Re-launching the Boat Project
 

We've talked about this before (here and here), but the NPCs weren't moving correctly. I just finished fixing them.

The problems (1) warping to a waypoint, (2) doing a little half circle when leaving a waypoint followed by a warp, and (3) always facing north at a waypoint have been fixed and are in final testing on our server. They should be in the EQEmu source in a day or two if there are no problems.

Anyone still interested in having working boats? We have set up a special boat builders area on our forum along with upload/download areas.

What do you think? Anyone want to do this?

Great work !

btw, there's been no update to source cvs for 4 weeks :(
It'll be good to have fresh stuff :)

I just started playing with EQEmu in the last week or so, but I'd be interested in doing whatever I can to help get boats working. You guys are doing a great job!

I skimmed thru the two threads you linked, and it looks like the biggest issue right now is how to handle the zoning. I'm guessing that the way EQLive handles boats and zoning is a very delicate synchronization, with the boat popping in one zone about the time it depops from another... and then the boat that just depopped is now on a respawn timer. Of course, for this approach to work, the zones have to be static, so this approach won't work really well for most EQEmu servers where we'd like the zones to stay down until a player needs them. That approach is also very fragile and too prone to the boats getting out of sync... which helps prove my theory that this is the approach EQLive uses :D

My first thoughts are that the boats should be treated separately from other NPC's. Scorpius2k might be thinking along the same lines as me, as he (she?) suggested that changes to world.exe and zone.exe might be necessary. I was kind of thinking that world.exe should employ a boat subsystem where it will keep the zones informed of what boats are passing thru. And even tho the boats in EQLive are circling their routes 24/7, to ease the burden on our servers we can have the boats be suspended at their home docks until something triggers the route to start. That "something" being a player walking onto the boat, for example, or if the quest system will allow it, something the player says to an NPC can trigger the route to start.

My thought was to get the two boat method going (cruiser/shuttle) which is not like live, but produces a workable system. I think I described it in one of those threads.

Because of the way it works, it functions well with servers running only dynamic zones or those with static zones.

This is not to say that a live version of boats couldn't/wouldn't be done, but I was thinking it would be nice just to have something working quickly. I think 12 people could do this in a week. A live version would take longer.

Good point :-)

Re
 

Was just reading through old threads and noticed this one. Im dearly interested in getting the boats back.

How they did it live? Was not much synchronisation I think. The boat paused when zoning in its movements enough to let people have time to zone (I was a fast zoner in the older days and I noticed how the boat was slacking around on the same spot for ages after zoning =P).

All I care about is gettin the lil canoe boats to work(the ones you can click to controll). If you can get those to work you could do so much more, like make an item that summons boats.