a couple of ideas I'm working on

[Whizzie Wiz]

1. Spawn list/spawn time tweaks
I've done a few minor patches to my copy of the code to add the spawn ID and the spawn time to the filter strings, and most recently I've added a tweak to set the 'spawn time' of a corpse to be the time that the mob died (since EQ spawn timers start ticking from that time). You may well ask why this is necessary when the spawnpoint code does it already, but the reason is that there are spawn cycles where mobs on the cycle can pop at several different places, and can only really be identified by the respawn time. (Some of the most elusive EQ mobs fall into this category). For these, the standard spawnpoint code is of no use, but the 2 tweaks I've come up with can help greatly in filtering out unwanted rubbish.

Is it worth submitting these tweaks as a diff patch?

Also, is there any way to get the spawnlist window to re-sort by time when I update the spawntime in this way?

2. Maps and depth filtering (for mobs too)
In most EQ zones, the world is essentially 'flat', and height filtering is, if anything, counterproductive. (Karanas, Wakening Lands, Great Divide). In others, it is absolutely essential, but the floor and ceiling values vary hugely from zone to zone -- for example Riftseeker's Sanctum seems to work well with a floor and ceiling setting of 125, but for Runnyeye this seems to be about 5.

What I propose is that the information on filtering is stored with the map, perhaps in the map header, OR in a new map code.

Comments please?

[uRit1u2CBBA=]

I think that any patch is worth posting. It will be up to purple and anyone else he works with if he wants to include it.

[purple]

It's worth submitting anything you want to share! I've not really looked into the spawn stuff, though I do get frustrated that it doesn't seem like it does a great job correlating spawns correctly. But I've not been frustrated enough to do anything about it.

Yes, forcing the spawn list to resort isn't that hard when you update the spawns in the spawn list. You can look at spawn renaming handling or there's an update op that changes the level of a mob (which was used when fabled mobs popped normal then changed to fabled). Or if you get from cvs, the shroud handler does it too. This hasn't been released yet.

I wouldn't store info like that in the maps, I don't think. I'd probably store it in a user-specific file alongside the map. The floor/ceiling is a personal preference. I've been tempted to implement per-zone map configuration but I haven't done it. It should not only store ceiling/floor, but also the other map configuration (stuff buried on that map right click context menu).

If you do put it in the map, I'd think ideally it should be controllable both relatively and absolutely based on your Z coord. So for multi-level zones, you should be able to say "When my Z-position is -100 to 100, the floor should be exactly -150 and the ceiling should be +150", "When my z-position is 100+, the floor should be exactly 100 and there is no ceiling", "When my z-position is -1000 to -100, the floor should be 100 under me and the ceiling should be 100 over me". Maybe even name those lines as "Ssra - Basement", "Ssra - Second Floor" and such so that you could have a list of them and swap between them without moving.

BUT... and unfortunately this is an annoying issue and what has made me not do stuff with the maps...

...the problem is that putting stuff in the maps isn't going to work as well because the map sources are tainted. The showeq project doesn't mantain up to date maps that are GPLed. People just use mapfiend. The people who submit maps to mapfiend probably will be drawing in-game sony-style maps, so they a) won't have this new depth information and b) won't be released under a license that lets us add them and re-distrbute them.

So unless seq people start doing maps again, I'd say we'd want to put this information in a different file than the map so that people can use mapfiend for their maps then get our z-info files for seq to go with them maybe. But I dunno. That seems kinda silly.

Sorry, got off into a brainstorm there. Don't mind me.

The bottom line is any patch you want to submit is more than welcome. I can't guarantee it'll get in, or it'll get in verbatim, but I'd be stupid if I didn't accept work other people did if it would benefit seq.

[Whizzie Wiz]

The spawnpoint handler probably just needs to allow for a small variation in spawn location, maybe +/-3 -- while many mobs do endlessly respawn on exactly the same spot, a lot of others have a little bit of jitter.

I was thinking of keeping the height information in the maps mostly because I wasn't sure whether it was worth the hassle of adding a lot of new file handling stuff just for that, but if someone can point me in the direction of how to add stuff to the preferences file, I do agree that'd be a better place for it.