EqEmu Rant :P

Bob98112 · #1 12-03-2002, 01:30 PM

Since I have difficulty adding anything meaningful to the posts on the EQemu areas, I will make a post here.

I have been reading this message board alot lately. I only discovered late at night last Wednesday. Since then, I have gotten the EqEmu server running on my Win2kserver. (The linux version compiles fine now, but doesnt work at all - I still dunno why) Sure, I ran into problems at first - But I kept hammering away at it. I Read the posts, Read about MySql, read the World and Zone projects code.. Anyway, I wanted to explain my brief experience before I made the observation.

I am really amused by the perceived attitude of some posts here as well as the people who have connected to my public server and bitched in /ooc.

To me, the EQ Emulator isn't just some gadget, it is completely COOL. Taking Verant Interactive out of the EQ equation is the best thing that could ever happen to the game. They slowly ruined the experience for me over the 3 years I played EQ. I learned to dispise them and their ability to crap on their customer's heads consistantly without any negative consequence.
I am clearly no marketting wizard but, I do know that you give the customers what they want before you seperate them from their money.

People see the Emulator doing all the cool things it does and complain about something or another. The servers are not up when I want to play. Like we are here to dedicate our hardware without any other compensation than some other random person's amusement? The _____ doesn't work. Geeze! Look what does work! I cannot get my _____ to work. Fix it for me!!! Come on people!

My favorite was this guy on my server last night that was pissy becuase I left the starting status at 20. This allowed people to fly around, set their skills as well as zone and summon stuff. He/She thought I should remove those commands to make the game more "legitimate". I wrote a program to strip the dup spawns from the zones, I am working on populating some of the newbie areas with proper level spawns. I am working on forcing a save so that people will not loose their group when they zone, Repairing some of the zonelines and safe points.. But/// Comon' this emulator is in beta! I think is rocks so far and I cannot wait until it is done!

If I could not contribute to the coding with my paltry 22 years of programming experience, I would like to at least find out what is being worked on so that I don't duplicate something that will be finished soon enough. That is why I am currently poking around with the Data in the database.

I end my rant just asking people to consider being reasonable about EqEmu. If you don't like what you see or cannot make it work... fine! Please Go back to playing EQlive. There is no way in HEll I ever will. I wrote this game off before I found EqEmu.

Phew! I feel better, even if no-one ever reads this... LOL

Syntaks · #2 12-03-2002, 01:56 PM

*Nods*

I hear ya, Bob.

My situation's a bit different than yours. I had NO bad experiences in my EQLive days. My only needf to summon a GM was because I needed my Surname. Never met the trouble makers that everyone says are there. Was a member of a Wonderful guild I miss too much.

Anyway, I digress..

I generally ignore the "this doesn't work" and "put this in" posts, and always try to help the new guys at least once..

My reason for usng EqEmu? Couldn't afford the live monthly fees. And I have a gaming group here that I want to hook together and LAN with in one of my favorite games. Plain and simple.

Anyway.

I'm really interested in what you're doing for your servers, Bob. I logged in to post that I've cleaned up alot of the Antonica zone points, and plan on fixing the whole world... not an easy task. I'm also interested in your dup spawn stripper. I could REALLY use it

Send me a message through the members section. Maybe I can offer some help...

Bob98112 · #3 12-03-2002, 02:52 PM

The code needs to be cleaned up to post publically (poorly commented, error checking is minimal) but, I will email it to ya if you want. It was very quickly written in VC++ using MFC (the proj files are currently 6.0 but .net should compile it fine). Right now, It will do a zone you specify but, I will fix it to do all zones automatically later tonight if I get a chance. It's not perfect. It is Quick and dirty but, it cuts the duplicates by 95% in some zones.

I am working on a proj to check and edit the lootdrops. I have an idea for a program to adjust the high end game zones so a small group can do what normally takes a guildraid. The endgame was the biggest disappointment for me in EQLive. I was in a great guild full of nice people and I miss them alot too. Our problem was that ppl hit low 50s and left for other guilds and we had almost no leadership at all. In Fact, our leader left for a supposed "better" guild at the end. <That bastard!> That is when I quit for good.

The customer service complaints I have are general like: nerfs.
Verant customer service school must have one rule. "Do not trust the customer". Every single time I petitioned I honestly think the guides/GMs thought I was up to something although I was not. They always told me "I am sorry but, I cannot help you". Bah!

Windcatcher · #4 12-03-2002, 03:50 PM

There are lots of reasons why people quit. I was in a good (though small) guild, with really great people (one of my closest RL friends still plays). What finally did it for me was a LONG planes raid that lasted till well after sunup. After that, I threw in the towel--I decided a game that demanded that sort of dedication wasn't worth playing. I haven't been back since, nor do I think I ever will. It's been long enough (well over a year now) that I feel safe in saying that.

As for guides and GMs, my experiences with them have always been positive. I don't know if you ever read Lum the Mad (or if the archives are available), but a mole in VI once got the story out on how they operate. They have tiers of GMs there, and a certain Sony guy (don't remember his name, but he was SONY, not VI) had a bad habit of chewing people out in front of everyone else and firing people on the spot (also in front of everyone else). Humiliation was apparently how he threw his weight around there. From what I read happened, he was the type of guy who would have been disciplined or fired at other organizations for unprofessional behavior (I've had Lockheed ethics training and he fit the bill for one of the training CDs--we had an ethics hotline for people like that; every phone had '333' stickered on it). Anyhow, the skinny on Lum was that the GMs, though paid pennies, were afraid to make ANY decision that rocked the boat, as it might put their jobs in jeopardy. That meant nothing got passed up the chain, and, importantly, word of this problem never left this guy's little fiefdom. Hence, his superiors never learned about it until it broke on Lum. (The word afterward was that the Sony guy was going ape trying to find out who leaked the info). Basically, I don't think you can blame the GMs, they were paralyzed by their need for job security. If anything it reminds me of the line from Real Genius: "When you're smart, people need you." GMs aren't in a position where they're needed--that's not to say they're dumb, but the point is to get yourself in a position where your bos(ses) dare not mistreat you like they were.

