Next patch items that will affect TLP

I would have thought that empty zone = respawns normal. Packed zone = respawn delayed. If a spawn is set to 20 minutes, it is weird that an empty zone would cause it to spawn faster than that.

Speaking from a design perspective, I think it would be more fun to have faster spawns (especially for rares and quest NPCs) when the zone was full of people. That would encourage grouping/social activities, instead of punishing them.

the fallacy that it is a punishment.

it's actually the baseline.

Spawns speeding up when the zone is empty is interesting. Makes it harder to log out and log back in to the spawn.

My own opinion is that nearly every spawn in the game could be made way faster and it wouldn't be ruining the fun of the game.

hopefully the dev's finally see the obvious answer... faster is better, more is better... nobody plays TLP for glory. they just want to see it all, do it all.

let's see... instances were a resounding success... faster exp undeniably more popular...

I'm just about ready to try another TLP, but if it's anything like a re-hashed or slowed down version of the current options, there's just no way people are going to stick with it.

If the zone is processing quickly, spawns will occur more quickly and vice versa.

In effect, this is what's happening. In the majority of cases, possibly all cases, spawns are occurring faster than expected or intended.

It's tick based not clock based, right?

I appreciateg it when you guys share interesting technical tidbits like this. Fascinating.

Crazy that people wouldn't have ever noticed a differential as large as 20% though.

Server processing based, yes.

Are we talking about every single spawn? Or just spawns that have a variance in their respawns? Like, a lot of old zones like guk/seb/solb have exact spawn times like 21min X seconds. Whatever it is that they are. Down to the point where people can time those exact spawns and start rains to hit named mobs as they enter the world.

If there are 100 people in Solb raiding Nagafen, for an hour, would the respawns on the normal trash mobs actually be slower than normal to where people's exact timers would be messed up, even on such a low repop of 20minutes? Or does the respawn need to be much longer for it to be affected?

In contrast, Frostcrypt has variable spawn times. I set my timer for 21 minutes there but it could be 2-3 minutes longer than that (roughly the 15% that Prathun mentioned in regard to Marl).

I thought "ticks" were 6 seconds real time and had nothing to do with the server processes.

I also though spawn timers were based on real time as well. It makes no sense to me to not have them real time based.

I would appreciate Daybreak explaining how much server speed affects these kinds of things. For example, old school mobs used to spawn at 23 or so minute intervals. This could be timed by players so they would know.

Later mobs usually spawned faster, as the entire game moved to faster paced gameplay.

The lack of "real time" for these things I find disturbing.

I used ticks in a very general sense.

A server normally has a listing of processes that it holds at a higher priority than others. This is most likely what Prathun means by spawns can be affected by server processing. Overloaded zones usually have players rubber banding across the zone, npc's warping, your frame rate comes to 1 or 2 frames per second if you're lucky. Spawn timers in that case will most likely get put into a queue until the players actions are processed.

Early spawns, I'm still scratching my head.

If a mob spawns in a zone and nobody's there to see it, did it actually spawn?

It appears we have Schrodinger's NPC here.

I was going to write a similar reply, but Riler pretty much nailed it. This may not be exactly how EQ works, but games generally run a bunch of their logic on an "Update" loop. Often, the Update function executes all of it's code every CPU cycle, "tick" or frame that is rendered to the screen.

Processors generally don't count time in seconds, like we do, but rather, fractions of seconds. If they process in a single-threaded fashion, they generally have multiple things they are trying to process and update in order.

So, if I tell something to move X distance every 1 second, depending on quickly the CPU gets around to counting to one - I may see end the result happen faster or slower than expected. The thing may move (or spawn) at a different rate than I set in data.

Generally, when you update something that needs to happen at a fixed time reliably, you can multiply each step by the delta (difference) in time from the previous frame to the current one.

If you've ever played a DOS game on a modern computer, without proper emulation, this is why you may see enemies, projectiles, etc., seemingly move at hyper speed. The processor is much quicker than when the game was created, and the programmer(s) didn't have to consider what would happen if the clock speed was faster.

That's interesting. All this time, I assumed it was just a time date stamp in the database for the spawn that would indicate when it is capable of being spawned again.

I really wonder just how different (improved or not) Everquest would be if the game content was applied to a modern MMORPG server. Like if all of the data for the content was mined, transformed to fit another game's system, and inserted in to it's database.