Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Why does the Feint Trap Display Incorrectly?

Alex Deathshade has a couple questions:
what school do you favor or think is the best and why does the feint card say it puts a 30% trap on you when it does a 70% trap?

Death is the best of course MUHAHAHAHAHA! I've already successfully avoided the first question on this thread, so . . . there you go.

Yeah, the feint spell is displaying percentages incorrectly. Be assured it is putting a 70% damage trap on your target and a 30% damage trap on you even though the words are saying a 70% trap is being put on both of ya. That's been a bug from day one, and it has been listed on their site as a known bug pretty much from day one.

Why? I don't know really . . . maybe there's no cheese at the end of the maze?



(I think someone moved my cheese.) I fear that to correct the problem they would have to go back and mess with some really old code in the engine or something; otherwise, it probably would have been fixed by now. I do believe it is the only simultaneous trap in the game. Just kind of a unique beast. Maybe a programmer with some key knowledge moved to another company. Maybe they just have the programmers working hard on a newer more awesome project. It's really hard to tell from the outside looking in. You'd think it'd just be as easy as changing a little 70 to a 30 somewhere in the code, but odds are that it's something deeper and definitely more mysterious. It's an enigma! GASP!

You know what? It really would be cool to have a programmer try to tell us, the non-programmer types, the reason why that bug is such a longstanding one.

/shrug

Happy Dueling!

8 comments:

witchwarrior said...

The word Feint means a move to decieve.
I believe the meaning is related to this card

smvb said...

I have never understood why this problem wasn't fixed. Unless their code looks like spaghetti (which I find hard to believe), it seems to me (a former programmer/analyst), that a graphical-only bug should be an EASY fix. But, since it is only a graphical bug, there probably are too many higher priority items on their bug-squashing list. Still, well over a year after the initial release, I can't understand why it hasn't been fixed before now.

Sierra Starsong said...

I think Cassandra's got it right, it misleads opponents (mobs) into thinking they'll get a higher boost against you than they do. :)

Seriously though, you're right about it being the only simultaneous spell and maybe that does make it harder to fix. (My college major was in computers.)

The Infamous Super Death Wizard said...

Professor Greyrose mentioned this was not intentional, and said it's a hard bug to fix. But, I do wonder exactly why it is like that. Also, I could have sworn it was working back in beta, but the MooShu, or Crown items update changed something to make Feint bugged.

So, they definitely wanted to make it as shown on the card. I don't think mobs "think", I think they're AI tells them to do a certain move. I think the deceiving part comes from how there are 2 traps and one is greater than the other, not from them having a false percent.

Anonymous said...

I actually like it with the 70% and 70% because for the people who don't know, it makes them think you have a regular 70% feint on you when you really have a 30%.

Anonymous said...

The first thing feint does when casted is setting the parameters. In m_effects key 0 70 is set as damage, then in m_effects key 1 30 is set to yourself.
Then it runs the cinematic spell, so you get the output on your screen.
This calls 2 sets of Ward_Curse, one for the caster and one for the castee (is that a real word?).
The problem is that the Ward_Curse can't be told to read m_effects key 1. So it reads the default, which is m_effects key 0 and that one is on 70.

Changing the feint, feint cinematic and Ward_Curse files so they pass the data to eachother is easier said than done. You could do a quick&dirty fix but i presume they want a clean fix.

Sorry if it was a bit technical :)

smvb said...

If I'm understanding Anonomous' post above, then the solution to the problem would be to create a new routine named something like Self_Curse. So that only in the case of Feint, the thing that calls Ward_Curse twice now would instead call Ward_Curse (which reads the default key) and then Self_Curse, which would know to read the second key.

It obviously isn't that simple, though, or they would have done it.

Stingite said...

A few KI employees do read this blog . . . keep the ideas flowing!