Friday with Means - August 19th, 2011 - Progress

burmese

http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?t=592971



Friday with Means - August 19th, 2011 - Progress



Next Version and Pande Instance:



Should be a new version coming to TestLive today with more significant tweaks the new Dust Brigade instance and the new swath of daily missions. The Pandemonium instance will not be "Live" with the very next update as we feel we want it better tested before its open release. That being said we will be having it available on Live for some event-style testing. Getting together then numbers we need to really give this a go on the test dimension is difficult and will be fun as an event anyways. Who is going to be first on each server? We'll absolutely know.



Battlestations:



There was a fair amount of discussion this week and last about the Battlestations. I took some time to speak with people who were *ahem* hostile concerning the current mechanics in place. After some discussion some modifications were settled on:



1. Regular conditions entrance time slightly increased (by 3 seconds).

2. Repeated trips to the Decontamination room (repeated death inside 90 seconds) will result in a longer "respawn time" of about 36 seconds (about 16 seconds longer than normal.)

3. The "Healing + Nano" HOT stops when you exit the decontamination chamber.

4. It is no longer possible to Cap points during grace period.



Hopefully these changes are a step in the right direction.



Engine Progress:



This week Parsed managed to both get the tilemap textures to line up perfectly for the first time ever but also got the ground (heightmap/mesh) to be perfectly reproduced for the first time. Both of these were huge.



First off - the tile map:

There is texture blending in the Conan engine for all ground tiles making it impossible for us to do something you would consider commonplace...place a straight edge between two textures. As a sci-fi game we have many sidewalks, paths, metal plates etc on the ground that we don't want blending with their surroundings. In Age Of Conan and straight edge you see on the ground is in fact a mesh object that has been placed there. So very significant for maintaining the look and feel of AO to get that to work...and now it does.



Height Map/ Ground Shape:

This was incredibly important as the visual and physical aspects of the ground, while close, were not perfect. This would result in floating buildings, fences, and where the ground did not match previously generated collision floating players. There are some locations where you can see this in current AO where the collision of the mesh does not match the visual representations of it. Without this great work by Parsed this week this would have been a very significant problem going into the future. This was the source of by far the highest number of visual bugs in the new engine....and now it is gone. I'm very happy about this week's progress.



Nano Changes and Documents:

As it would be fair to say this process is taking longer than expected, one of the more annoying nanos "Defeat Righteousness" will be getting a change in the next update to become "Shade's Caress". Included in this post are the icons made by Docaholic and Genele to replace the icons of all the old nanos...I think they look great and can't wait to see them in. See if you can guess which icons are for which nanos



Have a great weekend everyone!



Attached Images



AllIcons_WIP.jpg



__________________

Colin Cragg

This "Means" Cake

Game Director/Producer



Filmed in 70's "tall-vision"