UO Second Age

Part 1: Timber Wolf vs. Ogre
Shortly after I joined UOSA, a couple of months ago, something odd happened:

My newb with 57ish Magery and 60-something Int (unsurprisingly) failed to drop an Ogre with a mana-dump: with the Ogre poisoned @ c. 50% Hits, I had to break contact, or get flattened; "out of nowhere" a wolf bee-lines towards us with a "Grrrrr-RRR-rrr" and I think, "Oh drat, I don't need a dire wolf too ..."

It wasn't a dire wolf: it was a timber wolf, and it was attacking the Ogre, not me; with its timely assistance, and "tanking" intervention, I was able to regenerate enough mana to help the wolf kill-off the Ogre.

Enlightened, I recalled that almost the exact-same thing had happened to me, once, on Chesapeake, back in the summer of '98: a "wild" timber wolf inexplicably just decided to join in attacking an Ogre my Fighter/Miner/Smith was trying to kill (back then, I also made the same initial assumption that a dire wolf was glomming onto me).

Both instances involved, specifically, an Ogre and a wild timber wolf (not grey wolf, or whatever wolf); I have no idea if either wolf had formerly been someone's pet, but certainly there was nothing to indicate that it had ("a timber wolf"); in '98 I mentioned the incident to a RL friend who also played UO, and this person confirmed either witnessing, or hearing-of, something similar (can't remember precisely what my friend said ...), again involving Ogres and timber wolves specifically.

We ended up chalking the episode up to legacy code from OSI's abandoned "Artificial Life" project. Certainly, I played "regular" UO for another 1.5+ years and never witnessed a repeat occurrence.

Part 2: UOSA and the kamikaze Brown Bear

Okay, this started this past Monday, with repeat occurrences on Tuesday.

Monday: I had a character killing a troll; all of a sudden, a brown bear charged into the troll and started attacking it; after we killed the troll, the bear wandered off; "that was weird, but likely more legacy code from Artificial Life ... Hey, maybe I might PM Derrick ..." (I never did)

Tuesday: same area, so maybe same bear ... my Dexxer had picked-up a camp-train of 4 orcs and an orc captain/lord, and was keeping distance while poison + archery softened the whole gang up enough to finish-off ... not even thinking about it, I inadvertantly pulled the train to an area close to the spot of Monday's troll-bear episode ... in comes kamikaze bear! I helped the bear stay alive (no Vet on that character, but I used GHeals, and Reactive Armor, lol) and we both killed off the orcs. Thanks, bear, you are my bestest buddy! Afterwards the bear wandered off.

I escorted the kidnappee back to wherever and returned to the area, and started pulling ettins, ogres, trolls, ratmen, whatever into the bear zone: whatever was aggroed onto me, the bear would charge in and attack. There were other "a brown bear"s wandering around, but none of them emulated this bizarre behaviour; as soon as I realized this, I realized that kamikaze bear didn't wander around at all: when he wasn't charging out to attack whatever I'd brought into range (or returning after whatever had been killed), he stayed in an absolutely fixed location.

I haven't played today, but I intend to look-in on my buddy, "kamikaze bear"; I hope he's still around (maybe he would make a good tame, after all this fighting?).

Does anyone have any insights; is Derrick playing "fooligans" with us (or awakened some weird legacy code with the last patch)? Have other players witnessed anything similar?

I am, indeed, most curious.

SS

the animals have previously been tamed by someone and gone wild. these animals/creatures are still "inclined to good", and will attack monsters nearby. it's the same way it worked on osi

it shouldn't "stay in a fixed location", though, that's a current bug with AI. it should just look and act like a normal bear except for agroing monsters

nightshark wrote:the animals have previously been tamed by someone and gone wild. these animals/creatures are still "inclined to good", and will attack monsters nearby. it's the same way it worked on osi

it shouldn't "stay in a fixed location", though, that's a current bug with AI. it should just look and act like a normal bear except for agroing monsters

Such a rational answer, come on nightshark let him have his dream.

