New Game Update...

I'd been having recurring difficulties these days with trying to /camp to an alt, and rather than the nice, sane, 20 second countdown by fives, it would often hiccup/glitch/etc. and interrupt itself, booting me to a zone splash screen, where it would offer me an old-fashioned login screen, with the sort of "graphics" you'd expect to get using the workaround for a stubborn Launchpad, i.e. EverQuest2.exe. Having known from sheer dint of long experience that "that trick never works" if you get it from being booted, I always roll my eyes and hit the "Quit" button and login again from scratch.

Since I'm now engaged in testing Frostfell, complete with new gifties from Santa Glug and a lot of alts to get through, time is crucial, and any glitch will mess up my schedule something fierce. :-/

If this new fix fixes the problem, my hat's off to you all, o devs and techs!

Uwk
who'll probably take one look at the file and delete it anyway, just as a preventive

Could this also be related to the lack of updating of the drop-down list for "Select a Character" that I get? At least with my rather exhaustive list of Test toons, I've been mostly logging in with them recently, but all I ever see in the list right off are two of them, and a bunch of others I haven't logged into for days, if not weeks. :-/

Ah well, time to delete that problem child file and Validate... ;->

Uwk

The game update notes for chaos descending mention group/raid countdown window, not camping countdown

Ok, time for me to ask a few silly questions. What is this countdown window? What is it counting down, not sure if I have seen this. I know HUD has to do with the UI but what does HUD stand for, H.user.display?
Thanks

HUD = head up display: what you see on the screen. Almost but not quite synonymous with 'UI', which encompasses stuph like slash commands and so on.

Thanks Seefar,

So what is this countdown window and what is it counting down? I don't believe I have seen this, unless my coffee has not kicked in this morning.

Guess I was confused, too, since nowhere in that first blurb does it talk about group/raid stuff (the next one down does), just "countdowns." I guess we all see what we're looking for. ;->

Uwk

The above patch note is perplexing to me also. I can't remember the last time I saw anything "flash across the HUD while using it." What does that even mean? What are we counting down?

Also, asking players to locate and delete outdated files instead of the LaunchPad replacing them, as it routinely does, is a mystery.

That last, I can actually see; sometimes things do get lost in the cracks. :-/

As far as countdowns go, the only one I really know about is when you're /camping, either out or to another toon.

Uwk

Maybe we are counting down to imminent destruction?

ex: "Your mission, should you decide to accept it or not is XXX. This tape will self destruct in YYY"

*hums music*

da da da da da da da ..dum dum dum dum dum dum dum .. da da da da.....

*gets as close to a wall as possible and sneaks about with her back touching the wall*

(for us old folks, this is from Mission Impossible tele series in the 1960's)

"Countdown window" is referring to the Group/Raid Countdown feature added for the expansion: https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq...13-2018-chaos-descending.587366/#post-6528637

I should have put "Group Countdown Window" as the heading for yesterday's patch, apologies for the confusion! Group up, have the group leader run /coundown, hit start, and you should see what "flash across the HUD" means.

The part about deleting a UI file and allowing LaunchPad to update it should only apply to a very small group of players, but I figured better to mention it than not since we had reports of people having the older version of the file and seeing issues from that. If you experience any problems with this that aren't resolved by deleting that file and patching, please let us know.

I see it now, and it does indeed flash. The new feature wasn't listed in the UI section (up top) so I overlooked it. So now to start an encounter you don't even have to speak! My raiders would have loved that back when I was still raiding.

Well, I did update the mysterious file in question, but, not having the latest/greatest expac yet, I doubt I'll see any difference with the group/raid thing. Unfortunately, it also did NOTHING to correct the bloody problem up above that I've been having for years, and I can't imagine I'm the only one. X-P

Can you suggest any fixes on my end for that, Thart? Please?

Uwk

I'm having some troubles with the new countdown timer. Before submitting a bug report I'm wondering if anyone else can verify that this is an issue for them. Whenever the group or raid leader zones, the next /countdown will result in a crash to desktop every time. When the non-leader zones, the next countdown will result in a crash some of the time. Try this:

1. Form a group or raid with one other character.
2. The leader does a /countdown 10 (or uses the dialog box) multiple times, everything works fine.
3. Leader zones, performs /countdown 10 from the new zone, the game locks up at the moment the overhead number should be displaying 5. This can happen to player A, player B, or both. The only way a countdown works reliably with no lockups is for both A and B to not zone.

This happens whether the party members start out in the same zone or different zones. The act of zoning is what seems to be causing the crash. Using /makeleader to transfer leadership to the other member works fine as long as the new leader does not zone while having leadership.

About half the time both party members crashed to desktop. I could not find a pattern for why the non-leader only crashed some of the time.

This is using default everything with no add-ons.


Also: Before testing I deleted the old eq2ui_proxyactor.xml file and validated assets, which gave me a duplicate of the file I had deleted.

Comprehensive bug report, impressive! But did you /bug it?

Very cool, yeah; hopefully, Thart's still listening in, too.

Uwk

Oh! Something I forgot, Thart; when it happens (not IF), I get a window blurb saying, "This account is in use." (well, no kidding; of course it is, I'm just trying to camp to another toon of mine, or even to Character Select, in the same account)

Uwk

Thart has probably gone into hiding. You know in the past week there have been like 3 devs that revealed their existence to us and will now be hounded endlessly like we do to our poor Kaitheel.

Probably, yeah. ;->

Uwk

I don't have anything to suggest, sorry Uwk! Silver lining: if this fix had helped with that issue then I'd be concerned.

Thank you for the meaty report! I was able to narrow down the issue quickly thanks to this and just submitted a fix.