Pet Commands: All <target>

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Derrick
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Pet Commands: All <target>

Post by Derrick »

There has been for some time quite a big of controversy over targeted all commands, and while we found overwhelming evidence to support that "All" commands did not work with a target, I wanted to offer this last bit of evidence which seems to seal the deal, and I don't believe has been previously posted.
[url=http://web.archive.org/web/20010927180016/www.tamingarchive.com/index.php?dir=pets&article=messages]The Taming Archive: Pet Messages[/url] (this is post-UOR) wrote: The "all" command does not work for orders that require a target
This is the fix for the bug where it would store commands and call them later. When the "all" commands were introduced, they were never meant to be used with a [target] cursor. As a result, when telling 3 pets to "all attack", only 1 would attack, and the other 2 attack commands were stored away and retrieved when your next target cursor came up. This now only tells the last pet you commanded to follow your command without storing the other commands.
[url=http://web.archive.org/web/20020108134801/www.tamingarchive.com/?dir=patches&article=uor]The Taming Archive: UO:R (April 27, 2000)[/url] (This indicates this above referenced change came with UO:R) wrote:The all commands when used with a [target] cursor has been fixed. It no longer stores commands to be called up later. When you use an all comand with [target] cursor, it will give you a system message that you can't use the all command with a target cursor and the last pet that was commanded will follow your command.
Clearly this also indicates that we are not replicating the bugged All command properly, in that in era (as has been indicated other places as well) the "stored" command would be retrieved the next time you recieved an action target.

That is to say, if you used "all kill <target>" the a single pet (likely the nearest to you) would execute that command and the other two would save that command. Then the next time you recived a target, that kill command would be retrieved from the next pet.

Please note the usage of the work "fixed". This was not the removal of a desired feature this was a bug that was not at all desirable. I can probably replicate this bug, but i don't know if it's something that calls for a lot of urgency.

Thanks much to Kaivan for much diligence in finding the above archived webpages from the taming archive. He also verified that the message "The 'all' command does not work for orders that require a target." first appeared in the 2.0.3 version of the client. The messages for secure house trading first appeared in the 2.0.1 client.

There is a recent thread that suggests that All command -> target only worked for GM tamers. There is noting that's ever been seen to indicate that; it makes no sense in terms of the above information; and if it was true it would certainly have been a well explained bonus for attaining GM taming.
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Re: Pet Commands: All <target>

Post by SighelmofWyrmgard »

Derrick, you have given me the perfect opportunity to propose an accuracy convention that has hitherto been not considered (or, my bad, has been proposed and rejected before ...?).

I've been thinking about this quite a bit since joining UOSA, while observing "fixes" being applied, and all of the discussion that revolves around era accuracy.

The convention I wish to propose I will call, "thematic accuracy", or "spiritual accuracy": this is simply considering *whatever* in the context of how it was intended to be implemented as a finished, bug/exploit-free feature, in our target era; I do not propose a process of refinement, or tweaking, of any of the associated mechanics, merely an extirpation of identified flaws/bugs/exploits; that OSI either never implemented any fix at all, or indeed applied a fix but only after our target era, is irrelevant in this context.

UO was always an on-going project: numerous features were published in an incomplete and/or flawed/bugged/exploitable form; strictly insisting on mechanical-era-accuracy, regarding certain features that are obviously flawed, is simply 1billion% asinine.

"Thematic Accuracy", I imagine, is entirely the foundation for UOSA selecting Nov '99 as its "true" target date in the first place: this specific time was identified as the "cleanest" of all T2A publishes.

A partial list of what can be considered in the context of Thematic Accuracy:
  • -post-era OSI patches that fix era-accurate flaws
    -post-era OSI patches that balance new content that was itself published in-era, or even pre-T2A
    -client/server/connection issues that are tied to era technological limitations
I don't want to open a can of worms here: many things can not be assessed in terms of Thematic Accuracy, simply because we don't have access to the designers' notes of our era; additionally, just because "something doesn't work right (the way I want it, waaaaaahhhhh!)", does not make it eligible for "Thematic Accuracy" consideration.

Some specific issues, and their disposition under Thematic Accuracy (as per my opinion); this list is exemplary, not comprehensive:
  • -Above mentioned "all"-commands bugs: OUT; they are bugs
    -Runebooks: OUT; this is new content (but, why bother changing this?)
    -Server-Boundary emulation: OUT; the associated technological limitations do not apply at UOSA (sorry, all thieves and PKers who have been drooling over dreams of abusing the associated exploit ...)
    -Post-era Archery fixes: IN; this is balancing new content that was published in-era
    -Facets/Factions/Chivalry/Necromancy etc., etc.: OUT: new content, post-T2A
    -Poisoning checks against user's Poisoning skill: IN (at least for consideration); this patch was intended to redress a detected imbalance in poisoned-weapon usage
    -"wanderlust" NPC vendors: OUT; this was identified as bugged behaviour
Potentially, there is a lot more that could be analysed in this fashion; unfortunately there are a few issues that can never be resolved, because there is no OSI fix to refer to, nor any official discussion addressing the issue (I think analysing Stealthing Armor restrictions would fall into this category); I would also like to caution other members of the community that certain "fixes" that OSI implemented didn't fix anything, and we can not ask Derrick & co. to spend their time replicating these ...

