State of the World Update

Kanoth

News from the boards. Looks like the guys at RB have chased the lag monster down a deep hole, flushed him out, and broken his back. He may still be around somewhere, but all indications are he crawled off and died under a rock somewhere. This, along with the patch thats suppose to come out today, are the best news I've heard since launch. With the lag more or less gone (cant say for sure, but everyone seems to be saying they're not seeing it anymore), we can finally focus on getting out more features, expanding the map, tossing in more animals, and fixing the remaining login issues.If some of you havent seen KFR's update from last week I'll repost here:

---

Well, just over a month has passed since Roma Victor officially, albeit rather quietly, launched to the general public. Sadly the launch brought no holidays or relaxation time for us. In fact it's fair to say that the whole development team has been working even harder since launch than it was before! We're only now beginning to take stock of the progress that we've made during that month and it's certainly about time I brought the community up to date on a few things!

Server tracking / bottlenecking / lag build-ups Needless to mention this has been our prime focus since the memory leak fix. It turns out that a set of bottlenecking conditions could cause a cumulative build-up of delays, which has become known as the infamous "server tracking" problem. DGH has been working pretty much exclusively on this problem since launch with the odd bit of help from me. He's made some excellent progress and you should have noticed things gradually getting better throughout the post-launch month. It'll continue to get better and we're hoping to have got completely on top of the problem in September. By that I mean that we should be getting back to our original load-per-server capacity and it should free things up quite considerably.

New servers When we encountered the tracking problem one of the first things we did was order another couple of servers. We shouldn't have needed them so soon after launch but it's a real help while we're killing off the last of the tracking problems. RJH and I took a trip up to Telehouse to install them and I thought you guys might like to see a picture so I snapped one while I was there.
The Roma Victor servers in all their glory:

Loginhandler You probably don't need me to tell you that there's a problem with logging in. It's intermittent but it's fiendishly frustrating. What happens is that sometimes login attempts are blocked when the server is handling several other logins at the same time. This shouldn't have been a problem - but it turns out it is. So I've spent the last week or so putting together a loginhandler process that is separate to the main server process tree. As soon as DGH is a bit happier with the 'server tracking' bottleneck we'll get to implementing it straight away.

Terrain & Content You may recall we had some terrain-related nightmares at launch. Well since then EGH has been spearheading a team to resolve our terrain difficulties once and for all. The net result is that we have a new method - several new methods actually - of importing, adjusting and processing real world terrain. We'll be patching the changes out within the next couple of weeks and as well as providing a much, much larger playable area (including new starting locations) it'll also mean the original 10x10 gets a bit of a cosmetic overhaul too. The odd edges of waterways will be gone, along with those rare unnatural terrain spikes. After that harrowing experience of coming across a field of those things at the last minute during the first launch attempt they still give me nightmares so I'll be particularly glad to see the back of them - even if they have already become an endangered species. You'll also notice more ground surface variation - if you've got the graphics hardware of course - and more liberally placed flora and fauna.

Graphics Despite being under pressure from all sides to tell everyone what we're up to with regards to graphics, I'm still going to keep some secrets. I'll simply say that several graphic features that didn't make launch - and some amazing new ones - have got quite a bit of attention during the last month. Without giving away the details I think you're all going to be really impressed with the textures, lighting and effects that we'll be introducing very soon. One thing that I will say openly is that we're in the middle of a user interface redesign. We're unlikely to be getting around to implementing it until around October but nevertheless we're keen for your feedback as always so do please let us know how you'd like to see the interface change and we'll see what we can do.

Ballistics This is the generic term we use to describe all sorts of projectiles in the game from bows and arrows through javelins, slings right up to siege equipment missiles. It's a complex feature and one that has presented us with a broad range of challenges, most of which we're now well on top of. There is still work left to do at both client and server side but it's certainly not too far off now.

Skin tone This will be fully implemented in an imminent patch. One day soon you'll log on and your character - and all other characters for that matter - should have varying skin tones. Your character's should match the tone selected when you created it, which you may well have forgotten! So for a short while we'll run a kind of skin-tone amnesty where people can change it if they find it's not to their liking.

Hair & Beards This should follow fairly shortly after the skin tones take effect. Hair and beards just grow. You'll need to find characters with the appropriate skills to help you keep all groomed and tidy. This is pretty important for Romans and Romanised characters since, much like bathing, some NPC relationships will be adversely affected if you don't keep on top of it.

