Post LDoN Zone info here
 

I don't have much memory on how LDoN zones (once you're in), work. I never really played there that much.
I know that the first player in decided what levels the mobs would be (according to PC Level). What I'm not sure of are things like;
Does the same mob spawn (in the same dungeon) and have an adjusted level according to your group? or is it a different mob?
Do all drops change, or just the named?
How many level-groups of NPCs are there in a dungeon?
Any info you can remember on this or anything else you think important, would be helpful for me, and save much time researching.

Here are the facts I remember:

* only a single group of 6 players can enter any ldon zone instance.

* Once the group leader requests and accepts an ldon mission, a timer begins and they have x amount of time to enter the ldon zone instance or they need to go back and request a new ldon mission.

* Once a group enters a ldon zone instance, they have x amount of time to complete the mission goals before they are forcibly zoned out of the instance and placed at the zone instance entrance and the zone instance is destroyed.

* the minimum level to enter an ldon mission was level 19. You could only have members in your group that were in the same level range where all members of the group could earn exp. ldon requires a minimum of 3 players to create a zone instance. (although I can tell you right now I am going to code a rule to override this requirement).

* after a group completes their mission goals, they have x amount of time added they can remain in the zone until the instance is destroyed and they are forcibly ejected.

* if you camp out in the zone instance and log in AFTER the zone instance is destroyed, you will enter the world at the zone instance entrance.

they must have changed some of that stuff.

from what i remember (this goes back to about 1 year after ldon went live, when i retired from eq).

if you camped out, and came back in after the timer expired, you were placed into a "faked" instance. no mobs, no traps, no chests, no nothing.

similar if you died and logged out or went LD. you were placed into a "faked" instance where you could run up and loot your body, but there were no chests, mobs, traps, or anything. just an empty instance with your corpse.

also, if the timer expired, it was extended by 30min and you were able to complete the quest for a reduced bounty (it was usually something like 20-30% of the points you got if you succeeded).

for "kill the boss" or "rescue the friend" quests, the target mob wasn't spawned until about 60% of the zone was cleared. this prevented an exploit early on where people would invis/pacify/feign-flop upto the boss and gank them or avoid wrong turns on the rescue mission.

hope this helps.

== sfisque

How about the NPC's , what changes with the higher level groups?
Example; a level 20 spider becomes a level 40 spider? What drops change?

LDoN didn't make use of true instancing as we know it in other games and later expansions of EQ. What most unaware players saw as an "instance" of their LDoN dungeon was actually a different zone -- each LDoN adventure zone had 10 clones of it. Example: Mistmore Catacombs had zone ID's "mmca" thru "mmcj". The LDoN system mimicked instancing by keeping up with which zones were allocated for active adventures at any given moment.

As an example, an adventure party might be getting a level 45 spawn in mmcd while you're getting a level 55 spawn in mmca. Nobody else's adventure party will be able to enter mmca while your adventure is active (barring any bugs).

I'm not sure that I ever LD'd long enough to stay offline past my adventure's expiration, but if it put you back inside the dungeon as opposed to outside near the entrance, that would be a serious bug and I'm certain not what SOE intended. If you found yourself inside the dungeon, most likely you were in the same zone that was used for your adventure, and were fortunate that the zone was idle at that time. The zone could have just as easily been reallocated to another adventure party and you log into a full spawn :o

What the game was supposed to do (and always did for me) was that if you died and left a corpse that you didn't loot, after the adventure was done and you were all ejected from the dungeon, your corpse would be moved out of the dungeon and placed near the dungeon's entrance in the outside zone. This was the first time EQ saw the ability to move a corpse across zones... and shortly thereafter Shadowrest was born.

So not so really zone instancing, just a subsystem to manage entry to specific zones based upon dynamic conditions. That doesn't sound so bad :-)

The other thing I seem to recall was the importance of the average level in your adventure party. I cant remember all the "tiers" but there was a way to calculate how many ldon points you were going to get based on the average level of the group.. or was it that the average level of the group determined the levels of the mobs the zone loaded for you.. actually, i think that was what the average level of the group determined...

There was another calculation i recall we had figured out as players.. something along the lines of whoever was the highest level in the group got slightly more ldon points than the rest of us.. wish I could recall these numbers... I just vaguely remember thinking of them.

What about monster missions seems like the same as ldon.

to add a little bit on LDON.

The truly instanced part was the level setting.
When group leader woudl accept the mission, the game would determined average level of the group, and populated the zone with according level mobs.
Esentialy SoE has created a shit load of a_spider from level 18 to 66, and all other mobs. But during mission you would only see those that correspand to group average level -2 to +1 level. On HARD adventures this would +1/+2 levels from group average, capping out at lev 66 on HARD 65. Additional +2/+4 levels were for LDON raids (oh dear lord those were insnanly hard. Elemental difficulty for normal raids, and Time difficulty for Hard raids)
The named loot was also figured in the same way. There were a shit load of named_orc001, broken down into 10 level tiers. So from 20 to 30 you would meet a named_orc_01, from 30 to 40 named_orc_02 etc. And their loot was done in simular way. There were rathly 10-12 unique items per tier (10 levels) that would drop any named mob.

