Combat Revamp Discussion

[Jabantiz]

When I said zone crash I meant zone exceptions, non showed up when I did my tests. I swear when I was looking at EQ2TC I could have swore that is said is was just running eq2world not eq2world_debug but I very likely could have been wrong. I will see if I can do more tests later tonight.

[Jabantiz]

I noticed on 1 of the 4 clients I logged in that it appears the passive spells are not flagged as friendly (he showed up as in combat briefly then put his weapon away), on my server all passives are flagged as friendly so that doesn't happen. It could be the diffrent data causing the spell icon shading issues.

All passive spells should be friendly spells, I could probably hardcode it to make sure it is flagged as friendly before attempting to cast it, thus preventing the brief moment of combat (and possibly icon shading) when you first log in.

[Jabantiz]

Tested with 4 clients today on EQ2TC, 2 just sitting in antonica, 2 fighting in queens colony, I LD'd one of the clients sitting in antonica after a while, after a bit one of the clients in queens colony crashed, after both clients were fully disconnected I did /who all on the client in antonica to make sure it was still responding and it was, the one in queens colony was still fighting, I eventually LD's both of them and waited they were both fully disconnected and no zone exceptions were thrown and eventually the zones shut down as normal. It seems much more stable now then it was.

I did notice the duplicate packet messages every now and then, it seemed to match up whenever there was lag in combat wich wasn't often but it did happen. I am starting to wonder if that is related to it running slower from being in debug and if so why is it showing up now in revisions before and after combat was modified.

[Jabantiz]

I added encounter support so the first npc/player/group/raid to attack a spawn will be the only ones to get credit, I tested this with 2 clients and it seems to be working properly but more testing will be needed.

[alfa]

Is Encouter Lock handle by combat script ?

[Jabantiz]

No it is currently hard coded.

[John Adams]

Jabantiz,

I am not seeing any issues with the new combat code recently, though we do not have a high level of players at the moment, alfa would have said something if it was broken I think that's a done deal.

ProjMan: Combat

What I need you to tell me is what the hell was "Player Abilities"? I think combat arts, spells and such are fine. Or was this about the "cast through" aspect of EQ2?

[Jabantiz]

I have no idea what that is for, judging by the note I would say spell/combat arts and those are all working.

[alfa]

See some imperfections, some ping so need to take time to test on local machine, but bash some mob and it seem correct, still need to accure some value and spells things but really more "live" than older engine.

If you ask me combat engine GENERIC is 70 % complete GLOBAL COMBAT hummm 25 % :p but you don't ask me sooooo....

we do not have a high level of players at the moment

Hey two level 90 here, but not played about 6 month :p So not do raid on AoD but all previous content down ^^

[John Adams]

I meant quantity of players on Emu, silly alfa. You are our only player haha

[alfa]

Quality is better than Quantity ^^

[John Adams]

/bump this discussion

I just re-read through every post in this thread (I ask that you at least skim it) and noticed a lot of the issues we discovered yesterday already existed in this thread. While we're still a lot better off than we were a year ago, we have a long way to go for stability.

I would like to re-open the discussion on a Combat system re-vamp. Jabantiz had a lot of great ideas in this thread, and while he's been working on things over the last 6 mos, I am not sure what the status is on this revamp.

- Are we slowly revamping combat?
- Should we completely gut Combat *now* as a part of 0.7.2 and get this thing stable once and for all the way Jabantiz suggested?
- Should we continue to discuss options, and slate the revamp for a post-0.7.2 release?

I'm in no major hurry to release 0.7.2, unless we table a Combat Revamp, then I can proceed with my early April release of this current branch.

Please weigh in. Thanks.

[Jabantiz]

I haven't really touched combat for months, I have lots of ideas but it is all related to an almost complete rewrite of combat and ai. IMO the code is a mess, for example we have a AllowedToAttack() function to see if the attacker can even make an attack on its target, however most of the checks we do in there are also done in other places before we even call that function, mainly distance checks.

My main goal of a revamp at this point would be to make the code easier to modify and read in the future as well as better results then what we currently have.

[Jabantiz]

Over the past 3 days or so I have been working on my ideas for a revamp. I managed to get a usable version running last night and have improved upon it a lot since then. The code is running on my server for any one that wants to try it out. All combat should work but looting and encounter locking are broken, both were implemented in a way that won't work with the new system and would rather test this out to see if it is usable before spending time working on those.

[Jabantiz]

Sorry Alfa, saw you on my server but had router issues in other parts of the house and had to reset it, didn't notice you were on until after I reset it.