Bugs of the aquatic nature
 

Just a few bugs I found while testing:

1.) Fish don't "swim". They are anchored to the bottom of the ocean floor. If a player attacks them, they pop up towards the player and then fall back down to the bottom of the ocean, which repeats. They should be able to rise and fall on the z plane. Which leads me to bug 2...

2.) Fish aren't limited to the water. They will follow you out onto land (pretty funny to watch actually). I'm not really sure how this would have to be coded. The server would have to make a check so that the mob can't leave the water boundaries.

3.) If a player zones into water, or zones while underwater, when they appear on the other side, the 'air remaining' bar does not appear, so players immediatly start to drown. The air remaining needs to be somehow saved and reported to the next zone. Or at the very least, it should refresh itself from the start. This can be observed if zoning into kedge keep.

these are all due to the fact that we cannot detect water in the server at all. if you want to study the zone files and figure out how to tell it something is under water or not, your welcome to. maybe talk to the openEQ folks, they might have run accross it.

But can't that be packetcollected from live? I assume the client always knows when a player is underwater and sends some kind of packet to the server to inform it that the player has moved underwater, so at the very least bug # 3 can be fixed (which is the most severe, since zoning into kedge = death in 5 seconds).

Maybe for #3 something can be implimented so that a player is invulnerable during and for a couple of seconds after zoning. This could allow the client the time it needs to realize hey I'm in water I better display the air meter. The client handles drowning if I'm not mistaken. Its not quite live and it would prevent you from zoning in and finding 3 mobs hacking away at you but it still should fix the problem.

"Fish aren't limited to the water. They will follow you out onto land (pretty funny to watch actually). "

Note that this happens on the live servers too: if you aggro a fish and run onto land, the fish will continue to attack you there. I believe it's deliberate to prevent exploits (e.g. attack fish, run to land, heal up, run back and kill it).

Id try packet collecting the water thing on live and see what it does, itd be interesting to find out. Regarding Issue 3 that is.

Monsters that hang out in land AND water (like aqua goblins) very well can and do follow you out of the water. However monsters which are limited to water (fish, sharks, etc) can not follow you out of the water - at least, i've never seen it happen, and i've fought quite a few fish. Maybe this is just creative grid contruction on sony's part. Is there a way to make a NPC hard locked to a grid so it can't follow you out of the water?

this is not the case.... hence WHY i mentioned this...
there is basically nothing sent between client and server reguarding water. This is the same reason why we give everybody 100 swimming, and it never goes up... because the server dosent know your under water.

your welcome to prove me wrong... but this is the state of things right now.

Btw #3 will be fixed tonight. I found the location of player profile where SOE stores how much air the player has left. I just have to figure out a good formula for calculating how much air a person has and it will be completed.

Thats great, since #3 was probably the worst of them. The other 2 will probably only require some clever database work. Actually, now that I think of it, I have seen shark swimming on the top of the ocean in OOT, so maybe #1 is invalid. I'll have to look into it some more.

on further reflection, I dont see any particular gain to having the players air supply reset to the max when they zone in. So I'm just going to make it reset the players air remaining whenever they zone.

Fish type mobs won't follow you out of water on live. As of now, though, they've put some mechanics in to prevent safe-spot exploits. DoT's don't do damage if you're not in the water with the mob. LoS check always returns false if you're not in the water with them. And I believe if the mob happens to die while you're out of the water, you'll get no xp.

As for #3, store the air remaining. That's what Live does. I believe that STA is what determines your total amount of air. The formula in place now seems to be okay. May not be right on the dot, but it's close enough that I don't notice any big discrepancy.

#npcedit runspeed 0

That should lock an npc to the grid.


-GM Thrax

The poster probably intended "grid locking" to be different than perma rooted.

Setting an npc's run speed to 0 will perma root it.

Currently there is no support for locking the mob onto a grid.

Yes they will, unless that's been changed in the last few months. If I ran across the water in Twilight Sea, for example, I could aggro a fish on the way and it would continue to attack me after I reached the land on the other side. I could even see it there on the land attacking me.

Equally, only a few weeks ago I was on land in LoIO being attacked by a fish, though in that case I couldn't actually see it, I could only see the damage messages as it tried to bite me.

I know that in regards to fish, they don't always work 100%, even on live (flying shark syndrome, anyone?). But what I can say for certain is that fish NEVER followed players out of the water. At least, they never used to. I've experienced this personally multiple times, especially in Nektulos where I would occasionally swim across the river and get a couple of piranhas on my ass. However, they could never follow me out of the water. Instead, they would kinda stand by the waters edge, trying to get at me, but never able to get past the waters texture graphic. There were still agroed, but could not follow me. If I got close enough, they sometimes could still hit me even if I was on dry land, but the fish themselves never left the water. There is probably some special flag that sony applies to fish MOB's which either keeps them from leaving a certain area, or locks them to a grid.

I think I found something interesting. Not sure if it would be of any help, but here it is anyway. I was playing around with one of the EQ zone viewers called 'Dzoneconverter'. In the program, there is an option called "show special regions". Trying that option on west commonlands, 2 things suddenly became highlighted in red - the zone lines, and yep, you guessed it, the underwater area where the lake is. So there is something embedded in the zone files that the client reads to inform it where water is. But without the client physically sending that info to the server, I don't see how it could change things.

Its not really all that important, but I thought you might be curious since you mentioned openEQ.

Are there any zones that have multiple levels of water that contain aquatic mobs? I know there are zones with ponds, waterfalls, etc with different water levels but are the mobs only present in the lowest level? Is it possible that zones with aquatic mobs have a Z value stored against the zone that represents a zone wide sea level and the Z value for any aquatic only mob is limited to slightly less that this see level value?
I am probably over simplifying, it wouldn’t be the first time!

Kedge has many different levels. mobs arent restricted to a certain z axis.

Mobs can go wherever they want in Kedge, since its fully underwater. Z axis limit wouldn't be of any use. I was about to write exactly what Mollymillions wrote about blocking the mob's possibility to move higher than a certain Z limit when i was reading that post. As long as the water is flat, the idea seems ok. Tho for zones like Sirens Grotto, it remains a trouble since there's several levels of water... A mob could jump from 1 area to another one if agroed and then fly over the water or move to the ground.

I guess the zone will have to read the map file to get the bounds of the water areas for each level in the dungeon (as per aggro)?