VGOEmulator.net

BTW, everything has been good since Xinux took Shargash and poked around. In fact, the login has been extremely snappy, better than I remember it.

That's great to hear. You can thank our ferocious Peer Code Review effort for revealing these terrible places where the code just makes no sense. Again, I found where bad code was added for no reason and begged Xinux to help me isolate it - and hours of reverting, recompiling, testing, repeat over and over, we finally found it (it was what I feared in the first place, we just had to be sure - believe me, I tried to pin this on Faux, but he lucked out - this time ).

The funny side to this is I just posted a major bitch to the devs that loading into a chunk has become hella slow (20-30s sometimes with Not Responding) and now that is completely gone as well. We have regained control. Resume crashing at will.

[quote="Xinux"]
Also why don't we just send the highest rank ability that character has instead of all of them? Did people actually use lower level versions of abilities?[/quote]

Yes, they did. It was relatively common in fact, especially while mentoring. Each class that could "best buff" someone also got a scaling version that would auto apply the right level buff to whoever you cast it on.

[quote="Faux"][quote="Xinux"]
Also why don't we just send the highest rank ability that character has instead of all of them? Did people actually use lower level versions of abilities?[/quote]

Yes, they did. It was relatively common in fact, especially while mentoring. Each class that could "best buff" someone also got a scaling version that would auto apply the right level buff to whoever you cast it on.[/quote]

Perhaps this is something we can 'fix'? It was very frustrating having to adjust your hotbars to account for mentoring because of the lack of ability scaling. Would it be doable to have abilities check for level discrepancies and apply the appropriate level buff instead of just failing? EQ2 seemed to do this and it's mentoring system was much more comfortable.

[quote="Koralith"][quote="Faux"][quote="Xinux"]
Also why don't we just send the highest rank ability that character has instead of all of them? Did people actually use lower level versions of abilities?[/quote]

Yes, they did. It was relatively common in fact, especially while mentoring. Each class that could "best buff" someone also got a scaling version that would auto apply the right level buff to whoever you cast it on.[/quote]

Perhaps this is something we can 'fix'? It was very frustrating having to adjust your hotbars to account for mentoring because of the lack of ability scaling. Would it be doable to have abilities check for level discrepancies and apply the appropriate level buff instead of just failing? EQ2 seemed to do this and it's mentoring system was much more comfortable.[/quote]

Yes, this is something we can fix. I am actually really considering changing the implementation of abilities, and what I want to do will allow fast lookup of lower level abilities. After that, its a simple conditional when you use an ability. if the ability you tried to use is higher level than you (i.e. you are mentoring), it will take the highest level ability you have access to.

Just as a quick note, it wasn't only mentoring. My casters used to hand out drive-by buffs regularly. I used to have a special hotbar with the older versions of buffs, though that did get easier with the unified buff.

Also, some classes (e.g. rogues) had nice buffs that sucked power massively, such that you could only have it on for a few 10s of seconds before you were out of power. I sometimes used to use lower level versions of those buffs to keep the power drain somewhat under control.

Also, my psi had a combat form that would drain power instead of doing damage. I used to have a macro that had several versions of my best DoT. I would list the spells in descending order of level. Since the power cost scaled with level, the first version of the spell that I had power enough to cast would fire. This was critical, especially in a fight like Nerksawl.

Example:
/combatformset "Thought Thief"
/cast "Compression Sphere IX"
/cast "Compression Sphere V"
/cast "Compression Sphere I"

[quote="shargash"]Just as a quick note, it wasn't only mentoring. My casters used to hand out drive-by buffs regularly. I used to have a special hotbar with the older versions of buffs, though that did get easier with the unified buff.

Also, some classes (e.g. rogues) had nice buffs that sucked power massively, such that you could only have it on for a few 10s of seconds before you were out of power. I sometimes used to use lower level versions of those buffs to keep the power drain somewhat under control.

Also, my psi had a combat form that would drain power instead of doing damage. I used to have a macro that had several versions of my best DoT. I would list the spells in descending order of level. Since the power cost scaled with level, the first version of the spell that I had power enough to cast would fire. This was critical, especially in a fight like Nerksawl.

Example:
/combatformset "Thought Thief"
/cast "Compression Sphere IX"
/cast "Compression Sphere V"
/cast "Compression Sphere I"[/quote]

Clever!