Nexus Question

Erik · **Posted:** Fri Jul 18, 2008 8:59 pm

Or the place isn't instanced ICly, and it's just sheer coincidence that we never see anyone else their and it's only an instance for technical reasons. <shrug>

Tai'lahr · **Posted:** Fri Jul 18, 2008 9:13 pm

The problem with saying it's not instanced and it's just coincidence that we never run into anyone else there, is when some people camp out there, waiting to find out from their buddies where to link to next (whether they're meeting for a reason or sharing locations of characters) and you have multiple people communicating from their Nexus. The only way to fix that would be to make the Nexus a dead zone where the KI doesn't work. :shock:

Calam · **Posted:** Fri Jul 18, 2008 10:09 pm

Instancing is a real issue from an IC perspective. I think Cyan went too far making it canon during MO:UL. It just opened up a whole IC can of worms.

I don't think the Nexus is instanced, because the technology in place at the time of the Fall didn't account for instancing. For example, if you travel to an instance of the Nexus, and link to Ae'gura from there, you will logically be linking to an instance of Ae'gura and not the "real" Ae'gura, because you never left that instance. But we see that this is not the case, because all links from Nexus lead to the same Ae'gura. To suggest that the Nexus is instanced and yet somehow redirects you to original locations in spite of the fact that it is instanced doesn't make sense: the D'ni couldn't have set that up. Instancing is a Bahro/Yeesha tool.

The only logical conclusion then is that the Nexus somehow changes physical locations within the Age for each person linking to it, essentially like Ahnonay. This would mean that the Nexus facility would have to be large enough and rotate fast enough to accomodate every single visitor across the entire City every time they link in, so nobody ends up in the same place. This is not only not fisable, but seems rather wasteful.

However, the other contradiction is that Laxman said the Nexus was "monitored", and that anybody trapped there was fined and released. The only way for them to be released is for someone else to link in to Nexus and give them a book to link out. This means that at least 2 people would be in a single Nexus chamber at once, so the notion that the entire facility 'rotates' to accomodate each new visitor is defunct.

Really, all this tells us is that Cyan didn't really plan this out ahead of time. The entire issue could have been resolved by making more than one Nexus and making the actual Nexus locations significantly larger to fit more people-- and making them global, so if there are 20 Nexus stations and they're all global for each person who has a link to one station, you don't get traffic jams-- either that or just putting a Yeesha stamp on all of them.

JWPlatt · **Posted:** Fri Jul 18, 2008 10:20 pm

Like I said, many Unseen have died at our pleasure.

Calam wrote:

in spite

Despite.

Spite: Hurt the feelngs of; malice; feeling a need to see others suffer.

Despite: In a logical context, a contradiction consisting of a logical incompatibility between two or more propositions.

Sorry, pet peeve. Normally, I pass these thing by. But this time it was italicized, a bold move begging for my attention. Like the proverbial scorpion, it's just my nature. I have no excuse.

Alahmnat · **Posted:** Fri Jul 18, 2008 10:59 pm

Tai'lahr wrote:

The problem with saying it's not instanced and it's just coincidence that we never run into anyone else there, is when some people camp out there, waiting to find out from their buddies where to link to next (whether they're meeting for a reason or sharing locations of characters) and you have multiple people communicating from their Nexus. The only way to fix that would be to make the Nexus a dead zone where the KI doesn't work. :shock:

I believe this would be one of those dreaded "artistic license" points that everybody loves so very, very much. Here's how I see it: the Nexus was constructed so that it contained any number of small chambers like the ones we see in Uru, with some way of moving/rotating them quickly enough that people linking in one after another would end up in different chambers (the more likely solution, leaving aside potential problems with the link-in spot, which is a relatively fuzzy area). The issue of the Nexus being monitored for people showing up without KIs could easily be resolved by instituting a method of accessing individual chambers without linking in, or having an alternate link-in point for retrieving people, meaning they'd get stuck there for a while until the chamber rotated into the next accessible link-in point (I think some combination of these systems seems most likely).

Simpler, but less palatable (and slightly more nonsensical): the Nexus we see in Uru is not what the "actual" Nexus is supposed to look like (just like Myst Island in Myst isn't what the "actual" Myst Island is supposed to look like), and we're dealing with a technical limitation of the game engine.

Best of both worlds: the Nexus is the functional equivalent of a telephone booth. Each Nexus terminal likely linked to a different Nexus access station (reducing the volume of people arriving in a given station), but two people linking back-to-back from the same Nexus terminal in Ae'Gura would both arrive in the same room. Here's where the artistic license kicks in on a less immense scale: while in actuality you should see other people milling around if you go to the Nexus through the same terminal, doing so does very little to improve the game and a fair amount to make the gameplay in the Nexus worse. The potential for log-jams at the book machine and increased load times on what's supposed to be a speedy-access part of the game likely dictated the one-Nexus-per-avatar instancing rule.

Like Calam, I think Cyan went way too far with incorporating instances into the canon with MOUL, to the point where some of the game's most basic mechanics simply don't make any sense (i.e. pellet drops and marker missions) because you're doing things to a local instance that still have an effect on the global one. The Nexus is another one of those places that simply doesn't make any sense as an ICly-instanced location, because the D'ni wouldn't have been able to accomplish something like that with their understanding of the Art, and the DRC (not Yeesha) were the ones who brought the system back online, putting it into use as it exists today well before Yeesha got into the habit of messing around with the DRC's Books. Tangentially, it's also always irked me how much Relto has to do with changing your neighborhood affiliation, because that's something else that just makes no kind of sense from an IC perspective whatsoever, as it requires using an Age that didn't exist when the D'ni would have built their neighborhoods to complete the relocation process (and it's convoluted as all heck), but that's neither here nor there.

jek · **Posted:** Fri Jul 18, 2008 11:28 pm

Simple, each KI comes with it's own nexus station. Somewhere in there we should find our KI ID number, if it were visible. :roll:

JWPlatt · **Posted:** Fri Jul 18, 2008 11:30 pm

Alahmnat wrote:

dreaded "artistic license" points... the Nexus is the functional equivalent of a telephone booth.