If you read the original Playguide you'll know that NPCs all have aversions and things that draw their attraction. On top of this, certain NPCs have territorial inclinations and will actually attack others who try to settle in their neck of the woods. I doubt this was ever changed and even it was, it probably wasn't mentioned anywhere.

Blackbeard wrote:If you read the original Playguide you'll know that NPCs all have aversions and things that draw their attraction. On top of this, certain NPCs have territorial inclinations and will actually attack others who try to settle in their neck of the woods. I doubt this was ever changed and even it was, it probably wasn't mentioned anywhere.

Just read Raph Koster's blog on this :
http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/04/uo ... em-part-2/

Raph Koster wrote:The last big element, however, was that there were a fair amount of team members who saw the whole system as a boondoggle, and not worth pursuing. Alas, one of them also ended up in charge of implementing it in beta. By beta time, systems that used to work in alpha no longer did.

that system would of been so awesome it's a shame it was never implemented

Alright, so, say you have some light spawn around your house that is bothering you, for whatever reason. Could you tame 10 grizzlies, release them in a circle around the pad, and expect them to stay there indefinitely and kill any orc or ratman that wandered onto the screen?

hectorc2w wrote:that system would of been so awesome it's a shame it was never implemented

awesome indeed in theory

easily abusable in practice

The bear and timber wolf were really a bored GM in disguise. Hah

Hicha wrote:The bear and timber wolf were really a bored GM in disguise. Hah

Wrong, I was polymorphed.

The stuff Raph Koster describes is what I was alluding to when I mentioned the Artificial Life engine.

I figured kamikaze bear for a former tame, but I would think I should have seen this sort of thing more often ...

I do not believe this is the case with the Timber Wolf episodes: these critters behaved entirely normally, except when a -50%Hits Ogre was in range; both wolves were in close proximity to the fights at the start, but neither attacked until after the ogre dropped below half-hits; I fought and killed other stuff nearby, and they ignored it ...

Raph mentions a "hunger"+"bite" mechanism: any of us with Animal Lore who's ever bothered to check know that all wild animals in Britannia start getting hungry as soon as they spawn, but never eat anything: most wildlife in Britannia is suspended in a state of perpetual starvation ... whether "hunger" or "hate", maybe 50%Hits is when an Ogre becomes an acceptable "bite" for a Timber Wolf.

This is assuming some survival of the Artificial Life (or a related hate/rivalry-based system) scripts are still available, and being accessed; perhaps only certain timber wolves spawn, possessing this tendency (which would be a glitch: they spawn with their "off" switch turned "on").

Ah, well, I was entertained by the reminiscences. Years ago I was disappointed that the Artificial Life project would prove too cumbersome and resource-intensive to implement.

SS

Timber wolves are prime taming targets, since they have a low skill requirement to attempt to tame, but still give taming gains up to 60+ (when you head over to ice island).

So either they were pre-tames, or Derrick in his spare time, for free, programmed a complex artificial intelligence system that an entire team of designers - who got paid - decided was too complicated to do, then ninja-patched it into the shard in order to purposefully break the biggest rule we have here (accuracy).

Really, could be either one.

Mike123, woah, woah, woah ...

Derrick didn't compose Britannia from vintage-era screenshots, crib designer's notes to compose authentic combat algorithms, or otherwise entirely-independently-from-scratch program the UOSA game server to interact with the UO client in T2A-fashion ...

He had source material; he, himself has referred to the AI, in particular, as being extraordinarily complex; it's not a great stretch to propose that the AI source-material might yet contain legacy code from projects that OSI had abandoned.

In any event, any firm resolution is not likely to become available; these episodes merely piqued my curiosity.

SS

EDIT:

P.S. I'll refer you to the Raph Koster blog cited above: OSI started the project, observed bizarre results, messed with it a bit, but eventually decided to abandon the feature; I know enough about programming to know that they did not, subsequently, go through every line of code in the entire AI to hunt-down-and-kill everything associated with Artificial Life ...

SS