before we updated 10 channels every 30 seconds’ish and it just round-robined choosing the 10 “least recently updated” with no extra criteria + an extra channel (or many on notifications which is actually a composit of many channels, one per alt + a universal announcements + a username level notifications channel) when not on #all to be faster, now it updates 1 channel every every 2.5s’ish, but which channel it picks to update is based on a lot of criteria:
how active is the channel? when was the last received/sent message? [ more active -> expect there to be new messages again soon so update more frequently ]
are you scrolled up in the channel looking back at older messages? [ looking back at history -> care less about new messages arriving right now ]
are you filtering on a specific channel? [ update more frequently ]
how long since this channel was updated? [ if channel has just been updated, give it a break for a bit… and helps channels that get prioritised down to eventually update still ]
how many unread messages are there in the channel? [ if you arent bothering to read the channel, then update less ]
what type of channel is it? PM/Guild channels expected to be “more important” and updated more frequently than Universal channels, updated more frequently than Notification channels for your alts, updated more frequently than Guild-Log channels, updated more frequently than “universal” notification channels [ we very very rarely send a message out on these as devs ]
The result aims to not be any more “expensive” on the backend, but being much more responsive in general use-cases, eg you send a pm to someone: activity is higher, so is updated more frequently expecting you to get a response. If a pm is sent to you, once it is received itll be updated more frequently for a while expecting more messages to come soon. If you are actively PM’ing someone, even on the #all channel, it should be much more real-time than before where it would ALWAYS be slow as it was wasting time updating channels you hadnt interacted with in a really long time for no good reason [ and the bugs in the system meant that whenever it wasnt updating a specific channel, itd end up missing new messages in that period too making it much more useless… ]
Is there a reason why messages must be polled and cannot just be pushed instantly to users? Having them pushed means instant real-time interaction without any delay instead of anywhere between 1 second to 30+ minute delays? I’d rather have instant communication rather than lag-induced communication.
The original reason was that the messaging system was developed for async communication via the letterbox.
As usual, requirements change and gradually it became more and more “a chat system” but alreay developed ontop of a normal database that does not support publish/subscribe semantics that are needed for real time chat.
It wouldn’t be a small amount of work to change the backend, so as it stands that is not going to happen in the near future.
The UI is presented like a standard MMO Chat system, NOT a letterbox system. This is why I thought it should be designed for instant delivery of messages, not having them queued up like they are now.
For example, if interacting with letterboxes opened up a new UI which functions like mailing systems seen in MMOs like World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, RIFT, and the likes, where you can compose letters. Letters are displayed similarly to e-mail and you can send/receive items via letterboxes, I can understand having them be polled and delayed, but since its UI is akin to normal chat systems in MMOs, having it not be instantaneous chat is … not beneficial in the long run.
Sony doesn’t block as much as you make out. Its just different programming…the chat system doesn’t interest me at all… I only said something because it be nice to have a update that’s for all…Its still a great game
I’m still readin gthrough this thread, but is there any hope of us using a wiki (or THE wiki?) to brainstorm and learn and experiment together with the lua scripting? I like wiki way more than discord or forum for its organising on topic and tag rather than timestamp.
Modding is exciting as heck, but I haven’t got through enough material to wrap my head around how this happens in situ.
