I can't even begin to explain how good it is to be back. My "vacation" was exhausting...those of you with two small kids who have been on a multiple week vacation are certainly laughing knowingly at my expense right now. I am back in Oslo for 9 days before I fly over the ocean again to attend DC. Needless to say I won't be making any important decisions in my current zombified state this week.
It is always great to come back from vacation and see all the progress the team has been making while I am gone. Kintaii deserves a huge round of applause for the great job he did keeping things running on an even keel while I was away and doing such a great job at keeping you all up to speed on the horrific goings-on of the AO team. I'm toying with the idea of asking him to continue this weekly post as I suspect he did a superior job on putting this together...the scream of horror heard over Oslo when I post this is probably him.
Flaptoot has been killing himself for the last three weeks working on getting the new version of the opifex female character model working. Smoothing out the body and fixing the low-poly stretching issues of the original model sounds easy...but I can assure you it is not. This is a soul-destroying nightmare working with horrible old files and poorly/undocumented animation code. It would have been much easier to make a completely new body and start from scratch...unfortunately not possible as the new models need to work perfectly with all the original armors/textures and animations. It was fantastic to see the model animate correctly with the shoulders rotating correctly without texture stretching and most importantly the upper arms not going flat as a sheet of paper in certain movements. A lesser man would have given up a long time ago. He deserves a goddamn medal for his efforts on this. It is directly because of the dedication of of individuals like Flaptoot and their absolute refusal to surrender that AO is still here and the fantastic game it is today. I can't wait to see what he does with the other models as this work progresses.
We hope to get the next version of 18.2 to TestLive soon and I have a specific favour to ask:
Please take the time to play a little on Test in the upcoming weeks.
With time and work on the new engine we have finally been forced to update the AO codebase from Visual Studio 2003 to 2005 (for intergration work with the Dreamworld engine.). This is creating some client instability we would REALLY like to resolve before the update makes it to live. The sheer complexity of the AO codebase and world needs players and activity for us to see these issues...it is impossible for us to discover these issues through normal/sane testing routines. The sooner we get these issues out of the way the sooner we can bring the Nightclub and the new Shadowlands instanced playfield to the live dimensions. Thanks to all who have already been a huge help in eliminating some issues that will be repaired in the next version.
Great to see all of you again! I can't wait to get things rolling again I will get to my forum mails as soon as the dust begins to settle here....so sorry about the delay for those who wrote to me in the last few weeks.
Edit: MstrBstrd requested I link this "Cyberpunk enough for ya" work-in-progress Opi head image.