This week we have been putting the finishing touches on the update to the addition of the new PvP playfields and adjustments to the Battlestations. If all goes well we should see this version on TestLive later today and on the Live dimensions next week.
Now onto the questions from last week’s post!
Engineers are next up. This is likely to take a bit more time as it will involve a general overhaul process of ALL the pets and pet abilities for all professions.
None of these ranges are “set in stone”. That being said the ranges will get a chance to run on the Live dimensions so we can monitor how it goes…and if changes are necessary they will be made. Going hand in hand with these changes we will see the required number of people to start a BS drop from 12 to 8 and the people required for it to remain running drop to 4. This change coupled with the broadening of most ranges should result in more participation across different level ranges. On the subject of low level runspeed we have plans to overhaul runspeed in general. Low level players will be moving much faster and high level players will end up slightly slower to better client/server sync. Characters moving as fast as they do now is not practical in a networked game and it becomes a physical problem to accurately depict player locations in such an environment. Vehicle speed will remain as it is to encourage use and to make sure travel does not cause increased delay in game play.
Currently it is not possible to be part of more than one queue system. I’m also not sure a team of 215-220 players looking to win in the BS would appreciate a compliment of 175 players matched by 220’s on the other team. Much much more sophisticated matching systems would be required to make this idea effective. Anything is theoretically possible…but whether it would be worth possibly months of development could be debated.
I’ll take this as my chance to talk a bit about the engine. During the past year we have been working on integrating the same engine used by Age Of Conan…almost. The engine we have been working with is the “development” version of the engine. During the last year the render team has been tearing the engine apart and rebuilding it better, stronger, faster and more optimized. The problem has been that while this process has been very effective in making it possible for lower end hardware to run the engine effectively it has had the effect of us having to integrate many areas more than once as the engine has changed. Hitting a moving target is rather difficult when you are customizing the AO code and the engine to fit with an already existing game. The new version of the engine is in the process of being stabilized for use in Age Of Conan so this should make our progress much faster in the coming months. Using a shared engine for all Funcom products provides an obvious advantage and we are getting close. We are very excited about it. Another important aspect of the development that needs to be mentioned is that both new AND old versions of the client will be supported…meaning that ideally nobody will be shut-out the day we launch the new engine due to not having a strong enough machine. Making the new client support two sets of data has definitely accounted for some of the extra time that has been spent developing this change.
This week work is focusing on getting the sky, clouds and all those twinkly stars working. The atmospherics in AO are daunting but it needs to be there for the game to retain its unique feel. When that is done work will begin on handling the multiple ocean volumes that exist in many places…for a desert planet Rubi-Ka sure has a LOT of water.
With the increased scope of supporting both clients a Christmas launch is becoming less and less likely…but a Q1 2011 launch seems relatively certain.