Not sure if bug or intended (regaining monster stamina)

[Cryolite]

One of my tribe mates told me:

"If your dino runs out of stamina, dismount, hit it 5-6 times and mount, it will have instantly full stamina"

By logic it doesn't make any sense for me, how "hurting" your own tame regane his own stamina. Sounds for me like a bug/glitch.

Could someone give me some more information, including if this action is treated as "bug/glitch abusing".

I personally don't want to do this without confirmation how this works. For me it sounds like above - abusing some thing ending up as bannable offence.

If this is actually intended, could someone give me wiki page or dev message with detailed explanation for this mechanic

[FieryCat122]

Your mount regains insane stamina when you dismount regardless if you hit it or not, it's not a bug. Hitting it does nothing, it just gives it time to regain stam before you remount it

[Pipinghot]

On 11/27/2020 at 10:47 PM, Cryolite said:

One of my tribe mates told me:

"If your dino runs out of stamina, dismount, hit it 5-6 times and mount, it will have instantly full stamina"

Your tribe mate is just misinformed.

Next time you run out of stamina look in the inventory of your mount and count the seconds while they rebuild their stamina. If you think about it, the amount of time it takes them to regain stamina is about the same amount of time it takes to dismount, punch them 5-6 times and then remount.

Your tribe mate is mixing cause and effect. It's true that the mount regains stamina while he's punching it, but the punching is not what's causing it to regain stamina, that would happen in the same amount of time even without the punching.

 

[invincibleqc]

6 minutes ago, Pipinghot said:

Your tribe mate is just misinformed.

Next time you run out of stamina look in the inventory of your mount and count the seconds while they rebuild their stamina. If you think about it, the amount of time it takes them to regain stamina is about the same amount of time it takes to dismount, punch them 5-6 times and then remount.

Your tribe mate is mixing cause and effect. It's true that the mount regains stamina while he's punching it, but the punching is not what's causing it to regain stamina, that would happen in the same amount of time even without the punching.

While this is true punching your tames will not make them regenerate stamina faster, it will accelerate the interval at which you see it. Basically, when you dismount your creature, it goes into "idling" state and thinks less frequently (especially on high populated/poor performing servers). When you punch it, it goes out of idling and is replicated (updated to clients) right away giving you the feel that punching it was directly affecting its stamina. For example, if idling creatures think every 3 seconds and that they regenerate a total of 100 stamina points during that time, punching it every second would visually add 33 stamina every times although not doing so would have the exact same effect but would only update once, etc.

[Penguin73]

I think your friends are hiding in the bushes, watching you to see if you will actually do it. LMAO.  That is funny.

[d1nk]

18 hours ago, invincibleqc said:

While this is true punching your tames will not make them regenerate stamina faster, it will accelerate the interval at which you see it. Basically, when you dismount your creature, it goes into "idling" state and thinks less frequently (especially on high populated/poor performing servers). When you punch it, it goes out of idling and is replicated (updated to clients) right away giving you the feel that punching it was directly affecting its stamina. For example, if idling creatures think every 3 seconds and that they regenerate a total of 100 stamina points during that time, punching it every second would visually add 33 stamina every times although not doing so would have the exact same effect but would only update once, etc.

You're the only way I find out about actual mechanics. Where do you find this info? Or is it all just accumulated over the years?

[Cryolite]

22 hours ago, invincibleqc said:

While this is true punching your tames will not make them regenerate stamina faster, it will accelerate the interval at which you see it. Basically, when you dismount your creature, it goes into "idling" state and thinks less frequently (especially on high populated/poor performing servers). When you punch it, it goes out of idling and is replicated (updated to clients) right away giving you the feel that punching it was directly affecting its stamina. For example, if idling creatures think every 3 seconds and that they regenerate a total of 100 stamina points during that time, punching it every second would visually add 33 stamina every times although not doing so would have the exact same effect but would only update once, etc.

Thanks a lot for detailed explanation. 

[Pipinghot]

On 11/29/2020 at 7:53 PM, invincibleqc said:

While this is true punching your tames will not make them regenerate stamina faster, it will accelerate the interval at which you see it. Basically, when you dismount your creature, it goes into "idling" state and thinks less frequently (especially on high populated/poor performing servers). When you punch it, it goes out of idling and is replicated (updated to clients) right away giving you the feel that punching it was directly affecting its stamina. For example, if idling creatures think every 3 seconds and that they regenerate a total of 100 stamina points during that time, punching it every second would visually add 33 stamina every times although not doing so would have the exact same effect but would only update once, etc.

Your answer made me quite curious, so I sat down and did some nitty-gritty testing to see what would happen (both in real terms of the underlying time and in terms of the visual display of the information on the screen).

Unless I'm misunderstanding you in some way, you can get the same result simply by staying mounted and opening the inventory of your mount to watch the stamina bar. For that matter, based on my results below, if you watch the main screen really closely it looks like even the main screen stamina bar shows the same results as the inventory stamina bar, it's just harder to tell because the main screen stamina bar is small, you need to zoom in on the bar to do a good job of watching it.

 

What I tested for was to compare the behavior of the game server/client with three different methods and these were my results (I did each test 4 times because I'm manually counting the seconds, and I wanted to reduce the margin of error). I spawned in a Giga (Level 225 when spawned in) then granted it XP to add all levels of Stamina. My test giga ended up with 766.3 stamina.

