I have two situations where the octave of a player instrument (like the harp) does not get updated in the client.
1. When a client enters the zone. I’ve had players tell me that my instrument was in the wrong octave when trying to play with them. After changing the octave twice (once up and once down) this seems to go away. I think that the instrument octave is not sent to the client when a player enters the map.
2. Sitting down while instrument is equipped. If i do /sit while my instrument is equipped and stand back up again it seems to forget what octave it was in and revert to the default.
1. There’s is actually no possible way ever to solve this. I’ll do my best to explain. For the audio script portion of the data, the chunk of data which holds all the music notes, and all the state-management of the instruments for things like octave switching, this data is entirely client-side. It only ever updates when it gets instructions from the server to do so. Those instructions come from pressing buttons on your skillbar and equipping/unequipping the instrument item. So if there’s no client-to-server interaction when it comes to an audio script that is loaded, and all the server is doing is sending state-based instructions down to the client-side audio scripts, there is in fact no persistent data being saved between maps. So if someone loads into a map after you have previously equipped your instrument and switched away from the default loaded octave, then they’re going to load in with the default parameters of your instrument. The workaround for this is for you to unequip and re-equip the instrument and that’ll update everyone who is presently in the map to a synchronous state (with exception to user-define drum loops on the Frame Drum, this issue implies that there is no way to persistently save that data between any map transitions).
2. I tried reproducing this issue multiple times on our development builds and couldn’t get the bug to manifest whatsoever. Not sure what would cause that, using emotes doesn’t seem to reset the audio script in any way. Are you sure that’s all you had to do to get it to revert to the default? In any case if that ever happens, the simple workaround is to just unequip and re-equip and all will be made right again.
It seems like there is a possible way to solve it, which would be to add some extra bits to be sent and received between the client and server which holds the octave information so it wouldn’t matter if they were in sync at the time they show up on the map. Which would of course require some recoding of the client and server code. And if that were to happen, the UI team which was supposed to be doing an overhaul (weren’t they?) could improve the instrument interface to not use the 0-9 skillbar and actually allow us to map more keys (that would come into play whenever an instrument is equipped) to allow us to play a full scale with all the half-steps included instead of a fixed scale. If people could play anything they wanted without having to do a kittenamamie workaround to fit a song to a particular instrument’s scale, it might even boost the popularity of the gem sales of the instruments. Heck maybe even have a folder in the game client we can drop scripts of a particular format that can be selected from a menu without having to load up autohotkey or the like to run a music script would be awesome.
That and the forum’s censor code could use a touch-up. The word means ridiculous or silly and the first portion of the word which was censored has nothing to do with the slang word for the male genitalia.
The easiest way I was able to reproduce the emote octave bug was to equip a harp, change the octave, then /sit and finally break the sit by moving. The notes subsequently played would sound like the middle octave instead of the one I had selected.
As for part 1 I would think you can attach an octave value to each note skill so you don’t have to tell other clients what octave your instrument is in.
Like for harp: instead of sending Note1 you send Note1-1 when you’re in the low octave, Note1-2 in mid, and Note1-3 in high. The client assembles the whole message and the server no longer has to manage the octave.
An edit: I tried the sit bug a moment ago and i can’t get it to happen. I remember though sitting for a while listening to other guildies playing music though the last time it happened.
