Langsam aber sicher:

[kthxbye]

Hello Norrath!

I wanted to announce that we've decided to push Omens of War back to Late August in order to give the EQ team time to respond to important issues that the EverQuest community is raising (specifically including the issues with Gates of Discord). We've heard some concerns from within the community that we feel are important enough to push back our next expansion and spend time fixing the problems you have brought to our attention. At the end of the day, we work for you and it's important for us to demonstrate that we both understand and appreciate that. We're also inviting many members of the community to join us here at SOE for a day to have a direct dialog with the development team about issues that are important to the EverQuest community as a whole. We've already sent out the invitations and are making all the arrangements. In addition, our EQ community managers will be coming up with a list of issues raised on the message boards so that we can come back to you with a specific list of things we're going to address.

I'm sorry if you feel we haven't been listening and reacting appropriately. We do our best to balance all of the needs and concerns you raise along with expanding Norrath and giving you new and wonderful things to do in EverQuest, but we do make mistakes. We've heard you loud and clear.

We have many things planned for EverQuest over the upcoming years, and our goal is to keep you happily playing EverQuest for a long time to come. The best way for us to do that is by first and foremost is by listening to you.

John Smedley
President, Sony Online Entertainment

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Schon sehr auffällige, das direkt vor diesem offenem Brief jenes bei gucomics erschien:

Comic: http://www.gucomics.com/archives/view.php?cdate=20040526

Topic: http://forums.gucomics.com/viewtopic.php?t=2057

Auch für einen Augustrelease werd ich das ganz sicher nicht preordern, den Fehler mache ich nicht mehr, auch wenn OoW nicht nach einem Totalausfall ala´ GoD aussieht.

[Theldor]

Rofl,

noch eine Erweiterung?

Langsam können die ja Kunark wieder abschalten um so mehr Platz zu schaffen. Geht eh keiner mehr hin

[Ghanur]

Tja, Sony bläst wohl ein Blizzard ins Gesicht

Dazu kommt, dass der aktuelle Patch einen ganzen Haufen an OoW-Spells für NPCs freigeschaltet hat: Lvel 66+ Mobs casten seit dem Patch die entsprechenden OoW-Spells

[Tarsonius]

Dazu kommt, dass der aktuelle Patch einen ganzen Haufen an OoW-Spells für NPCs freigeschaltet hat: Lvel 66+ Mobs casten seit dem Patch die entsprechenden OoW-Spells

Anscheinend wieder net 100% korrekt reingepatcht, da ich heute in hate von nem 63er necro mob

You resisted Omen-Nec-Root Spell

bekam

[kthxbye]

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The walled/cornered NPC bug was the direct result of the client and server having two different values for the radius that is used for the collision sphere. This collision sphere is what is used as the basis for where an NPC and player can move. One of the things that changed with the DX9 engine was the introduction of data structures specifically designed to track collision states. The old engine didn't have this. These data structures will (and have) allowed us to make optimizations that the old engine simply couldn't support because it didn't have any concept of persistent collision data; everything was based on the scale of the model and that's it. Anyways, in these data structures the new engine had the collision size set at one point, then the model was scaled, and the bug is that the collision sphere was not also scaled on the server because the server doesn't actually load the model data so it has nothing to scale.. This caused NPCs to have a collision radius of 1.2 on the server for instance where cazic thule in potime on the client was using 4.7 or so. The server would think the NPC is properly cornered but the clients would all think it was on the opposite side of the wall causing a bunch of bugs you all know about by now. Once the collision sizes were synchronized these problems went away. This was also part of the problem with pathing for very small NPCs (the spiders in podisease for instance) because they were constantly getting stuck in the ground due to having a collision sphere on the server *larger* than what the client was using.

On a related note, in the old engine NPCs were actually prevented from going through walls by something unrelated to collision checks of spheres and triangles. It was just doing a point check in legal space, which caused NPCs to be pushable exactly halfway in the wall which made the target point for archery subject to numerical precision errors. And the old collision code had numerous precision errors (one of the many things we just couldn't bring ourselve to port to DX9). In the new engine, it does a proper collision check of the sphere for the NPC against the zone geometry and being halfway in the wall shouldn't occur any more from a mathematical standpoint and this should permanently solve a lot of not-fun archery and other line of sight problems. Animation wise, NPCs will continue to have parts of their body penetrating whatever is nearby, but the collision sphere which is used for all visibility checks and whatnot is definitely kept outside the wall.

Changing the system from something with many inaccuracies that worked only due to CPU intensive redundant safety checks (ie point check in legal space) to something mathematically accurate that doesn't need additional methods to validate behavior is one of the reasons why the new system is better than the old one. It has also made the behavior much more strict which is a large part of why there have been so many "getting stuck" bugs. The system depends on everything always being in a legal state. This isn't always possible however, and I've had to find and correct each possible condition that could put a player "legally" in the position of overlapping geometry. Such as when a door closes on a player; this now has special code to allow the door to be partially disregarded when this happens.. Anyways, it's all very complicated, much more complicated than I think anyone here expected it to become, but I do feel we are nearly done. The remaining bugs - while frustrating to the players for sure - are at least approachable with known solutions (unlike the hard to reproduce stuff we've been dealing with lately) and it's just a matter of getting to them as fast as possible. Once those are taken care of the system will be ready for some very interesting new features that only a properly engineered collision system can support. How exactly we plan to extend it is not something I want to get into yet, right now we need to stay focused on making what we have now work correctly. We're pretty close, I think.

At any rate, we'll be patching the live servers as soon as we are confident these fixes are in fact fixes so for a few more days you can expect the behavior on live servers to remain the same.
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no comment here

[Elrusion Startail]

These data structures will (and have) allowed us to make optimizations that the old engine simply couldn't support

Da bekommt man das Gefühl, es wird ein Bug als Feature verkauft hehe
"Stellt euch vor: Ihr habts jetzt die Möglichkeit durch den Boden zu fallen *freu*, Mobs durch wände zu pushen *Juhuuu* und als nonplusultra: Caster sparen Mana, weil sie auf Mobs nicht casten können *HURRAAA*" ...