Mythic

[Secrets]

Well, after hours of boredom, I decided to launch this server, it's a result of about 2 weeks worth of coding off and on, and it's just an experiment right now. It's name is Project M, or Mythic for short.

What is this server? It's basically what I envisioned EverQuest to be. NPCs use the exact same calculations as players, and players use the same calculations as NPCs, minus HP calcs which were a clientside thing I fought with.

You start at level 70, and do not lose experience, or items, when you die.

You are restricted to 8-12 spells, without a spell file needing to be downloaded.

You start at 75 in each of your statistics and can raise them to a maximum of 500 points via a statistic merchant. You may only aquire a combined total of 425 AA points, and each of those can be used to modify a stat, up to the aforementioned value.

Here's a brief description of what statistics do, based on my memory:

STR = Melee Damage
STA = Extra HP
AGI = Avoidance (Parry, up to 47%)
DEX = Critical Hit Chance (%), Avoidance (Riposte, up to 47%)
INT = SpellDamage, different formula depending on buff/spell is a DoT or not, 1/2 of the formula for pet damage
WIS = SpellHealing, different formula depending on buff/spell is a HoT or not, 1/2 of the formula for pet damage, half of pet hp/ac multiplier
CHA = Critical Chance for spells, half of pet hp/ac multiplier

NPCs also follow these statistic rules. Yay for virtual functions.

Currently, there is no custom content other than the statistic merchant. This is purely formula testing. All NPCs are level 70. Any NPC who is in old world is easy, kunark is medium, velious is hard. #peqzone is enabled with a 30 second reuse and no debuffs.

If you want, hop on and try it. It'll be different for sure.

At the very least this server will be up for a month, for those of you who have count of my track record :p

[Vaklain_Kinvva]

Hopped on quick to check this out, Got to making my character, And then the server went down?

[Secrets]

Hopped on quick to check this out, Got to making my character, And then the server went down?

Was restarting it. It's back up now.

[Secrets]

Just wanted to mention I made incredible progress on the server yesterday.

- DEX is now a melee critical multiplier, in addition to a melee critical chance booster, up to 26% critical multiplier and critical hit chance.

- Melee revamp; Weapons are now 18 delay for 2handers, 36 delay for 1handers. Damage is now useless on weapons, instead, they are replaced by strength. Since strength is melee damage, it seems silly to add two statistics to a weapon that do the same thing. Haste can still affect these delays, up to 100% of the base value of delay. Existing weapons had strength added to them, to balance out the fact that weapons do not have damage anymore. The number of strength added to weapons is damage / 2, so if your weapon had 9 damage, it is now 4.5 strength, which rounds up to 5 strength.

- Melee damage increased for pure melee. Warriors, Monks, Rogues, and Berserkers all fit under this category. Warriors are significantly better in raw melee damage output than Monks, Rogues, and Berserkers.

- Healers are revamped slightly. Hybrids heals should be considerably weaker than pure healers such as druids, shamans, and clerics. Clerics should be considerably better than druids or shamans, however.

- Disciplines are added in-game. These give raw statistics in addition to your weapon damage, and any purchased AA statistics. Depending on your class, you may or may not have disciplines. Bards and Beastlords do not, while all the other hybrids and pure melee do. Warriors contain two disciplines, one for a small DPS increase, one for tanking. Monks receive a balanced discipline granting 75 to all melee/tanking statistics, minus stamina. Rogues receive an increase to STR, DEX, and AGI, being the master thieves that they are. Berserkers receive a massive 200 STR output. Paladins and Shadowknights gain WIS and INT respecively on their disciplines in addition to strength and dexterity.

- Riposte chance is fixed, there was an issue where it was calculating AGI, and an else if statement where it should have been if, I really hate these bugs, but they got fixed. If your dex is higher than your AGI, you will parry, if your dex is lower than your agi, you will riposte. (this is subject to change.)

- In addition to pure healers getting a boost, all heals in general were boosted by 125%. This should make heals worth it, where as before they were doing 1% a heal at the beginning levels with default HP, they are now doing 2-4%. (this is a hybrid casting on itself. pure healers are closer to 4-6% health a heal. )

- Wizards are now significantly better than all other casters in terms of DD nukes. (200% compared to 100% if you want a statistic.) Wizards also got a third nuke, on a fast re-cast time. Enchanters' single DoT now does 300% damage, as it is their only form of damage other than charming, pets, or melee.

- Cleric/Paladin Yaulp changed to 25 STR increase.

