Client to Server Development Question
 

Do any of the clients (UF, Titanium, Etc) receive information from the server that could potentially be used to modify the in-game map on the fly? Something like points with player names that would identify a players position in the zone? I am building a moba style server and it would be ideal if I could use the in-game map and emulate fog of war by only showing players in revealed areas using distance calculations. Perhaps there is a way to modify the client to do this?

I've considered hooking into the client with an external app overlay but I'd rather not require players to run an additional application on-top of the client. This is rather tacky and I just won't do it. Any ideas? I've also considered using the UF browser to display player positions (which I did try) and I was only really able to do it by generating a bitmap that placed dots on the map correlating to their x,y position but the problem is that every time the image refreshes, the browser flickers white which looks awful.

Funny enough, live did something like this a few years back to curb cheating (and probably save bandwidth). The server would only send regular position updates within a radius of the PC. You could probably do something similar. Maps are completely client side though so you would have to incorporate MQ2 or similar.

I was hoping for some kind of hackish way to send an array of data to the client to be parsed into points on the map, even if that involved client modifications but if I have to require a 3rd party application to do it - I will drop the subject and just retrofit the UF browser somehow to serve my needs. I really don't want to do this but if I have to...

I think there are some expedition-related opcodes that will 'push' locations to the client..there's a single quest set up to use them, iirc.


EDIT: Nope, that was compass..sorry! (\\quests\everfrost\Qileour_Bahiael.pl:50)