UNSAFE HOUSE FIX

[Kaivan]

There's some misinformation and question I'd like to cover from this post.

There was NO program in T2A days which allowed you to target the ground under a house.
Its that simple.
It doesn't matter if the bug was in the game or not because there was NO method available to exploit it.

There were two legitimate ways that you could perform this on OSI servers. The first was simply using circle of transparency, which allowed you to target the tiles under a house. The second was using the target relative location function that was implemented into UOAssist on September 2, 1999, after it became a UO Pro program in July 1999.

Back when T2A came out there was a bug where you could get into Green Acres ... (its North of T2A)

The GMs blocked it off in game on every shard.
Should we make travel to Green Acres possible here?

If the bug was fixed, or travel to Green Acres was prevented on all servers, then there is little reason to replicate the bug here on UOSA, especially if this was done before our cutoff date (although, we don't even know how it might have been done, thus we have no way to replicate it).

Back in T2A days there was a program called UOEXTREME...
It allowed you to dupe items and set stats on your player as well as items.
(Keeper used it to dupe himself 1,000,000 diamonds which GoD used to finance all their pking)
(Another guy on Great Lakes hacked himsef a bow which did so much damage it would 1 shot anyone even in FULL PLATE.
Should we make THAT possible just because it existed for a few months?

This is simply not true. Setting item stats, and creating items was all done through commands that were serve side exclusive. This prevented any program such as UOE from ever performing this.

Anyone who says this should be in the game...
Just answer me this...
Show me proof that it EXISTED on OSI ... EVER.
You cant ...

Certainly.

First, we have a post from January 1998 where a player details how to teleport into a castle courtyard:

Now this ONLY works for castles.

Ok, there is one spot outside of the castle that will allow line of sight so
that you can teleport into the courtyard. Finding this spot it the only hard
part. My best advice is to go somewhat SW from the door until there are only
1-2 tiles of courtyard in the very top right corner of the screen. Try a few
times, once you get the spot down, it will be worth all the trying.

Oh yeah, and OSI, suck my ass. Cancel my account, I don't care, I haven't
played in weeks, you'd be doing me a favor. If anybody else has bugs or
cheats but don't wanna get banned, email me and tell me the cheat/bug, I'll
be happy to post it.

The Ex-Dread Lord Red Knight

From the description of the post, it is clear that the player is teleporting from outside to inside the castle courtyard, with the house doors near the top of their screen, allowing them to teleport in as if the walls do not exist. This behavior is exactly the same type of behavior seen when casting summons into a house on UOSA. This shows that this was possible to do in early 1998, indicating some odd behavior with line of sight.

Fast forward to the time of the demo in May of 1998, and this exact same behavior is found in the demo, although it is no longer possible to teleport into a castle courtyard due to changes to the teleport spell itself. Further investigations reveal that it is possible to target under a house, and not simply past the walls of a castle.

Finally, we look at current day (as of August 2012) OSI servers. On current day servers, the exact same behavior is still seen, identical to the behavior found in the demo, teleport and everything.

From this, we can tell that the mechanic behaves identically in all circumstances, which shows that in early 1998, this behavior was known in some capacity. However, this is not all there is to this particular issue...

A further investigation into this issue shows that this particular behavior is attributed to a flag that is missing from one of the tiles in game. This tile, which is used to build the foundation of certain types of houses, allows players to see past the object for the purposes of targeting magic spells, due to this missing flag. This fact gives us a trail to follow using the client, which had its tile data kept consistent with the tile data on the server. If the client tile data was ever changed, it would tell us whether this issue was ever fixed. On all of the installation CDs (original, first T2A release, second T2A release, UOR, LBR, AoS and Mondain), the necessary flag for this particular tile is missing. This means that the issue was never rectified within OSI's own tile data, which is a consistent with the behavior seen on the live servers.

Ultimately, we cannot tell whether this was intentional or not, but we can say with a high degree of certainty that this was never changed. All evidence that we have been able to gather points to this as still operating in this manner.