu, 13 Feb 2014 03:38:26 +0000

:^/ John, what if the allocation for RAM were decided on a personal space-by-personal space basis, with the owner being able to alter it? Either from the XMB before entering the space, or from within the space, with the caveat that he’ll have to exit and re-enter the space before the change will take effect?

That may be able to allow Norse’s idea of adjusting the divider between two memory channels. And if that were combined with my idea for untilizing the furniture channel more efficinetly, we could squeeze some pretty impressive results out of Home….

By: John C. Ardussi

John C. Ardussi — Wed, 12 Feb 2014 17:59:22 +0000

I have been an advocate for making more room for Active Items since they came out. It was explained to me that the way Home works, they cannot dynamically move RAM from one group to another. For instance, part of the memory is pre-allocated to play video. But what if you never have a video player in that space? They cannot reallocate the space because they have to allocate it when you enter. And they don’t know if today is the first day you are going to pull out something that plays video. Same with visitor memory. They don’t know how many people you are going to invite in so they allocate room for the maximum possible.

With that limitation, they have done about as good a job as you can creating multiple types of spaces that developers can choose from to create and control the memory configurations ahead of time. For instance Cutthroats runs in a public game space that only allows up to 32 players in an instance at a time. By making it public, no one can place furniture (aka no video). By making it a 32 player space instead of 64 we got even more memory.

The suggestions are all good, but as in all game engines, at a certain point, the new features that are the obvious next step require a massive core update. Something unlikely to happen at this point. There is too much in there to start over and remain compatible. It may be possible, but I certainly would not do it unless Home was going to live on more platforms than just the PS3.

As a developer I used to be frustrated at the pace things progressed. Now there are so many new things I cannot keep up. Look for some fun, new features going forward from us and other developers. There is a lot more that can be done even if development on Home stopped. And, as far as I know, they aren’t stopping.

By: NorseGamer

NorseGamer — Wed, 12 Feb 2014 06:25:18 +0000

I like cats.

(Sorry, not much I can say now that I’m on the other side of the curtain these days…)

By: Danger_Dad

Danger_Dad — Tue, 11 Feb 2014 21:51:40 +0000

;^) Very well done, Kassadee.

It is discouraging to think that Sony may never alter the existing furniture tools, but how about if a developer did something similar?

Imagine an active item that occupied, say, fifty furniture slots, but the executable within it used only five or ten.

When placed into a space, Sony’s furniture mover would mark those fifty slots as used, and not put other furniture there.

When run, the active item’s embedded executable would be its own furniture moving tool, sub-dividing its leftover RAM more efficiently than Sony does. Some active items already do this with their own embedded ornaments, but I’m thinking of an active item that would allow us to deploy our existing furniture inventory, instead of limiting us to objects embedded within the active item.

;^) Maybe Loot could give this a try, or maybe Norse could comment….