Method to HP -neg maddness!

[anmorphic]

As I read through the forums here I recall seeing that Verant no longer sends HP update packets to the clients, but rather updates to the HP bar only. Hopefully I didn't miss a thread already discussing this, and if I did forgive me.
That got me thinking, how does the client know how much to increase or decrease the HP bar?
Has anyone been able to successfully sniff the EQ server packets for the HP bar updates and determine a method to the madness? I'm assuming it must be some algorithm that the clients understand in order to translate the movement correctly (no more HP bouncing up and down as a result). Ideas or suggestions?



-Morph
"SEQ sucked me into the world of Unix/Linux, thanks to developers, as a result, windoze days have never looked so gray"

[Cryonic]

Only NPCs send a percent. PCs still show the total numeric amount. So when the client is told the NPC is down 2 it moves the bar down by 2%, etc.... When it is told that a PC is down by 50 it calculates that by doing (Current - damage)/Total when full and redraw the bar, or does damage/Total, shift bar that much %.

[RSB]

Sorry Cryonic but your description is a bit hard to read.

For NPC's the number of hps is NEVER sent any more. Now it is a value that equates the the current percentage of hp's. (normally 0 to 100, but if you haven't got a update on their hps yet then it sits unintialised.
For Players it is their actual HPs

This is to let EQ now have mobs with more than 32k hp but not increase the packet size.

Their is no accurate way of determining the actual amount of hp a mob has. If you solo you can guess by blasting once, or hitting a bunch then backing of. Checking how much dmg you did then figure out with the percentage change what its hp is about.