Melee while casting?

[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.

[saevel]

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...

We never said it was impossible, merely that currently the server side event engine isn't set up for it. Only one action is allowed to be active at any point in time. They could change that but it would require an overhaul of the servers event engine, something you do not do without lots and lots of time and effort. This isn't like changing something client side where the worst you gotta worry about is a PC crashing or people moving where they shouldn't be. If you screw something up in the event engine the server itself would crash, meaning lost data / loot / fights. Could be scrambled world database's forcing you to revert to the last backup. It also could mean really bad things randomly happening, like getting 10K gil at the end of a fight, except the action never completes and that it keeps giving you gil until your character becomes corrupted. Or the monster casts a spell and it keeps processing until you die, and possibly more until the server crash's.

As for the technical aspects, there is no magic in real life. We system engineers do what we do because certain design's tend to work better then other design's. Action based event engines have proven to be the most efficient method of resolving tens of thousands of independent actions per second by thousands of actors (technical name for players and monsters in a virtual world). Other methods tend to be crushed after 30ish players as their are simply too many things going on for the server's processors and memory to handle while being coherent, things will start lagging and your actions will be delayed a few seconds. That and if the client had ~any~ say whatsoever in what was going on, then you'd see TPP that would instantly win you every fight and get all the drops you wanted.