Friday with Means - December 18th, 2009 - Busy day and Leet infestation
Holiday Party Details and Times:
http://www.anarchy-online.com/wsp/an...&table=CONTENT
Fridays are ALWAYS busy. Today was of course no exception. We were privileged to have a visit in the office from Strupstad and Docine in the Oslo office. It is always nice to get a chance to actually meet up with you guys and get a good reminder of why we a work as hard as we do. Thanks to both of you for boosting our spirits at the end of a long week.
Leet Infested!
Today' quick downtime was a result of a Christmas Leet infestation across all servers. I asked Customer Service to "make sure there are ALWAYS enough leets for everyone"...as a result the scripts got bit out of hand and we had (in some cases) 4000 Leets on single playfields. The servers were not happy and this problem would have escalated over the weekend. The only quick way of fixing/exterminating this number of the furry bastards was to restart the servers. I hope the quick downtime was not too bothersome and you can forgive us for this little interruption. It is interesting to note at this point that "Leet infestation" while unusual is not particularly unusual in regards to the interesting problems that tend to surface on Fridays. I am happy that this one was handled quickly and efficiently before everyone begins their vacations for Christmas this week. It did interrupt my plans of having pizza with Strups and Docine...we'll just have to reschedule. :)
I am currently in prison and cannot currently log in my characters...please don't delete them!
I spoke with some people on RK1 the other night and I confirmed that "When we do a character wipe...you will need to log on your low level bots to make sure they are not removed.". Let me be clear...This is not happening soon. We will not be up to any such nefarious activity over the Christmas holidays (The next two weeks) and we certainly will not do it without any notice. There will be notices in the launcher for weeks before...notices on the forums...and we will likely send mails to everyone in the interest of making sure nobody loses anything they are even remotely interested in. Lots of notice. You will all be sick of hearing about it when we do it.
On a personal note to the person who wrote me from prison. Best PM I have ever received. It is going on the wall of my office. To be clear: It is not the policy of my team to delete the characters of people who will be out of prison soon. (Please don't hurt us!)
Character Transfer
The code used to generate in-game ID's for items etc exploded this week generating 500000 bogus ID's during testing. Cleaning up this mess took a great deal of time. Macrosun quit a record 103 times this week. It was not fun as it was not even remotely his fault or his code that made the mess. Work will continue on this initiative when and if he returns from vacation in January. Getting this to work properly requires work from the biling team, the database team and Macrosun himself. Blowing things up when any of these guys are away on a well deserved break would be a disaster...so January is what we are looking at...assuming again that Macrosun comes back. Hail Macrosun...pleeeze don't leave us.
The Engine
Damn it is starting to look good...and the artists haven't really even started to poke it yet. From an integration standpoint we are getting pretty close to feature complete. The reason we always use Tir is this: most of the visual features of the entire game can be found in this little easy to load playfield: meshes, ground, statel animations, npcs, self illumination, character animation, water, gfx effects, sky, weather systems, grass, dynamic shadows etc etc. All the visual resources need to be converted to a new format to be viewed in the new engine...so working in the same feature rich environment makes a lot of sense. Both the old AND new engine are rendered at the same time..side by side...for comparison to make sure that things look as they should and no detail is missed (and in most cases drasticaly improved upon). Watching the orbital strike in Tir today was great fun...we weren't 100% sure how it would look or if it would work..but stunning is the best word for it.
What is missing:
The last issues:
Characters are "naked". Meshes (like shoulderpads) and weapons are displayed but the textures on the character are not "swapped" to display the correct armor. This is a feature missing from the new engine and we are waiting on work from the Montreal office for this feature to come it. This is not complicated but has been delayed by the expert in our Canadian office somehow breaking his leg horribly while actually IN the Canadian office...I don't know how he did it...but I am sure he was "compiling" at the time. He is back on one leg now and this work should be coming along soon.
Large playfields crash the conversion utility. AO playfields are 4000 x 4000. Conan playfields are 2000 x 2000. It wasn't important until we made it this far. Now we are working on it. I'm not even remotely worried about it. I hope we can show an enormous SL playfield soon.
What is next:
With integration (all features where they should be) next we get into optimization. This will consist of cutting out the old engine completely and running only the new. Removing "old" AO will immediately result in a better framerate...but there will be work to do on making it run as smooth as possible..with options in place to work with as many setups as possibe...from the most humble laptop right up to the gnarliest gaming rig available. Having not said "gnarly" for years I enjoyed that. Work is beginning in earnest shortly in the Beijing office on the new heads. We received the first Atrox head complete back from the office and it was more amazing and detailed than I ever would have imagined..it will be great to have all 358 done over the next few months.
It was great getting the chance to show two real players the new engine today (it was last week's version...not with the new support for dynamic light sources in working today!). Up and running...not cut in any way shape or form. I look forward to being able to show it directly captured from game NOT in Tir in the very near future. This has been an uphill battle the whole way...we clearly will not be seeing this hit the servers in 2009...but it is great to see it coming together. We are finally starting to win this one...I'm really hoping to put a hard release date (rather than a guess) on this soon.
So exciting.
Note:
I am clearly getting this one to the translator horribly late. Rather than negatively focusing on him possibly not being able to get this out tonight let's be grateful for all the other times I have screwed his weekend plans when he put this translation first. It is NOT his job to translate my ramblings at 9pm on Fridays. Thank you Waldgeist. Sorry again. I will be on the German dimension for some time tonight in "The Grind"..maybe I'll see you there.
See you all over the weekend at The Grind :)