(Note: For anyone who doesn't want to read the details of my testing, you can skip to the "Test Summary" and "Conclusion" at the bottom.

 

1) Sprinted until the giga ran out of stamina, held up a magnifying glass to my screen to watch the stamina bar symbol on the main screen. (A real magnifying glass to look at my screen, not the magnifying glass in the game).

--- Looks like ~33 "ticks" visible on the screen until stamina was full (I counted from 30-36 in my four tests). Sometimes a tick will fill more than 1 row of pixels/dots on the screen which makes it a little hard to follow, but I think 33 is a safe average.

--- Looks like ~20 seconds until the stamina is full.

 

2) Sprinted until the giga ran out of stamina, then while mounted looked into the giga's inventory to watch the stamina bar fill up.

--- Looks like ~33 "ticks" visible until the stamina is full (varied from 31-34). Slightly different individual results from the first test, but the same average.

--- Looks like ~20 seconds until the stamina is full (same results as watching stamina bar on main screen).

 

3) Based on these two tests it looks like the giga recovers full stamina in ~20 seconds. Based on that number I did this final test at 5, 10 & 15 second intervals to see how the stamina recovery compared to the previous two test.

Sprinted until the giga ran out of stamina, then dismounted and started punching it while counting down the time, then looked into the inventory to see how far the stamina bar had recovered.

As you might imagine, this test was harder to get "just right" because I was manually counting while punching, it's hard not to speed up or slow down when counting, especially the 10 & 15 seconds. It takes some discipline so the individual tests had a fairly wide range of results. To help make up for this factor I did 5 tests for each interval and have listed all 5 results below.

a) Punched for 5 seconds, looked into the giga's inventory to see the exact amount of stamina recovered.

175, 185, 200, 179, 215 - average 190.8 stamina recovered. (190.8/766.3 = 24.9% recovered)

b) Punched for 10 seconds, looked into the giga's inventory to see the exact amount of stamina recovered.

388, 386, 380, 350, 347 - average of 370.2 stamina recovered. (370.2/766.3 = 48.3% recovered)

c) Punched for 15 seconds, looked into the giga's inventory to see the exact amount of stamina recovered.

579, 515, 539, 585, 558 - average of 555.2 stamina recovered. (555.2/766.3 = 72.4% recovered.

 

The numbers for these three sets of test are not precisely 25/50/75%, but they're close enough to demonstrate the concept that if you're watching very closely there is no difference between punching and not punching. I strongly suspect that the reason my averages were a little lower than 25/50/75 is that my manual counting of seconds is a little fast, I guess this is why I never became a drummer.

 

Test summary:

What I found is that it doesn't matter if you stay mounted and watch the main screen, stay mounted and watch the stam bar in the dino's inventory, or dismount and start punching, no matter which method you use it takes about 20 seconds to recover stamina and the visual display of stamina recovery is very much the same.

 

Note: The one caveat to my testing is that I did it on a Local/Host game, which means there is 0 latency between my screen and the "server". I could easily see getting

slower stamina recovery on Unofficial & Official servers since latency (lag) will make all results arrive at the game client with a delay, especially on Official servers where there are constant delays between pressing keys and actual execution of commands. So on a dedicated Unofficial server it might take, for example, 22 seconds to see the Stamina recover 100%, or on an Official server it might take 25+ seconds to see the Stamina recover 100%. Even so, I would expect all three tests on any dedicates server, whether Unofficial or Official, would end up being the same. Which is to say that on an Unofficial server all three tests would take the same 22 seconds to recover, or on an Official server all three test would take 25+ seconds to recover.

What I don't see is any evidence that the third test, punching a dino, would give any different results from the first two tests.

 

Conclusion:

While I understand that your explanation of the underlying server/client communication mechanics is true, I'm still convinced that any difference people think they see from punching their dino is purely psychological. The visual display of stamina recovery on the screen is essentially the same regardless of punching or not punching.

It feels like it's faster because the player is busy doing something while the stamina is recovering. That's a typical "observer issue" that we experience. Based on these tests the punching doesn't actually, "accelerate the interval at which you see it". When we're just sitting there watching something it always feels like it's taking longer than it really does and punching the dino gives the illusion that less time has passed when really it's the same amount of time, not only the same amount of time for the stamina recovery but also the same amount of time for the visual display of the recovery on the screen.

[invincibleqc]

1 hour ago, Pipinghot said:

What I don't see is any evidence that the third test, punching a dino, would give any different results from the first two tests.

That is because you tested locally, where there is no networking and the server has nothing else to do. I won't address timing/data because I don't think that is relevant but here is a short clip illustrating it:

The more busy a server is, the more noticeable it will be. For pretty much the same reasons tames can take few seconds to react when asked to follow you, or the mating progresses are all over the place and keep resetting client-side, etc.

[Pipinghot]

9 hours ago, invincibleqc said:

That is because you tested locally, where there is no networking and the server has nothing else to do. I won't address timing/data because I don't think that is relevant but here is a short clip illustrating it.

The more busy a server is, the more noticeable it will be. For pretty much the same reasons tames can take few seconds to react when asked to follow you, or the mating progresses are all over the place and keep resetting client-side, etc.

Ok yeah, I see how it makes a difference doing it on a dedicated server that's cycling between many different tasks across the server.