Mon pathing and safe areas

[Vladesch]

On live in most of the kunark zones, it was possible to find safe areas where the mobs would not wander. For example north of the giant fort in FM was a large area which mobs never went.

Burning wood had a couple of these, namely down the bottom of the path and north and east from there around the crater.

Also there was a spot west of the giant fort. Actually around the giant fort was safe too.

However with this database, the mobs seem to wander everywhere. I spent some time looking for a decent spot in FM but never found one. Out the front of the giant fort was popular, but here the safe spot is very small. Not suitable if you are fearing mobs.

I've just spent about an hour wandering around burning wood trying to find somewhere that's safe to pull, but with the exception of the corridors to DL and skyfire (which aren't good pulling spots), anywhere else you're going to get adds. Maybe not a lot of adds, but when you're grinding out levels this can make it not worth your while to xp here.

It's a pity, these were good zones on live. I was rather looking forward to xping in BW, but I can see that isn't happening now. I can imagine it would be a long painful task to rewrite the pathing to be more like classic and the devs no doubt have better things to do.

(unless I missed a spot?)

[Estu]

You can try submitting a bug report. It would help if you could find evidence that there used to be safe spots.

[Nazran]

I remember along the wall by the crater I could fear kite with my necro and there was about 0% chance mobs would wander in to the area during the fear kite. I also remember setting up groups on top of the hill leading up to the forest giants.

Marked on uploaded map....

but I am not going to complain about wandering mobs.... I love this game!

[Vladesch]

Yeah that area you marked is one of the places I discovered.
It seems even the giant fort and underneath it isn't sacred. I saw some mob come by and path right under the giant fort.

I remember too that in skyfire there was a good place to pull to north of the OT zonein along the wall and a few hundred units to the west, and this continued right up to the north east corner where they have that structure. I haven't had a look in skyfire, but I bet that the mobs just wander everywhere on this server.

I think any evidence to back this up is anecdotal. Just about anyone who hunted in BW on live would be well aquainted with at least 1 of these spots. Of course a lot of people never bothered with the zone, which to me is part of the attraction. Anyway it would be a big job to go through and change the monster pathing for all the mobs in zone so probably not much point in pursuing it.

Gonna give it a try anyway and see how annoying the adds are in some areas. South of the crater seems about the "best" I found.

[Deadmantis]

I have also noticed the pathing is different from how I remember classic in a few zones. Whether or not it is intentional or just how things are with the code on this server, it does provide a challenge for solo and groups looking for the elusive "safe spots".

The undead ruins in BW, almost directly across from the giant fort, used to have a small safe spot in front of them where my cleric could solo when need be. Not sure how the pathing is around there now.

[Polixenes]

I imagine it's all but impossible to 'prove' how roaming trash mobs used to work on live, unless of course we took extensive video of every mob in the game and sent them to the devs, who would then have to care enough compared to other projects.

I remember the BW undead gorilla house east of the giant fort. On live, I recall the safe 'spot' being a pretty large safe area. There are 6 spawns there iirc and the adjacent large grassy area was totally devoid of any roamers so in my druid's high 40s, low 50s I could quad between the fort and the undead house for hours at a time and never see another mob. If you got in amongst the fallen tree trunks nearer the fort you could run into a roaming sarnak/skel. I have not been there in P99 yet.

In East Karana, the area close to the wall between the Gorge and the village nearer to High Pass was a safe-ish area on live. In P99 there are 2 pathing lionesses and a griffawn whose patrol takes them along there, and one of the cats goes right into the mouth of the canyon leading to the Gorge. As an aside, each of these three mobs appear to be on single mob spawn tables so the P99 version of EK doesn't have the same randomness of mobs in this particular area that live did. I liked this spot on live as it was a good level appropriate area to collect spider silks before you graduated to the crag spiders, but soloing there in P99 means those two cats will account for the bulk of your kills.

[ojamajoe]

I have a feeling that mobs on live each had a path; whereas this is generally only true with named/important/well-known mobs on most emulated servers.

This would be extraordinarly tedious work with very little to show for the effort, if pathing information were even available for a_random_mob_001 to a_random_mob_1000000 from 11 years ago.

I imagine that most of the yard trash and non-nameds here are utilizing roamboxes or something similar where they randomly wander an area deliniated by entered pos and neg x and y coordinates. Randomroam is also a possiblity; this allows a mob to select a random location at a distance from the spawnpoint, checks LOS, and moves there if it's good.