Artistic license? Uru, The Cavern, is the last bastion of reality upon which all else depends. Otherwise, Uru can only be yet another Cyan game which we see and use on a monitor and leyboard. We all know that's not true, right? The mind boggles at the implications.

Say it ain't so, Joe.

Telephone voice: Operator.
Neo: Get me out, quick!

Calam · **Posted:** Sat Jul 19, 2008 12:26 am

JWPlatt wrote:

Alahmnat wrote:

dreaded "artistic license" points... the Nexus is the functional equivalent of a telephone booth.

Artistic license? Uru, The Cavern, is the last bastion of reality upon which all else depends. Otherwise, Uru can only be yet another Cyan game which we see and use on a monitor and leyboard. We all know that's not true, right? The mind boggles at the implications.

Say it ain't so, Joe.

Telephone voice: Operator.
Neo: Get me out, quick!

Yeah, the "artistic license" thing doesn't apply to content in Uru, only content outside of Uru. Therefore, whatever is in Uru is 'real'. Which makes the whole Nexus problem an even bigger and more scary headache.

Alahmnat · **Posted:** Sat Jul 19, 2008 1:00 am

Calam wrote:

JWPlatt wrote:

Alahmnat wrote:

dreaded "artistic license" points... the Nexus is the functional equivalent of a telephone booth.

Artistic license? Uru, The Cavern, is the last bastion of reality upon which all else depends. Otherwise, Uru can only be yet another Cyan game which we see and use on a monitor and leyboard. We all know that's not true, right? The mind boggles at the implications.

Say it ain't so, Joe.

Telephone voice: Operator.
Neo: Get me out, quick!

Yeah, the "artistic license" thing doesn't apply to content in Uru, only content outside of Uru. Therefore, whatever is in Uru is 'real'. Which makes the whole Nexus problem an even bigger and more scary headache.

I (somewhat) beg to differ.

Perhaps AL was the wrong term to use (since RAWA says they can't really use that term in Uru), but there are elements of Uru that are dependent upon the technical limitations of the game engine... the neighborhoods having identical KI coordinates, the Nexus instancing, the Uran silo instancing, Gira's basket-kicking, the quirky and inconsistent behavior of the Kemo fireflies, and the GZ instancing all come immediately to mind (incidentally, I still don't really get why the GZ had to be instanced at all in the first place... it was always completely desolate no matter when I went there).

That's not to say that instancing should be shunned as a technical limitation in any and all circumstances... it's obvious that there are certain circumstances where Yeesha and/or the Bahro have gone to seemingly great lengths to create personalized instances of many places (including virtually every Age, for better or worse in some cases), and that's fine. It sometimes strains credibility (i.e. Sharper fixing things in Teledahn propagates to everybody's instances immediately), but it still falls inside the suspension of disbelief bubble. However, some constructs in Uru do (or at least, should, for the sake of everybody's sanity) exist strictly OOC because at the end of the day, it's a game replicating a "real" place, and you're never going to be able to make the former perfectly resemble the latter. In such cases, suspension of disbelief will likely get you a lot farther than beating your head against the wall trying to work out why the problem is so incomprehensible

. Now, with that in mind, try my "best of both worlds" explanation again, substituting "artistic license" with "technical limitations of the game engine".

JWPlatt · **Posted:** Sat Jul 19, 2008 1:33 am

RAWA also says, correctly, that bugs should not be considered part of canon. So perhaps "bugs ex machina" (what's latin for "bugs?") could be applied to the Nexus like so much Yeesha magic when we know something is wrong. Which classifies it in the list of things to fix someday - along with invalid KI JPGs and things the Uru client holds captive like the cursor, NumLock, 'Z', and gamma.

Tai'lahr · **Posted:** Sat Jul 19, 2008 2:22 am

Alahmnat wrote:

because at the end of the day, it's a game replicating a "real" place

JWPlatt wrote:

Otherwise, Uru can only be yet another Cyan game which we see and use on a monitor and leyboard.

A leyboard? I'm such a technofeeb; this must be something new I haven't heard about, yet.

Sorry, I normally let typos slide, but since you never make these kinds of mistakes, it was just so glaringly obvious and begging to be pointed out. Like your post above, I just couldn't help myself. And, that's my excuse. :wink:

Erik · **Posted:** Sat Jul 19, 2008 8:25 am

JWPlatt wrote:

So perhaps "bugs ex machina" (what's latin for "bugs?") could be applied to the Nexus like so much Yeesha magic when we know something is wrong.

That would be "insecta ex machina".

Tai'lahr · **Posted:** Sat Jul 19, 2008 1:34 pm

Erik wrote:

JWPlatt wrote:

So perhaps "bugs ex machina" (what's latin for "bugs?") could be applied to the Nexus like so much Yeesha magic when we know something is wrong.

That would be "insecta ex machina".

Well, if we're going to wander off topic to entomology... not all insects are bugs or "true bugs" so I believe the word you really want is hemiptera.

Erik · **Posted:** Sat Jul 19, 2008 5:52 pm

However, hemiptera isn't Latin, but Greek.

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