EQoffline, bots and more..

[davood3]

List of stuff that I'd like to see added/ fixed:

*Group heals hitting the bots.

*Armor/robe tinting (from the item, not from dyes), default colors are weak

*Misc display bugs, like equipped weapons not being refreshed properly, and helmets (hah)

Options that we can toggle in the rules maybe:

*Option to make the bot inherit the masters guild tag and show up in /who alls, and auto respond to tells with "I am soandso's bot"

*Option to randomly stagger their distances to the master

*Option to have them "walk" like regular pets instead of chain teleporting around with the master.

[Vulok]

So I just copied the zone.exe, world.exe, and the .dll over the other ones in the EqEmu directory.

Then the game goes crazy, and its not playable. Looked for that quick installer by cavedude I read about a fe posts ago but not sure where or what it is called at the peq Site.

Any ideas would be greatly appriciated.

Thanks

[GeorgeS]

I could not get the recent bot binaries to work, so reverted to saved binaries without bots. Works, but not sure what's going on with the newest bot binary

GeorgeS

[Congdar]

I'm running the latest binaries on The Realm server down near the bottom of the login list. not sure what problems you might be having.

[Congdar]

Originally Posted by davood3

List of stuff that I'd like to see added/ fixed:

*Group heals hitting the bots..

Wish granted... this was working but I added a check to group teleports because group porting of bots crashed the zone and that check broke the group heals. Unfortunately the group heal over time spells have the same identifier as group teleports(spells[spell_id].targettype == ST_GroupTeleport) which is kinda strange. I've added some checks to get by this for the group heal over time spells, I didn't check the flat group heals yet, do those fail too?

Originally Posted by davood3

*Armor/robe tinting (from the item, not from dyes), default colors are weak

This isn't bot specific code and I couldn't find any tint code that wasn't specifically related to the Client Character only.

Originally Posted by davood3

*Misc display bugs, like equipped weapons not being refreshed properly, and helmets (hah)

I made some changes that probably fix this... not sure about why helmets aren't showing.

Originally Posted by davood3

Options that we can toggle in the rules maybe:

*Option to make the bot inherit the masters guild tag and show up in /who alls, and auto respond to tells with "I am soandso's bot"

This would be quite the feature to code. Maybe somebody can take this on.

Originally Posted by davood3

*Option to randomly stagger their distances to the master

I've tried messing with this but the /follow command has it's own idea of distance and there is some staggering already.

Originally Posted by davood3

*Option to have them "walk" like regular pets instead of chain teleporting around with the master.

There may be something I can do here, but it would lose what little staggering there is now and all the bots would end up in one spot.

These fixes aren't available for download yet. I'll try and put them up in the next couple of days.

[GeorgeS]

The problem I noticed was I could not move in game fwd/back, but could turn around. Any ideas?

GeorgeS

[eski2]

Originally Posted by GeorgeS

The problem I noticed was I could not move in game fwd/back, but could turn around. Any ideas?

GeorgeS

where you getting the message that you were being moved to a safe point? that's what i was seeing.

[eski2]

Originally Posted by GeorgeS

The problem I noticed was I could not move in game fwd/back, but could turn around. Any ideas?

GeorgeS

where you getting the message that you were being moved to a safe point? that's what i was seeing.

[Congdar]

Originally Posted by GeorgeS

The problem I noticed was I could not move in game fwd/back, but could turn around. Any ideas?

GeorgeS

The only time ive experienced this is when I have zoned in under the world, or slightly under the world using #goto x, y, z and the z was just an inch under the world. The bot code doesn't specifially use zoning code or zoning xyz coords. Maybe the db zonepoints need to be updated for the zone you are in?

[BatCountry]

Either that or your strength buffs have worn off.

No joke, I've done it before.

[eski2]

I'm not sure this is the right approach. If i use those three files, the problem occurs, if i don't, it doesn't, if i do it comes back and so on. It's nothing to do with buffs. I can use goto or zone to alter my coords, i can change my size using #size but i can't get around this issue. I am unable to comment on it being an incompatibility with the database as i don't see anything that marks the version name or number.

However, if georgeS and i get the same symptoms when we use those 3 files, and our systems work as soon as we stop doing it, then i think there's more going on. I can't investigate, i don't have the skills but if anyone working on that code could do so, it would be much appreciated.

[BatCountry]

Originally Posted by Congdar

There may be something I can do here, but it would lose what little staggering there is now and all the bots would end up in one spot.

I've made some progress in this direction on my server (during the course of completely rehashing the bot command structure). The trick seems to be to pull out the staggering code you've got that is bypassing the movement system, then make the bots follow each other in order, forming a train.

If you keep the follow distance short enough, they stay together enough to avoid being a problem for agro or navigation without them getting in your way or making it impossible to click target one of them (or around one of them).

[davood3]

Divine Arbitration from epic, and from AA both seem to land on the bots. Whereas word of vivication does not, nor does any other instant casted group heal.

The instant group heal aa hand of xxxx seems to hit bots just fine.


When I was referring to tinting, basically you have xxx armor that is tinted, you give it to the bot, and it appears as the base colour, not the actual armors colour, so rubicite will appear as regular grey plate, etc. whereas robes appear properly tinted, until you resummon the bot, then they lose their tinting.

I will investigate the code, and eventually create a diff for the guild tag thing, I don't know how I'd go about making them respond to tells or appear in a /who all though.

[davood3]

any chance of sharing that with us bat? hehehe. that sounds like the perfect solution.

[BatCountry]

Originally Posted by davood3

any chance of sharing that with us bat? hehehe. that sounds like the perfect solution.

Well, trivially, in commands.cpp under the bot follow command:

for(int i=0; i<MAX_GROUP_MEMBERS; i++) {
	if(g->members[i] != NULL && g->members[i]->IsBot()) {
		//--BAT : Forms trains out of the group instead of them all dogpiling your face
		if(i > 0)
			g->members[i]->SetFollowID(g->members[i-1]->GetID());
		else
			g->members[i]->SetFollowID(c->GetID());
		g->members[i]->Say("Following, %s.", c->GetName());
	}
}

More advanced following code avoiding jitter and jumping as much as possible and letting them look like they're really running is what I'm working on right now. Shouldn't prove too much of a problem.

Making them actually behave sensibly when you stop is another thing.

At least formally, you'd probably like them to stop at some point behind you, catch up with you, fan out behind you without getting in the way of other party members, and avoid aggroing anything by fanning out too far. In theory, you would take your heading and transform a point behind you a certain distance, then have each party member take a point of the compass behind that point and move a set distance from it, avoiding walking through (or against) walls or spreading out so far that they can't see what's going on.

That part is quite a bit harder. I think Congdar's code for that is a pretty good solution to keeping them out of your way but still in a position where they have line-of-sight to anything you might target, but as he says in his code comments, it makes them behave like ugly bots rather than like natural party members.

Ideally you'd have the things find the nearest AI node behind you and form up around that, then move themselves so they had line of sight on whatever you might target as soon as you engaged, but that would be pretty much impossible without some rather sophisticated FPS-stype AI operating on the AI node trees, which is probably more effort than anybody would want to go to just to make them look a bit more natural.