Water Detection Patch

[cavedude]

It's running TGC on with 1071 without any problems. I have the pathing support disabled, as bestz is too cpu intensive when you have 100 zones loaded, but fishing is working perfectly.

The only issue was azone wouldn't create maps of zones without water/lava, and without maps, fishing works anywhere in the zone. So, I just commented out the lava/water check in azone and recompiled to have it spit out those maps.

[cavedude]

Oh, I guess I should also mention I also have this code running on my internal test with is based on 1071, with bestz fully enabled, and it works fine there.

[Derision]

Originally Posted by cavedude

It's running TGC on with 1071 without any problems. I have the pathing support disabled, as bestz is too cpu intensive when you have 100 zones loaded, but fishing is working perfectly.

Thanks for the feedback.

I spent 5 or 10 minutes fishing on TGC and didn't catch a thing, although it seems to detect water well enough (my fishing skill was low, and then my pole broke!)

Regarding BestZ, I appreciate your problem. My pathing correction tool is coming along quite well. I'm only working on developing it for outdoor zones at the moment (using LOIO as a test subject) as they are easier to fix semi-automatically (i.e. click a button to correct ground collisions or paths that are too high above the ground).

Maybe in a couple of weeks it will be in a state where I can use it produce a (nearly) complete set of corrected grids for a mostly outdoor zone (say LOIO, Frontier Mountains or Field Of Bone) that are free of hopping mobs without the need for the runtime BestZ correction. I've already proved to myself that I can do it for a couple of test grids, but there are still some glitches/bugs I need to work through.

[cavedude]

Yeah, fishing sucks at the lower levels. You don't start seeing catches until your skill is around 20 or so. But, once you get to master you get a catch 50% of the time, and maxed skill guarantees something everytime. Though, I agree the water detection is working great!

You have me drooling about the pathing correction tool. Hopping prevention with no additional overhead is something I am very interested in! Could that also be used to get us valid grid points for fear and flee? If so, you just nailed one of the biggest problems in EQEmu. Maybe even the biggest.

Keep up the awesome work!

[Derision]

Originally Posted by cavedude

Could that also be used to get us valid grid points for fear and flee?

All I'm working on right now is the tool to correct the grid_entries so that mobs stay on the ground and paths between waypoints don't attempt to go under the ground. This should stop the hopping with no need for BestZ checks in the server.

As was discussed in another thread, FNW's Apathing tool takes these grid_entries along with spawn points, fear_hints etc, to build a zone wide pathing grid that could be used for fear, flee, etc.

Although it is related, it is not something I am actively looking at, although I plan to when I feel what I am currently working on is 'done', but that will probably be in a month or two.

[fathernitwit]

The reworked patch has been comitted after a bit of polishing. Good work.

I hope that some brave soul will hunt down the water info in .ter files. I think we know enough about .ter to find out what material is on each surface, which might give us enough info to build our own bsp tree. I know I spent a long time messing around with the .ter file trying to understand its format. There is some large blob of data after the material data and before the geometry data. I highly suspect that this is (or at least contains) the BSP tree, but I wasnt able to discern any sort of structure from the data. If you look in azone, you will see that I finally got annoyed at it and hard coded a ton of offsets in there to skip over this blob... if somebody figured out the structure, it might help us with water as well as help us get normal maps from newer zones... who knows....

[KLS]

I gave it a shot tonight: http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a2/...broodlands.jpg

The blue is water, the red stuff is lava, the off-white stuff is other stuff. Only tried it on broodlands so far...

I'm pretty sure that data block after the material list is probably info from that material list, just cause I can't imagine it being entirely a BSP tree when the materials looks structured like, one of the water planes as an example:

Found material layer: watertable-swmp
Found Shader file: Opaque_MaxWater.fx
Found material sub layer: e_TextureDiffuse0
Found Texture file: swmp_screenA.dds
Found material sub layer: e_TextureNormal0
Found Texture file: rc_cavewater_n.dds
Found material sub layer: e_TextureEnvironment0
Found Texture file: ra_watertest_e_01.dds
Found material sub layer: e_fFresnelBias
Found material sub layer: e_fFresnelPower
Found material sub layer: e_fWaterColor1
Found material sub layer: e_fWaterColor2
Found material sub layer: e_fReflectionAmount
Found material sub layer: e_fReflectionColor
Found material sub layer: e_fSlide1X
Found material sub layer: e_fSlide1Y
Found material sub layer: e_fSlide2X
Found material sub layer: e_fSlide2Y

The things like fresnel bias and fresnal power and colors have to be stored somewhere in there.

...but it's of course just a theory of mine I can't prove it.

[Zandig]

Brilliant code Derision!

Grabbed the latest Win32 compile (1073), put all the watermaps in the /maps folder and set the rules in the database. Zoned to POK and grabbed my fishing pole to test it out. I couldn't fish for landsharks any longer!! Actually had to be near water for fishing to work as it should.

Thanks for another sweet fix!