Harakiri's Updates

I started to work on Traps and their associated skills sense traps & disarm traps. I figured out what kind of packet the server has to sent to the client, that he will turn into the direction of the next trap.

I also figured out the disarm trap skill so far, it seems there are two possibilities here - a rogue with at least 1 in disarm trap skill can click on a trap OR just use the skill disarm traps to execute the disarm action. In the first case it is similar handled to opening a door (client sents to the server a request with the door/trap ID), in the latter case its just the info that the client wants to use the disarm trap skill without any associated trap. The clicking on the trap is rather easy at first, but you had to figure out what to sent back that the trap visually stops moving. Its another value in the open/close door action which we already use for closing/opening doors on the client.

So visually disarm trap for clicking a trap works, i need to do some server side code for using the skill button to figure out which is the nearest trap next to the player, same goes for sense traps. This is the easy part.

However, i spent most of my time debugging the client and figure out why no damage is generated from traps when you walk into them. The damage should be done client side i think, its the same with drowning or falling in lava - the client recognizes this event and will do damage locally and only sent the info (and the damage done) to the server. I went as far as logging into EQL and going to SolusekA to take a look how the traps work, the damage of each trap was hardcoded and always the same for each different type. What is funny is that using the damage value information i was able to find the client side function, which returns a different trap damage value depending on the trap type (pendulum, spears, saw). I spent most of my time reversing were this function is called from - but there was no indication that the client would do a check if the player is near a trap - damage him.

I will spent some more time reversing the client and trying to find out why the trap doesnt do damage, might be still a specific byte in the door/trap struct we sent to the client to spawn these door/traps - who knows. I currently think that the older client didnt trigger the damage, it was done server side and later changed to be client side - it would be easy to do this on the server (similar to sense traps, if a client gets near a trap the server would damage him). However it would have the visually effect of doing damage to the client, even when the pendulum is currently not hitting the client since the animation is done by the client the server cannot possibly know when it would hit the player, it can only know that the client is standing where a trap is.

When you think about it, that there are only 20 real traps in classic in 3 dungeons (soluseka,b and paw) - thats alot of engineering going into such a small part of the game =).

~ 660min
= 3540min (59h)