Drakkin Features

[trevius]

I am trying to figure out the best way to handle new SoF specific stuff like Drakkin Features. For NPCs, we could just add drakkin_heritage, drakkin_tatoo, and drakkin_face_spikes to the npctypes table with default of 0. But, for characters, I am wondering what the best way is to save that info. I think there are 3 possibilities to consider:

1. Use one of the following unknown fields in the player profile blob to assign them as drakkin related fields. I think this would work just fine, but wanted some input on it just in case. Probably any of these unknowns would work:

common\eq_packet_structs.h

/*0112*/    uint32                unknown0112;        //
/*0245*/    uint8                unknown0245[7];    //
/*0348*/    uint8                unknown0256[44];
/*2456*/    uint32                unknown1496;
/*2505*/    uint8                unknown1545[47];    // ?
/*2580*/    uint8                unknown1620[4];
/*4716*/    uint8                unknown3756[4];        //

2. Add the drakkin_heritage, drakkin_tatoo, and drakkin_face_spikes fields to the character_ table and pull them from there.

3. Create a new table named "Profile" that could be used for player profile related fields. It might not hurt to have some of the profile in table format anyway, since it is much easier to adjust if needed. I recently did a currency change on all characters and something that would have been extremely simple to do if the profile was in a table instead of a blob became quite a hassle. Does having the profile in a blob really help overhead that much?

I figured I would start a discussion on this to consider the options before trying to implement any of the new stuff. I am sure there are other minor DB changes like this that will be required as well. Even though 13th floor doesn't have record of it, and I don't think any items on Live utilize it, SoF most certainly has Heroic Resists, and we need fields added to the Items table for those stats. Of course, even once the fields are added, there will need to be code to get that data for use in game.

[KLS]

I would suggest against that, what if we later find out what the field we stored it in means? You then have to write a utility to convert every character over. I would suggest the extended player profile.

[trevius]

(KLS, I know you fully understand what I am explaining below, but I am just trying to explain my understanding of it so others can follow and so I can be corrected if I am wrong about something. And I am trying to figure out if we should really care about the blob struct anymore.)

I figured that the profile blob didn't really matter at all. It is essentially used as a table inside a table. In that we pull out the blob, pull the data from whatever piece of it we are needing and then save changes if needed and put it back in. Seems like we could arrange it in any order we wanted. It doesn't send the actual blob itself, unmodified. It creates the profile 1 field at a time by us telling it where to look in that blob based on the structure we have set for it.
There is so much wasted space in our current profile blobs, that I am sure it eats up a fair amount of space in the DB. Any unknowns in there are just a waste as far as I can tell.

One problem I have is that all of our clients have encodes set on the player profile. This means that the structures for our clients do not match our blob structure. So, even if we did ever identify new fields on either Titanium or SoF, the player profile blob is completely useless to us for that since it most likely isn't going to line up perfectly anyway (they are very different). So, we have a ton of fat on the current PP blob that is just there for no reason as far as I can tell. We should probably either try to use it, or get rid of it.

Just a little math (and yeah, sorry I am getting off subject lol):
The player profile structure for the blob is currently about 20,000 bytes (20k)
If PEQ has 100,000 characters (just making up a number), then their total space used just for player profile blobs is about 2GB (100k X 20K)
That makes for a fairly large database backup file I am sure. So, over half of that blob is unknown, and I believe completely unused. So, they could be saving 1GB of space if the unknowns were removed. The Storm Haven full database backup is about 2GBs and 500MBs of that is just the character_ table alone, and I am sure almost all of that table is player profile blob. Not that size is really an issue, but just giving an example of how much space we are wasting with the unknowns.

Since we do encodes of the whole thing anyway for all of the expansions we use on EQEmu, couldn't we just make up our own PP structure to however we wanted it? I am sure it would be a hassle to convert it over, but other than that, I don't see why not. I personally would love to see it moved into it's own table, but that would probably be a nightmare to write that all up.

Sorry again about getting off of the subject, but I just think the old player profile is not as useful as it probably once was. Before needing to do the encodes, we could probably just send that whole thing in 1 big chunk! But now, we break it down and put it back together again however we want it, so it probably isn't that great of a way to handle it anymore.

[KLS]

Alright but you gotta make sure you write the encodes so they work. And remember once you put something into the pp it's kinda hard to take it out~

[trevius]

Still trying to figure out exactly how I want to start implementing these. Maybe I will try to use the extended profile after-all, just to get away from using the player profile blob. Maybe some day we can do an overhaul on the PP storage or replace it with something better and easier to manage.

