Page Design Test 1

Content - Verify & Observe Live

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Players familiar with Everquest II will expect to find their NPC's, objects, and ground spawns in their rightful places on our server because it is meant to mimick Live.

If you are a player/tester please report these with the /bug command using your chat window.

Verifying NPCs

Locations

Verifying the NPCs are in their proper place is a simple task, because 90% of the time, Collector found a static spawn standing where they belong. There is a very small percentage of spawns that are simply facing the wrong way due to a math glitch in the PacketParser being unable to determine heading. For these cases, we need to verify spawn locations.

Example of NPC in wrong place:

In this example, I moved a spawn completely to the wrong place just to show you that a Formidable Sparring Partner should not be standing by the tent. This should not be an issue anymore due to how a zone is migrated to the database. It is possible that someone has accidentally placed a NPC in the wrong location.

For those that are testing please report this with the /bug command using your chat window.

For those who are developing, or fixing bugs here is how to fix this.

Since that guy is in the wrong place, you'll need to move him. Execute the command

/spawn move

while you have the NPC targeted, and move to where you think he should go (by the other sparring partners in this case). Using the mouse-wheel, you can spin his heading too, just like placing furniture in your house!

Example of NPC facing the wrong direction:

NPCs, and other spawn types can be facing the wrong way. This is more common then NPCs in the wrong location.

For those that are testing please report this with the /bug command using your chat window.

For those who are developing, or fixing bugs here is how to fix this.

Do not grab the spawn, twirl it around and set it in the right place. You could very easily have the NPC off its location even if it looks like it is in the right place. Instead edit the spawns Heading parameter in the DB Editor->Spawns menu.

Since you know the spawn is facing the wrong way, and you see his Heading is currently 0 (zero), simply type in 180 (for 180 degrees, 1/2 a circle) and save the row, then execute the

/reload spawns

command in-game and you'll see your sparring partner is now facing the right direction!

Appearance

Recent changes to our Parsing process have resulted in much more dynamic Appearance options for our NPCs. Utilizing the EQ2Emulator's powerful randomize feature, we can spawn NPCs of many shapes and sizes and appearances (hair, beards, color of skin, shape of face/body, etc) all from a single spawn ID.

Check out the WIKI article on Randomize for more information about this option. For the purpose of this discussion, we will assume all NPCs are spawned properly and their randomize options are not set.

Take our poor naked Sparring Partner for example. In EQ2 Live, he is definitely dressed in armor! If you check his npc_appearance_equip page in the DBEditor->Spawns menu, you'll see he has no entries, when he should. You can either dress him yourself, or return to the raw data to see what went wrong.

A more familiar Appearance problem would be bald heads, mis-shapen faces, incorrect races (evil races in good city areas), or missing skin (ewww!)

By missing skin, of course I just mean the color is lost. Spawns without skin_color settings are given 0,0,0 - or Black. They are pretty obvious to see, because no spawn should be 0,0,0 color - that is just too dark to even make out features.

Fixing these is important to the player's experience and the accuracy of our database.