ahem..SATURDAY with Means - December 6th, 2008
I was pleased to experience a "healthy" week! I felt great. No vertigo, no flu, no unexplained discomfort of any kind. Now if I can get my wife and children healthy again we'll be in good shape! Thank you all for your good wishes. This is beginning to feel like some kind of ridiculous soap opera.
Our build engineer has finished wrestling with the first major patch of the booster...118 Megs of juicy new graphic assets (two new huge complete playfields - Alien and Dust Brigade areas.) and the first iterations of the new Fear and Knockback nanos for the OFAB vendors. The new playfields will be accessible by speaking with an NPC in ICC that should have been spawned last night....so the minute my client finishes patching I will put it there myself.
OFAB PVP Nanos:
First the bad news:
Engineer PVP Mines missed the deadline and should be in the next version for TestLive (Next week). I remember now why these did not end up included in Lost Eden..getting them to work properly (and in a manner that will be usefull) is requiring a great deal of patience. The Enforcer Fear nano "You Are Next" will also upload correctly in the next build. Put those voodoo dolls away...I'm working on it!
Good News:
Martial Artist, Fixer, Trader, Bureaucrat, Enforcer, Doctor, Nanotechnician, and Keeper will soon be available for evaluation on TestLive. All of these new nanos will be usable by Agents in the appropriate False Profession. Decisions are in process for extension of nanos castable in false profession (based on player feedback in the agent forums.).
I look forward to seeing the traditional "Can has DB-rip thread?". These are not the "ultimate final" versions of these nanos and will likely be adjusted (based on sane, rational and open dialogue with the community) before they hit live. This is a starting point. I am certain the discussion will be passionate and thrilling. I will advise Famine to wear his Haz-Mat asbestos suit to work. Note: Calling me an "incompetant ass-monkey", while admitedly is extremely amusing, does nothing to quantify what exactly, if anything, you would like to see changed in your/someone else's nanos. Let's work this out together to make sure it doesn't bother us for years to come.
The Booster:
The first versions of the two main content playfields should be accessible through an NPC at ICC this weekend. This should be a good start to sinking our teeth in to balancing and adjusting this playfield accordingly. I am excited to see how the new solo content plays. Transfer to test is currently broken due to differences in the character database between live and test...we are going to have to do some "nano-magic" to get this to work during the next week.
The Engine:
The engine being implemented is Ogre 1.6. At the beginning of this week it was Ogre 1.4. Moving up to the newest version of this engine has broken a few things (textures, Antialiasing etc.) but the guys are working really hard on it. As promised here are two new screenshots of the engine. Do not ask about the framerate yet.
Looking forward to the feedback on the playfields and Nanos!
Colin "Means" Cragg