In any event, I am neither proposing a scheme for "making UO better": I am hoping that this idea of Thematic Accuracy can be used by the UOSA team to best evaluate what needs to be replicated here, and how.

Thanks to all who actually read all this,

SS
SighelmofWyrmgard wrote:
uosa44 wrote:For sale, by original owner:
1 Human Brain, never been used, only slightly damaged, still in original packaging.
$1, obo
FTFY.

SS
uosa44 wrote:The inability for this person to respond in such a crazy manner proves my point.

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Re: Pet Commands: All <target>

Post by GuardianKnight »

Can anyone answer this?

When did the "all kill " command start working? It did work and we all used it up til the end of UOR for sure. Find me the info on WHEN it did start working and we'll just agree to drop it. Otherwise it worked in era but wasn't documented or actually fixed by the patches.

Is there someone bright enough to find the information?

I just know that as a tamer, i never had this much trouble dealing with groups of pks.
"I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it, and what's it seems weird and scary to me, and it'll happen to you, too." Grandpa Simpson

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Re: Pet Commands: All <target>

Post by nightshark »

GuardianKnight wrote:Can anyone answer this?

When did the "all kill " command start working? It did work and we all used it up til the end of UOR for sure. Find me the info on WHEN it did start working and we'll just agree to drop it. Otherwise it worked in era but wasn't documented or actually fixed by the patches.

Is there someone bright enough to find the information?

I just know that as a tamer, i never had this much trouble dealing with groups of pks.
I've been researching this a lot, and unfortunately there is just NO official notes on this.

From what I can tell, it was fixed in either publish 15 or publish 16. There were major overhauls of taming in these two patches, and usenet posts also reflect this - the first mention of someone saying "all kill didn't used to work, but it does now" is here:
Mar 2, 2002 - 2 months post publish 15 wrote:As I said, some monsters in the game were added that were difficult
for tamers to kill to try and stop pleople camping the uber spawns all
day with wyrmms, these executioner type chars were one of them,
another is the Orc brute but witth the re addition of "all kill" the
tamers have been killing the brutes in the orc dungeon by using 6
wyrms.
Posted on Mar 2, 2002, the previous patch to this was publish 15 where many overhauls to taming went in.

The next mention I can find was
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.game ... c6121c10d6
Jun 26, 2002 - 3 days post publish 16 wrote:>>>>The problem is with the way the game handles commands to multiple pets,
>>>>rather than the tamer. If the tamer is under attack by, say, 3 elder
>>>>gazers, and has 3 dragons and wants 1 dragon to attack each gazer, they
>>>>simply dont have the time to type out "<fancy name> kill" three times.
>>>>Even with a macro for each pet it takes time which the character may not
>>>>have.


>>> All Kill

>> I thought that didn't work for ages, or at least only commanded the very
>> nearest pet to do it?


>It didn't work for ages, they put it back in.


>Billy

And then they upped the price of NPC hirelings to 8k each because a noob
character could hire a small army with his 1k starting gold and go kill
dragons. Not to mention faction twinks camping moongates with an NPC army.
;-)
Honestly, every seemingly well written and explained post during mid 99 - late 2000 points exactly to the bug Derrick posted about in the OP and the tamer complaining about it "only commanding the nearest or last commanded pet". For a while during 2000, you can find many mentions of there actually being a message on all kill stating "this command doesn't work with all".
<green> grats pink and co. .... the 3 of you f---ing scrubs together can blow up a bard. IMPRESSIVE

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Re: Pet Commands: All <target>

Post by MatronDeWinter »

Seems to me like the "all kill" command is a virtual non-issue. It seems to me that the same thing could be possible (well, not as functional, but still up to par) by spamming name-kill/name-target. There seems to be some sort of throttle preventing this from working as well as I would imagine it though.

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Re: Pet Commands: All <target>

Post by Kaivan »

While there is no patch note regarding the fix associated with all kill, it's my guess that the fix came with the addition of context menus as per this patch on November 30, 2001. It is shortly after this patch that I was able to find the first documentation of players using all kill with any effective results:

February 15, 2002 newsgroup post
Involves hiring like 20 NPC archers, and hanging around the moongates.

