Rework Multiplayer server files & Compress worldmap

[mindflayer]

Hi devs,

I'm trying to containerize the PZ server to deploy it to a k8s cluster, and noticed that your game files are huge!!

 

Uncompressed v compressed, the media directory is 4.8G -> 860M, or 5x smaller

 

An area we can focus on specifically are the maps. If we look at all of the `media/maps/Muldraugh,\ KY` dir, it's 3.9G!

 

It's a large directory, but it's also doing 2 things at once, which might have been a legacy decision.
 

Muldraugh is a named spawn point, but unlike its 3 neighbors, it also holds the entire gameworld files. This is slightly annoying as a server operator, because if I want to modify the spawnpoints in Rosewood, it's very obvious where the work needs to be done:

I can't say the same for Muldraugh. That directory is full of chunk data files that get in the way.

 

I think you should crowbar the functionality of Muldraugh being a named spawn point away from it storing the whole default world map. Doing so would be a nice quality of life improvement for server ops.

additionally, having the world map stored off somewhere else would allow you to compress (zip?) the big chunk files into a nice, single binary file that can get decompressed at runtime, without closing off tweaks to the spawn area.

 

Here's what that could look like:



It's not lost on me that right now the team is going through a major rewrite of the game for 42... Maybe now's the time to tackle a bit of tech debt?

If you want to talk more about this, I'm MindFlayer # 0001 on the Discord. Thanks.

[EnigmaGrey]

Others have looked at using containers for PZ before. For example: https://github.com/Danixu/project-zomboid-server-docker

You don't change the base game files to add custom spawn points. You modify the $userhome$/zomboid/server/ spawn_regions.lua file.

 

It's not practical to have to decompress the entire map directory at runtime.