Astromech2003

Developer Structure Viewer 2003

This article is to give you a little insight into one of our behind the scenes tools. Please note this tool is not available to players. We just wanted to lift the curtain a bit so you could see some of our processes.

The Structure Viewer takes a snapshot of the locations of all player placed structures on all of the servers. With it we can at a glance determine where players have built their houses (black) and harvesters (blue). The primary benefit of the tool is for us to know where and where not to place more static encounters (red). To spread the players out we can easily find what portions of the worlds are underused.

The side benefit of this tool is that is will help us readjust our server boundaries so that we can better manage load across the cluster. If too much is happening in one area, for example, we can tighten the server boundary. Additionally, this tool has helped us to track down bugs (we are currently using it to learn better ways of preventing lairs from spawning on top of houses for example).

Across all of the galaxies we currently have over 90,000 player houses. Other structures easily double this number. This number grows every day.

This shot shows Corellia with all galaxies selected, player structures only.

Dantooine on the Bloodfin galaxy

Dathomir on the Valcyn galaxy

Endor on the Bria galaxy (of note: we limited what could be built on adventure planets, but ended up "grandfathering" structures built before we clamped down on it)