Doh! Sure, change the subject on me. :-)
"unintended fix" Yea, that is pretty funny in a sad way.
At 02:32 PM 9/22/00 -0500, Daniel Sniderman wrote:
>
>Below is a snip that I got from EQ Vault - that was cut from the Verant
>boards. I had to chuckle that he actually used the expression "unintended
>fix"...
>
>
>Slyde
>
>Hello all,
>
>I noticed a number of people here talking about the way that creatures
>decide to flee, referring to a change that went in with the last patch.
>After speaking with the programmer responsible for AI among other things,
>it's apparent that there was a change made while optimizing code that caused
>an "unintended fix" to the AI. Though no one sat down and said, "I'm going
>to make creatures flee more", that's the result.
>
>Without going too far into specifics and formulae regarding the decision to
>flee, there are several "components" that NPCs use to determine how brave
>they are. One of the common ones that everyone knows about is the
>interrelation of hitpoints and level with the attacker. One of the other
>less-known components was using some uninitialized memory (memory space
>allocated to a variable that hasn't yet been 'set' to anything, and usually
>contains garbage) that had the effect of making NPCs much more brave than
>they should have been.
>
>We are going to discuss this in the tuning meeting Monday, but my initial
>impression is that the AI is now working as it should, and I like how things
>are turning out so far.
>
>What are your thoughts?
>
>-Gordon
>
>
>
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