Monster Summoning line

[00000100]

The spell is implemented. It is purchasable/droppable/research-able...in short, it's in the game and it's in the DB; the problem is that it's in there incorrectly. The pet can be summoned, it can be equipped with weapons and armor, it can fight and be buffed, but it always looks like a male human. If advanced models are turned on, it looks like a male human with a beard floating above his left shoulder, rotated 90 degrees CCW, and his hair is floating about 6" (estimated in-game, not on screen) from his head. It is supposed to take the form of a random mob in the zone, and it clearly isn't.

[unknownhost]

never looked at the spell but it sounds like it is ether not using a random npc list or its spawning random npc graphics in an uncompatable zone?

curious with the beard thing, sounds "coldain" ish. is velious era spell line if its mebbe pulling those graphics in specificly.

ahh well, just a wanabe-hack guessing here, surely one of the masters will swing by an lay out the code in source before long.

[00000100]

Well, I took some screenshots months ago when I first noticed this.

[provocating]

I am bringing this thread back, is there a fix for this yet ?

[Vaughn2117]

I loved the Monster Summoning line of spells, i hope it can be fix'd

[realityincarnate]

I think I have the Monster Summoning line working properly as of revision 691. Try it out and let me know if there are any other issues or anything not working as it should.

[steve]

Originally Posted by realityincarnate

I think I have the Monster Summoning line working properly as of revision 691. Try it out and let me know if there are any other issues or anything not working as it should.

How did you set the models that it uses? The reason it was discontinued on Live was because each zone needed to be gone through manually for each expansion, selecting a handful of models from that zone for it to work. It got too tedious to maintain, so was phased out.

Are you just having it randomly choose from a global model?

[cavedude]

No, it's even more brilliant! He's getting the model from a NPC in the same zone. Very clever.

[steve]

Originally Posted by cavedude

No, it's even more brilliant! He's getting the model from a NPC in the same zone. Very clever.

Eh? How does the server know what models are loaded? Is it checking the database to look for models loading and compiling a list for each zone at the time the server is started?

Sorry, I don't know enough about SVN to go look myself

[cavedude]

It determines what NPCs spawn in the pet's current zone using spawn2, picks one at random, and uses its appearance. We'd probably want to exclude NPCs with a base race, or certain bodytypes (triggers and the like) but those are simple tweaks.

[Yeormom]

Originally Posted by steve

Eh? How does the server know what models are loaded? Is it checking the database to look for models loading and compiling a list for each zone at the time the server is started?

The database doesn't directly include which models your client has loaded. However, there is the general sense that if there is an NPC spawned in the zone with model #5, then model #5 must be loaded.

So it is getting the list of spawns for the zone and picking from said list.

[steve]

Lol, nice.

That makes a heck of a lot more sense than the way they did it on Live.

[realityincarnate]

I knew the people I got in cities were probably inappropriate, but I hadn't even thought about the trigger npcs, traps, or objects... and then I went to Qeynos and got SeaKing as a pet....

So I changed the database query to ignore playable races, town citizens, guards, invisible men, objects, and boats, plus body types of 11, 33, 66, and 67, which seemed to cover all the traps and "mystic voice" type npcs. I'm sure there are other things that shouldn't be there that I missed, but it seems to work well for now.

Oh, and in homage to the broken form of the spell that was all I ever saw on Live, if the query fails or there are no monster npcs, it looks like an earth pet.