Demo effect

So it was finally time to open the horribly unfinished test version of the game to public. I wish I could keep my mouth shut when someone asks about release dates and instead just say that the game will be out when it's ready. But since I was stupid enough to make the mistake of giving an exact date, the game had to be put out (or face the wrath of angry nerds of the interweb).

Of course, as usual, the first thing to happen was a chaos. No matter how many months something gets tested, the so called demo effect apparently always happens. The first thing to be noticed was that suddenly ore deposits didn't disappear when mined. This was kind of amusing since we had been constantly mining the deposits the past quite many months without any issues.

The second bigger problem (which is still being worked on) was a major lag during saving. At this point I have no idea what is causing it since it cannot really be because of the amount of players. We held tests with more players online than we had yesterday and didn't encounter any issues during the past 6 months of the closed testing.

Well all this is normal I guess. It's just been so long since I upgraded the game's version the last time. All these issues will hopefully be fixed during the coming weeks and then I can finally move to addition of new and missing content.

Small update and missing stuff

I have finally managed to make all the crafting professions joinable. This means that the game already offers more craftable items than it ever has before. Sadly for now only tier 1 of 5 is available. I hope to be able to add at least tier 2 for the armour and weapon crafters before the release but time is running out.

From the big features I still need to add auction house and player houses before the launch date. I'm not 100% certain that I'll have enough time to make the second player city, Dun-Wa accessible as it'd also require addition of the Seito Prefecture. If the time runs out before the launch then I'll freeze the player houses in Dun-Wa to make sure the rents there will not run out. This, however, means that players might not be able to get their items from the houses right away.

The auction house I hope to be able to make operational before the launch as it's a big feature that will require lots of testing and server boots. Addition of this kind of features can get annoying to players especially if no sandbox server is used for testing. The auction house is also going to be one of the most important trading methods. Players can sell for example crafted items or just crafting resources so if someone is good at mining they can sell refined ores there for members of other professions.

We'll see how badly the time runs out :) New features will follow soon after the launch anyways.

Player Boats operational

Player Boats, a feature our players have been waiting for a long time, has finally been made operational. Even in the past we've had player commandable boats but those have been unarmed and lasted only around 10 minutes. However, the real player boats our now in game.

Player boats will be sold as boat deeds at a boat seller npcs. At first the boat sellers will offer 3 different sizes of boats: small, normal and large. The smallest of these boats has max space for 5 passengers and 1 cannon for each side of the boat, and the cost is around 700k gold. This is a very good choice as the first boat as it allows travelling. However, if someone happens to attack then it's probably best not to fight back but escape. The small boat is also the fastest.

The normal boat allows up to 10 passengers and 3 cannons for each side of the boat. Normal boats will probably be the most common boat for highbies as they can be used for war and transporting parties between places.

The biggest boats cost 6M gold but they're gigantic. A large boat allows up to 25 passengers and 6 cannons for each side.  These are a very good option for transporting whole clans around. The largest boats also have the most hitpoints so it's going to take several smaller boats to take these giants down.

When buying a boat from the boat seller NPC the boat won't come fully armed. Instead they'll have some small default amount of cannons and passenger seats. Players can then buy additional cannons and passenger seats to reach the boat's max values. Players can also buy different sails for the boat so this makes it possible to have your very own pirate ship.

Whenever boat takes damage the boat's hitpoints will go down. Currently there's no way to see the boat's hitpoints but user interface for that will be added soonish. If the hitpoints go to 0 the boat will sink and turn into a shipwreck. All players inside such a boat will fall into the sea. Broken ships and shipwrecks can be repaired by normal npcs for a fee.

The boat seller NPCs will also offer a "Recover boat"-option which recovers a boat or shipwreck no matter where it is located. This should be useful if the boat is lost in the middle of the ocean or sunk somewhere.

New Character selection/creation

The Character selection and creation screens were finally redone. They are now similar in usability to what is seen in quite many other games nowadays.

In the old version we had all 3 player characters visible at once which caused players to for example accidentally login with wrong characters etc. It also did not allow seeing much of the character details as the characters were rather small on the screen.

The new selection screen shows only one character at a time. The character takes a lot bigger part of the screen so it's possible to see details such as the eye color. The new view also allows the camera to be rotated around the character which is a nice addition. To make it even better the music was replaced with somewhat nicer tune.

The Character creation looks basically the same as the selection but the major change was that it's now possible to adjust the character's face style, eye color and skin tone. All races will have around 5 different skin tones (most likely will be increased later) which will allow even deeper customization of characters. A major change is also to allow players to choose different class than warrior at start. This was possible before the current version but it was removed since most of the other classes were too hard for new players. In the New World all classes will be made playable right at the start so this won't be a problem anymore.

Updated party and mount status windows

Yesterday two updates were added to the New World: mount status window and modified party status windows. Both of these features should make playing a bit more enjoyable.

In the Old World the party status window only showed party members' health. Seeing spell points and endurance points, however, have been asked by several members of our community. With this update I was finally able to change the system so that each party member has also both sp and ep bars. Because of space limitations it won't show the numeric values for those though. The numeric values show up when mouse is over the party member's status window.

The mount status window was also a feature wanted many. It basically shows the mount's hitpoints and hunger status whenever not riding it. The mount status shows up even if being at a different area. This should help taking care of the mount a lot better.

Both status windows also contain level information which might be a nice addition.

Upgraded wings

New World's wings have been upgraded to support partial transparency. Before they supported just full transparency because of some issues on how the graphics engine handled ordering of transparent things. I was, however, able to make somekinda workaround to it so now the game can have a lot nicer wings. Iphinome has already been busy working on some of the wings like faerie wings etc.

These will definitely add lots of nice customization possibilities and of course the possibility for winged character races eventually :)

Addition of NPC voices

Some days ago I came up with a funny idea of giving NPCs greeting-voices that could play when talking to them. Similar feature is nowadays in almost every online RPG but Gekkeiju has been lacking them (and quite many other sound things too).

As a hobbyist indie developer I cannot just go and hire some voice actors so I decided to start an event that allows our game's community members to record and submit their voices and then possibly get those added in game. Even during the first week I already got several good ones so it seems like this was a relatively good idea.

I don't know how many of our players are aiming for some industry where having their names in some games' credits would be useful but I still offered that option to the ones submiting the voices. It'll always help them to boast to their friends if nothing else :)