What is the deal with Highpass
 

Of and on for years now I have had complaints about Highpass and looping. Many seem to think it is overlapping zone lines, I am thinking it is not. I have had people say this has happened from Karana and Highkeep. I can never seem to duplicate the issue, no matter how many times I have tried. I had another complaint about it today but when I tried it, at least 10 different times it would not do it for me. I was hoping it was possibly hitting the zoneline at a different location could be causing it, but I have yet to see it myself. I am nearly positive all complaints have been when people are using Underfoot.

If it were the zone line I would think it would be easily duplicated.

If I remember correctly (when I had the same issue), the highpass zone is hard coded. You have to be using the new one (highpasshold) with the newer clients. Either way, it should be showing up in your logs as unsolicited zone requests.

That's just from memory, so I could be off a little.

Yeah I am going to turn on more debugging in my source after this. I will be blowing away all of those zone lines tonight to make sure they do not overlap. I saw a post on PEQ about a possible overlap. If I could for once make my own client do it, that would make diagnosing it so much simpler.

What is really strange is it appears the actual zone line is hard coded? I could move the zone line between East Karana and HighPassHold anywhere I wanted but the zone point always seemed to want to stay at a particular point. I am thinking this could be the entire issue. And yes, I did finally get caught in a loop and the logs were showing an unsolicited zone request.

There are a couple places they did that, but yeah, that's what I found too. I ended up switching to the new highpass and just calling it a day.

I think I solved the problem, but not in a desirable way. I will not argue as long as it fixes the problems for the players and consistently works.

I toyed with the idea of putting an invisible porter trigger nearby. Is that what you did?

Yep!!

Now this is the strange thing that makes me think there is something really screwed up with that zone. If I placed the invisible NPC way toward the back of the the zone, he would quit working. I moved him inward of the zone and he starts working, moved him back and it quit again. But now that everything is placed I really hope this ends the constant "I am in a zoning loop"

I do think I've heard people who work with the client-side zone files say there are occasionally zoning lines set in the zone geometry definitions. I wouldn't be surprised if there were also tight min/max x/y/z coordinates for NPC processing plugged in occasionally for performance optimization on the ollllllld computers that used to run EQ.

Well that NPC would not respond to proximity checks before I moved him, it was very strange.

Do you have all three files in your map folder on the server?
highpass.wrt
highpass.path
highpasshold.map

Yes /10chars

there is a zone_points table and there is/was a 'number' field tied directly to the zone point id. You couldn't change these numbers around because the client had an array of zone points hardcoded. I imagine the zone points added later on they either used the existing zone points or added new #'s in.

http://wiki.eqemulator.org/p?zone_points

I had read the same in the wiki when doing this. I used the original sequence numbers PeqTgc had used. I am nearly positive this is going work well, time will tell, and lots of testing.

An update on this...

The one place I did not zone a player via quest, and just used normal zone lines it happened again today. I will replace those with quest npc's too. But this was in the log. I wanted to just give some more information on it, in case someone else runs into this.