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Got a message over the weekend from a buddy telling me about a problem he had seen with existing HideNPeek versions. They will indeed leak internally and eventually negatively affect the server. This update fixes that as well as adding a visual mode to prevent it ever happening in the future with this mod or any other that polls the pawn list. More on that in a second.

What is HideNPeek? Well, we've all played monster servers where the monsters seem to blink in and out of sight even though they are still there. This is caused by the monsters origin point (think of it as center mass) is not in direct line of sight to you as a player. This causes the engine to think you cannot see the monster and so it stops visually rendering it to you. The effect of this is that monsters standing behind a low wall or partially obscured by a pillar or block (or behind a glass panel) can become 'invisible' until you or they move back into full sight.

HideNPeek addresses that by forcing the monsters to become relevant to you, preventing them from becoming invisible. There's a trade-off though in that doing this will affect your server bandwidth. Use with caution.

Improvements:
I went to a three pass system instead of the single pass I was using before. The mod now attempts to fix monsters who are actively engaging the players over monsters who are just sitting dormant and waiting. Over time this will favor the monsters you need fixed and should be a better experience.

Also I added a visual testing mode. Enabling this will cause any monsters it adjusts to become pink and easily identifiable. This mode is only for testing and is not to be used for normal server operation. It's only purpose is to provide feedback to you as a server admin so you can see how it is working on a particular map or with increased settings. It looks like this:


This mode gives instant feedback as to which monsters are fixed and how many of them are done. Now if there is a leak in the code you will know. Feel free to use this mode code in your mod to check your adjustments as they are being made. It's very handy. I should have done this years ago.

Mod and source: readme included, as always feel free to rip the code into your server controller (or whatever). I commented the code in case you want to see how it works.

Going back to sleep now you beautiful nerds. Have fun.

-Kel

Kelly strikes again.

I wasn't really looking to do anything but this was a rather nasty legacy issue with my old code. Eventually it will leak and convert all of the monsters in a map to relevant even if you limit the number. If any of you guys use older HideNPeek versions you ought to discard them and remove them from any posted downloads you host. I probably caused some server crashes on big maps with high monster counts. That really bothers me too, dammit. I'm sorry for that.

This new one will fix any problems though so just update. Your old settings are good, just bring the count forward to this mod.

HideNPeek was mostly popular used for sniper servers as well.

Good to know this one will be for MH version, but shouldn't it rather limit the visibility of the monster only to the client, so the client won't be lagged and such?

Quick reminder that this is handled by default in XC_Engine servers.

1) As always, nice to see you back after you've informed us all you were leaving forever.
2) I'm sensing a pink elephant joke here... if by "elephant" I can say "Unreal Monsters".

A note:
I'm using a tool configurable set in default for Max 50 creatures at time around hunters. However, I intend to remove it for a simple reason: by playing regularly MH you already know the map and I'm not sure if you need these as long as you know even in sleep where are those monsters. It loads bandwidth and that's why I think I'll get rid of it - relevance for pawn is a good thing recommended the mostly in camper sniper servers, but for a high loaded game like MH, in maps like Crescendo this will not be that healthy and neither other similar maps. For a very selected configuration (decent loaded maps) it might be welcomed I repeat by New Players not regulars which knows each monster reaction.

Higor wrote:Quick reminder that this is handled by default in XC_Engine servers.

Yes. & not on server that isn't running XC_Engine.

EvilGrins wrote:1) As always, nice to see you back after you've informed us all you were leaving forever.

For sure relax, It's not like I'm scheduling a playdate. Brooze showed me that something I released could cause server crashing or lagging. You know how I feel about that so it wasn't something I could just ignore and so I fixed it.

Chamberly wrote: shouldn't it rather limit the visibility of the monster only to the client, so the client won't be lagged and such?

There's no way to do this without impacting the bandwidth of the server. While it's true that the monster is drawn only on the client, it falls on the server to provide the constant updates of the monster's position, movement, etc. That's why we force the monsters to be relevant, so the server will send those updates and not skip them because there are no players in sight.

If we were replicating something more static then yeah it could be cheated some but apart from players the scripted pawns require some of the most constant updating because they are the most active with the least predictable behavior.

JackGriffin wrote:It's not like I'm scheduling a playdate

No playdate?

EvilGrins wrote: No playdate?

No. Now go play outside, it's summertime. The skybox is incredible and it's always lag-free HD graphics.
.....No respawn though, so do take care.

JackGriffin wrote:Now go play outside, it's summertime. The skybox is incredible and it's always lag-free HD graphics.

NEW VERSION AVAILABLE!

HideNPeekMHv4 can cause some issues with limited ut channels in some maps, so the server shows a "lag effect" and new players can't join it. The reason is some missing source code so that HideNPeekMHv4 uses every time interval additional one or more of the free channels and this can sums up to several hundreds. In maps that uses for itself nearly 800-900 channels the end of 1024 channels is reached soon and the map is unplayable. This can happen even if the match has not begun. Hopefully fixed this now

Download here:

For sure update to this version, Aldy pointed out a real oversight on my part and fixed it. My apologies if you used this mod and it caused problems.