Melee while casting?

[Doombringer]

LOL @ this statement like you and Saevel are the authorities on all things SE and MMO.

actually, the joke here is that he and saevel have never agreed on anything, including the color of the sky, and probably never will again.

the implication being not so much that they're the definitive authority on all things, as it is that the sun and moon have somehow allied to defeat this greater evil.

strange bedfellows and all that.

[Mirage]

Pretty much this. You can only have one action *active* server side, its like this for many online games. The most you can hope for is more fast cast and spells with less ridiculous casting times.

I find it hard to believe that this couldn't be changed by developers relatively easily. I think the reason most games are like this is a gameplay design choice, not because the programmers were unable to code such a feature into the server software.

And while I know your trying to be a d!ck, you do realize I've actually run a RO server before. Ridiculously complex is small a statement for what the server side of an MMO looks like.

Well, most of those RO servers are reverse engineered hobby projects, it's no wonder it sometimes looks like a mess. Also, RO actually has a class that can attack while casting .

[ManaKing]

I find it hard to believe that this couldn't be changed by developers relatively easily. I think the reason most games are like this is a gameplay design choice, not because the programmers were unable to code such a feature into the server software.


Well, most of those RO servers are reverse engineered hobby projects, it's no wonder it sometimes looks like a mess. Also, RO actually has a class that can attack while casting .

RO does have a class that can attack while casting. That's pretty much where this all started, for me at least. I don't mind that it has turned into us asking if we can have a Zanshin Attack after we cast a spell. I would actually love that.

/startRant

Other games have already implemented the feature to be able to attack while casting. Can FFXI specifically make that change? You would have to actually ask someone that worked/s on the engine instead of random people on a forum, who are not an authority on the game's engine. SO STOP TALKING ABOUT THE TECHNICAL ASPECTS OF THIS GAME THAT YOU ACTUALLY ARE NOT AN AUTHORITY ON TO LEVERAGE MELEE OR ANTI-MELEE ARGUMENTS. No one cares about how smug you are while arguing about things that are completely based on knowledge you aren't actually privy to.

Stay on topic for a discussion about RDMs gaining the ability to continue their melee attacks in some form or another while casting, and stop running off on useless tangents just so you can start fights.

Here is some info we actually do know about: Zanshin. No matter how Zanshin is coded, it exists as a reaction to a players action that failed to hit an enemy and acts like an additional action. It is a passive job trait, the player does nothing to activate Zanshin. So it has a condition to go off, it acts like an additional action, and it is a passive trait. It was also added after the original game engine was created.

I'm asking for a passive trait, aka JT, that will add an additional attack on the condition that I cast a spell. If the mob isn't in range for melee, then I don't get the additional attack because it didn't meet that condition. If you don't think the SE can code that, then you don't think they actually do anything, because this is simple and already exists.

If you want to put further conditions for which spells will actually give you additional attacks, we can discuss that. But whether or not a work around that would work will no longer be discussed here by people that aren't employed by SE. You are just wasting people's time and being blatantly disrespectful to your fellow forum goers with your OPINIONS of things can and cannot work. You don't even have to listen to what I said about Zanshin, just stay on topic.

Just in case you missed it, the topic is about RDM continuing to melee in one form or another while casting so that they can actually have a chance to keep up with other jobs in DPS. Take anti-melee sentiments to another thread and start a discussion about how you would like it improved instead of undermining melee discussions.

EDIT: None of this is aimed at you specifically Mirage. You mentioned RO and I appreciate that someone else has played it as well. Attacking while Casting was not part of the original game engine for Ragnarok Online. Scholars were a later addition to RO coding.

[Selzak]

The game's combat engine simply won't allow you to be in the process of 2 actions at the same time, of any type, ever. It is not built for it. Monsters can't do it either.

Spaghetti code is not the excuse. Engine limitations are.

Are you sure that this is the case? Is there actually something in the code that won't allow it? Because technically, it could always be changed (whether or not it's practical to do so).

edit: NVM, read a bit further. You don't know as much as you think you do about the processes involved here. The only thing making it impossible would be the complexity of changing the code. Maybe you're in college and have learned about object-oriented programming but not multi-threaded processes yet. An engine is just a collection of modules and such that define how the game acts, nothing about an engine is set in stone and unchangeable. Whether or not this particular 'limitation' is too deeply rooted for them to consider altering it is something that only they know.

Computers are very capable of making a video game where the character is casting a spell and hitting something at the same time.

[Greatguardian]

Are you sure that this is the case? Is there actually something in the code that won't allow it? Because technically, it could always be changed (whether or not it's practical to do so).

It's a fundamental design decision that was likely reached at the engine development level for various practical and preventative reasons.