Both are pretty slick.

[Estu]

I have a feeling that mobs on live each had a path; whereas this is generally only true with named/important/well-known mobs on most emulated servers.

This would be extraordinarly tedious work with very little to show for the effort, if pathing information were even available for a_random_mob_001 to a_random_mob_1000000 from 11 years ago.

I imagine that most of the yard trash and non-nameds here are utilizing roamboxes or something similar where they randomly wander an area deliniated by entered pos and neg x and y coordinates. Randomroam is also a possiblity; this allows a mob to select a random location at a distance from the spawnpoint, checks LOS, and moves there if it's good.

Both are pretty slick.

My experience on P99 has been that mobs follow set paths rather than roaming randomly. I've noticed this with several trash mobs in areas where I've EXPed for a long time.

[miethos]

I imagine that most of the yard trash and non-nameds here are utilizing roamboxes or something similar where they randomly wander an area deliniated by entered pos and neg x and y coordinates. Randomroam is also a possiblity; this allows a mob to select a random location at a distance from the spawnpoint, checks LOS, and moves there if it's good.

Both are pretty slick.

Yea, that is a good idea. This is sorta how I populated zones on my own server when PEQ first started up a looong time ago when there were not paths built in. I generally knew what mobs belonged where, went in game and took coordinates of their roaming areas then built a script to make paths for them with some random directions. The final result was pretty convincing, after some tweaks you really couldn't tell it was built on random numbers.

[Vladesch]

In general mobs follow specific paths for eqemu.

(I say "in general" because afaik all mobs follow specific paths, however as I am not an expert there may be some specific exceptions I am unaware of.
This is clear from looking at the database)

[nilbog]

In general mobs follow specific paths for eqemu.

(I say "in general" because afaik all mobs follow specific paths, however as I am not an expert there may be some specific exceptions I am unaware of.
This is clear from looking at the database)

Most(?) of the database has been altered (for the better imo).

Looking at either the public DB or public branch of source isn't a clear representation of what you will encounter here.

[mwatt]

Quite some time ago, I actually did submit a bug for mob pathing in the large burnt spot that is adjacent to the Giant Fort and a large crater (If you look it up, I mispelled "Burning" as "Buring").

That was a great place to pull to and kite in as needed. But the pathing is different here. Unfortunately, I agree with other posters who hazard a guess that providing the correct raw data is nearly impossible, and some dev_001 altering the pathing of several mobs to create such a safe spot seems almost as unlikely.

And yet there is a dearth of places to solo at high levels. Burning Woods was always one of those places on Live - but it is unfortunately somewhat compromised on P99. Not complaining! Project 1999 is great and we are all indebted to the development crew -past and present - including the folks who created EQEmu.

[Uthgaard]

There are packet collecting tools available that can grab pathing information. If you have a live account, go grab some packets in some zones where the content hasn't changed much.

[miethos]

I hope when EQ Live is dead and gone that Sony would do the right thing and make their db data public domain for the open source community. I'm not gonna hold my breath on that however lol

[miethos]

There are packet collecting tools available that can grab pathing information. If you have a live account, go grab some packets in some zones where the content hasn't changed much.

Can packet collection tools even detect way points and such for pathing? I would think it just grabs locations of mobs at a given time like a snapshot.

[Vynn]

Can packet collection tools even detect way points and such for pathing? I would think it just grabs locations of mobs at a given time like a snapshot.

Even if that is the case, compiling said data over a certain span of time would/should yield desirable results.

[SupaflyIRL]

There are packet collecting tools available that can grab pathing information. If you have a live account, go grab some packets in some zones where the content hasn't changed much.

Isn't that something that's bannable or do they just not care anymore? I stopped playing during PoP but I remember them being pretty hardcore anti 3rd party programs. I remember the backlash when they implemented their thing that snooped on your computer actively looking for stuff.

[kalzin]

yes it is considered a banable offence, and technically any of the data that is gathered couldn't be used without some sort of tweaking due to the legality of using said information "captured" from the live servers...

[Vladesch]

Sounds like overkill to me.
You could make it a useful zone just by picking a fairly safe spot and changing the pathing of about 3 mobs, so it becomes a completely safe spot... as it was on live.

Sadly the problem exists in multiple zones.