Task System (preliminary work)

[Bulle]

I think you can forget your worries about scanning 40 mob IDs in a list, as long as everything is already in memory : our regular CPUs do that in no time. Doing a binary search for that small a number is not worth it. From 500 IDs on OK may be... Or may be from 5000... You have to profile that to be sure.

What matters is that you read the ID list only very rarely from the database. DB queries cost. If it is all loaded in one shot at startup, then it is not a concern. Just make sure you do not issue one DB query per activity, as it would be a killer. For example, issue one query to load all activities at once, then one query to load all dependent mob IDs at once, then do any activity-dispatching (list creation and populating) in-memory. If you add proper "ORDER BY" sections to your queries you can even scan your activity list and your mob ID list in parallel, making it a very efficient process.

[Derision]

I've been busy with work this week and not had as much time as I would have liked to work on this, but today I figured out the Titanium OPcode to flag a task as complete (which is different from 6.2) and make it display the green 'Task Completed' message (I think I have found the struct values to make it display 'Task Failed', but I haven't got around to testing that yet.



The more astute amongst you will note that the 'Children of the Fay' task does not finish in Kurn's tower, however I used a bit of 'artistic license' is setting the task goals during development.

There is still quite a bit left to do, but the system is now functional end-to-end for tasks with talk/kill and loot activities. Hopefully I will get a lot more done over the weekend.

[trevius]

That is so awesome! I am currently working on a custom zone that will use qglobals to track kills similar to tasks. But, it would certainly be cool to use the real task system for it instead!

[Derision]

I've started to document how the system works on the Wiki, the overview page links to the pages I've written so far:

http://www.eqemulator.net/wiki/wikka...SystemOverview

There are still some Perl interfaces to be written, and a few tweaks to the tables, code cleanup and testing (robustness against bad data in the tables, discovering the limits on the number of active tasks, task selector entries, completed tasks, etc, that I can send to the client without it crashing) before it will be ready for an alpha release.

[Andrew80k]

Dude! Can't wait... I love seeing stuff like this getting done in the emu.