Twisting songs for a bardFollow

You know, to this day I'm still not sure how Fansy did the trick of training high level evil players in Oasis or Ro with sand giants. I can understand aggroing them all and outrunning them with bard speed but a low level bard has no way to clear agro. The zones in Ro and Oasis are pretty far from the usual camp spots. It would seem to me if Fansy zoned out, there's no guarantee the sand giants, on their return paths, would move close enough to the evil camps to agro on them. I see no evidence that Fansy ate a death at the evil's campsite, thereby passing the giants' hate onto them by proximity.

It's a great story but still not totally "solved" in my mind.

Edited, Feb 4th 2016 12:17pm by Sippin

I vaguely recall some site or other back in the day where he drew out the routes he would run on a map to show how to do this (or someone else had based on his claims). IIRC, it wasn't about getting them to walk back through camps, so much as timing his zone out to have the SGs right in the midst of someone's camp. So, for example, you run them all the way to the southern edge of the zone, then zip across the zone along the west side to the north side, then angle a bit to the east and zone out. The SGs, being slower, would be right in the midst of the orc camps in the middle of the zone when you zone out the north side.

His routes were a bit more circular so as to make them come in at odd angles (and to get them around the lake), but I believe it was all about timing the zone to make it happen.

Spectres, of course, were much easier since they all started at the same spot and would path right through the beach area on their way back.

Oh yeah. Super predictable. Doubly so back in the day. EQ had some "odd" pathing rules. And you could often find spots where mobs would take what appeared to you to be a circuitous route to get to you. There used to be a "seam" in the mob pathing on the first floor of Unrest. Basically, there was a room (dining room I think?) with a hallway running along three sides, and three entrances from said hallway, each entering from a different direction (call them North, East, and South). If you were standing in the room just inside the South doorway and aggroed the mobs, they would run straight at you, but if you backed into the hallway, they would path out the North or East doorways (depending on which was closest), then around the hallways and hit you from the side. Of course, people not aware of this might tag something in the room and back into the hall to fight it, wonder what was taking so long, only to be hit by a massive train coming around the corner in the hallway, having aggroed everything along the way.

You could, in theory, use this to your advantage though. I once made a mob basically run back and forth for several minutes by simply stepping in and out of the room. He'd run towards me, I'd step back. He's run back towards one of the other exits. I'd step back in and he'd turn around. Ok. Not terribly useful unless you'd already cleared the room first, but still something you could play around with if you wanted (and probably far more useful for say a necro using dots than my paladin). What appeared at first to be random and strange, was in fact quite predictable. It had such things because the layout of the building was somewhat circular. There were multiple routes to take, so the devs decided to simplify pathing rules to make sure mobs didn't get stuck in a room, running back and forth constantly changing the route to get to wherever the target was, but never reaching it. So the mob always had one path to get from point A to point B, even if it wasn't always the most physically direct. That path could change if you moved, but never as a result of the mobs own movement (which was the point of the coding).

They've massively improved pathing point granularity in the game since then, so this doesn't tend to happen as often, but back in the day, this sort of odd "run off to the side first, then run towards you" behavior was pretty common, even in outdoor zones. And if you learned that pathing, you could totally take advantage of it and make mobs (or trains of mobs) move in what appeared to be odd and unpredictable directions. I never used this knowledge for evil, of course, but I could see how it easily could be. And for outdoor zones, a bard was certainly the class to use to do things like figure out mob pathing and timing. So it's not unlikely at all that this is how Fansy did what he did.

Haven't done anything more than poke my head in and look around in TBM, but it does seem strange that they managed to ***** up pathing that badly. I could see it happening though, because of the irregular ground. It does seem as though pathing gets bad when they have slopes and curving paths, which they seem to have adopted a lot in the last couple expansions.

One of the things you have to understand about pathing is that there are basically two methods a mob uses to get from point A to point B. Essentially every physical location in a zone is identified as being part of a subzone or region. If point A and point B are both in the same region, the mob follows a straight path within said region towards you, using pretty normal logical X/Y/Z math. If point A and point B are in different regions, the mob follows a pre-set plot of regions to get from the region they are in, to the region their target is in. And the route from region A to region B is somewhat set. This is why you'll see mobs decide to veer off at an angle, run for a distance, and then turn and make a beeline towards you. The mob is in a different region, and thinks "to get from my region to your region, I follow this path". Once it's inside your region, it will move more logically. In a flat plain, you can mitigate odd pathing by shrinking the size of each region (more granularity for pathing).

The problem is that you must identify these regions in ways so as to get mobs to properly follow things like ramps, slopes, tunnels, etc. So some regions with uneven terrain and areas with differing Z axis elevation can be a problem and often require significantly different sized regions to make pathing work at all. From a programming perspective, you have to have some way to tell the mob that to get from this room, to another room that's at a different Z coordinate, it has to travel up this ramp over there. Otherwise it might decide to take the shortest X/Y path, and get stuck running into a wall. So the ramp must be a separate region itself, which may or may not match size wise with other surrounding regions.

This is actually easier to deal with in indoor zones, where the walls of rooms constrain mob movement. In outdoor zones, it can be really really hard to get a mob to know that if you're standing in one spot, it needs to run straight across the canyon floor to get to you, but if you're 20 feet to the left, it needs to run up a path along the side of the canyon, up to the top, and around the edge to get to you. If there's just one path around, it's not too bad. But it's when there are multiple paths, with varying Z axis elevations, it can be a huge problem. And it does seem as though they've introduced some of these more "complex" zone designs recently.

We saw the same sort of thing with DoDH zones. Lots of twists and turns with open spaces around them, which made for really silly pathing. Its' a tradeoff between "interesting" zone design, and "functional" zone design. Again, if you pt everything in a flat plain, you could manage this pretty well. But that would be boring zone design.

The orcs in GFay guarding Crushbone are all about this.

1. Get within 20 yards of a guard.
2. Hit it with (whatever)
3. Guard runs due west/east for 100 yards and comes back at you at that point.
4. ???
5. Kill that dude

I got just such a ticket!

Coming home from the Black and Blue concert (Black Sabbath and Blue Oyster Cult, LOL) in 1980, it's about 1 am, and there's nobody on the road. I'm in Chicago, and headed back out to the suburbs. There's no posted speed limit, and it looks similar to a road near my house with a 40 mph speed limit, so I'm doing 40. Get pulled over, that cop's telling me all unposted streets in Chicago are 30, and I should know this. How should I know, I don't live here! He gave me a ticket (teenagers coming home from a concert, no slack there).

My revenge? My godfather (not making this up :) is a Cook County Sherriff's deputy. He took care of it, so ha-ha :)

Tat

Not to derail but that reminds of the rare times when I'm pursuing a running mob and it runs "into" the zone-out but, of course, doesn't zone. Now if I follow the mob to continue to engage it, I will zone. This is an unexploitable bug since it saves the mob's butt. Can't remember where I last saw this, and it hasn't happened in a long time, but I have encountered it.

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Seriously? **** for the word "but" with an extra T at the end? Seriously? LOL

Edited, Feb 12th 2016 8:41pm by Sippin