P99 Open source

[Gustoo]

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

Pretty much. I want to login and not have fun. I'd like to come home from school, login, be unable to get a group for an hour, finally get an invite "if I can make it down", die from a mob spawning on me while I try to cast root over and over and a group is standing right there watching, I say, "Please help?" but they don't care, finally I get my root cast off but its resisted, "FUCKING HELP" I yell, but still they don't care, I get another root cast off and it lands, yes! I back up and consider if I should just gate and run back here for another hour, I bet I can solo this one blue mob, right? Oh no! My root broke already, the group comes and hits the mob once right as I die. I spent an hour running back anyway and have lost 4 hours of experience.

I collect my shit, dying another time in the process from a sand giant on the other side of a zone line who kills me before I even finish loading, and decide I might as well just go solo. I run around for another 2 hours finding that all the hot solo spots are taken before I decide to try a new spot of my own creation. I die again when I almost killed the mob but things looked a bit iffy and I decided to risk it only to try running to the nearby safe zone line but right I as reach it I get hit again and my run speed slows to a walk. I'm side strafing and jumping and oh no! I went THROUGH the zone but it didn't zone me! I die on the other side of the zone line in a dead end cave I'm not supposed to be able to see.

I get a tell, someone wants me to join the group back in that dungeon, yes! I tell them I'll be there in 2 hours after I get my corpse and run back. I get there and the group is gone. The person that messaged me isn't even in the zone anymore. "Oh sorry I forgot" they say. I spend another hour trying to find a group and now it's 4am and I need to get ready to go back to school so I can go to bed in class. I've lost half a level. Pretty good progress for the night.

Shits classic gif

[TheConsortium]

i want to skip class and tell my mom i went, then dial up the 28.8K, waiting 1 minute or longer for the initial EQ character login, listening to the hard disk drive needle chug away reading my bits as I sit another day in just a robe i got for Christmas 2 years ago.

Pecking away at the key board, I type /who all friend, and follow up with a gusto, /who all guild, before I say something witty like "Hi all" in gchat to people -- people decades older than me, who are supposed to be at work or are working allegedly.

I want to be like them. I am them.

I strengthen my primary arm and look at the flat tube that has become my WASD arm while I listen to the UPS guy and postal service man deliver mail and probably kiss girls at nighttime...

It's a long run from Qeynos to High Hold Keep to see if there are any spots in the goblin groups, but it was important I went back to train at my Guild Master. The monk guild needs me to train my body and mind so I can defend against a truly important foe - the ability to speak to another human.

I can take some time to stretch while AFK running on the West Karana shoreline .. but how am I going to learn to tinker if I'm not a gnome? Why doesn't my dad talk to me?

Someone picks up the phoneline and the screen goes black, "You have been disconnected"

Maybe a quick hot pocket will warm my belly since I don't know how to properly cook eggs until 20 years later when I see Gordon Ramsay on a strange thing called You Tubes...

[Swish]

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

Pretty much. I want to login and not have fun. I'd like to come home from school, login, be unable to get a group for an hour, finally get an invite "if I can make it down", die from a mob spawning on me while I try to cast root over and over and a group is standing right there watching, I say, "Please help?" but they don't care, finally I get my root cast off but its resisted, "FUCKING HELP" I yell, but still they don't care, I get another root cast off and it lands, yes! I back up and consider if I should just gate and run back here for another hour, I bet I can solo this one blue mob, right? Oh no! My root broke already, the group comes and hits the mob once right as I die. I spent an hour running back anyway and have lost 4 hours of experience.

I collect my shit, dying another time in the process from a sand giant on the other side of a zone line who kills me before I even finish loading, and decide I might as well just go solo. I run around for another 2 hours finding that all the hot solo spots are taken before I decide to try a new spot of my own creation. I die again when I almost killed the mob but things looked a bit iffy and I decided to risk it only to try running to the nearby safe zone line but right I as reach it I get hit again and my run speed slows to a walk. I'm side strafing and jumping and oh no! I went THROUGH the zone but it didn't zone me! I die on the other side of the zone line in a dead end cave I'm not supposed to be able to see.

I get a tell, someone wants me to join the group back in that dungeon, yes! I tell them I'll be there in 2 hours after I get my corpse and run back. I get there and the group is gone. The person that messaged me isn't even in the zone anymore. "Oh sorry I forgot" they say. I spend another hour trying to find a group and now it's 4am and I need to get ready to go back to school so I can go to bed in class. I've lost half a level. Pretty good progress for the night.

That's the spirit [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[Shac]

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

Thanks, looking at the March 2000 client.

*Jaws music fades in*

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Kind of blows my mind looking at those two function graphs. One is Charm, the other is CastingRequirementsMet which has a ton of stuff in there reagents, movement, channeling, checks for things like if you're unconscious, everything. The Charm function is more complex though. In that Charm function graph the green box is the main function entry point and the gold circled box is where the message gets output "your target is too high for your charm." I mean look at all that shit, it's hilarious, for one spell.

Thankfully with advances in reverse engineering tools provided by the NSA via Ghidra we might finally get some insight into the classic client. I was able to find developer comments that allow for determining the function names. They used a general error message format like, "My shit broke in CastingRequirementsMet()!" and through some comparison of those comments and the functions they are contained within a large valuable portion of the client functions can be named definitively which should be enough to go on to tie things together. As functions are identified via this methodology and other ways they fill in the blanks among the other functions that call those functions so things becoming increasingly obvious and easier to figure out.

this is neat, can we have a thread about more of this stuff, or a blog post of your development/insight

[AenorVZ]

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

Everything is tightly held and controlled for seemingly no reason.

Everything is tightly held and controlled for perfectly sound reasons. I'm not going to rehash those here but dm me your discord user info if you'd like to discuss further.

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

P99 is great but man is this shit frustrating and seemingly dumb as fuck. We would have a 10x better server if we got a better contribution pipeline than a 12 year old bug forum post that isn't true.

It's fucking awesome that you want P99 to survive and thrive but these levels of mad about a 22 year old game aren't going to push things forward. Ten times better? We're pretty close to as good as it gets. I'm working through this thread and I'll have more to post later. I think 1.09 times better is a worthy goal.

[Dolalin]

Charm is a complicated spell on the client side, because think about what the client has to do to facilitate an NPC charming a player for instance. In the classic client this disabled movement and chat controls, disabled mouse clicks for all UI elements, and put the client under control of the server for movement etc. I would fully expect Charm on the client side to be very complicated. But I would expect most of that complication to be related to NPCs charming the player.

[AenorVZ]

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

I think it's pretty obvious this won't last another 10 years. Not after the way Green played out

What's wrong with the way Green played out? It's been a fantastic experience. As much as I worry about follow through on plans for a new PvP server, I think Green was quite an achievement. It's the only instance of a recreation of the classic launch experience, something that took Blizzard tens of millions of dollars to develop.

Now if your objection is to Seal Team being the only guild with access to Sleeper's Tomb (and Veeshan's Peak for almost a year before that) then your objection is with the original game design, not with Green.