Uncraftables & unrepairables There's still a significant list of objects that can't, for one reason or another, be crafted. For some things it's because of a lack of vital resources or components and for others it's a lack of player skills. In some cases it's simply because noone has worked out how to craft them yet but for everything else I'm on the case. I've had a hard time keeping up since launch to be honest, having been even busier than usual (!), but I've set aside some time this week to go through the entire class list and make sure that any vital missing resources are present in the playable areas of the SEC playfield and that all the relevant NPC teachers etc. are available. I'll go through the repair tables at the same time and make sure that some things that should be repairable are in fact repairable.

More mails There's still not enough feedback from the game itself in terms of informative and helpful game mails. I've written some but not all and only a few have actually made it into the game so far. I'm hoping to wrap most of that up by the end of August.

Animals Animals in particular have been exacerbating the 'server tracking' problem and DGH is fixing that particular issue right now as it happens. As soon as I have confirmation from him that the subsystem is working correctly I'll increase the wild spawns and people can start hunting and domesticating animals much more than they have been able to thus far.

Carcass processing Most of the animal carcasses can not currently be correctly processed. For some it was good old fashioned bugs but for others it was missing table data, which I'm hoping to fill in during the week while I'm going through the 'uncraftables'. By the time animals are becoming more common I'll be sure that all the corresponding carcasses yield the right meats, hides, furs etc. to those player characters with the appropriate skills.

Swimming The swimming skill will soon be implemented in an upcoming client patch. If you don't have the skill you can walk into water but your vigour does not recover at all while in the water. If your vigour runs out completely while you're in water, your character will drown and be on its way to Elysium before you can say 'gbbubbbblebebggble'. If your character does have the swimming skill then your vigour recovery rate while swimming will depend upon your swimming skill so wide bodies of water can still be pretty intimidating - but so long as your vigour doesn't run out you'll just bob along the water surface, animating appropriately of course.

Maintenance schedule Towards the end of this month we'll be introducing a regular maintenance schedule, which will let us bring the servers down for tuning, updates and backups. The servers will be taken down once a day every week day early in the afternoon (UTC/GMT). I expect they'll usually only be down for less than half an hour but it's nevertheless sensible for us to officially declare the daily downtime to be two hours. There will be no maintenance downtime during weekends.

Monthly SotW Starting at the end of next month we'll be posting a regular monthly State of the World update. It'll be brief and probably fairly nebulous on occasion but it'll appear regularly at the end of each month and will ensure that we're all kept up to date with changes, feature lists, updates, patches and the like.

I'm sorry I haven't been my usual active self on the forums since launch but to be honest I have an aversion to talking when there's much doing to be done. However as I say the team has been working virtually non-stop since launch and I'm now feeling a bit happier about the changes, fixes and improvements that we've got lined up. Besides, it's my birthday today so surely I can take a minute to myself to bring you guys up to date! Anyway, we've made some excellent progress this month and I'm really proud to be a part of this team. The veterans amongst you should remember various quiet spells during development that were inevitably followed by a slew of new features and improvements. Well, our chief focus has been the server problems of course, but nevertheless we've also spent a lot of time since launch addressing as many concerns and criticisms as we possibly can. And that will continue of course. With your guidance and support we'll continue expanding and improving Roma Victor month after month after month. But right now you can expect some of those things to begin to make it into the game this week!
-KFR

---

Kanoth

Another update from KFR:

---

OK so we didn't get to patch today. And to be honest we might not finish it tomorrow. It's only fair that I take some time to tell everyone what's going on behind the scenes again. 8)

Whatever else you might think goes on here at "RB towers" as Fishmuffin calls it, you may - or may not - be surprised to know that one of our biggest challenges - and probably the most problematic one - has been the true-scale real-world terrain data. So while DGH and I have been concentrating on the recent lag problem, EGH, Rooikat, Jooky and others have been grappling with terrain. Lots of it.

Here are some snaps I took from the playfield tools. Not only is it a glimpse into some of the other whopping tasks we have to handle, it's also a good way of illustrating the playfield and its continuing expansion.

A board is 1km x 1km of playable area. The entire playable area on the live server at the moment is 10x10, so 100 unique boards - as shown by the red square on the second picture above.

This imminent patch will include the terrain for the 30x30 boards, which are inside the red square in the third picture above. We'll still have to import all the object templates (for Hadrian's Wall, the settlements, mines, bridges, etc.) but that shouldn't take long.

