2 requests - bone dragon hit box & summon Drink/Food spells

[Daffie]

Two suggestions/requests for small QoL changes:

1. The past week or two I have been putting in some time farming Dragon Necropolis for the shaman mask part, (and just generally killing stuff around the zone,) and I am reminded as to how horribly small the a Bone Dragon and Dark Boned Dragon hit boxes are. It is really stupid small, and makes it needlessly difficult to melee them. The other non-bone dragons have a decent hit box, and you can actually melee them without much of an issue. This isn't the end of the world, but can the hit box be made larger for the bone dragons, at least along the x/y axis?

2. Summon food/drink spells only summons 1 item at a time. It is kind of silly and needlessly tedious. Really, most of the high level players have at least a food clicky item, so this is only a pain in the ass for low level players who need to summon food/water. Can a QoL change be made for the spell to summon 5 or 10 or 20 at a time? (Honestly, even having the items with these click effects summon more than 1 at a time is not game breaking in any way shape or form...)

 

[Nebi]

#2 be a mage

or get a clicky and stop being lazy!

 

[Dinadass]

#2 be a mage

or get a clicky and stop being lazy!

Why do you hate fun?

 

[Nebi]

Why do you hate fun?

because getting a bag from the storemaster (i literally have 5 + throughout my toons) is the easiest thing ever. getting the thing from the frogs isnt easy either.

having fun and give me everything are 2 different things

 

[Daffie]

because getting a bag from the storemaster (i literally have 5 + throughout my toons) is the easiest thing ever. getting the thing from the frogs isnt easy either.

having fun and give me everything are 2 different things

Thanks for popping in to hit me up with a bag. super nice of you Got one already though

 

[Grinkles]

I believe that hitboxes are defined in .wld files within their respective .s3d files. This would mean they're effectively unalterable. The best candidate for working on something like this would be Zaela, given her recent strides in cracking open these pesky files for editing. However, I imagine it would entail a lot of work for something so specific...

 

[Vitali]

The best candidate for working on something like this would be Zaela

 

[Waldoff]

Hitboxes are not something we can change with our current tech. Theoretically we could patch over the model file, but we would first have to know how to edit the file itself without messing everything up.

So although I agree it is annoying with Bone Dragons, I think it is something that will have to wait for the new 2.5 bone dragon model to save the day.

 

[Zaela]

The client calculates melee hit distance entirely from mob size settings. The trouble is that the DRU (undead dragon) model is way, way too big relative to its size. Here it is at the size of a dark elf (5):

Luckily I already made a little tool for doing raw scaling of S3D-based mob models a few months ago. It's not perfect, however: it needs to muck with the skeleton, which use a kind of weird format that doesn't always play nice. Here's the same model at the same size, scaled by a factor of 0.2 -- notice the wings are a bit messed up:

I might look at tinkering with the tool a bit to see if I can fix that. The model looks and animates mostly correctly, at least. I can make files with the scaled down models available if the devs want it, though they will have to go back and increase the sizes of any race 122 mobs by 5 times to get them equivalent to their current apparent sizes, if they decide to use them.

 

[Cinny]

The bone dragon changes would be nice. I would much rather see the hit box increased to match the size but if the other way is easier than more power to you.

 

[Zaela]

I would much rather see the hit box increased to match the size but if the other way is easier than more power to you.

They are the same thing. No easier way, just the way that exists.

I don't expect the explanation to be understood since there are two senses of "size" going on in there (the inherent size of the model versus relative size settings, which are what allow two mobs using the same model to appear to be different sizes and just generally allow the devs to decide how big a mob will be). In any case if the fix went in it would be trivial to make the bone dragons in game appear at exactly the same size that they currently do, just with the proper hit "box" (radius) to match that size.


For interest: I was looking into the hit radius calculation for unrelated reasons a few months back and someone shared a decompile of the relevant function with me. I neglected to keep a permanent record of it but I believe it went something like this:

float MeleeRange(float size_a, float size_b)
{
  float range = size_a + size_b;
  if (range < 14.0f)
    range = 14.0f;
  range += abs(size_a * 0.6 - size_b * 0.6) + 2;
  if (range > 75.0f)
    return 75.0f;
  return range;
}

where size_a and size_b are the relative size settings for your character and whatever mob you're trying to attack. For reference the default size setting for a human is 6 while dragons and such tend to be somewhere between 20 and 30.

EQEmu (and our codebase last I saw it) use an approximation that's not quite the same. The range of archery and throwing attacks are supposed to include the value from the above function on top of the ranges indicated on the relevant items as well, judging from how far away the ranged attack button will successfully grey out; neither codebase has that either. Not a huge thing, but it does mean you technically should be allowed to bow dragons from like 50 range further back, which is kind of crazy. (Makes sense in practice, avoids the situation where you could be in melee range of something but still too far to shoot/throw something at it if the item range is really short.)

 

[Grinkles]

I love getting a little glimpse of what goes on "under the hood" of the game! While we're on the subject, I remembered that the Alligator model probably deserves a similar treatment; the model itself is very small in relation to its hitbox. If this could be changed, it might save some Beastlords who chose the Alligator pet some hassle in tight spaces. In addition to potentially beefing up its size or reducing its hitbox, is it possible to pare down the actual perceived height of this model, or any model for that matter? The Alligator is among the flattest models, yet it still seems to have a noticeable (invisible) height to it that can easily get in the way of PCs.