Usual disclaimer: I Played on live for 15 years. Never on AK, never on an EMU until TAKP, and no other EMU other than TAKP. Moderators: Feel free to move this if and when it should be. I am almost lv 40 on my 3 toons, so I have no experience with any of the fun places that most of the server probably inhabits, and certainly no experience yet with raid zones on TAKP. That said, I've noticed that F8 doesn't appear to work correctly. On live, grouping aside, I was the main assist on raids for north of 6 years. In groups, I frequently pulled if there was no splitting. I used F8 constantly. The only time I didn't use F8 was if I needed to select a specific mob (read: non-mezzable mobs, mobs already being off-tanked, robes vs. 4-armed women in VT, etc.). I cannot recall a time-period, a zone, or any circumstances where using my mouse (right click-hold to look/left click move forward) where F8 did not interact correctly. However, on TAKP it seems to not function frequently. In some zones (Kaesora being the most recent annoyance), it appears completely random if it will work or not. Sometimes I HAVE to use mouse-click to target. Frequently mouse-click doesn't work well (another difference from live?), though, so I have a 2-5 second delay where I am trying aimlessly to target mobs. If I keep moving around, sometimes F8 will work, or if not I can eventually click-target. I never play in F9. Have other people experienced these issues? I figured if this was a problem on raids that I would have seen a post by now. This would be infuriating on a raid.
It appears to be greatly effected by z-index. It doesn't seem different from what I remember on AK though, it can be very frustrating at times...
Ditto. Just a quirk of Early-on Everquest, which P99 doesn't experience because they use an later-on Client, or Live, where they improved the F8 Functionality.
Certain mobs Models (large fire beetles are nearly impossible. Small fire beetles are difficult) find nearly impossible to target with F8. I don't recall ever having issues on AK. Other PCs and pets seem to sometimes be the cause for me. Sometimes I think it's z-axis or LOS but there are certain areas where this clearly isn't the case and I'll target something a decent z-axis away that I can't cast on due to LOS issues.
I don't recall F8 being so infuriating all those years ago. But I now mostly play on PC not on Mac (oops!) - does the Mac client play nice with F8 targeting?
I never used a mouse to target unless there was a couple mins stacked on top of each other on AK. I'd say I've used a mouse to target more in my few months on TAKP then I did in my entire time on AK
I don't have anything concrete to add right now, but I'll just say that I've also noticed F8 targeting working differently (worse) here than AK. I've seen some bizarrely bad F8 performance with a twice-shrunk ogre. I'm using the OS X client. Wild speculation: it may have to do with line of sight checks -- presumably F8 only works on mobs you can see? Perhaps TAKP is stricter about LoS geometry than AK was.
The LoS thing isn't really true. Go to CoM kill the first two mobs at the enterence. Look left or right. There is a mob up on a little ledge. You can F8 to target. But you can't cast on them. Says you can not see your target
So, it seems that most people (of those that have replied) appear to have a rather similar experience. re Pithy: I should note that one of my 3 characters is an ogre, and for approx. the last 20 levels I have played max shrunk (since I box a shaman). I'm not sure that I have noticed much of a difference now vs. lower levels when I was never shrunk, but I also haven't been paying especial attention. I will try to be more observant. That said, I was curious whether it had anything to do with the way the mobs' are set up in their particular 3d space. I can postulate all I want, but the fact is that I know next to nothing about the coding aspect, so short of looking for ideas I won't venture to guess. So, I guess the big question is - Is it possible to fix these issues? Jugo mentioned that this might be client based. (1) Is this true? IF so, and IF more recent clients fix this, is there not a way to "import" a feature of a more recent client to fix this? Again, I know nothing about coding, but how I imagined this in my mind is that the body of the F8 code already exists in our client, the only thing that differs is "tweaks" to that code. If this is totally crazy, ignore me. I'm just trying to understand better exactly how this all works and whether we can fix the issue. (2) If it is NOT client based, this *is!?* fixable, right? That seems to be the trend. Conditional on it not being client based, it is fixable(?).
If it is client based, they pretty much have no way to fix it. If they had the client source, it would be a pretty easy fix much like how you described, find the code in a newer clients source, tweak it slightly and paste it into the respective spot in our clients source, compile. However, without the source of our client, it isn't really feasible.
F8 is a big headache. It's been like this since Alpha, where F8 will target a random mob or no mob at all, even if I am standing right in front of the creature. F8 worked wonderfully on AK, it would often target a mob I couldn't even see yet was in range of the F8 request. There has to be a way to compare x-y-z on all of the mobs nearby and have F8 return the closest one. Ideally F8 would fail only if there are no mobs in visual range. Another ideal would be to have F8 give preference to the mobs that are right in front of you.
Thanks for the addition, Elron! Just an idea. I haven't done extensive testing, but does f7 (target closest pc) work well? If so, would the code for such be similar such that it could almost be copied, but as applied to NPC's?
Is this in any way related to spell casting line of site? If so I don't think that's the root cause of our issues
F8 is not working because client doesn't think you have LoS. It could be off 0.001. I don't know for sure. It could be a rounding issue.
I noticed when I was lower level in tight zones like befallen, if there are corpses in front of me (even if hidden), it wouldn't always work right.