Seems like it is going to be quite a pain to get these new fields added. Going to need to update the npc_types table with the new fields, and update the extended profile with the new fields. Then, going to have to update all of the related structures and encodes/decodes where appropriate. I think that will include the char select, char create, spawn, player profile and facechange structures at the very least. The hardest part is probably going to be making sure that the way these structures get that data are all setup properly. I haven't added new fields like this before, so this should definitely be a learning experience. Hoping not to mess anything up in the process, but I will try to test as much as I can to be sure before updating the SVN with anything.

Before doing anything with the new features, I need to make sure that Titanium facial features are all working properly without the previous hacks. I already removed the hacks and SoF is working perfectly as far as I can tell, but now I need to get Titanium working 100%. Once that is all done, I will try to get started with adding the new drakkin features. It's gonna be cool to have this stuff finalized

[realityincarnate]

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it looks like at least some of the Titanium features are wrong now. I haven't looked into it in depth, but one of my test characters is now bald (no idea what he used to look like, I hadn't looked at him for a while, but I know he had hair), and Arias in gloomingdeep has a beard and combination ponytail/baldness. I know he's never looked right, but he never looked like this either. Those are the only two issues I've seen so far, but I haven't looked much either.

[trevius]

Yeah, I am aware that Titanium isn't working perfectly yet. I think it is a structure issue with the spawn struct and maybe the player profile as well. SoF seems to be working perfectly from the limited testing I did so far. The only reason I updated the SVN with this change before it was complete is because there is quite a bit of updating that had to be done to clean some stuff up. The actual change that is affecting Titanium would be easy to back out of if needed, but I am pretty sure I can get it working perfectly and properly as well.

Also, even after the changes go in to correct how this stuff works, people will almost certainly have to do a facechange in game to get their character looking the way that it used to again. I am sure that would be the case if it is actually a structure issue. Though, if it is some other non-structure related issue, then they may not need to. I think as long as NPCs look correct after the change, then the change should be a good fix. I know most NPC settings were pulled directly from EQLive, so for those, they should mimic live appearance exactly. If they don't, then we have something wrong with a structure (which is my best guess to the problem atm).

I think one of the things that might make this change more complex is that it is hard to know which NPCs in the database are exact copies from Live and which were added manually by EQEmu people. Also, the hack that was previously in place may cause some unwanted effects after this code is corrected. Basically, with players, any features that were set to 0 were being converted to 99 and saved and then when they were loaded again, it converted them back from 99 to 0 again. So, since after my change, it no longer converts 99 back to 0 (or the other way around either), anyone who had a feature that should have been set to 0 would now load 99 instead, which is always bald or broken features. This may be the same case for NPCs as well, because it seems like those were all being converted to 255 (0xFF) and saved and then converted from 255 back to 0 when loading them again. There may be a simple solution for NPCs to correct this though. We could probably just run a simple query for each of the feature fields in the npc_types table and convert anything that is set to 255 down to being set to 0 as it should. I haven't really looked too closely at the table to see what is going on with that yet, but I will.

I am pretty confident that we should be able to get this working 100% perfectly for any client without having to use the previous hacks. The only thing that we may need to do special is that we might need to put certain conditions for some of the player races so that they automatically block certain fields from being set. I haven't fully tested that just yet, but I will try to tonight if I have time.

***EDIT***
After looking over my own DB (1.5 year old PEQ included), it seems like most of the feature fields look normal and none of them are set to 255 with the exception of the face field. For some reason, it seems that about have of them have face set to 255. It is possible that this is due to an issue with the code that was previously doing those conversions, but I am not quite sure.

[Shendare]

I can confirm that player characters in both SoF and Titanium are showing bald (and probably incorrect beards, colors, etc.) since the in-game fix to SoF. This appears to be because of the old code that used to change zero values for appearance fields into 99. The characters still have 99 recorded in the fields in the database.

Uncommenting this block of code in worlddb.cpp fixes the problem:

worlddb.cpp - Line 90

  //*
  if (pp->face == 99)       {cs->face[char_num] = 0;}
  if (pp->eyecolor1 == 99)  {cs->eyecolor1[char_num] = 0;}
  if (pp->eyecolor2 == 99)  {cs->eyecolor2[char_num] = 0;}
  if (pp->hairstyle == 99)  {cs->hairstyle[char_num] = 0;}
  if (pp->haircolor == 99)  {cs->haircolor[char_num] = 0;}
  if (pp->beard == 99)      {cs->beard[char_num] = 0;}
  if (pp->beardcolor == 99) {cs->beardcolor[char_num] = 0;}
  //*/

That will reverse the old 0 -> 99 code. Note that cs->hair[char_num] in the fourth line must be fixed to cs->hairstyle[char_num] for it to compile.