Essentialy, LDON wasn't realy instanced zones. But it was instanced populated from a list of mobs coresspanding to group level

Much of what I have read here sounds to my newbie ears, to be correct. You had 30 minutes to enter the dungeon after you requested it and had 90 minutes to complete it after you entered, also an additional 30 minutes to leave after the timer ran out.

There were 5 different dungeon themes with at least 8 distinct dungeons in each. --From my boxed copy.

I am puzzled a little bit by the descriptions above. If there are 5 themes with 10 dungeons, that is 50 different dungeons. With only a group of 6 to enter each dungeon that is only 300 players that would be able to enter an ldon dungeon at one time. Seems like that number is way to low, wouldn't you have lots of people standing around waiting on a dungeon to open up. Especially right after release. I don't think my server was one of the more heavily used servers, Luclin, but there were always that many standing around in POK. I don't have a clue how they did it, but I always thought that when I requested a dungeon, it choose a floorplan (based on theme), level (based on group level) and spawned a dungeon that only I or another member of my group could enter.

Note: After looking at my Titanium folder, (unpatched), there are 10 instances for each theme except for Deepest Guk, where there are 8. It may have changed since Titanium was released.

Hope this helps, probably created more confusion :-?

300 players is more than enouhg actualy.
note this is 300 AT ONCE.

Average server population 2.5k
people on line at any given moment (peak hours) - 1k
People under lev 20 - 500
People who never group and always solo - 500
People who find LDON silly and do not do it - 250
Peopel who never bought the expansion - 500


soem of these overlap, but over all its 1k-250-250-250= 250 :cool:

Also note that 1/4 of EQ population are raiders and durign peak hours they won't do LDOn- they RAID =)
also hwo many LDOn runs a normal person can do in a row? I did 6 in a row once - and i had regreted it for next 3 days =)
Overall a person will do 1 ldon run and go soemthign else - which means - you get 300 people shiftign every 2 hours - and within 6 hours limit half a server can do LDON

I'm wondering about the drops off these mobs - was it always the same stuff? I know the named mobs dropped different items, but what about the regular mobs?
I'm thinking of giving a try to one of these dungeons, the main problem is, there's not a lot of packets to work with.
I remember players saying the first one in the dungeon would decide if the mobs where a little higher (if the highest level player went in).
I think I can make the dungeon spawn according to your character level, and limiting itself to one group shouldn't be too hard.

That's correct, Angelox. The first person in would determine the level range of mobs. One smart thing to do for power leveling was to get the highest to go in first. If you were farming smithing combine parts, you sent the lowest in first or if you were just farming instances you sent the lowest in first. I remember getting several groups as a 65 with a few 50's just so we could power through the instance and get the augment upgrade.

Spawning a dungeon based on character level would be easy enough and could even be managed with a PERL script. Just get $ulevel and then use a spawncondition to alter the dungeon.

As to the drops, certain drops were universal. Many of the trash or tradeskill drops were consistent across all level ranges and were a fairly reliable source of income for lower level players working their way through and selling that stuff to people working their smithing. I remember several mobs dropping similar level range items. For populating the mobs, you may end up looking to Magelo and Allakhazam and having to do a manual population, as much as that sucks.

I did a considerable amount of research into the emulator code and the live systems a while back (and as usual received not one bit of acknowledgement, just others taking over) including gathering most of the adventure text for the Adventure Recruiter and Raid Recruiters.

Since then, I can no longer get Adventure Recruiters or Merchants to even respond to me, so I am not sure what has changed. Still using the same client (titanium - raw), but the server has evolved considerably since then. In trying to review what I had discovered before, it reminded me how pissed off I am at being snubbed ;) but I am happy if any effort is made by anyone to complete the LDoN system.

Just thought I would throw my two cents in...

(instancing is in place, just takes a bit of scripting)

This should work for LDoNs
Have Adventure Merchant flag group with an instance flag when adventure is accepted

Have a invis npc inside LDoN zone that sets the spawn condition flag based on the first players level that zones in.

Have the same invis NPC pop the zone and trigger a timer when the first person zones in. When the timer is up have that same NPC boot everyone out.

LOL, it looks like you got quite a reaming from the LDoN haters in that other thread. I personally don't see a point in arguing which code deserves attention and which doesn't. The devs will decide to work on what they want to work on and what they feel deserves attention. All systems, liked or not, should be working in the emu for it to be considered fully functional. LDoN has it's good and bad points, but I think it is a major system in EQ that holds big value to the emulator. I would personally love to use the system for custom purposes. Being able to make custom LDoNs and probably use some non-LDoN zones for adventures could turn out really nice. At the very least it adds more variety, which I think is a huge factor in keeping people from getting bored.

