Fight Sharding
Dedicated Performance for Battles
Dedicated Performance for Battles
Hello Lokans!
We've talked a lot about sharding fights as a whole, and we're finally nearing rolling out the new tech. The goal for sharding fights (sticking them on their own server) is to be able to host fights on a server where we can disable all non-essential features of both Loka and even vanilla Minecraft with the goal of ensuring that the only processing power being used is for the fight, and is not wasted or competing with anything else. Neutral Fights will not be sharded. They still need the open-to-the-world concept to function for when players want to interfere with the neutral. Rivi fights are also likely excluded from sharding because they're small. Sharded fights are only for normal, town-v-town fights.
Because this means fights will no longer happen organically "on the continent" like they once did, it means there are gameplay changes to the nature of Battle Zones in terms of how sharded fights work as a whole.
Fight Sharding Mechanics
- Up until the last 5 minutes before a fight happens, nothing changes.
- Attackers/Defenders are still able to freely build traps, walls, gank each other, etc.
- Once the 5m window begins, players still loitering in the BZ be sent to spawn like usual, and the Territory/BZ Area will be copied over to the fight server.
- Additionally, Walls will be automatically generated on the border of the territory. They're still a WIP but essentially are short-ish wall of stone-brick, etc blocks, with barrier blocks to the sky limit.
- We will add some protections around the walls:
- Flying into them with an Elytra won't damage you.
- Pearling into them on accident will not teleport you to the wall, but we will also likely "give you back" some of your pearl cd so you don't die from throwing a pearl towards a wall you probably can't even see (depending on view distance).
- This makes for the biggest change to BZ's due to this feature, which is that:
- You cannot leave Battle Zones anymore.
- Like it works now, players will warp to the BZ with town/spawn beacons, but once you've teleported to the fight (provided it's not pre-warp still), you cannot leave the BZ.
- You will either need to win, lose, die, hide or use a Recall Stone, but there is no such thing as walking out of the BZ due to the walls/barriers.
- There are ultimately far too many janky cases for trying to implement any kind of phasing in/out of the edge of a sharded BZ fight. We debated this heavily and the cleanest option is to treat the BZ like a properly closed-in fight that has one way in/out.
- Once the fight concludes (after the 5m post-fight grace period), all participating players, including anybody offline as well will be automatically teleported back to spawn.
- Otherwise fights will behave like they otherwise do and shouldn't feel any different.
- Territories on the home continents where an active fight is happening on the fight server will behave as though there's no fight going on. Random nomads wandering through will generally be unaware that there's a fight happening on that tile. At least that's the plan for now.
- Fight Sharding is intended to be the real implementation of handling large fights. Relocating fights to Balak was only a temporary measure and will be phased out as a concept once this is fully implemented.
Naturally this will need heavy testing as it has fundamentally changed a lot of backend features on supporting this feature. The plan is to organize planned fights with Free Fight mutator and no EB stat tracking, etc so players can test without it mattering.
On the initial phase of rollouts, we will be able to explicitly flag which fights are sharded or not so we can be sure not to try it out on significantly important fights until it's working well. With luck we will have fight sharding ready for August's Conquest Cycle but it may be messy to start with as it's a Big Deal™.
Go Forth!
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