Alternatively, logging the bald character in and using the Face change feature to reset the affected appearance fields permanently fixes the problem.

I couldn't get beard colors to work in Titanium, but beard styles were fine. It's probably a matter of figuring out the correct field location for Titanium beard color in Spawn_Struct and CharSelect.

Also, I didn't see a problem with Arias in Gloomingdeep with Titanium. On my screen, he's a normal brown-haired male human with a moustache, wearing leather armor. He looks the same to me with the SoF client.

[Shendare]

EDIT: After further testing, I have confirmed that beard and beardcolor are reversed in the Titanium Spawn_Struct.

Also, face-based beards (High Elves, Dark Elves, and Half Elves) are not changing color no matter which field you change. I believe this is a limitation with the Titanium client, because even while inside the Face changing window, the beard color won't change, and that doesn't involve the server at all, it's 100% client.

[trevius]

Nice find, Shendare! That is exactly what I was suspecting was the issue!

I still have to look into the face-based stuff you are talking about. I am sure we could put in a little piece of code to fix that stuff if it is possible. Can someone else confirm if beard color can be changed with a Titanium client for elves (in any revision of server code)?

[trevius]

Ok, I got the new Titanium fixes for beard in on the SVN now. Seems like features are finally working as they should without any hacks. Players will need to adjust their features if they were using features that should have previously been set to 0. This isn't a big deal at all IMO. Takes about 2 seconds to fix.

Guess I will start messing around to see if I can get the new Drakkin Features added. Since they have to be added for both players and NPCs, I guess I will try to do NPCs first and see how that goes, then worry about players next.

[trevius]

All Drakkin Specific Features are now in! This includes for both NPCs and PCs! Even Drakkin Corpses seem to appear perfectly after a zone dump.

I didn't really want to have to do this all at one time, but there were so many things to change that I finally just went ahead and did them all so that it finishes it without causing possible issues. As far as I can tell, it seems that there are no issues with this change, but there was so much stuff that I had to change that it is possible something might have gotten messed up. Let's hope not, though!

I wound up saving the new Drakkin features to the player profile after-all. It was just easier for me to figure out and to do it the same as all other facial features were. I also added in the new drakkin_heritage, drakkin_tattoo, and drakkin_details fields to the npc_types table right after luclin_beard.

I tested both SoF and Titanium and now they both seem to be flawless for all player race feature settings and I don't see anymore issues. If there aren't anymore issues, I will be very glad to have this one thing all done with!

Also, I wanted to note that I have not identified the drakkin related fields in the SoF player profile. But, apparently, they aren't even required. It just sends the char info packet that overwrites anything that the PP would send. There are many things in the PP that get ignored by the client due to other packets handling and overriding anything that the PP had sent for them. It wouldn't hurt to identify these fields in the PP for SoF, but unless there is some real reason to do so, I don't think we need to worry about it at all.

Please let me know if anyone is seeing issues with the latest SVN updates in relations to facial features. As mentioned, players will have to redo their looks in game if they have changed. That only needs to be set 1 time, though. Any other issues should be reported here if possible.

Here are some Drakkin examples with different Heritages, Tattoos, and Details:





Big thanks for Shendare for the help

Now with this stuff all working properly, maybe I can figure out what to do to get the illusion function working for all facial features. Once that works, I am going to try to get #fixmob working for all facial features. So, when you spawn a mob, you will be able to quickly and easily cycle through features before saving it to the database. This way you get it set perfectly while in game much quicker than currently possible. It would be nice to get NPC armor tint in there as well, but I probably won't mess with that for a long time.

[vales]

Nice work guys!

[trevius]

I got the support for the new features added to the illusion function, but the fields will still need to be identified in the SoF illusion_struct before we can use any of the new fields. It would be cool to identify armor tint in there as well, because I am pretty sure it is in there somewhere and then we could use it for setting the new armor tint stuff from in game.

I started work on updating the #fixmob command, but I suck at coding from scratch. I can't get it to compile this yet because of the case settings, and I don't really know how to do the switch from the command argument properly.

