UO Second Age

Missed shot timer

Shot cycle can be missed completely (no shot/animation) by being slightly out of the shot range for a split second. Not sure what causes this, it could be a Heaxy xbow only. Archery range is set to 12 tiles with the exception of the heavy, seems like there is a mis match for heavy as they seem to move through swing states at above 10 tiles.


Rapid Fire Miss Bug

Pretty much anyone who has fired a bow has experienced this and it is how the demo handles archery. If you move before 1 second after firing a shot you will have a 100% miss rate, an arrow/bolt will be consumed, and you will fire again after 1 second of non movement.


Outrun/Invis exploit

Arrow/Bolt shots can be totally negated by moving out of range after the shot is fired.

Arrow/Bolt shots can also be negated by using the invisibility spell or an invis item on the archers target directly after the shot is fired. This works in full range of the bow being used.


Z-Axis

Currently Z-axis diminishes a shot range greatly, I believe Anarcho fixed this already and is going to be in an upcoming patch.


Preparation delay (equipping for the first shot)

It seems that Archery has both the 1 second melee prep delay as well as the regular Archery prep delay of a full shot cycle. Both delays together make the first equipped shot of Archery take longer than the normal full shot cycle delay.

Double preparation timer delay exists, this sometimes makes your first shot take up to 15 seconds to fire. I am not sure how to recreate this but I suppose it has something to do with the "missed shot timer" I mentioned above.


Suggestion - Trying to recreate a brutal Archery bug that existed in era was a bad idea. It is not and has not played out well at all since its inception on UOSA. I suggest that archery be restored to the final pre-T2A functionality state with the addition of T2A patch notes found in March 2000.



A brief history of Archery (chronology)

Pre T2A 1 - Archery worked exactly like melee skills but with a massive range of attack. This meant that you could ride a horse without stopping while shooting, very OP. People complained about it and it was changed.

Pre T2A 2 - Movement restriction added "plant and shoot", prep delay added, damage increased, range increased, fire rate increased.

Pre T2A 3 - Movement restriction reduced (lowered time after movement to shoot), prep delay time reduced.

Pre T2A 4 - Damage decreased due to complaints of over powered.

T2A Release/Demo - Massive archery bug that was a consequence of a large game expansion (broken mechanic unintended). No patch notes address this issue until the end of the T2A era.

T2A - Archery is finally fixed and resembles the mechanics before the T2A expansion release with various damage/speed changes. This patch happened during the T2A era but after UOSA's cutoff date of November 23rd. The patch was in March of 2000 shortly before the release of Renaissance. Yes this does mean that Archery was broken for most of the T2A era, but was fixed in era.

My interpretation of how Archery can work based on historical changes.

Starting position = Ready state, unarmed.
or
Starting position = Advancing state, unarmed.

1) Equip bow + Attack target
2) Prep delay of one FULL CYCLE* of the users shot timer commences
3) Shot timer advances to ready and waits for Archer to stop moving
4) Archer stops moving for X** time, shot timer advances and fires at target
5) Hit/miss calculation is done followed by a 1 second travel time (just like most spells)
6) Post fire effect arrow/bolt has a chance to land on the ground, in the targets backpack, or deletion. (this is already working good)

This means no rapid fire bug, no 1 second melee equip delay, and no avoidance exploit.

* Prep delay is not clearly defined in the patch notes, this is really up to the discretion of the coder to implement something reasonable.

** How long is required for the archer to stop moving to advance his shot timer to a fire state is not well defined anywhere and is up to the discretion of the coder to implement something reasonable.

Interesting point about the prep delay reduction in the pre-T2A patch notes... For whatever reason they had set the prep delay to be way to high and subsequently changed it by reducing the timer. This beg's the question, what did they reduce it from?

If reduction lead to a full shot timer delay, then that would mean "cycling" a bow for a shorter timer would not work. If it was originally a full shot timer delay and was reduced to something like half, or anything under the full shot delay, it would indicate that "cycling" a bow is possible yet not as effective as a melee weapon which has a maximum of 1 second prep delay.

"cycle" re: halberd cycle.

Hey there, you've done a lot of work I see. Well done.

I wanted to insert some clarifications based upon my own observations.

Re: "Missed shot timer"

If the archer "stops & plants" with a shot ready to be fired, but is out of range, the archer loses the shot completely: it isn't held, and the timer begins to count towards the "next" shot immediately; this can be very annoying with a heavy xbow's 6-second timer ...

Obviously, it isn't an aspect of the system that could be described as, "WaI"; I can't remark on technical era-accuracy.

Re: "Cycling" and "Prep Delay"

My understanding is that the "shot timer" runs on an entirely different thread from the "swing timer" and, also, that equipping completely resets the "shot timer", every time. If true, there is no way to fire any faster than shot-timer-plus-equip-delay: there can be no way to "cycle" an archery weapon.

What I've said about timers commutes with my own observations.

Anyhoo, I hope all of your work inspires some positive action.

SS

P.S. You probably know this, but you can look here to read the substance of OSI's patches in-era.
SS

Good info there Sig, that missed timer drives me mad.



https://web.archive.org/web/20120512032 ... n_159.html

This is the March patch I am referring to. It's not available in the normal patch notes, gotta use the way back machine website to access it (shout out to Izual). As for the damages and speeds, I do believe UOSA currently uses the damage values associated here. If I remember correctly the statics page that gives UOSA its weapon values is past this publish date.

*you see a nerd preparing to fix archery*

*you see a nerd throw your weapon in the trash.*


a nerd says: "Archery has been fixed".

/thread

Great post!!

Bump!

Missed shot timer bug should be fixed above all.