[Closed] a weird monster bug

[Tabitha]

i was running from a lizard once, and it wasnt on my screen anymore, and then it somehow attacked me and i was pulled back to it.

[Tobias]

Hi Tabitha,

Short Answer: Things like that could either be latency, or a glitch with the client prediction - if something like that happens, immediately "/tag" the session and report it. This is the only way I can review the session and see why this is happening.

Long Answer: Movement is predicted by the client - if you press a key or click your mouse, the Flash client sends that to the server, and starts moving your character immediately, assuming that it worked. And most of the times it does: In case you're stunned, sleeping or such, the Flash client knows that and won't make you move either - so server and Flash client are in agreement of what's going on.

Here's potential for a glitch (option 2, above): If you can't move for whatever reason, and I forgot to check that in the Flash client, its prediction will be off (it thought you'd be walking, when in fact you aren't).
And of course, there's potential for latency (option 1, above): If your connection is slow and the message that you're walking reaches the server late, then you won't actually be as far as you think you are.

The reason of what you saw is due to one of these two options. Which one it is, you have to help find out, and you do that by /tag-ging your session and telling me to check it.

Now, even if one of these things occur, you usually won't notice them most of the times, because the client conceals its corrections and latency as well as it can. However, there are situations where your current position matters: One of them is that monsters are attacking you. If that happens, and the server and your Flash client severely disagree on where your current position, the server wins: You are "pulled back" to the position where the server says you are.

This is a different approach to other games such as MapleStory and Transformice, that - to my knowledge - trust the information from their Flash/Windows clients (they use "authoritative clients"), which in turn enables flying and warping hacks. I opted for the above approach ("authoritative server"), so you can't have hacks or cheats, at the cost that if you're at a disadvantage if you're laggy. You can use the indicator light in your menu bar on the top to judge how laggy you are - if it lights up yellow or red, hover it to see details of how bad it is.

[Tabitha]

a question, why do you make these answers so long? O.o

[Tobias]

If you read my post, you'd realize that it

(a) tells you what to do if you run into the bug again, in order to increase your chances of getting it fixed (instead of making a worthless bug report that has literally no information I can work from), and

(b) gives you a list of what information I'm looking for in your bug report.



Essentially, there're three ways you can deal with my reply now. You can

(a) ignore it and post the same bug again: In that case, I'll simply use just as little time as you did, dismiss your report and paste my previous reply in it. Sorry, can't reproduce it, tough luck, it works for me. :3

(b) do the bare minimum that I told you to do before you report it, and tell me the time you played: In that case, I might get back and fix it, if it looks simple enough. Otherwise I'll probably end up forgetting it after I went bowling with my friends.

(c) do what I told you in my reply, and give me relevant details of what you did (using the information I posted earlier) to give me a good idea what might be going on, without even having to debug your session. In that case, you can pretty much count on getting me to fix your bug.


Hope that shed some light on this. :3 I could also just say that the lizard threw a lasso at you and pulled you back, because your character was too clumsy to dodge it. No running away for you!