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What does "Instancing" mean?
frehley
Member Posts: 46
Just curious as to what this means for mmorpgs. The only one I've ever played was FFXI and I can honestly say that I don't ever remember hearing anybody mention this in the game.
Comments
when you enter a dungeon, you and/or your group are in a private dungeon that 1 else can enter unless you invite them. There cna be 100's of INSTANCES of the same dungeon at the same time but with different groups.
Yep thats basically it. For real instances tho try out guildwars.
"Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a god."
-- Jean Rostand
Yeah, you don't get a whole lot of it in FFXI. Instancing is where in games, and you'll most frequently hear this in reference to WoW, they take an area and make it specific to your group, allowing multiple groups to do the same thing in separate environments. The closest FFXI has to this is Dynamis or Limbus, except in those cases you have to wait for other groups to finish before going in, whereas most instancing allows for simultaneous copies.
Ahh. Cool. Thanks a million for the replies.
The term comes from programming and is used to describe a copy of an object definition at runtime.
In the OO programing world you define objects such as a player. At runtime you can create as many instances of that object as you want (until you run out of memory).
As a stupid example I'll define an object. The object is called Player and has 1 property Name.
object Player {
Name;
}
Elsewhere in your program you would "instantiate" the Player object for each player that enters your game....
Player p1 = new Player();
Player p2 = new Player();
p1.Name = "John";
p2.Name = "Jane";
p1 and p2 are instances of the Player object definition. They each represent a different player (John and Jane).
In MMO vernacular the term "Instance" mostly refers to a dungeon instance.... Say you have some dungeon called "Blackrock Spires"
object BlackrockSpires {
MaxPlayers=5;
action AddPlayer( Player p );
}
John and Jane hate each other and do not want to go into Blackrock Spires togther, so they each go into the dungeon alone.
So to handle this we create two instances of the dungeon.
BlackrockSpires brs1 = new BlackrockSpires();
BlackrockSpires brs2 = new BlackrockSpires();
brs1.AddPlayer( p1 );
brs2.AddPlayer( p2 );
Now John and Jane are each in their own instance of the dungeon and don't have to share.
yeah i'm bored...
It means you play your own INSTANCE of the game. So if you enter an instanced mish, you will play a copy that none else than you and/or your team, can enter, and, some ggames, uses it to prevent the spawn kill, drop steal and to adjust dificult to the group size, and/or, configure difficult.
Instancing means the developers took shortcuts instead of designing quality mechanics and ruined the game.
Not all instancing is speedily unthoughtful mechanical shortcuts. Well, maybe at present it is ^^ There are plenty of ways to make instancing a great part of gameplay, give me 3-4 years and you should see them.
- Burying Threads Since 1979 -
Instancing is also used as crowd control. As in, when an area reaches a population cap a new area is created. This was done heavily in popular dungeons in Anarchy Online, its also used for introductory zones. SOTNW, I think, actually spawns multiple of instances of main towns and whole zones.