Whenever someone in an enemy factions steps through, its "ALL KILL", and
then they are dead in a hail of 20 arrows.

Totally lame, but works almost every time.
It's also possible that the all commands were fixed and re-enabled as a part of publish 15 that had released on January 10th, 2002 (the "all" commands that provided a target had completely been axed with the release of the UO3D expansion in March 01 (source).
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Re: Pet Commands: All <target>

Post by GuardianKnight »

UO3D we were spawning firehorses or whatever they were called. People were taming MASSES of frenzied ostards at the time and using all kill to use kill people. I don't see how they could have axed all kill if it was in high gear throughout the whole time.
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Re: Pet Commands: All <target>

Post by Kaivan »

Frenzied Ostards became a highly effective weapon when pact instinct was introduced in Publish 16, along with control slots. Beyond that, there is little indication of any use of all kill in any effective manner until early 2002 when we have several quotes that directly indicate that it was now doing what players expected it to do: commanding all their pets to kill the selected target at once. If the command was in use prior to early 2002 (by nearly a year if it was indeed used during UO3D), then some indication of its use should exist. As with all things, all kill didn't exist in a black hole where it was not documented.
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Re: Pet Commands: All <target>

Post by SighelmofWyrmgard »

Kaivan wrote:While there is no patch note regarding the fix associated with all kill, it's my guess that the fix came with the addition of context menus as per this patch on November 30, 2001. It is shortly after this patch that I was able to find the first documentation of players using all kill with any effective results:

February 15, 2002 newsgroup post
Involves hiring like 20 NPC archers, and hanging around the moongates.

Whenever someone in an enemy factions steps through, its "ALL KILL", and
then they are dead in a hail of 20 arrows.

Totally lame, but works almost every time.


It's also possible that the all commands were fixed and re-enabled as a part of publish 15 that had released on January 10th, 2002 (the "all" commands that provided a target had completely been axed with the release of the UO3D expansion in March 01 (source).


The Newsgroup post refers to "factions": unless the original source misspoke him/herself, this targets a timeframe post-UOR-release; this type of thing could only be feasible (because of time v. opportunity v. profit) in that era, anyway.

In any event, I encourage all who desire debate on this issue to very-carefully re-read Derrick's OP; all I can say on the specific issue, because I never developed a dedicated tamer in-era, is that pre-era and in-era all the tamers I knew had pets named "a" and "b", and all the posts in the forum described commanding pets to attack individually. That's not exactly smoking-gun, I concede, but I'm sure I'd have seen "all-kill" murderers gating into dungeons back in the day, if all-kill affected more than just the last-commanded pet; this sort of thing never happened.

SS
SighelmofWyrmgard wrote:
uosa44 wrote:For sale, by original owner:
1 Human Brain, never been used, only slightly damaged, still in original packaging.
$1, obo
FTFY.

SS
uosa44 wrote:The inability for this person to respond in such a crazy manner proves my point.

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Re: Pet Commands: All <target>

Post by Hemperor »

There is honestly no greater abundance of information than what is against "All Kill". Topic is almost unnecessary, there are already 10 floating around with dozens of quotes.
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Re: Pet Commands: All <target>

Post by Eaglestaff »

SighelmofWyrmgard wrote:Derrick, you have given me the perfect opportunity to propose an accuracy convention that has hitherto been not considered (or, my bad, has been proposed and rejected before ...?).

I've been thinking about this quite a bit since joining UOSA, while observing "fixes" being applied, and all of the discussion that revolves around era accuracy.

The convention I wish to propose I will call, "thematic accuracy", or "spiritual accuracy": this is simply considering *whatever* in the context of how it was intended to be implemented as a finished, bug/exploit-free feature, in our target era; I do not propose a process of refinement, or tweaking, of any of the associated mechanics, merely an extirpation of identified flaws/bugs/exploits; that OSI either never implemented any fix at all, or indeed applied a fix but only after our target era, is irrelevant in this context.

UO was always an on-going project: numerous features were published in an incomplete and/or flawed/bugged/exploitable form; strictly insisting on mechanical-era-accuracy, regarding certain features that are obviously flawed, is simply 1billion% asinine.

"Thematic Accuracy", I imagine, is entirely the foundation for UOSA selecting Nov '99 as its "true" target date in the first place: this specific time was identified as the "cleanest" of all T2A publishes.
I liked this idea but I think its a bit ahead of its time for this shard. At least for now the super strict accuracy policy is the glue that's holding this thing together; by that I mean it's what's keeping Derrick sane ;) Try waiting a little longer until Derrick and co start getting closer to completing their epic saga of "Total utter and complete accuracy" before you start flirting with the shard's constitution from a more visionary standpoint. My personal feeling is that "total utter and complete era accuracy" will be achieved here on UOSA in direct conjunction with the cosmic shift of the 2012 prophecy and when that happens the planets will align, there will be a mass catacalysm, and in the end a new paradigm will be opened to us. :o I think I just had an orgasm, yes I did.

