UO Second Age

nightshark wrote:I have been using herding in the demo and there's a few key differences with it.

Firstly, herding is difficulty based in the demo. It is not difficulty based on UOSA, you can GM from a rabbit. From what I can tell, herding difficulty in the demo is based from the required taming skill of the animal you are targeting. There is a hint that when you target yourself with a shepherd's crook, it says "that being can not be tamed". If you try to herd an animal that you do not have the skill for, there is no special message. You will just fail every time and never gain herding.

2) Get rid of the mechanic that allows for stat gain doing very easy things
that will not raise skill anymore (the phantom arrow and/or herding a
rabbbit/bird/cat/ or sheep, for example), or at least severely cripple the
rate of stat gain in these cases. I'd almost suggest making herding a
non-difficulty based skill, but pretty soon you'd see monster harvesters
adding herding to their repertoire.

    integer Q4AD = getObjVar(usedon, "petCanTame");
    integer success = testAndLearnSkill(user, 0x14, 0x08 * Q4AD, 0x32);

nightshark wrote:The second difference is how the targeting works in the demo. When you first use herding in the demo, you receive the usual "what do you wish to herd blah" message. Upon targeting, a skill check is done. If the skill check fails, there is never a second target.

nightshark wrote:Another really interesting difference, is that you can't herd or tame anything that is in the Moonglow zoo pens. You can herd and tame animals that you bring in from outside, but attempting to herd or tame animals spawned inside gives an overhead message on the animal "You can't tame that!" or "You can't herd that.". This may happen on provocation as well, I did not test it.

  if(isMobile(usedon))
  {
    if(!hasObjVar(usedon, "petCanTame"))
    {
      ebarkTo(usedon, user, "That being can not be tamed.");
    }

nightshark wrote:The third, most notable difference, is that it is not possible to gain skill from failure with herding. Out of roughly 200 attempts on a llama from 25-30 skill, I never gained once from failure and gained probably 50% of the time on success. I posted a thread back in 2010 about it not being possible to gain skill from failure during T2A, however was told that I was wrong because the demo allows you to gain skill from failure. Does this warrant another look? I will be testing out other skills and will report my findings on them.

Herding no longer prompts you saying that the creature can follow you.

An exploit with herding has been fixed.

      if(!isHuman(usedon) && (hasObjVar(usedon, "petCanTame")))
      {
        Q46A = 0x01;
        animal = usedon;
        targetLoc(user, this);
        systemMessage(user, "Click whom you wish the animal to follow, or where you wish it to go.");
        return(0x00);
        break;
      }

>"An exploit with herding has been fixed."
>
>I must know, who was exploiting herding and why?

You can herd yourself and you get stat gains. Interesting thing is
you stop gaining herding skill at 25 which means you just get the stat
benefits with no skill atrophy.

  if(isMobile(usedon))
  {
    if(!hasObjVar(usedon, "petCanTame"))
    {
      ebarkTo(usedon, user, "That being can not be tamed.");
    }
    integer Q4AD = getObjVar(usedon, "petCanTame");
    integer success = testAndLearnSkill(user, 0x14, 0x08 * Q4AD, 0x32);

This is the most complicated question, and is something that we can only test with empirical evidence at this time, since the overall skill gain system is embedded in the core of the demo and requires a lot of work to crack into. If there is direct evidence presented in the other thread of skills gaining from failure, we can extrapolate that it is possible to do with all skills, perhaps up to a specific skill level.