- Grim Aura (SK Spell) now increases damage output by 5%.

More to come as I remember them.

[Clipz]

Very interesting server :)

I've tried it out and i like your idea!

[Secrets]

New updates today:

- AC is converted into HP because AC was useless. Whenever you get an item with AC on it, it converts it to HP and even shows on the character sheet in-game, when you zone in, equip an item, #mystats, any time.

- More tweaks to NPC heals, and heals in general. Since clerics get the only heal over time, DoT heals should be doing considerably more healing, and as a result puts clerics back on top.

- #refundaa now resets all AA points gained to 0, your stats to 75, and now actually refunds them to the playerprofile for redistribution. I also removed some checks because it seems that the aapoints_spent gets reset every time you zone, which makes sense with the old AA system, it's just a confusing name in the struct.

- NPCs now cast spells. These spells are class dependant and are the same exact spells players cast, discs included.

- NPCs should no longer go invisible, in addition to the aforementioned spells.

- If anyone is interested in any of this code for their own servers, please let me know in a PM. I would be flattered to share any tidbit of code with you.

[shadowdeamon01]

secrets,

great to see youre bringing back the EDGE server, i played through your first few betas and loved it

[Secrets]

secrets,

great to see youre bringing back the EDGE server, i played through your first few betas and loved it

This is in no way using any of the original Edge code. That all is Ailia's doing, I just did a small amount of content development.

This code is 100% my doing, however.

[tacohat]

I would love having this sort of code on my server, the statistic system is just great and I would love to try and build around it, however I've never really tried editing anything on a server more than the stuff in the database. I have always wanted something like this though.

[Secrets]

I set up an SVN with the current and future code in it.

https://code.google.com/p/mythic-edgev/source/list

[pfyon]

That's interesting, if just to show that emulating a commercial game doesn't necessarily mean using their content and rules.

[Secrets]

Server is down for the time being. It's got some issues with the new HP code and i'm going to revert it soon.

[Secrets]

Server is back up as of today. It's got a complete combat revamp, mainly the addition of NPC health being calculated by STA and AC, weapon damage being part of the formula and an NPC reset for difficulty.

We'll see how this does, I was largely unsatisfied with the last combat system (mainly because it was unfinished) so we'll see how this one does.

[Secrets]

New revision from googlecode.

- Mob HP changed to smooth out progression. NPCs that normally have lesser stats should have less HP than they did, NPCs with higher stats (such as nagafen) should have a lot more HP than they did.

- NPCs now regenerate 1% of their health/tick, regardless of what is set in the database or their combat state.

[Secrets]

More tweaking...

DEX is now Parry & Critical Chance. AGI is now Riposte and Critical Multiplier. If your DEX is higher than AGI, you will parry instead of DEX making you get a critical multiplier, a critical chance, and a riposte chance all at once. (to be fair to the AGI stat, it's also ranged weaponry damage, but being useful for one class isn't enough. :P)

Endless Quiver is implemented for all classes by default.

Healing restored to the pre-hp tweak value as I undid the HP tweak.

Reduced NPC HP in half when it is calculated. This should make NPCs considerably easier for classes with no heals to start.

[tacohat]

Hitpoints seem to be totally messed up right now.. I am stuck at around 23% life when maximum. Then I get knocked unconscious and stay that way until they beat me waay negative.

[Secrets]

Hitpoints seem to be totally messed up right now.. I am stuck at around 23% life when maximum. Then I get knocked unconscious and stay that way until they beat me waay negative.

Haven't had a chance to try the new build on the test server but I hopefully have it resolved on SVN.

[Secrets]

new build is live, should reslove the issue with HP. I'll be looking into plans and a direction for the codebase soon, but for now it'll stay up.

[Secrets]

down really quick. forgot to add stats back to items. should considerably help you all with your mob killings.

edit: it's back up

[Secrets]

Down again, upgrading the box's to support at least 50 dynamic zoneservers, since its starting to get a tiny bit of population and the 15 zoneservers it was running is not nearly enough.

42.3% done, 4:16 to go, 36.28 MB/s as of this message. My host is migrating the filesystem over.

Also updated the revision to EQEmu 1181, to try out some of the new stuff Trevius has worked on with random pathing. Thanks, Trevius!

edit: it's back up!

[Bellos]

I will definitly check out your server, If you need help with content lemme know ive ran a few servers in my time

[Secrets]

Added STA = mitigation into the code today. 25% Mitigation is the cap @ 2000 STA.

