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.

Anarchy Online Shows a Glimpse of its Future Makeover

More screens here.

Friday with(out) Means - April 29th, 2011

Kintaii this week fills in for Means:

"Aight folks, I ain't gonna lie - It's been a long, hectic, crazy, tiring month, and my rant juices are just about depleted so this is gonna be a short one. Or, well, short for me.

Work on the new Pandemonium raid encounter is coming along swimmingly, with the final design decisions in place and the worldbuilding beginning next week. The design document is being polished up today by myself, and I think that we've really got something interesting in this one. Looking forward to getting it out there. =)

Most of the week for Means was taken up in meetings with Genele and Macrosun, making some pretty major decisions regarding the code changes needed for the Rebalancing. Some of this stuff is pretty major, like "wait, really, we're doing that?" kinda major. Here's a teaser: map navigation as a skill is disappearing, and all RK maps (as well as some of the upgrades) will be automatically applied to all characters. That's really just the tip of the iceberg, with some other large surprises in store later. 

Revisting Rubi-Ka

Actually, I've been playing Anarchy Online on my 2 Froob accounts for the past couple weeks, tearing up missions as a 130 MP and 130 Engi. Froob means, "free noob" and you get to play basic AO levels 1-200 without expansion packs minus Notum Wars. There are a decent number of Froobs running around, and the Froob experience is actually pretty good.

There is still a decent player base on the Atlantean server, with a great community. People are still using raid bots for farming Alien Playfields, Pandemonium, 12mans and more. This is a good thing, because the majority of the guilds are fairly small, some using chat bots to connect guild chats together.

After some thinking, I decided to re sub for a month and see how it goes. Logged in to find exactly where I logged out, right in front of my player shop and I had 250 million credits waiting for me, which is great, because I was broke! Next, I spent an hour moving my UI and setting up my bars and learning how to play my Bureaucrat again.

I figured the best way to relearn how to play was to run some inferno missions (who doesn't want a Crat in their team?). Easy stuff, everything came back to me pretty quickly, regarding nanos, perks, pets and general game play. Good to go, I decided to solo an alien ground city raid. Having all my endgame nanos and a lot of decent gear, it was fairly easy. Of course the alien General dropped total crap.

I needed more credits to buy better gear and since the RK1 market is so inflated, 250m wasn't going to do much. Ice Golem patterns used to sell for around 20-30m in the shops, so I figured I would farm a few of them. Next stop, Adonis catacombs, which is so easy for a Crat - yay calms. Bosses down there aren't for the feint of heart for soloing, but for Crat, it's cake. Crats can solo pretty much anything with all their Init debuffs. First boss in the catacombs dropped the Yomi page and quickly left. I had a bunch of insignias to summon Cama. I quickly ran to the Redeemed temple and Cama's placeholder was up. Killed it, and then talked to the npc to summon Cama. Took about 10 minutes to solo Cama, but it was fairly easy. Dropped the Heart I needed and ran to the Unredeemed temple. Traded in all the parts and I received the Complete Ice Golem Pattern. Portaled back to RK and sold it within the first 10 minutes for 60m! Not bad for 30 minutes of work.

I spent the majority of the weekend farming pocket boss patterns to sell symbiants, raiding using public bots and re-acquainting myself with the rest of the AO expacks.

My characters are:

level/ai/research

Crat - 220/22/59
Doctor - 215/10/12
Soldier - 214/12/10
Martial Artist - 181/7/10
Engineer - 150/4/5
and a couple other lowbies.

My Crat still needs some AI levels and research and the daily missions is a great source for free "level" for a short amount of time invested.