For starters, the new packet can set which client scripts have all of their variables synchronized between players. The previous hardcoded list of IDs for synchronized scripts has been removed.
Players can no longer unilaterally use items on themselves in their inventory. When they try to use an item, they send a PlayerItemUse packet to the server with the item's details. A serverside script can then check the item and either send the packet back to make the item use go through or drop it.
Spell, potion, enchantment, creature, NPC, armor, book, clothing, miscellaneous and weapon record data can now be sent in a RecordDynamic packet. Additionally, the packets include data related to associated magical effects (for spells, potions and enchantments), data related to default inventory contents (for creatures and NPCs) and data related to body parts affected (for armor and clothing).
The server now has associated script functions for setting most of the details of the above, with the main exception being individual creature and NPC stats.
Records can either be created entirely from scratch or can use an existing record (set via the baseId variable) as a starting point for their values. In the latter case, only the values that are specifically set override the starting values. Creature and NPC records also have an inventoryBaseId that can be used on top of the baseId to base their inventories on another existing record.
The client's RecordHelper class has been heavily expanded to allow for the above mentioned functionality.
When players create spells, potions and enchantments as part of regular gameplay, they send RecordDynamic packets that provide the server with the complete details of the records that should be created. When they create enchantments, they also provide the server with armor, book, clothing and weapon records corresponding to the items they've enchanted.
This functionality added by this packet was originally supposed to be exclusive to the rewrite, but I've gone ahead and tried to provide it for the pre-rewrite in a way that can mostly be reused for the rewrite.
Although weather sync was added by Koncord to the rewrite in fd721143e2 in a way that used surprisingly few lines of code, it relied on the server requesting weather states every second from authority players and sending them to non-authority players, while also allowing only very sudden weather transitions across regions, i.e. if there was one player in the Ascadian Isles who had stormy weather, and another player with clear weather in the Bitter Coast Region walked across to the Ascadian Isles, that player was instantly made to have stormy weather with no kind of transition at all.
My approach solves both of those problems. It solves the packet spam by only sending weather updates to the server when weather changes happen or when there are new arrivals to a weather authority's region, and it allows for both sudden weather transitions when players teleport to a region and for soft, gradual transitions when players walk across to a region. It is inspired by my previous actor sync, and uses a WorldRegionAuthority packet to set players as region authorities in a similar way to how ActorAuthority sets players as cell AI authorities. Weather changes are created only by the region authority for a given region, and weather packets are also only sent by that authority.
However, it should be noted that gradual weather transitions are used by default in this implementation. To use sudden weather transitions, the serverside Lua scripts need to forward WorldWeather packets with the forceWeather boolean set to true. That is, however, already handled by our default Lua scripts in situations where it makes sense.