You shouldn't get too upset over the acknowledgment (or lack there of) of your research in LDoNs. People work on what they feel like working on and you can't expect others to jump right into something that you might have been personally looking into. I have ran into this many times. But, normally at some point, someone else will find interest in the area and the ball starts rolling on it again. I think the same goes for everyone and everything around here. I have found plenty of posts that I ignored at some point because it wasn't something I was involved with at the time. Then, later I found myself involved in it and revived the previous person's work on it. Luckily, I look into enough things around here now that a good portion of the things I work on peak someone's interest to help with them. But, that certainly isn't always the case lol. Either way, there seems to be alot of involvement around here these days, so I think it is more likely that at least someone will help out. I don't know if you were looking for some other kind of acknowledgment for the research though. We don't have anything formal for that, only credit for actual code updates that go into the source.

You mentioned merchant and recruiter text, but I didn't see any of that reference in the post you linked. Is there somewhere else that you might have posted those? It helps to keep everything organized.

As for getting LDoN Adventures working, it does seem like most of the code is already there. I wish I knew what the roadblock is currently, or what they are if there are multiple. I think it would help if we knew what was being done by Wildcardx and others on PEQ. I would think that they would just put the code they are working on into the SVN so they don't have to re-add it every time they update, but I am not sure if any of the stuff they have been working on has been added. The last I heard about work on LDoN was from Cavedude a couple months ago in a PM when he said that Wildcardx was still working on it and that it should be getting close to being done.

It sounds like we just need a few tables, maybe a couple opcodes, structs, and offsets for it to work. There probably isn't really that much missing right now. Once we are able to accept an adventure, I think most of the rest will be fairly easy. I have a system on my server that already works similar to LDoN, accept it uses a ton of quest globals and works purely from scripts. It is still missing a couple of features, but for the most part, it seems to work pretty well. I am fairly confident that I could help get some of LDoN working once accepting an adventure actually works.

It would be nice if there was an open discussion from the devs for working on this and brainstorming together to get it implemented and finalized. I am sure between the core devs right now, it wouldn't take long to iron out the kinks.

One thing I wanted to mention that might be interesting for LDoNs is that we should be able to use the new quest::modifynpcstats() command that KLS made to scale the entire zone to any level of player/group. I have actually been waiting for LDoN to attempt scaling a whole zone that way. The only issue other than that would be doing loot in a scaled zone. We have the option of using the quest::addloot() command, but that might get a little too confusing, trying to make multiple loot tables for multiple NPC levels. I am pretty sure condition events would work fine for making LDoNs with various levels. I actually updated the Wiki on spawn events and conditions just the other day to have a good amount more info than before. But, I think scaling using the command KLS made would make spawning these zones much easier. It would be nice if there was a way to switch the loot table of an NPC. Like, maybe something as simple as a command to change the loot table (if that is even possible) in real time to another loot table ID. Then, while you are scaling the zone, you also switch the loot tables at the same time. I know loot table changes require a reboot, so I am not sure if they are somehow loaded into memory like the items table. If so, then that probably isn't an option, but it would be cool if it was possible to change them.

Another idea for spawning LDoNs would be to use a combination of systems. At least one new command would have to be created for it to work though. Basically, you would spawn the entire zone with the layout and pathing and everything (other than loot) that you want it to have. Then, you would use a script that scales the entire zone using the quest::modifynpcstats, which would adjust the levels, hps, min/max hits, resists, etc for all NPCs in the zone. It could probably just use some type of multiplier. I could write that script myself pretty easily (and maybe it could even be changed into a #command that would let you #modifynpcstats on all NPCs in the zone #modallnpcstats or something). Then, once your zone is scaled down with the temporary values, we would use the new command that I mentioned would need to be created for this. Basically, the new command would create new npc_type/spawn2/etc entries for every spawn in the zone. This same scaling and create copy could be done for each needed level range. Then, you just use conditionals to decide which spawn template you want to use. Though, it would definitely make adding single spawns, or changing any spawn pretty rough, so you would need to make sure your zone was finalized before you started the scaling work. Last, you would just add the loot tables to the various versions of the zone.

Probably the simplest solution would be having someone make a tool that can easily make copies of a full zone and sort and scale the different versions quickly and easily. It could even setup the conditionals automatically. It might be useful if we are going to have multiple copies of NPCs, to make a new Notes field in the NPC_types table to use for tracking which spawns are for which scenario/level range.

On the timers that Rocker8956 was talking about, I don't think it will be hard to handle those. We will almost certainly need to use the quest globals for that though. Trying to have an NPC track the timer won't work well if the zone crashes, or if the group wipes and the zone drops for any reason. I have a good timer tracking system that works across zones already on my server. It is somewhat complex, but I think I could simplify it considerably if the rest of LDoN was working as it should. Either that, or we can just create a new system for tracking LDoN timers if needed. But, the qglobals should work really well as far as I have seen. I don't think timers is much to worry about at this time. If we need a solution for them, I can come up with a solid one quickly.

I imagine that it won't be too long before someone finally gets LDoNs working. I am definitely interested in helping out if there is something I can work on for it. Mostly, I just need to know where it stands at this point, because there is alot of code in there already and without knowing what works and what doesn't it is hard to work on it :P