The patch will also include full ground surface and flora - i.e. tree - detail for each and every board, including the existing ones. We've taken great pains not to disrupt the active boards within the 10x10 so as not to place trees in people's lovingly crafted roundhouses. This also means a great deal more raw natural resources will be available for profitable extraction.

And that brings me neatly to the real heart of this terrain challenge. Roma Victor is a very open and chaotic world - quite as it should be - but that means that the trickiest part for is integrating the live, effectively random, player object data into this new terrain matrix.

The process is really quite something I can assure you. Somewhere along the line it acquired a name amongst the development team. We call it the Earthquake. And that's entirely appropriate.

Shifting terrain should hopefully only happen very rarely. But sometimes, when dealing with data sets this vast, terrain needs to be... adjusted. It's curious how it came to be that the developer behind Vulcan is the only guy that really seems to know when these terrain shifts need to happen - that deity after all, really should know. And he does know.

So when Vulcan tells me that the existing 10x10 is a very old chunk of the playfield I can't argue. It has indeed served us well, as a home, for several years now. I have fond memories of when the playable area was in fact just the board of Cilurnum. And even fonder memories of when it was just a bunch of text. But that's another story. The point is our dear old 10x10 needs to be shifted about a bit. An Earthquake is coming.

Keeping on the deity theme, right now we're doing the jobs you might expect the Gods to be doing. Trying to minimise the effects on our beloved mortals. We're running different scripts on snapshots of the live data, manipulating objects and tweaking things up and down, here and there. It's quite fiddly - the fiddliest part of the whole fiddly thing - but it should only need to happen once or twice during the deployment of an entire playfield.

And thanks to the team's tireless efforts it looks like the effects to the existing live data should now be minimal. There may be a few buildings cutting into slight slopes, objects raised or sunken by a few centimetres but nothing drastic. And we'll be keeping our eyes open.

I think you'll agree that a slight ripple in the terrain is worth all the new content, new detail and richness that being able to finally patch out the rest of the South Caledonia playfield will bring. That first picture by the way isn't even the whole playfield. It's zoomed out more than the other pictures bit it's still only a 130km x 30km strip taken from the whole Caledonia playfield. Vulcan assures me that we're expecting no Earthquakes to hit between now and the deployment of the full playfield.

Some of you are thinking: "That's just not enough of a sneak peek. And now the lagmonster is in hiding it'd be a great time to finish this patch!"

Funny - I was just thinking the same thing. 8) So here's an unedited grab talem from the changelog of the massive patch that we're currently finishing off. There may be some slight changes if anything else makes it in between now and then but but it's close to the post I'll make when the patch is published later in the week.

---

<[*]Login button is gone. Client will now automatically open login dialogue.<br>[*]User login name is now remembered between sessions.[*]Trees incorrectly billboarding at close range fixed.[*]Tree placement after crossing board and sector boundaries fixed.[*]Ground surface placement after crossing sector boundaries fixed.[*]Surface shaders improved.[*]Multiplying tree bug fixed.[*]Skills page scrolling problem fixed.[*]Dialogues should now dynamically resize more consistently with their content.[*]Objects now fade in and out of view at distances corresponding to their size.[*]Character names are now only visible within a certain range.[*]Fix for animal animations.[*]Female characters will now have their own gender-specific animations.[*]Character animation-related sound effects have been updated providing gender-specific sounds.[*]Text rendering improved.[*]Pells (combat training dummies) fully activated. Experiment for best results. ;-)[*]Skin tone support implemented.[*]Icon enhancements and other graphical touches including new river textures and underwater effect.[*]Terrain, flora & ground surface data for 900 more unique boards.[*]Many other optimisations, bug fixes and enhancements

sempiternal

In summary, the lag has been drastically reduced, fewer attempts are required to login, usually one now, and the developers are hard at work on improving the virtual world and servers.

sempiternal

The sweet is never as sweet without the sour, and I know the sour.

Kanoth

Patching out the new client now.  And it's huge.  Make sure you have ample space before starting the patch process.  1.5 GB is the final uncompressed size.

sempiternal

DVD class.

drewdown

Originally posted by sempiternal
DVD class.

---

ERRRG.. thought there was another update... guess it's just a week late bump.

Sticky?

STICKY STICKY STICKY