True, but if they borrowed from the levitate code, which apparently 'knows'
where the current surface level is, or the falling code, they could
accomplish that I think. There may be some untrivial issues, but zone based
data ranges ought to be able to solve that. They can't afford to implement
that kind of check for things that happen instantaneously on the fly like
movement for bandwidth/delay reasons, but who will notice if a mob that
spawns after a random amount of time spawns after a random amount of time
plus a processing time to be sure he's not in a wall. It would all be
server side computationally so shouldn't impact performance significantly
unless they are pushing their boxes immensely. I imagine their box usage
looks a lot like some of ours, cpu usage at 80% available, io bound at 60%.
Kitasi
-----Original Message-----
From: Steven S. Klug [mailto:
sklug@...]
Sent: Thursday, December 02, 1999 3:19 PM
To:
eqbards@onelist.com
Subject: Re: A way to fix tedium and predictability was RE: [eqbards]
RE: Cler ic/Bard armor quests
From: "Steven S. Klug" <
sklug@...>
Heh, that's all we'd need is monsters popping up in the middle of walls, or
halfway in sloped floors, then
falling into netherspace to attack us with impunity. I don't think it's a
bad idea, but I think you're
oversimplifying the difficulty in implementation. It has already been
demonstrated how fragile the thin
plane of ground we walk on is. Certainly with respect to getting things to
stay on that ground, and not
below it.
Laluni Songhammer of E'Ci
"Kimes, Dean W." wrote:
> From: "Kimes, Dean W." <Dean_Kimes@...>
>
> I can think of a couple ways to fix that fairly easily. Whenever a Mob
> spawns, just offset its location by a random number in the X and Y
> directions and pop him to the nearest surface. This would make the game a
> heck of a lot more difficult at higher levels where a spawn that pops up
on
> the other side of a wall is suddenly part of a melee in another room that
> wasn't expecting more trouble because everything was 'predictable'
Camping
> a spawn in a dungeon would become really tough if anyone was camping
nearby
> spawns as well.
>
> Just the amusement of have the PGT Mucktail suddenly spawn between the two
> medd'ing wizards instead of in front of the tanks would be worth the
coding
> difficulty. This cannot be that hard to code, obviously monsters spawn at
> fixed locs, just insert a function call to the random number generator to
> offset the database coords passed to the spawner and you'd be done. If
> their design is any good, this should be easy to implement.
>
> Kitasi
>
> In all seriousness, Verant has painted themselves into a
> corner with the basic game design where nearly everything is
> predictable. The same mobs spawn in the same places carrying
> the same items and can be killed using the same tactics. The
> only things that really require strategy are multi-mob fights,
> and exploring. Given the high degree of predictability, it's
> virtually impossible to make things challenging - once you
> figure out how it works, it's predictable, and no longer
> challenging; so they're stuck with making things tedious.
> --
> John H. Kim
>
> > Please send submissions for the eqbards newsletter to lol@...
with the subject submissions.
--
Steven S. Klug
sklug@...
Please send submissions for the eqbards newsletter to
lol@...
with the subject submissions.