Drakkin Features

[KLS]

By updating the struct inside the corpse's data field all old corpses are now prevented from spawning. In the future I'd probably avoid doing this if at all possible and if there's no other choice you need to provide a way for people to upgrade the corpses in a database (I'm writing this atm so don't worry about it).

[trevius]

Yeah, as I have said elsewhere, this is my fault and I honestly didn't know it was going to happen. I didn't notice that there was a blob in the corpse tables. I thought it was just pulling the info from the PP. I had never attempted to do any changes like that before, so I really didn't know what I was doing. Honestly, I was hoping that someone more skilled would pick it up and add that stuff in at some point, but I know there are many other more important things to do. I figured I would try it and see if I could get them working and then just test it as best as I could to make sure there weren't issues with the changes. Unfortunately, I only tested newly created corpses, I didn't look for any old ones.

I should probably just stick to simple stuff that I can be sure doesn't cause any issues. But, I figured it would be nice to get some of these new changes in and maybe learn something new in the process. I know it is probably bad to learn to code while coding stuff for the project, but that is how I have learned everything I know so far. And, I normally try to test enough that it doesn't cause issues. Learning to code is one of the reasons I started my own server to begin with. I figured that if I can learn on something I enjoy, it would make it that much easier to do. Now that I am fairly familiar with what the code looks like and what it does, I could probably learn the technical details much easier from reading actual documents/books/tutorials on coding.

[Shendare]

Uh oh, something happened with corpses?

I'm gratified to see that you're on it, KLS!

What was it that broke existing corpses?

[KLS]

I'm prolly just gonna build it into the server on 2nd thought. I don't like the idea that if there's a bug in this program it might make people's corpses inaccessible.

[KLS]

Sigh it took me a fraction of the time to write the server check than to write the utility to convert all the data too.

[trevius]

Thanks for the fix KLS. I didn't mean for you to be forced to do that. At least the feature work should be done for good soon. Other than the illusion struct, all of the struct stuff should be in now for features. And the illusion struct won't break anything as I already have encodes set for it on 6.2, Titanium and SoF. Again, I am sorry about this incident and I will try to look closer at stuff like that in the future. I don't know how I missed seeing that blob.

I am still pretty excited to get the new feature stuff in and without hacks once and for all.

[trevius]

I now have all of the feature fields identified in the illusion struct as well, and added commands to use them. It seems like eye color is not in the illusion struct as far as I can tell. I searched all through it and couldn't find it. Right now, I only have all fields identified for SoF, but if someone wants to do it for Titanium, this encode worked for SoF and wouldn't be hard to modify into the Titanium one:

ENCODE(OP_Illusion) {
	ENCODE_LENGTH_EXACT(Illusion_Struct);
	SETUP_DIRECT_ENCODE(Illusion_Struct, structs::Illusion_Struct);
	OUT(spawnid);
	OUT_str(charname);
	OUT(race);
	OUT(unknown006[0]);
	OUT(unknown006[1]);
	OUT(gender);
	OUT(texture);
	OUT(helmtexture);
	OUT(face);				// face
	OUT(hairstyle);			// hairstyle
	OUT(haircolor);			// haircolor
	OUT(beard);				// beard
	OUT(beardcolor);		// beardcolor
	OUT(drakkin_heritage);
	OUT(drakkin_tattoo);
	OUT(drakkin_details);

	if (emu->race == 522) // Test NPC!
	{
		uint8 ofs;
		uint8 val;
		ofs = emu->texture;
		val = emu->face;

		((uint8*)eq)[ofs % 256] = val;
	}
	FINISH_ENCODE();
}

Basically, at the end of the Titanium Illusion encode, you add this section like above:

	if (emu->race == 522) // Test NPC!
	{
		uint8 ofs;
		uint8 val;
		ofs = emu->texture;
		val = emu->face;

		((uint8*)eq)[ofs % 256] = val;
	}

You will also need to change the "256" to match the total size of the struct and will probably want to change the 522 at the top, since Titanium doesn't have race 522. You could probably test it on race 1 just fine (human).

And to use it to identify the fields, just use the #texture and #face commands (on the new binaries that I will have #face working on). Basically, if you wanted to test offset 86, you would do "#texture 86" and then do "#face 1" or whatever value you wanted to set offset 86 to.

[trevius]

For anyone who doesn't keep up with the changelog, here is some stuff that I added last night that is related to this topic.

==05/18/2009==
Trevius: New Commands added: #face, #helm, #hair, #haircolor, #beard, #beardcolor, #heritage, #tattoo, #details
Trevius: Adjusted the #fixmob command to use all features. The new format is "#fixmob featurename prev/next"

For Titanium to take full advantage of these new commands, the spawn struct for Titanium will need to have the hairstyle, haircolor, beard, and beardcolor fields identified. All fields are already identified for SoF.

I am excited to finally have these commands in. It should allow for considerably more customization at the time of spawning NPCs. I would like to get armor tint working too as a customize option, but that will probably be a bit hard since I don't think it exists in the illusion packet. I think that means the only way we could adjust armor tint would be to make a new command that will change the armor tint setting in the database and then repop that single NPC to show the changed effect.

I also could not find eye color in the illusion packet, but it appears that eye color stays at the same setting when the illusion packet is sent. So, if you have an NPC set to eye color 2 and change another feature like face or even race, it would still be using eyecolor 2.

Another thing that annoys me a bit is that I can't figure out how to make the illusion packet turn off helms on player race NPCs after you make a change to them. So, if they are wearing plate as their texture and you change something, they will have a helm on, which covers up half of the stuff I am trying to set! At least helm can be disabled in the database easy so that after changing them, a simple repop should correct it. The spawn structure shows helms on or off as they are set, so at least that is good.