That being said, you might dare open a thread somewhere for a more prophesizing developmental discussion. Doing so in this board is sort of a blasphemy ;)

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Re: Pet Commands: All <target>

Post by Faust »

At least my information will not be lost unlike in the other billion threads since this thread is sticky...

Jun 29, 1999 - Pre:UOR - http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.computer.ultima.online/browse_thread/thread/f5fa6d65eacfd51a/0f8a15005a5dd6f9?lnk=gst&q=%22all+kill%22%2B1999#0f8a15005a5dd6f9 wrote: Have you noticed that it doesn't work with all commands? I have been giving commands like "All kill" and I know the pets are tamed hard, but only one will respond.

The all follow seems to work right though.
February 4, 2000 - Pre:UOR - http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.computer.ultima.online/browse_thread/thread/c66df3280967a0c5/255185c66cce0456?lnk=gst&q=%22all+kill%22%2Bbroken#255185c66cce0456 wrote: My whole instruction queue gets munged.
Typical exchange:
me "all guard" - target myself only pets and yourself can be guarded
me "all follow me" - 'me guarded'
me "all follow me"
me "all kill" - nothing
me "all follow me" - get attacked.
April 10, 2000 - Pre:UOR - http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.computer.ultima.online/browse_thread/thread/151d404b09a8df9e/73325b202b05bc5c?lnk=gst&q=all%2Bkill%2Bbroke#73325b202b05bc5c wrote: I will tell you there is a bug with the 'all kill' command, it only works on one pet no matter how many pets you have. You could have a 1000 dragons and give an all kill command and only one responds.

It is that simple, tame two dogs, give the all kill command on a rabbit, see how many attack.

I can accept a certain level of ignorance, I can accept a certain level of disagreement. I draw the line when something is a demonstrable as checking out the all kill command being broken that can be done in 2 minutes is ignored so people can say the sky is falling. All guard does work, but anyone that is guarded has that appearing over their head.
April 30, 2000 - UOR - http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.computer.ultima.online/browse_thread/thread/bd4ef37ce556658c/93e51f7192a5a3d3?lnk=gst&q=%22all+kill%22%2Bbroken#93e51f7192a5a3d3 wrote: Another off hand comment, you now get a message when you use the "all kill" command that it doesn't work. I sit here puzzled, it never had worked, so is
this an admission that it is broken or OSI taking credit for a bug as a feature that avoids an exploit?

Reply: I believe the comment is something about "The 'all' option cannot be used with a targeting command" (such as kill or attack) But it does make the closest pet perform the command...

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Re: Pet Commands: All <target>

Post by Reena Dae »

Derrick wrote:Please note the usage of the work "fixed". This was not the removal of a desired feature this was a bug that was not at all desirable. I can probably replicate this bug, but i don't know if it's something that calls for a lot of urgency.
I am the author of the Taming Archive. I started playing after T2A, roughly May/June 1999 and I got my GM Animal Taming late summer/early fall. The "all kill [target]" worked until it was disabled to fix the bug, so it was part of T2A for the time period you are looking to reproduce. It worked in the buggy fashion for T2A, was disabled after UO:R, and later re-enabled but only a single pet would follow the order.

If there's any other taming related questions relating to the time period, I can probably answer them or at least find the information in some of my archived files if I don't remember.
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Re: Pet Commands: All <target>

Post by tekai »

oh my god wow please don't be a troll!
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Re: Pet Commands: All <target>

Post by GuardianKnight »

Reena Dae wrote:
Derrick wrote:Please note the usage of the work "fixed". This was not the removal of a desired feature this was a bug that was not at all desirable. I can probably replicate this bug, but i don't know if it's something that calls for a lot of urgency.
I am the author of the Taming Archive. I started playing after T2A, roughly May/June 1999 and I got my GM Animal Taming late summer/early fall. The "all kill [target]" worked until it was disabled to fix the bug, so it was part of T2A for the time period you are looking to reproduce. It worked in the buggy fashion for T2A, was disabled after UO:R, and later re-enabled but only a single pet would follow the order.

If there's any other taming related questions relating to the time period, I can probably answer them or at least find the information in some of my archived files if I don't remember.

If you could prove that you are who you say you are, i believe someone has offered 2 castle deeds if this gets the taming fixed here. There's a whole thread on it.

http://forum.uosecondage.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=21438
Last edited by GuardianKnight on Sun Aug 15, 2010 6:46 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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