Brush should stop movement in woods

[Faust]

EA changed brambles and a few other similar objects from impassable to passable after a network patch tweak involving blockable items. Briefly on production shards after this patch was introduced these items created a huge hassle for the players that complained immensely when they kept running into them out in the forest rubberbanding them.

[Kaivan]

That's part of the client side rubberbanding I was talking about. If you use a fresh installed copy of the T2A client with the demo, it doesn't do that because of the tiledata.mul which has the proper items as impassable.

Indeed. It makes sense that there isn't rubber banding, but I guess what I was trying to say is that in determining which rock / sapling tiles should be impassable and which ones are passable, what is the best approach?

I'm would think that if the UO:98 demo server is rubberbanding you, it would mean that it's one of those impassable tiles (changing client would just prevent rubber banding)... so when you said previously that some of the saplings / rocks were impassable (meaning that some were passable), should not the UO:98 demo server not rubber band you back when you walk on those tiles? In my somewhat short jog around the UO:98 demo server, I was unable to find any rocks / sapling that did NOT rubberband; do we have any indication of which (if any) of these bramble / rock / sapling tiles shouldbe passable?

Unfortunately we don't really know where any of the passable objects were. What's worse is that its rather difficult to actually test the entire map in the demo (although its possible), which limits how far we can test these things.

[the bazookas]

Unfortunately we don't really know where any of the passable objects were. What's worse is that its rather difficult to actually test the entire map in the demo (although its possible), which limits how far we can test these things.

Hmm.. quite the conundrum it would seem. What confuses me most about it is this:

• If the proper client is used for UO:98, then you don't get rubber-band lag, but are blocked by certain tiles. This MUST (as far as I know) mean that those specific tiles in the .MUL file have the "Impassable" flag on them.
• Since this flag is associated with a specific Static tile ID, then ALL the tiles with that ID on the map should have that flag
• If all the tiles on the map have that flag, it would not (as far as I know) be possible that some of them are passable, since the client would prevent it (whether the server allows it or not).
• Following this logic, it would seem that the only way that some were passable and some were not would be to assign the Impassable flag to one TYPE of bramble (there are only two), and one TYPE of sapling (there are only two), and possibly a few TYPES of rock (there are several)

  

  tiles.JPG (58.93 KiB) Viewed 2033 times

• This seems reasonable--i.e. the idea that only one type of sapling blocks, but the other doesn't... some rocks block but some don't... HOWEVER, in running around on the UO:98 server (with the UOSA client), I was getting rubber-banded on both types of brambles, both types of saplings, and all the rocks that I could find... which seems to imply (obviously I haven't tested all of them) that there aren't any of those tiles that are passable.

Yet I seem to recall (as you do, Kaivan) some being passable, which is why this is so confusing.

It might be useful to get a hold of an old T2A client that DID have the impassable flags set correctly in the MUL file, and open it up to see if in fact ALL these static tiles are impassable, or whether some are passable.

[Kaivan]

Regarding the different saplings/brambles being marked as impassible or not, it is distinctly possible that they were changed after a client patch was pushed down from OSI.

[the bazookas]

Hmm.. True; that would mean the demo doesn't necessarily have the absolute true answer for our cutoff date...

At the very least, I think that we can say with practical certainty that every tile of the same ID will be either impassable or passable, right?

[Kaivan]

In theory, this should be the case. It's also possible to check the T2A client at various patch dates and determine if there is different data for whether an item is passable or not. A good place to start might be with the second release T2A client that was introduced in August 1999.