Board News.old [context]
Sender Astark
Date Wed Jul 16 15:49:57 2014
To all
Subject Astark Blog / Reflection Post - Part 1
With the next major milestone in Aarchon's history approaching, I wanted to take a few minutes to reflect on the past year or so. There was a time where I was writing regular updates here on what immortals were working on and trying to keep all players in the loop, but time hasn't allowed for that as of late. This post is going to span multiple notes probably and it's more of a personal blog post. I put it on news only for exposure as it contains MUD specific info. There aren't any content announcements here, so if you're not interested you can skip over the rest of the note at this point. In the past year or so, over 400 documented changes have been made. Some changes are as simple as typing a single command, some are much more complex, like Masteries, Lua mprogs, or Leaderboards, where hundreds or thousands of lines of code are written. I've broken out the changes into a few categories below to give an idea of what kind of work has been done, and tallied up the changes for each category. Keep in mind that there is a lot of overlap between categories, where "tools" or "balance" could easily be considered "new features". I did this fairly quickly, and so the distribution is fairly rough. No change was counted more than once. {C1. Bug Fixes - 78{x Fairly obvious. Fixes for things that cause crashes, interrupt gameplay, or have unintended effects. {wMy favorite bug fixes:{x {w1a.{x Fixed bug where default stat assignment would not update stats (Bobble) {wWhy? :{x After rolling out a great change where new players could quickly roll competitive characters without needing extensive knowledge of the MUD, we found out that stats weren't being applied properly. Bobble fixed and remedied things pretty quickly. {w1b.{x Mpkill will now target immortals instead of silently failing. (Astark) {wWhy? :{x After literally spending hours trying to figure out why an mprog wouldn't work, I tracked it down to a silent failure on the code side. Not even two days later, before I had a chance to fix the code, Aethyn went through the same frustration. {w1c.{x Fixed memory leak in achievements. (Vodur) {wWhy? :{x This nasty little bug (my fault!) caused a whole bunch of weird issues. If you looked up achievements on a player it loaded them into memory and never released them. This made it so that you could do "locate object" and get results for players who were not online, and maybe had not been online in quite some time. After Vodur added a bunch of utility commands for immortals to track down bugs, we were able to quickly find the cause, and fix it. {C2. New Features - 44{x New features include both minor and major features, area releases, and even some tools / balance changes. So, basically anything could be a new feature, but the 44 I chose I felt belonged best in this category. {wMy favorite new features:{x {w1a.{x Updated lua mprog system with a better structure. (Vodur) {wWhy? :{x This wonderful little lua mprog system that isn't visible to mortals has made life immeasurably better on the immortal side. It's allowed us to develop more robust quests and mprogs while using a real scripting language, instead of a custom one (old mprogs). It's stable, infinitely more readable, and has encouraged other players to contribute to building. {w1b.{x Added meta-magic casting system (Bobble) {wWhy? :{x Meta magic has revitalized caster classes and changed the way the game is played. It forces you to think about mana management, and allows for a much more engaging / unique combat experience. It single handedly made caster classes feel like casters. {w1c.{x Newbie help system added to help players keep their gear updated (Astark) {wWhy? :{x New player integration and retention is extremely important to me and I felt like this was one of the few ways we could give them automated advice without overwhelming them with "tips". I have a lot of ideas for things we can do to improve the system, so hopefully over the next year this grows. {w1d.{x Skill mastery system added. (Bobble) {wWhy? :{x This great system addressed a number of items. It allows players to customize their character, it provided greater rewards for players who spend time increasing their skills, it allowed us to acknowledge these increased skills in the achievements system, and it offered another way to invest into a character. It also let us give unique bonuses to some skills and spells. End Part 1