Last expansion before old zone revamps
 

I am setting my server up to use all the original old world zones. I am wondering which was the last expansion before any of the old world zone maps were changed. Anyone know which old world zone was changed first? I am thinking it was the arena.

After researching these sites

http://everquest.allakhazam.com/history/patches.html
http://www.tski.co.jp/baldio/patch/

I have decided (hopefully correctly) that lavastorm was the first zone to get a terrain revamp (followed closely by arena) and it happened around Jan 26, 2005 placing its release just before the release of the Dragons of Norrath. That means that the last expansion to use the old lavastorm is Omens of War.

I'm interested in doing this also, do you have any notes or anything on what was required to do this?

Be advised that Highpass is going to hold you up on newer clients. It's hard-coded to use highpasshold instead of highpass. So if you're going with a modern client, you're going to have to use the new version of at least that zone.

OP might already know this but!

For other zones, as far as the client goes: newer zones are usually in .eqg files while classic zones are in .s3d files. When the client wants to load "lavastorm", for instance, it first looks for "lavastorm.eqg" to load; if it doesn't find it, it'll load "lavastorm.s3d" instead.

So for newer clients, it should be enough to tell your users to rename or remove the .eqg zone file (or give them a patching program to do it automatically), provided they do have the corresponding .s3d file.

I can't remember if renaming highpass.s3d (and its internal highpass.wld file) to highpasshold.s3d works... Never really looked at the newest clients, though.

I have tried renaming the highpass* files to highpasshold*, and I cant get it to work. Whenever I zone into highpasshold, i get stuck at loc 0 0 0 and cant move and can see nothing but empty sky all around and various objects and npcs at various distances from me. I changed the zone record for zone 5, highpass to zone 407, highpasshold, and also renamed the server map files from highpass to highpasshold. As far as I can tell, that's all I should need to do. Yes I will have to make sure other data records get fixed like paths, spawns, objects, etc., but i simply cannot get a character to zone in properly. I can't figure out the problem.

I was able to get the zone to run properly by copying in the original highpass files and leaving them named as highpass, and using a binary editor to actually change the zone name in the eqgame.exe file from highpasshold to highpass by overwriting the last four characters with zeros. But I hate that solution. I don't want to have to change the exe.

I just don't know why the zone wont load with the highpass files renamed to highpasshold.

Wouldn't you have to change the zone line coords to actually send you to highpass, and not highpasshold?

I'm not sure what you mean by "zone line coords". If you mean the zone record, the old zone record has short_name "highpass" and zoneidnumbner 5, and it has all the zone data i want. But, trying to zone to zone 5 in the underfoot client does nothing, which is the basic problem. So I have to change the short_name to "highpasshold" and the zoneidnumber to 407 to get the client to do anything when I type "#zone highpasshold" or "#zone 407". Looking at the logs, it does seem to try to load zone 407, but, again, I get no landscape.

Here is the log entry for zone out of highkeep to highpasshold:

[07-11-2016 :: 17:04:47] [Status] Zoning 'Wizzie' to: highpasshold (407) - (0) x=-105.000000, y=63.000000, z=4.000000


and here is the entry for zoning back to highkeep using #zone:

[07-11-2016 :: 16:49:39] [Status] Zoning 'Wizzie' to: highkeep (6) - (0) x=88.000000, y=-16.000000, z=4.000000
[07-11-2016 :: 16:49:41] [Zone Server] Dropping client: Process=false, ip=10.0.0.3 port=61622
[07-11-2016 :: 16:49:46] [Status] Zone Shutdown: highpasshold (407)


As you can see, it is zone 407 that is being used, which normally loads the new version of highpass called highpasshold, but which should load the old files that I have renamed to highpasshold.

It seems like there is one fragment within zone .wld files that bears the zone's shortname (e.g. HIGHPASS_MP, on the 0x31 (material fragment list) fragment).

It's possible that the client searches for this fragment by name and refuses to load any geometry if it can't find it (although it would be a bit silly to search for it by name given other available options).

Expanding a string in the .wld file's string block is non-trivial, unfortunately, although it would be easy to make a tool to do it. Changing "HIGHPASS_MP" to "HIGHPASSHOLD_MP" would be worth trying, at least.

Converting the geometry data from the .s3d version of the zone into the .eqg format is also an option, although it would be confusing having two different "highpasshold.eqg" files around.

Quick test (with a different zone + modifying strings in the binary) suggests the name of the .wld fragment mentioned in my last post does not matter.

You did rename "highpass.wld" to "highpasshold.wld" and "highpass_obj.wld" to "highpasshold_obj.wld" inside the renamed highpasshold.s3d and highpasshold_obj.s3d, using S3DSpy or EQGExport, yes? I feel like people were running into problems even after doing that though, iirc...

No, I did not, and doing so seems to solve the problem! Sheesh. It didn't even occur to me that the client would try to find files inside the archives that match the zone name.

Thanks so much!

So what was the total sum procedure to get all the old zones working with say underfoot?


Celestial

It never occurred to me to document the process. I wish I had. It's been so long now that I started this that I don't even remember all that I had to do. I'm still not done. I still have to:

1. fix pathing in hph
2. fix spawns and pathing in lavastorm (the old data no longer exists in the peq)
3. zoning into temple of sol ro from lavastorm displays "unknown zone" when loading (not sure how to fix that)
4. remove big invisible object in the middle of lavastorm lava lake (no clue what that is)
5. fix other references to new zones like the fall from plane of sky landing you in new freeport.

Still lots of crap to do.

Hmmm, I wonder if you could use the data from TAKP daily dumps to get the info you need?


Celestial

Not sure if this will help or not but years ago when I was trying to restore a couple of old zones someone on this forum shared some old peq databases with me which helped a lot.

Here is a link to them if you are interested.

https://mega.nz/#fm/o1Q0yTaa

I don't know how long that link will last.