VGOEmulator.net

I played with this a bit tonight. Here is what I was able to discover:

1. When you click the buff once, you get no UI feedback (i.e. the hotkey button does not depress, you do not see global refresh, etc). However, the buff seems to take effect.

2. If you hit the button again, nothing happens again. However, the buff seems to "queue up". After hitting the button a few times, you will eventually see packet times spike up. I saw packet times over 200,000 ms.

3. After a multiple button press, it takes maybe 30-40 seconds before the next buff "kicks in." When it does, it stacks with previous buffs, and it drives the packet times up.

4. High packet times do not affect chat or /who commands (oddly). It does affect emotes and observations of NPC movement around you.

5. If you are grouped, the high packet times affect your group mate. However, if the person is not grouped, he does not notice experience high packet times.

6. The buff appears to increase the max hitpoints, but does not immediately increase current hit points. This causes you to appear to be down in HP, though this may not show up for a while because of lag. I believe the buff in released VG increased both together.

7. After the last buff I spammed kicked in, packet times would eventually work themselves back to normal.

This seems to be highly reproduceable. It happened every time I tried it, even after crashing the client and logging back in. I have only tried this with a paladin. I wasn't sure what other classes had buffs that were implemented.

Let me know if you want me to try anything else.

Split this into it's own defect, because it's more about packet jams than the paladin ability. Nice discovery, shargash. Hopefully it's easily reproducible by a dev.

Faux, NT does not have the latest spells code, so I asked them to try this on Targonor - though it's a different OS so it's likely not an apples to apples comparison. Either way, I'd like your 2cp on whether or not the new spells code will allow us to rewrite all existing spells and get things back into a working state.

For the packet overflow (what I suspect is causing the high ping), that will likely take care of itself once we track bene/terms buffs.

The behavior is somewhat different on Targ. There is a brief packet spike into red, but it is too brief for me to read how high it actually gets. However, the UI responds quite well to spamming the pally buff. As soon as global refresh is complete, the UI is ready for the next casting. There is a slight delay in seeing the "button press" animation the first time you cast (2-3 seconds, which is still longer than it should be, but not bad).

On NT, the "button press" delay is more like 30 seconds, during which nothing much happens. Then the button press animation happens and packet times go through the roof.

One other thing I noticed on Targonor is that the game (whether client or server, I'm not sure) is inconsistent about letting me queue up spamming the buff. Sometimes I get a red "You can't do that yet" message (which is correct, I think), but most of the time it lets the keypresses queue up. I never saw the "you can't do that message" on NT. It appears to let me queue up as many castings as I want (I tried as many as 8), though it takes 30-40 seconds to work through each of the queued castings.

Edit: I figured out the sequence of the "You can't do that" message on Targ. When you press the button to cast the spell, there is a 2-3 second delay before it takes. If you press the button during that time, the button press will queue. If you wait till it takes and then press during global refresh, you get the "You can't do that yet" message. I think if the 2-3 second delay goes away, the command queuing problem will probably go away too.

I'll take a look into this but we may want to just reevaluate it as Spell casting comes together more completely.