AO: Monthly Development Update – Dec 3rd 2012

• Server Migration
• City Changes
• Engine Upgrade 

 Ilaliya writes:

"I've been playing the new client.

Let me stress how cool this is. We've talked a lot about the back-end work we've been doing on the engine. Before, if I wanted to see the engine I had to walk over to a coder's desk and then he hits compile and there's the new engine. Now, Macrosun can give me a .rar and I can unpack it on my machine and without having any tools or development environment installed on my machine I can run around in the new engine, and play it. We can now build and compile, and deploy as a standalone piece of software that patches and updates and does all the things one would expect a game-client to do. The coders did some fantastic magic to get this to work, and I can't compliment them enough on getting it up and running.

So why don't you have it yet?

Couple of reasons. I posted some screenshots below, and if you notice doors are about 20 feet away from where they should be (Parsed is fixing). Grass isn't in (Macrosun is working on). Ground-tile alignment (Vhab). Vhab fixed water and it looks amazing, but in some places it's flowing uphill & lacks depth calculations. There are some gamma issues with some playfields and sRGB. New character models/heads aren't in yet (although, Adamse will be finished in the next week or so). So there are issues, but we're very close to something we can get out there.

But most importantly, the new client needs to run against version 18.7 because that's where we are fixing things. I can run it against 18.7 internally, but unfortunately you guys will have to wait until it makes its way to the Live server."

More details, read here.