I agree with Zahan, and Sehraci -- the above isn't a bug. It's a consequence of the way that Ryzom handles player input.
It's well known that players with faster framerates (computers) run faster tahn those of us on older hardware.
That means that ryzom is written to favour the actions of the player versus where the server decides you are at any given time. It makes the gameplay very smooth and responsive, but does have such odd side effects.
The hit happened when your avatar's server position said it was next to the mob, there is time involved in it sending you the hit information, telling your toon to act hit, and updating your stats, in the meantime, you have sent to the server and processed on your client many movement updates, so the server then decides you're away from the mob unless it gives chase
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It's also a 'gift' from the devs, as you really did move where your PC says you did, so you only suffer one hit from the mob. if your avatar was where the server had calculated you to be, or waited for the next server update to update your client position, you'd be hit a lot more.
My problem with the system is that essentially, it's almost unfair to some players while being more than fair to others. Slower PC means the mob may catch you when movement rates are relatively similar, but I believe they cap the upper end on speed to avoid too much advantage either way.
They'd have to, or they couldn't stop a hacked client from moving faster than any other homin. Mind you, in MMOs you usually don't let half arsed hacked clients even connect, so this mitigates that problem a fair bit (they usually have checksums or various things on the files to say if your client is altered from what the right client is at connectoin time, which is also how they can self patch).
And yes, the mob 'speed run' is the server re-updating within a closer range to you (possibly some multiple of the far clipping plane away), all mobs' positions, based on where your client was rendering them at the time. You tend to cut down the transmission of data for entities further away, except in very gross terms, to cut your bandwidth footprint (otherwise, you'd flood out the clients' network stack).
In other MMOs, you experience the opposite problem, you may have heard of the term 'rubber banding', that's the opposite type of system, where the server is always in charge of the simultation, but you allow the client avatar to move about, when the server realises you've moved beyond an acceptible 'tolerence' in deviations, it moves you back, if your input is continously getting to the server very slow, say on a very slow network connection, your toon bounces back and forth a good deal.
I tried to explain this in as 'user friendly' of terms as I can, so there could be some liberties taken with technicalities
. I didn't write the netcode for ryzom, and only gave advice to the coder that wrote netcode for the one MMO prototype I did, so I'm not an ultimate authority in this area, but have some knowledge, so take it with a grain of salt
hehe.