Here is what I have so far to rewrite it so that it doesn't get ridiculously long when I add in the other features. It will still be long, but the old way was just WAY too long lol.

void command_fixmob(Client *c, const Seperator *sep)
{
	Mob *target=c->GetTarget();

	if (!sep->arg[1])
		c->Message(0,"Usage: #fixmob [nextrace|prevrace|gender|nexttexture|prevtexture|nexthelm|prevhelm]");
	else if (!target)
		c->Message(0,"Error: this command requires an NPC target");
	else {

		int16 Race = target->GetRace();
		int8 Gender = target->GetGender();
		int8 Texture = target->GetTexture();
		int8 HelmTexture = target->GetHelmTexture();
		int8 HairColor = target->GetHairColor();
		int8 BeardColor = target->GetBeardColor();
		int8 EyeColor1 = target->GetEyeColor1();
		int8 EyeColor2 = target->GetEyeColor2();
		int8 HairStyle = target->GetHairStyle();
		int8 LuclinFace = target->GetLuclinFace();
		int8 Beard = target->GetBeard();
		int32 DrakkinHeritage = target->GetDrakkinHeritage();
		int32 DrakkinTattoo = target->GetDrakkinTattoo();
		int32 DrakkinDetails = target->GetDrakkinDetails();
		char ChangeType;
		int32 ChangeSetting;
		
		switch(sep->arg[1]) {
			case nextrace:
			{
				if(Race == 586)
					Race = 0;
				else
					Race = Race + 1;
				ChangeType = "Race";
				ChangeSetting = Race;
				break;
			}
			case prevrace:
			{
				if(Race == 0)
					Race = 586;
				else
					Race = Race - 1;
				ChangeType = "Race";
				ChangeSetting = Race;
				break;
			}
			case gender:
			{
				if(Gender == 2)
					Gender = 0;
				else
					Gender = Gender + 1;
				ChangeType = "Gender";
				ChangeSetting = Gender;
				break;
			}		
			case nexttexture:
			{
				if(Texture == 25)
					Texture = 0;
				else
					Texture = Texture + 1;
				ChangeType = "Texture";
				ChangeSetting = Texture;
				break;
			}
			case prevtexture:
			{
				if(Texture == 0)
					Texture = 25;
				else
					Texture = Texture - 1;
				ChangeType = "Texture";
				ChangeSetting = Texture;
				break;
			}
			case nexthelm:
			{
				if(HelmTexture == 25)
					HelmTexture = 0;
				else
					HelmTexture = HelmTexture + 1;
				ChangeType = "HelmTexture";
				ChangeSetting = HelmTexture;
				break;
			}
			case prevhelm:
			{
				if(HelmTexture == 0)
					HelmTexture = 25;
				else
					HelmTexture = HelmTexture - 1;
				ChangeType = "HelmTexture";
				ChangeSetting = HelmTexture;
				break;
			}
		
		
		}
		target->SendIllusionPacket(Race, Gender, Texture, HelmTexture, HairColor, BeardColor,
				EyeColor1, EyeColor2, HairStyle, LuclinFace, Beard, 0xFF,
				DrakkinHeritage, DrakkinTattoo, DrakkinDetails);
				
		c->Message(0, "%c=%i", ChangeType, ChangeSetting);
	}

}

Anyone wanna help me figure out what I am doing wrong with that case switch? Seems like I should be getting close to something that would work to replace the current code for the command as it is. I am sure I could get this stuff in the long way, but it would just make more very ugly coding.

Once this is working for the current #fixmob arguments, I will get the others added in. Then, we will just need to identify the rest of the SoF illusion struct and we should be set. As a bonus, I bet we could get that new armor tint setting working in this afterward, but I don't really know much about breaking the separate color fields out of the single armortint int32 field.

The new illusion function features are on the SVN already, so this stuff should be fairly easy to add in once it is written properly.

Also, I was thinking it would probably be a good idea to add in some commands to set the new features similar to the #texture command. I know #face has been in the code and not working forever, but I bet I can probably fix that pretty easily now lol.

###EDIT###

Went ahead and tried implementing #face and it seems to work fine and wasn't hard at all to add. I think we can probably just do the same thing for the other features. The #face command was already in, but wasn't coded properly. Here is the correct code to change it to in the command.cpp:

void command_face(Client *c, const Seperator *sep)
{
	Mob *target=c->GetTarget();
	if (!sep->IsNumber(1))
		c->Message(0,"Usage: #face [number of face]");
	else if (!target)
		c->Message(0,"Error: this command requires a target");
	else {
		target->SendIllusionPacket(0, 255, 255, 255, 255, 255, 255, 255, 255, atoi(sep->arg[1]));
		c->Message(0,"Face = %i", atoi(sep->arg[1]));
	}
}

That seems to work anyway. I will get this added with my next SVN update. May have to play with it a bit to make sure it can maintain previous settings when changing face, though.

[Shendare]

Edit: Oops. Reworking.