Where Is NM - A Limbus NM & ??? Tracker

For the lay people it comes down to it using widescan when it should not be able to, correct?

Yes, in part. There's two layers:
1) using Widescan functions when the client should not be able to (can't open map at all in either Limbus zone)
2) being able to go much beyond widescan range, to request updates about any arbitrary mob that exists in zone, whether it's dead or alive, at any distance, and whether it appears on widescan or not.

Putting aside 1 for a moment, the packet used in 2 is normally only sent by the game client when you use the Track function of Widescan - so you can only select a mob that has already appeared in your Widescan, limiting range to w/e range your job has. Mobs beyond that range are inaccessible, and you're rate limited, the client doesn't let you spam that request (need to cancel the previous one). And certain entities, like ???s and homepoints and many more, do not appear on widescans at all in the first place!

This is nowhere near close to gearswap injecting equipset packets faster/more precisely than the game can, or using weaponskills while not engaged[*], it's a couple of orders of magnitude more exploit-y. And detectable. And will very likely be patched if it becomes too widespread, like warping to locked homepoints was, but that's just my prediction that could be wrong.

My issue, which do note that I bring here personally and not as voice of the windower team, is not with the function itself (other very common addons do much worse), it's with a disclaimer that only says "inject packets", sounding innocent like a million other addons that also inject packets and are very, very much innocent (dunno, the temps addon, or MAGA for Oseem augments, or the already mentioned superwarp). It is not. It's a full on exploit.

EDIT: see Thorny's post below, the packet involved in this is a lot more exploit-y than I was describing in this post.

_{[*] which for the record only happened as a bug and is only still there for legacy reasons, it's been debated a million times if it should be removed}

My understanding is yes, and its especially egregious in limbus because

well, instead of telling you
go try to use wide scan in limbus


Ok so I just tried this. It scans the area, detects all NM's that are up and reports what floors they are on. You really dont need this to run every 30 seconds. This is literally a one-time scan option. MAYBE two-times if theres other people in the area and you need confirmation the other group killed the NM that should be up and you're unable to find it.

And yes, I accept the risk I took doing this.

The amount of people that still don't understand that vanilla client can't simply ranged WS without engaging first..

"But why are you engaging that mob before you leaden it?! Just fffff leaden it!"

Then someone has to explain that (a) that's a GS thing and (b) that player is vanilla they can't do that.

Also the screams will be heard.. very far.. if that ever gets removed.

Is this "Update packets (0x00E)" similar to just coming within the 50 range of a mob?
That seems to be a much better alternative

the zonewide check seems like it'd be good for getting kupopowers.

Not to nitpick, but 0x016 isn't widescan related. It's used by the client during cutscenes and menu interactions when an entity is expected to be visible and isn't, to request an 0x0E packet. As far as I know, it will never be legitimately sent for any monster. I doubt it's ever legitimately sent for many of the other things it's used for, either.

The gist of the post is accurate though, it's just worse than described.

Auto-reporting any NMs that appear within 50 yalms is plenty sufficient for helping a server kill all the respawns before the month period is over.

Has this been updated since the discussion over widescan in places you can't?

Does it still use widescan?

And has it been made clear?

I'd like to start using this again as well as see the whereisnm site start working again but it's kinda come to a dead stop because there hasn't been much communication.

You need to DL whereiswhereisnm to find out where the add on went.

If you’re not sure where to find it, look up whereiswhereiswhereisnm

https://whereisnm.com/addon

Best way is looking at the website, but yes it was updated almost 2 weeks ago.

It was reverted back to the method before I added logic from the limbus addon mentioned in this thread. So it will not scan zone-wide and just detect if a NM or ??? is close to your position.

When the addon detects a ???, it could check whether it is set to be visible or not, and if not visible can report the ??? as having despawned.

While the addon is not doing that perfectly, a Cronjob is running every night and removes ??? that has 72hr+ since last update, so they become stale.

I have played around with the mob array and the visible value wasn't always reliable. It would sometime detect NM or ??? on floors you weren't on and would make it as active/visible.

If you manually compute and check the XYZ distance is < 50, that should eliminate things on different floors. The distance stored in memory is only XY distance, and that value can become stale when it is no longer visible so cannot be relied upon. Also for ??? specifically, since it doesn't move, if a reported not visible ??? has the same coordinates as the last reported visible ???, then should be able to be pretty sure it truly despawned.

Honestly the coordinate check is probably overkill, once you filter out invalid entries in the mob array, if ??? marked as not visible then should be able to conclude it despawned, the same should be true for NMs as well (based on their respective alive/dead status).

When I think back it was probably NMs I saw this issue since they are/can moving around and between floors in some cases, and it was the main goal with the addon when I was designing the MVP.

Yeah for anything, you must compare its XYZ coordinates to player's and check XYZ distance is < 50. If it's > 50 then it's stale/invalid and should be ignored.

Looks like the website has recorded a despawned ??? I was spying on, you will need to check the packet isn't injected or modified before reporting it.

Doing some server patching today, this includes changes to letsencrypt so in the meantime the website might display out of date certs until the services is back online.

Addon should work as normal.

Edit: Patching done. If no data is displayed, you might have to clear your cookies/cache.