Pets fixed for pet classes, they now inherit stats as different stats from their owner.

Also added PVP support for anyone using this codebase that would like to make a PVP server running it. It actually has good PVP potential from what I can tell due to the mechanics tested on NPCs. I haven't honestly tested mechanics on PC versus PC combat, but it should work exactly the same as NPC versus PC combat seeing as the NPCs use the same formulas, but not the same calculations for HP. That should actually unintentionally leave people on an equal playing ground.

In with the PVP code support comes an EXP gain for PVP, kill player, and if they are not from the same IP address as the killer you will receive experience. The experience gained is equal to 1 AA point, which can be used for statistics on the server, and yes, it still caps out at 425 AA points, just PVP is another way for people to get AA faster. I've always felt like PVP should have rewards in EQ, instead of mindless slaughter of people.

As an FYI, the code *can* be modified to add PVP rewards for a killer's group, etc, as long as they are not from the same IP if someone wanted to/has enough knowledge to. So if someone wanted to add LDON merchants with PVP rewards and make a pvp points system they could if they know the code well enough. Something like that would be great for VZTZ if they ever wanted to remove item loot.

Also damage mitigation on PVP is less for melee than it is spellcasters. This is to compensate spellcasters for already overpowered melee.

I'm personally not hosting a PVP server myself btw, this is just code available for anyone to use.

[Secrets]

Just wanted to mention that I have not forgot about this server since I took it down. I am in the process of re-factoring the combat system based on a few things:

A few things I realized when helping others:

* One thing that bores people about EverQuest is the lack of content. Another thing that bores people about EQEmulator is lack of original content.

* The quality of gameplay is less important than making content, but not to the point where the gameplay is fully neglected.

* The quality of content does not matter, as long as it is not broken, and is convenient.

* People like hack-n-slash video games better than traditional MMORPGs.

* There is no sufficient way to combine the elements of the aforementioned, but there is a way to make it seem more hacky-slashy.

* Traditional EQ Elements were built on advancing your character through experience and the 'journey', not so much 'the reward'.

* The best gear is obtained not by raiding, or grouping, or soloing, but the difficulty of the encounter therein. Encounters should take as many people as needed to take it down; never design things around how many people it should take, rather, you should design content around the quality of people's gear obtained from content.

* It isn't so much about how many conveniences you have in the game. I recalled making a post where half the fun would be traveling to your corpse. I reconsidered my theory, and the fun is actually playing the game, not watching your character play the game.

* You cannot please everyone, but you can try to make a game as pleasant as possible for everyone.


Mechanics wise, I realized :

* The previous incarnation failed because of a level-less system. Sure, you might think that because of no levels everyone would be on an equal playing field. Wrong, it just adds another playing field for people to advance on. The only playing field that I have noticed is gear, by removing levels everything is dependant on another factor. If you remove gear, then you do not have an MMORPG anymore. Thus, my previous idea pretty much sucked.

* With level back in the fray, there should be a way to upgrade your character past max level, except once again, I did not want to use gear. I realized that you could make a game fun by adding semi-legit concepts (being god) to it. Why not add a system where you could reset your level, but keep the gear you have, but add a permanent addition to your character, aka maplestory reborn? This can be done with perl as seen in EZ Server, but I did not want to copy their system directly.

* Since level ended up being half of the math, giving people significantly higher gear would become a viable option at lower levels. The trick is to maintain balance but upgrade your character at the same time. Instead of doing a hackish fix, I decided to tackle the problem directly by adding a permanent damage modifier to characters that gets modified every time you complete a reborn. This multiplies your damage by 0.1% every time you finish a reborn, and has a cap of 100%. With this system I made, other statistics can be added easily, and maybe even a player will be able to choose which statistic they wish to upgrade at some point in time, rather than having it just damage. Eventually, all players will have the same modifiers, and there will be an equal playing field vastly divided by time invested. I personally don't like the time invested model of MMORPGs, but it seems like everyone is doing that these days. I suppose if you put time into a character, you deserve it.

* Everything else about the server is basically the same. Classes have an active role in the sense that you don't press one or two buttons to do DPS. There's always something you have to do to maximize it.


These are my findings, and i've worked on and off on this source code while doing other projects and taken the best things from them and put them into one server source. If you are interested in tracking my development, there is a google code page at:

http://code.google.com/p/mythic-edgev/

This project will be finished when it's finished, it is currently a side project at the moment.