SnellMovement

Jumping into a snell

When you cross a snell, you can end up in a different location than your fellow clanners. Several things determine where you end up when you 'jump into a snell' and land. The most important thing to realize is that your initial landing spot is random within the defined landing zone, which is usually between 4-6 exile widths long and about 8-10 exile widths wide. Again this is determined by how the person who linked the snell to the previous one defined the landing zone.

How far you jump in is affected by how far your mouse cursor was before you crossed the snell and how crowded it is on the other side.

Cursor Location

The closer your cursor is to your character's sprite (icon on the playfield), the less distance you will have jumped into the snell border. So if your cursor is almost on top of your sprite, when you jump in you might land less than one character length away from the border. Conversely, if your cursor is far from your sprite, say 3-4 sprite lengths away, that is approximately how far away from the border you might be when you jump in.

This effect has to do with how long it takes for the client to redraw the new snell. The longer it takes to redraw the screen the further in you will appear because while the client is updating the graphics, you continue to travel. The length of time it tasks to redraw the screen is determined by a number of really technical things. These are some of the known factors:

• how long the packet with the image numbers to draw takes to reach the client from the server (determined by the network speed and your current latency.)
• how many images need to be fetched from RAM versus how many need to be fetched from the image file. (determined by the speed of your hard drive.)

Crowded Snells

In crowded snells, it might take longer to enter because the server is trying to find space to put you, and if all the room in the landing zone is taken (by wither exiles of creatures), you will not be able to enter at all. This can be used to your advantage in the case that a lot of people are fallen in the snell. If a person disconnects from the game until they are removed, and then reconnects the game is presented with a problem. The exile has no room to "land" and the server has no other choice but to place the exile in the starting location for the world: The Temple. This only works as long as there in no room for the exile to be placed when they reconnect. So, it only works occasionally.

Precautions

In most places, it is safe to cross at full speed. But in some places, you can land so close to a border, you end up crossing into the next (or previous) snell. If a lot of exiles are entering a snell at once and you land behind an exile that is close to the border, you can "bounce" off the person and be bumped back into the previous snell. This is usually not a problem, until you consider that some snell edges do not lead back to the previous snell. (See Orga Outback {OOB} and Tanglewood {TW}). Also, some in some areas the entry angle you take puts you in line to accidentally exit the snell because you can't stop in time to avoid moving to the next snell. In those cases, it is important to stop on entry so you do not do that. Usually, the leader(s) or more experienced exiles will tell you "stop on entry" or "enter stopped."

Another reason to stop on entry is in the cases where the next snell is very dangerous (either because of webs on the ground or a lot of creatures) and you want to be able to orient yourself before you move so you don't end up stuck in webs or swinging out on something before you realize it.

You can stop on entry by moving the cursor over the edge of the snell, but before your character gets there, release the mouse button or click the mouse button to turn off your character following the cursor if you use click toggles to move. You will enter stopped.

Using pathfinding

When you cross a snell using PF or the PF of the previous exile, the location you land in is not usually the same location as others who crossed before you. This is particularly true of the marsh, where you can end up 10 exiles lengths or more along the border away from the last exile who crossed. So if you are crossing north, you could end up 10 more west or east than the previous exile. What can be called lateral movement.

Because of this lateral movement phenomenon, you need to take care when crossing to come to a dead stop, less you jump onto the lateral border and end up 'falling off' the snell.

Falling off a snell

This happens when you accidentally exit a snell that is not directly connected to the snell you end up on. Tanglewood, Snagglewood, and the Marsh are places where this happens. An example is if you cross a snell on the west side, in an ordinary snell, crossing back east would put you back in the previous snell, in a disconnected snell, you will end up in a snell that is at least 2 snells away from where you were. Not all snell boundaries in Tanglewood, Snagglewood, the Marsh and other places are disconnected, but most are. It makes sense to study various maps and guides available {link: need maps - Drablaks, Ton's, Lorikeets, etc}.