Modern game code works like a large pyramid. You build from the ground up, in layers. By the time you reach the top layer, changing anything on the ground floor would be impossible without collapsing the entire structure and building it over again. A rough overview would look something like this:



Most, if not all, changes to the game made post-development are done on the Toolkit level. This includes things like damage calculations, new jobs, abilities, spells, monsters, animations, zones, etc. This is where you can make abilities and spells do whatever you want so long as they fit within the guidelines set by the engine. Spells have to have a cost (even if it's 0), they have to have a casting time (even if it's 0), and they have to have an action delay (which is globally set to 2.0338~ seconds, and can be changed but won't because it's there for good reason). The engine is what actually handles all of these things, and what can and can't be done at the most fundamental level.

Tangent: I'm not an SE programmer (or am I? I wouldn't be allowed to tell you if I was), but you really don't need to be in this day and age to understand what's probably going on in any particular game system. I say probably, but it's a pretty strong probably, as in "It would be fairly godawful coding for the original designers to have done it any other way, and everything we can see on the client side serves to reinforce this idea, so this is probably how it works".

Saevel's about as pro-melee as they come, and as he seems to have similar experience in this field he's basically saying the exact same shit I'm saying. This has nothing to do with "pro melee" or "anti melee" stances. I'm sure if we could attack while casting, he'd be all for it (and hell, why would I be against it honestly?). We just can't.

Making useless comparisons to Zanshin and Parrying throughout this thread can only be called intentionally dense at this point, as we have demonstrated multiple times how those do not mean a damn thing in the context of a single-action system. Do you cast spells when your Zanshin goes off? Are you putting attacks in your attack so you can attack while you attack, dawg? No. Zanshin and DA hits are not individual actions, the game just rolls stats a second time if the player or monster passes a DA/Zanshin check when combat stats are being rolled (see the flowchart I made earlier in the thread).

I think we could use more caps lock, boldface, and "zomg Opinionssssssssss" though. They contribute a lot to this technical discussion. I'm sure if you scream loud enough, the game engine will rewrite itself.

Edit: Multi-threaded processing is impractical and dangerous in a 10-year old persistent MMO environment that wasn't designed for it - not so much on a hardware/software level any more but an implementation and design level. The original server code was a lot more open to this sort of thing (not allowing multiple simultaneous actions, but allowing the delay between actions to reach 0), and it wreaked havoc in practice. People could duplicate items by spamming packets and requests to the server, attack delays could be bypassed by spamming engage/disengage commands, it was a mess.

I'm also not confident that the original server client was built to address this, and I've brought up other times that it's very clear that the game's combat mechanics themselves are certainly not. When you have a basic premise such as "One concurrent action" built in at the ground level, each subsequent level of combat coding assumes that it is accounted for already. The game is not designed to handle multiple concurrent actions, and changing something so fundamental means changing every bit of inherited code as well and rewriting some mechanics completely.

You're right, it's potentially possible with a completely different design in mind, but I never said that no computers anywhere could handle it. I simply said, from the get-go, the amount of fundamental design changes necessary to do so is completely impractical and would essentially require rewriting a massive amount of the code base from the ground up. That will never happen, as it would be easier to just make a new game at that point, so this will never happen.

[Selzak]

I know where you're coming from, and I could care less about whether or not RDMs are meleeing, I just think you're assuming way too much about how the engine is built and what kind of trickery may or may not be possible to get around its supposed limitations.

You made a very valid point when you brought up the fact that this game mechanic is probably not as easy to change as people were assuming. (like flipping a switch or changing a 1 to a 2)

...Then you just kind of went overboard with it (at least, from my perspective) by acting as if it would be impossible to make it work.

as an example:

*Player casting spell*
*If attack round is up, stop casting and hit target* (record time)
*Continue casting spell* (subtract lost time)


An approach like this (obviously a lot more involved, but the overall approach) might work, even though it's not technically doing two things at once. It might not work, but the point is that it's probably not as complicated as you're assuming to get something like this to happen, and probably more complicated than many others have assumed.

[Greatguardian]

I know where you're coming from, and I could care less about whether or not RDMs are meleeing, I just think you're assuming way too much about how the engine is built and what kind of trickery may or may not be possible to get around its supposed limitations.

You made a very valid point when you brought up the fact that this game mechanic is probably not as easy to change as people were assuming. (like flipping a switch or changing a 1 to a 2)

...Then you just kind of went overboard with it (at least, from my perspective) by acting as if it would be impossible to make it work.

Fair enough. Like I said, I don't think that this sort of thing would be impossible for any computer anywhere. I just think that it's highly unlikely that this could be done without a massive overhaul of the game's server client, and an extremely large rewrite of existing combat mechanics. For all intents and purposes, this is outside the realm of possibility.

If people were to offer more educated insight into how this might actually work aside from "I want it, do it now, this is my opinion and that's your opinion and zomg you don't work at SE so shut up" and "well I can write a 1000 line python program that can do this, so SE's server code should too", we might actually be able to move this discussion forward. I find it extremely unlikely that that would happen, though.

