Harvesting Nodes (split)

[Ratief]

By random I thought you meant that the nodes (say trees) would spawn in random places within an area. I believe that the respawn_timer would end up making nodes queue like they did on live. I guess we were just talking about different things.

I believe that all node spawns had a chance to spawn a rare/ultra rare node of the same tier as the normal spawns (some spawns had multiple tiers of nodes). That would be your different raceIDs. These rare spawns use to have special names, but that causes players to run in and steal a node from someone else when they were waiting for others to come help. So SOE changed all of the rare spawns to have the same names as their normal spawns.

In case it helps, Soresha long ago mapped out many of the harvesting nodes and made an awesome searchable map with tiers of each node (including mixed tier spawns). I know for a fact that not all spawns are there as my favorite T5 plant spot isn't there, but it has a great deal of information! It might be helpful in determining which spawns were mixed tiers and what those tiers are.
http://www.soresha.net/vgmap/

I'm still thinking that it might be helpful to have a way to have multiple different respawn types, but it is always something we can add later.

[John Adams]

[quote="Ratief"]By random I thought you meant that the nodes (say trees) would spawn in random places within an area.[/quote]
Nope, not what I was on about (not sure if Xinux was though). I know they had specific x,y,z's beacuse of the Soresha InfoMap displays. If there was any randomness at all, it would be feet, not miles (that was the EQ2 "x/y/z offset" system). EQ2 also had an "expire_timer" and offset, for nodes that if they sat in game untouched for 'x' minutes/hours, they would despawn and random-pop again, giving players another node to harvest. But again, that was EQ2. We do not need to do that here if it will throw off the delicate balance of the universe for the RSI squad

[Xinux]

[quote="Ratief"]By random I thought you meant that the nodes (say trees) would spawn in random places within an area.[/quote]

Nope they still have there normal spawn spots just the timer would be random on the re-spawning.

[shargash]

[quote="John Adams"]As for cutting down a tree, then the next, and onward until you return to the start - that's simply respawn_timer in the placements table. We can tweak the timing that by the time an area is depleted, the first nodes are showing back up.[/quote]

It was definitely more complicated than this in VG. It was easiest to see with plant nodes, as plant nodes occurred in clusters. You could find a cluster site with one vielthread up, and you could go AFK for 10 minutes and come back, and that same one vielthread would be up. But, as soon as you completed the harvest on that vielthread node, another one would pop. When you harvested the second, a third would pop, and so on. I don't know if they did it by using one spawn as a trigger for another node to spawn or as a block that prevented it from spawning.

So, some nodes were definitely not directly on a timer. I never did figure out the mix of timers and triggers. I always intended to do that, but I guess I wasn't motivated enough.

Now, I'm not saying the emulator should necessarily do spawns exactly like live. However, if spawns are purely timed, then I would think you should have a way of synchronizing the timers.

[Ratief]

Plants made it easy to see the pattern. Typically there would be 2 groups of 5 plant spawns. Only a max of 4 could be in game for that group at any one time. Once you harvest all 10, there would be a dead time while the respawn timers counted down before they would start spawning again. They would also spawn in the exact order that you harvested them in (which would be the respawn timers). The trick will be getting them grouped so that only 4 will be in world at any given time.

This pattern was much harder to see with other nodes as they tended to be spread out a lot more, but harvesting with a bard's run speed you could still see the pattern in you knew where all of the nodes would spawn. To complicate it, some groups of nodes overlapped! In those situations it is very hard to figure out which ones are linked. I remember finding a group where there was part of another group in between them. So I would just run though to the nodes that would make the rest of my group respawn.

[Jakkal]

Being a visual person myself I made some pics to help explain how it works. It's the extremely simplified method, but anyone that's mined in SOD/KDQ should understand. But this is how it worked (From what I recall. It wasn't always in this nice clean pattern, but once you established the pattern you could do it until you decided to stop).

[img]http://jakkal.com/vanguard/HarvestLoop1.jpg[/img]

[img]http://jakkal.com/vanguard/HarvestLoop2.jpg[/img]

[img]http://jakkal.com/vanguard/HarvestLoop3.jpg[/img]

[img]http://jakkal.com/vanguard/HarvestLoop4.jpg[/img]

[img]http://jakkal.com/vanguard/HarvestLoop5.jpg[/img]

[img]http://jakkal.com/vanguard/HarvestLoop6.jpg[/img]

[img]http://jakkal.com/vanguard/HarvestLoop7.jpg[/img]

[img]http://jakkal.com/vanguard/HarvestLoop8.jpg[/img]

[Ratief]

You are missing two in that loop.
One to the left and one to the bottom left. I'm sure you know, but I thought that I'd point it out.

[Jakkal]

lol, I was wondering if anyone would, but I figured this would be good enough! I think we all did that loop far too many times! *shakes fist at POTA*

[John Adams]

[quote="Ratief"]Great job on the visuals! It doesn't even matter if it's not perfect, we get the idea and that was the point![/quote]
^^ What he meant to say ^^

[Moldew]

Comic sans?!? Really?