Consider Project 2002

[Torven]

Originally Posted by Lorian [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Out of curiosiry, how come that the p2002 team is able to release the expansions so quickly? Do they already have the code? They are not needing to reverse engineer like you guys have done?

It's simple. They have lower standards for quality than p99 does. Also the vast majority of their server was developed by other teams as they forked an open source project. They launched a mere month or so after forking. They also still, of course, pull code from TAKP, and rely on TAKP for almost all of their code work. As they forked an existing project, it's easy for them to devote a lot of time doing tedious grunt work as they are starting fresh and haven't burned out yet. Imagine how burned out p99 devs are at this point.

The database they copied already had zones from classic to PoP populated with placeholder stats and loot tables. Many of the quests were already done, or in some sort of poorly working state at least, although many more are left unfinished. Players would have no idea if, for example, an NPC was hitting at 3 attack delay instead of the 2 it should have-- they just see mobs walking around and kill them and assume it works fine. So long as quest NPCs accept their turn ins and mobs are moving and killable, they think 'this is done', but they would be in fact playing an ez-mode version of the game and not know it.

A 'roambox' system for NPC wandering which allows for rapid development of NPC movement areas was also developed after P99 forked, so it's a very easy thing to click on an NPC and input four coordinates that define the box that the NPC can wander in. You can make an outdoor zone look complete in a very short amount of time with this newer emu feature, particularly if the NPCs had already been imported. There are still accuracy issues with where and how large the boxes should be however.

Some examples of accuracy issues:

p2002's plane of air keys were made no-rent. Air keys were not no-rent, but instead poofed when you zoned. This information is readily available in old PoSky guides.

I also wrote some code to allow NPCs to see through walls in flagged zones to more accurately emulate the planes and other outdoor zones. (or more accurately, completed what cavedude started) P2002 pulled the code without knowing what it did, which caused mistmoore NPCs to ignore walls because they copied our database with all outdoor zones flaged no-LOS. Then they blamed and ridiculed me for 'setting assist radii too high' or some nonsense, not knowing what actually happened. (the assist radii for NPCs was in fact 0, meaning the same as aggro radius) One wonders if their hateplane even has LOS disabled at all.

Then there are minor issues like epic quest scripts not checking factions. Making an NPC say text and accept items is the easy part-- details like determining faction levels and such are much more difficult, and again is something most players wouldn't notice.