Mob visibility issues {Moved}

[shargash]

I'm bringing this here so as not to sidetrack the announcements forum. I've was boxing my DK and cleric to see if I could crash anything with grouped combat. The good new is that I didn't. The bad news is that I experienced some really strange anomalies between the two characters. In other words, what I was seeing on one monitor was different than what I was seeing on the other.

I was running both clients full screen. The DK is on my main monitor directly in front of me. The cleric is on a secondary monitor to my left connected to a secondary PC. I mainly look at the main monitor and depend on sound from the second monitor to alert me to anything going on there. Both PCs are behind a firewall, so they will show as having the same IP address to the outside world.

Here are the oddities I was seeing:

1. My DK would see a waspling and move towards it. The waspling would agro and move towards me. However, it would go straight past the DK and attack the cleric. The DK was able to turn around and attack the waspling (possibly after some repositioning to avoid the "you can't see" error). Because I could hit the mob, I am sure the mob was actually there, and not a phantom. The cleric could see the mob and hit it as well. The oddity here is that it did not agro the nearest PC (the DK) but went past him to aggro the cleric. It was as if the waspling could not see my DK.

2. A couple of times, after the scenario described in #1, I would turn to the cleric's PC to reposition the cleric to attack the waspling (the one that had bypassed the DK to agro the cleric), and I would see a second waspling attacking the cleric. On the DKs PC I could not see the second waspling. I could not tab target it. I could not /assist the cleric to target it. As far as the DK was concerned, there was no mob there. The cleric, however, was taking damage and could attack, kill, and loot the mob. After the mob was dead, the DK could still not see the corpse. On the rare occasions in released VG that mob position was uncertain from lag, killing the mob would usually update all clients and resynch the visuals.

3. At one point, after killing a waspling that was attacking the cleric, I ran both characters over to the area between the bank and the tavern. While standing there, the DK started taking damage. I could not see any mob on either PC. My hit points would go down, and then they would regenerate back almost to full (that is probably a bug, as being attacked by something should put me in combat-locked mode, and my HP regen should have been slower). After camping the DK (I should not have been able to camp, as I was being hit), the cleric started being hit. At no point during this incident did I see a mob, nor could I target a mob (it should have auto-targeted me. I then camped the cleric. When I brought the DK back, he immediately started taking damage from an unseen and untargeted mob. The best explanation I can up with for this is that the server thought there was a waspling outside the bank, and it agro'd and attacked my characters, but the client was never notified of the presence of the mob, just the damage that was being delivered.

4. While single-boxing the DK, I ran up to numerous wasplings, and the majority of them did not agro. At this point (10-12 hours later), I cannot remember if I could attack the mob or not. I'll test that at some point today. If I could, it would be an agro bug. If not, it would be a position bug.

5. When I watch either of my characters move on the character's own box, it looks normal. However, the visuals on the other box are extremely jerky. In other words, if I look at DK's monitor while watching the cleric move, I see see the cleric going forwards and backwards in jerks, and then moving past the actually stopping point, and then warping back to where it was supposed to be. The is the classic "warping" that you see under extreme lag. However, the both of VG's frame rate meters show normal on both machines, at least every time I checked. I'll watch more closely next time.

[zippyzee]

The DK issue might just be from not having the faction value set in the database for wasplings vs. dk's. I copied and pasted the race_id's from another set of factions in the database so I'll have to check into that.

The visibility issues will take a while to work through. There's a lot to do there still.

[shargash]

The DK did get agro sometimes, though I can't remember any case where he got it when the cleric was around. The cleric is dark elf, the dk is thestran human.

[John Adams]

If the mobs name is Red, the faction is correct as that is what determines the name color (not /consider, as i other games).

Good report, shargash. This post could probably be public though so other testers could see what we already know, and do not spend their time reporting things already discovered.


Zippy: trying latest SVN on my local machine, the "Too far away" seems worse than before. That damnable waspling sticks to the center of my being no matter what I do.

[zippyzee]

Hmm. They definitely leave space around me, unless I move right back onto them. I'll look into it.

EDIT: I can't make them do that. My files are all up to date with rev 1416 and no issues at all. The code is pretty specific to split the difference from the current location to the goal location if one movement step would arrive at the goal location or further. I have no idea why there's a difference on your build. I'll have to keep looking.

[John Adams]

Now that the release stuff is done, I'll try it again and give it a little more focus. Do you have any logging in tracing positioning? Maybe that could be helpful; ie., player pos vs npc pos. But before wasting time on that, let me try it again

Yup, you are right. I have no idea why my recompile/run initially did not work but I cleaned everything and recompiled again and the mobs are stopping a ways away from me, perfectly. Nice work.

http://vgoemulator.net/images/Combat_Distance.mp4

[zippyzee]

Haha to the video! I agree!

You could have run around and grabbed a few wasplings and climbed a hill or something to make it more dramatic, but I think you will see that it is nearly impossible to get the npcs on top of you now unless you walk onto them yourself. It's surprisingly slick other than a little bit of warping here and there that I hope to overcome.

The gataro podlings in IOD are good for testing the z-axis movement on those slopes. That was another nightmare formula to figure out:

Code: Select all

new_rotation.pitch = (int)(32768.0f / 3.14f * atan2f(z - location.z, sqrt((y - location.y) * (y - location.y) + (x - location.x) * (x - location.x))));

Keep in mind it is only calculated when an npc needs to change speed or move to a different target location. It looks worse than it is.

Also don't forget you can turn on pathing again and add aggro ranges and faction to whatever you so choose...I'll be curious about performance.

[John Adams]

[quote="zippyzee"]Also don't forget you can turn on pathing again and add aggro ranges and faction to whatever you so choose...I'll be curious about performance.[/quote]
Just finishing up some new randoms in the Unreal Parser, once I kick that off I'll see what things I can script. I didn't have much moving on NT, since the data is all temporary, but you're right trying a few out wouldn't hurt.

I'll globally set "Attackable" NPCs to have an aggro radius, too.


Edit: Note to Self: Do not set aggro radius on hostile NPCs while standing in the middle of the Pawn Shoppe in Silius Flats. About 100 things just attacked me at once. The noise was so loud, I literally jumped out of my chair.