I lose motivation to put in disclaimers for these kinds of people very quickly, as they're often completely misinterpreted or misrepresented in order to serve their agenda. Imagine walking into a room where people vehemently believe that the sun is made of cheese, and trying to say "Well no, we're pretty sure it's not made of cheese, as that makes no sense, and we're 99.9% sure that it's really primarily composed of Hydrogen and Helium". People are going to latch onto that 0.1% chance and say "AHA, SO IT COULD BE MADE OF CHEESE, NA NA CAN'T PROVE ME WRONG UNTIL YOU FLY TO THE SUN".

It's much easier to just turn and say "The sun is not bloody made of cheese, at all, shut the bloody hell up."

[Selzak]

Fair enough. Like I said, I don't think that this sort of thing would be impossible for any computer anywhere. I just think that it's highly unlikely that this could be done without a massive overhaul of the game's server client, and an extremely large rewrite of existing combat mechanics. For all intents and purposes, this is outside the realm of possibility.

Guess I caught your arguments out of context because you were being irritated at the people you were replying to. That's a legitimate assumption (still, I just really think it's more guesswork than a given). Tossing a like for wrongly calling you out (my bad) and moving along now...

[Greatguardian]

Guess I caught your arguments out of context because you were being irritated at the people you were replying to. That's a legitimate assumption (still, I just really think it's more guesswork than a given). Tossing a like for wrongly calling you out (my bad) and moving along now...

Don't worry about it, no harm done. I really should have been more clear in general, it can just be extremely frustrating to feel like you're talking to a wall over and over.

Edit: To continue with the idea you presented, the biggest issue I'd see is really the situation wherein your melee round overlaps the end of the spell. Even if you simply cast the spell after the round went off (this is assuming that the Devs make sure to code for negative numbers in remaining cast time. Shouldn't be too hard, but important), you'd still have the 2.0338~ second post-action delay after the spell goes off, which would pause your attack rounds - resulting in a low net gain.

This is also assuming that the magic commands are sent in real-time rather than simply "When Time = Start Time + Adjusted Cast time, check for StartPosition==EndPosition and SpellInterrupted=False" or some variation therein. It would be more efficient for them to have the server calculate magic casting time at the beginning of the cast rather than having the client send both start and end packets. This would mean inserting a check for attack delay and delay status into the original "magic start" routine and adjusting the completion of the spell to be "When Time = Start Time + Adjusted Cast time + Attack round time", and would still miss taking into account whether or not the player is actually able to swing at something.

Christ, the more I think about it the less I want to be "that guy" on the Dev team that gets asked to look into something like this, lol.

[Selzak]

There would definitely be conflict sometimes, but I don't see why it would be terribly difficult to deal with. A particularly easy solution would just be to consume that swing and give the cast priority. Like I said, I was more introducing the idea that it may be possible to effectively allow meleeing while casting instead of trying to make it possible to perform two actions at once. How they actually handle the act of "casting", I have no earthly idea. I do have a hunch that this is possible though, for a couple of reasons:

Casting (as in, waiting for a spell to occur) is sent a lot quicker than it seems because the animation tends to lag behind. If you ever get interrupted you'll notice that your casting animation goes on (sometimes for a really long time...) but you are not actually casting anymore- the log says you were interrupted and you are allowed to swing. *This produces the illusion that you are swinging while casting, actually. If you just watch the log as you're selecting/casting a spell you'll notice that the information is being sent a lot faster than it looks like it is graphically. Keep in mind, there's also a meter that calculates your % location in the spell's cast time. I doubt it would be possible to make it so that your attacks are simply not affected by casting (sometimes the stars are going to align the wrong way), but making it so that you do tend to get your attack rounds in while not affecting the cast sounds possible to me, and I think that'd definitely be good enough for what people want.

In PvP, you'll sometimes notice players (on melee + mage jobs) turning their backs while casting a spell in order to "queue up" a melee attack when they're done casting. This leads me to believe that attack rounds are, in fact, happening while you are casting and that they are simply not produced. I don't know if this is common knowledge or not, but eh.

But we're just having fun here, neither of us (or at least I know I sure as hell don't) know very much about what's going on underneath this game.


Are the mechanics beneath this flexible enough to allow them to do something like I mentioned? I have no idea, but I don't think it's unrealistic to think about. Again, the point was just that there may be any number of ways to "make it happen" so to speak. Or maybe it's too complicated and no one could come up with a working solution...I don't know. I think we both agree on the idea that they probably won't be able to do this, but I think it's more of an issue of the size and nature of the development team + whether or not they can be assed to try it. Our disagreement on this seems to be that I think (out of my ass) that's it's probably 65/35 in terms of there being an impractical/practical solution and I think you're more like 95/5.

The real kicker here is that, even if they could do it (even easily), they probably won't lol. I'd love to keep talking about possible solutions though; programming is a lot more fun than discussing melee RDM!

( I kid, as a DRK main I understand the pain of a broken job concept ;; )




*More casting weirdness: That remaining time meter is terribly inaccurate. On long spells, I'll notice myself beginning to cast about 60% into the meter sometimes. I read this as:

1) They are keeping track of casting time in a continuous fashion
2) These calculations are talking to your actual "actions" a lot faster then they are talking to you.

I think that's a good sign for the above idea.