Tuesday, January 2, 2018

New year, address and client

Woah, we are slacking pretty hard on writing blog posts.  I've been wanting to do a 2017 recap post and explain the new client details so here we are.  First off, we bought vidyascape.org, so our address is a bit nicer and it ended up being really cheap to do once we found the right place to make it happen.  The new client 5.9.5 is now updated to use this address and the same goes for the Vidyascape launcher v0.4. Version 0.3 will keep working for a short time as we still have vidyascape.no-ip.org registered, but eventually it will stop working so make sure you get the new one at some point!  There were a few small client fixes we've had ready for a while, moving the update/server message/private messages so they don't float in the middle of the screen in resize mode as well as better supporting Linux and *nix systems.  It just takes a while to have a reason to update the client as it's never a smooth transition.

I'm gonna work through the year backwards and make small comments on some of the larger things we achieved this year.

Pickles tossed together a Christmas event on Christmas Day, Saxi ran through it and checked it out quickly and I drove an hour home to go update the server... (grandma's house has really garbage internet now?).  We cut it pretty close but we rallied and got it out before the day was over (at least for North America).

A lot of people had a hand in getting Kingdom Management rolled out and working correctly.  We had a problem (payments and approval were going over 50k/100% and giving really large rewards), so we had to disable collection for a few days and work on it.  I personally spent a lot of time on it and made sure to fix it in a way that still gives people credit for the time it was disabled.  Herbs and seeds still need rewritten to work correctly, hopefully we get to that soon.

Benny added ducks to the fishing guild.

Halloween came and went with a nice event (by lead event developer Pickles) that allowed you to choose a reward from Halloweens past, something that will probably see a return with events in general.

Highscores was changed to show if you're looking at an ironman with a little icon next to their name on the list and now counts ironmen among other players in the rankings.  We chose to change herbs to have a "unid" appearance now,

Sheep herder was added and as anything involving npc movement, needed a couple patches.  Agility Pyramid which some thought we weren't going to be able to add to our server was implemented. The middle of the year mostly saw the standard quests and bugfixes, other than Easter and Fourth of July events.  Devious Minds, Wanted, Sea Slug, Between a Rock and Rag and Bone Man rounded out the year.

Oh and the most complex thing we've ever added, construction happened 364 days ago.

All in all it seemed like a quiet year, but looking at about 500 commits, hundreds of fixes and 7 quests I still feel proud of what everyone achieved.  We're well funded, we have players and we're making progress.

Happy (late) New Year everyone!