Boats and SHips

[iamjooish2]

I like killing/sapping/sinking the halas raft all the time.

Fun for the first 5 seconds. :(

[John Adams]

I'm tellin ya. There's a boat in Neraria's Landing you can get on, and it moves. Doesn't zone you, but it's a start. Also, someone mentioned a while back that setting the boat's "gender" makes you not fall through? Not sure if that was the setting.

[cavedude]

Yep, John Adams is correct. Zoning is no problem, we use Perl. We'd have to anyway to help ensure that when you zone in there will still be a boat under you On Live if I remember the boat was a zone within a zone, so if you were a slow booter or crashed, you'd log back in on the "boat zone" no matter where it was. Obviously, we can't do that but we can setup delays and such...

[Angelox]

I can already see ways to enable zoning 1 player via perl - problem is, how to land many players on the boat, while it waits.
There would actually have to be another boat waiting at the Zin, that will not move for x-amount of time, give chance for all to zone. after that time is up, any players not zoned yet, get booted to the character screen, where they log into their starting point, thus the boat starts moving.
I don't think the reason why Sony stopped the boats because of players falling through - they stopped the boats because they were having major trouble keeping the FV boat and skiffs in sinc with the rest, including the oot boat. to a point where they decided it was not worth the trouble, as they were already making everything much easier for the rich, lazy players with the newer methods of transport.

talk with scorpious2k, he was the force behind he boat project last time, he may still have some of the work, or at least tell you there idea =)

[cavedude]

If we set up the paths so that we nearly always have a boat at the zone in points, even if it requires 4 or 6 ships I think that would help with most of the issues. We could use perl timers to regulate the spawning of a boat in the port zones, so even if Freeport is dynamic, when it boots it ticks off the 10 or 20 min whatever it was and then spawns the boat. Since there is always a boat at the OOT zone-in due to OOT's paths (OOT will prolly need to be static) we don't have to worry about players zoning into watery deaths. So the trick here is I think 1 boat in Freeport, BB, etc. But several in OOT.

EDIT: Just realized this didn't take in account players on their return trip into a port, but I still think this idea could work with some tweaking.

EDIT #2: We should take a look at the Mangos source and see how they do it. Yes, I know Mangos is a WoW emulator and much different then EQ but the theory of sending a ship through a zone while keeping players in mind should still be the same, right?

[Richardo]

I made a system that worked a long time ago. Not sure if you want to do it in perl but, it is plausible.

Here is a little ghetto and there are probably better ways of going at this but whatever... This is not a tutorial for people that dont know perl or how to write new functions which is why I didnt put it in tutorial section.

First..
we will use oasis for an example.

Spawn the boat in oasis and make the boat start away from the docks, create a grid that leads the boat at the docks and depart to a final waypoint which will stop for 30seconds.

Once the boat goes to the final waypoint which is at the edge of the sea, make a waypoint check in perl and on the check, make it set a proximity that teleports players to the coordinates of the boat in the next zone, and also make a timer on the waypoint check for 10 seconds and once the timer is up, use quest::depop(); and set the boattimer to however long it will take the second boat to dock and make its round trip.

Ok, here is the tricky part. On the second boat that players will spawn on, you must give it a proximity and when players enter the proximity, you will need to make it close the proximity and set a timer on the boat for 30 seconds giving players enough time to load through. After the 30second timer is up, make it join a grid that will go to the docks and then make the boat go to another edge of water and set another proximity that will teleport the players back to the boat on the oasis side. After the proximity is set, give it a 10 second timer and make it leave the waypoint causing the boat to wander back to its original spawnpoint. (It may not leave where you made it leave the grid so you might want to make it depop using quest::depop(); and give it a fast respawn time)

Anyhow, thats a hard and tedious way to redo boats, now if you have a better idea, please feel free to post your strategic idea below.

(ya I ripped this from an old post of mine.)

Originally Posted by cavedude

Yep, John Adams is correct. Zoning is no problem, we use Perl. We'd have to anyway to help ensure that when you zone in there will still be a boat under you On Live if I remember the boat was a zone within a zone, so if you were a slow booter or crashed, you'd log back in on the "boat zone" no matter where it was. Obviously, we can't do that but we can setup delays and such...

You can do that with hardcode or proximity.. Maybe after the boat leaves, spawn an invisible npc that creates a proximity that calls the boat quest, tells it to move the player to its x and y coordinate and give a reasonable z coordinate so the player falls on the boat in enough time to hit the boat and not miss it as it zooms beneath him/her. And if you crash.. well, I guess your screwed.. or create a perl function that checks for LD players within the proximity and checks the zone for the player to log back on and moves the player the same way as the slow zoner npc.

Ghetto? Perhaps.. Fixes the problem? Definately