A follow up to the R123 Livestream

Greetings!

During the stream I described the source of the issue we found for Pets and NPCs either not moving around, de-spawning or not being able to be placed, along with a range of other symptoms, like not being able to use a bed or chair and even not able to cast an AOE spell/skill.

I wanted to go into this a little more: Many hours and the sacrifice of at least one fully decorated lot went into isolating the symptoms. I want to thank Bug Brigade and all the players involved in troubleshooting these issues that resulted in Jiras for the various Haystack and related deco, the Compendium Teleporter, Trophy Lava fish, and the Lava Fishing Pools in addition to others.

Even with the Jiras created and the issues isolated to these specific objects, we still found it difficult to identify exactly what was causing the issues. I was urged by @Laney to prioritize the Haystacks this last development cycle, and that directly led to the discovery of the cause.

In the image below you can see aqua colored boxes around most all of the placed decorations. These boxes are not the actual collision that makes the items solid to players. They are navigational collision that tells NPCs and pets to stay away, this also affects animations, like AOEs or actions like sitting or using a bed.

In this image, the HUGE box is being generated by a small haystack.


This, even bigger one, is from the Teleporter to the Challenge Dungeon (Compendium of Pain and Suffering):


The issue is an error in the mesh collision that caused the item's transform coordinates to be inflated. Scottie very kindly showed me how to fix these, and I will be passing on that knowledge to the rest of the team. Now we are on the hunt for objects that have the same issue!

Seeing the box, it now made complete sense; the pets were being pushed off the lots completely! Causing them to either despawn or appear on neighboring lots. In some cases, (depending on the order decorations and pets loaded into the scene, the pet could appear to be frozen as it was trapped inside of the box (where the game code says it is forbidden to move).

I found that all of the adult Plesiosaurus trophies are affected. These will be fixed during this dev cycle and included in R124. We will (of course) include a full list of items corrected in the patch notes.

Lastly, but for many most importantly...

The Lava Pools. These precious little things have their own special version of the issue (the technical term is borked). These too will be worked on during this month and should be corrected for R124.


The boxes should be surrounding the item completely, not sunk into the ground, or shifted forward.

Once again; it was the direct result of the extensive testing by our players that led us to the actual cause and solution. The timing this month was ideal, since I was working on final testing of the Market lots, and had to make adjustments to them related to the same navigation collision, and based on the specific symptoms presented in the Jiras, I checked and found what you see above. We now have a new tool to help us identify issues and bring some of the long standing odd problems to an end.

This is a great example of how the Bug Brigade is invaluable. Keep up the great reports and testing, it's really making a difference!