WC

Baron Sprite · #5 12-03-2002, 06:39 PM

Feel free to comment exsisting code if it bugs you

Bob98112 · #6 12-03-2002, 07:06 PM

Wow! What a post. I would like to sincerly Thank You for your Insight Windcatcher! I always pictured the average VI GM job was filled by people with profound inferority complex. That is how they always came off to me. I do remember some odd things though, The GM that gave my main his surname was fired a couple of weeks later for dueling Players in the arena at a friend of mine's guild meeting. He was the coolest one I ever talked with so I was pretty disappointed about it.

Your memory of past-sunup raids scares me because I.. for whatever reason, didn't stop playing after that. Being a nice guy was a bad combo for the addiction too - I often would be ready to camp at 2:00am and have some random player beg for a cr and summons. 4 hours and 12 coffins later, I would get maybe 2 hrs of sleep before work. Woohoo!

Thanks again for the great reply and for clearing that up for me.

Bob98112 · #7 12-04-2002, 07:09 AM

Thank you Baron...
I did that this morning

There is a readme file in the zip

If anyone wants to mess with it, here it is:

http://members.telocity.com/p_quinn/...neCleanSrc.zip

fnemo · #8 12-04-2002, 07:38 AM

uh, whats this zip before i DL it ? :p

<-- (me) is dumb

Bob98112 · #9 12-04-2002, 08:55 AM

It is the source code and .exe for the program I discussed in the above reply. The program is not part of any release or anything. I would not recommend downloading it unless you are a) running a server and b) you want to clean up duplicate spawns in zones based on the latest DB-addon. It is windoze only and requires MyODBC as well to run it. It is not supported either. If the instructions in the readme.txt don't work... I don't know what else to suggest - It is all new to me as well. I really was only posting it as it pertains to this thread.

BoB

Trumpcard · #10 12-04-2002, 11:40 AM

You need to change the <Cmycolhbs.h> in DialogDLG.h to
"Cmycolhbs" . Its not a standard header.

Just finished compiling it, the code looks really clean ! If it works well, we can probably use it before new addon's are released to clean up the spawns. Thanks for the contribution!

Trumpcard · #11 12-04-2002, 01:27 PM

Hmm.. It compiles fine, but I get errors linking..

Generating Code...
Linking...
LINK : warning LNK4089: all references to "OLEAUT32.dll" discarded by /OPT:REF
LINK : warning LNK4089: all references to "SHELL32.dll" discarded by /OPT:REF
LINK : warning LNK4089: all references to "comdlg32.dll" discarded by /OPT:REF
LINK : warning LNK4089: all references to "ole32.dll" discarded by /OPT:REF

and it dies when i try to run it... the debug configuration doesnt generate any link warnings though...

Im guessing Win XP doesnt like it

Bob98112 · #12 12-04-2002, 01:43 PM

Thank You Trumpcard, for pointing that out. Yeah, I ripped the original from a standard object library of mine. I will fix the .zip file after I reply to this.

I found the problem you pointed out and also a leftover test point in DialogDlg::FindZones() where I: if(TRUE) lol..

If anything I can do might help the project in any way - I am very happy! Until the next EqEmu source release, I am going to continue a project I started tonight to root out and fix wierd stuff I found in the lootdrop tables. (like chance being set to zero) and some named mobs having no drop entries that I can find by hand.

I would like to dink with some of the cool "partially completed" features in the Zone source but, I don't want to spend time on something that will be replaced soon enough.

Thanks again for the reply.

Bob98112 · #13 12-04-2002, 01:52 PM

LINK : warning LNK4089: all references to "OLEAUT32.dll" discarded by /OPT:REF
..... and the other warnings...

This happens because I have Incremental linking turned off.. I don't trust IL, myself. It has caused me grief, especially in debug mode. Turning it back on will make the warnings disappear.

Concerning the app just dying, I am curious if you saw the readme.txt file in the main source dir. I am going to go back and look to see if I mentioned anything about using the new "test connection" button in MyODBC 3.51 .. Does the ODBC driver connect to the database okay? If not, the app will die becuase there is no error checking.

Hope that helps..

Trumpcard · #14 12-04-2002, 01:58 PM

Wiz has been working on looting code, wait till the next version is released before you do anything.. there are plenty of things that need fixing and/or updating.. swing by irc and talk to one of us if you're interested in becoming an active emu developer.. are you interested in working on tools or the emu code?

I'll take a look at my ODBC stub, I bet youre right...

: Yep, you were right, it was choking on my ODBC connection.. Working now, trying it out...

Bob98112 · #15 12-05-2002, 07:34 PM

Cool. I will check out the IRC channel soon. Personlly, I could go either way on the Tools or EMU code. I would just like to contribute. 80% of the stuff I do at work deals with Databases.

I like what I see in the EMu project. So many things look like they were started and then almost finished. I would like to throw some ideas into the hat even if I would not get the chance to code them.

One idea I had tonight concerned the messages the client receives when you pass over certain spots in EQlive. (Or at least they did before I quit). I figured out an, I think, easy way to implement that. There are more important things to work on, it is just something that occured to me.