RoF2 Client synch issues
 

I've set up an eqemu server and have played on it locally fine with both the Titanium and RoF2 clients (connecting through ports 5998 and 5999 respectively). I'm using the most up to date build (803da509) and both the server and clients are running on windows.

The RoF2 server however exhibits some odd synch issues and I wanted to make sure I hadn't missed a setting somewhere. The Titanium client seems to be much better behaved.

1 - The RoF2 client even with Character:SoDClientUseSoDHPManaEnd set to true seems to give fluctuating health scores, making it difficult to know how much health you have left. This is probably worse at low levels than at high levels.

2 - On the RoF2 client the Halas boat is really jerky. Instead of moving smoothly it jumps about once a second. Also when you watch another player enter the area of the boat they teleport to around 10 meters away from it, when they leave the boat it correctly shows where they are again.

3 - On the RoF2 client it was quite common for players to not travel with the Faydark lifts to the wood-elf starting town. The lift would go up and the player would be left floating in mid air.

4 - This might be totally subjective but the RoF2 client seemed to have more occasions when a pathing (particularly fleeing) mob would suddenly teleport, particularly when it's path brought it to a wall.

I think that's about it. I'd like to play with the RoF2 client ideally but the Titanium so far seems synch better with the world. Hopefully it's a setting somewhere I've missed. Let me know if there's any more info I can give to help.

Edit: I'd forgotten to mention. I've tried running the client with only one core and as administrator in windows xp compatability mode but nothing seemed to change.

I don't know if my answers will be 100% correct or accurate..but, I'll start it off :)


1 - SoD+ clients hp update behavior is different than older ones. There could be fallacies with the server update code..but, it's more likely that the bonus code
doesn't match the client's 100% and there are hp differences. (What does live do?)

2 - Boats have been messed up since they updated their directx version. You might be seeing the effect of a work-around.

3 - http://www.eqemulator.org/forums/sho...73&postcount=8. Are you/they playing on a 32-bit cpu, by chance? I've tried to find the cause of that issue
for a long time and it (magically) went away when I started using a 64-bit cpu. (Figured it was a floating point calculation error in the client.)

4 - Probably the result of our pathing code. If pathing can not plot to destination within 'n' number of moves, it teleports to that point.


RoF+ clients use a slightly different behavior for determining z-axis coords..so, maybe the issue has crept back in. (I didn't see any issues when I tested RoF way back when.)

Thanks for the quick reply, it sounds like it's mainly working as intended then. I was really only posting to make sure I hadn't missed a setting somewhere that made the server more SoD+ friendly.

I'm playing on a 64-bit processor but I might have just been being unlucky or standing in the wrong spot with the Faydark lifts. I'd also noticed that a lot of crafting stations were floating when playing with the RoF2 client but I'd already seen a note saying that was also expected behaviour.

That about wraps it up for this then, the bugs are quite small compared to the useful additions like the extended target window so I'll probably stick with RoF2.

Thanks again for the quick reply. I don't envy you trying to develop this emulator to support a decades worth of client versions!

Yeah, the crafting station issue is known..and results from that z-axis thing.

In older clients, we fudge a little above ground so the client will drop it into place..otherwise, there's a chance the station would be underground.

That becomes painfully obvious in the newer clients...

It will probably be worked out in the future..but, until we can get spot on for both behaviors, it'll need to stay fudged.

There's a lot you can do to match the server and client. Hide as much information as you can from the client and let the server push the update. There was someone who had a brilliant idea that lead me down this path. I want to say Kayen? Anyway, he basically hid certain spell data so the client didn't parse it's effects. I don't know if a tool has been created yet to ease this process. (It should, it's brilliant and more servers should utilize it!)

I was also able to hide meditate and base values from the client. Once that was done, I was able to comfortably watch a fairly accurate health and mana bar. I never looked into Iksar and Troll regen values but I'd assume those are hard coded.

How do you hide values from the client? I'm assuming some tricky server code?

I wouldn't call it tricky server code. But yes, there were a lot of changes that I made to the source code that don't exist in rules. Oh, I forgot, you'll also need to set a perpetual combat state to be set upon zoning (because of the client rest state). Anyway, you can have them (basically) completely synced.