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 :)

Hair/Face stylist added

Last weekend I finally added a new kind of hair/face stylist to Gekkeiju. In the Old World the changing of hair and hair color happened through potions that would either drop as rare drops or be bought from shops. The biggest problem with these was that there was no way to preview the hair before buying and applying the potion.

The new stylist-interface shows a preview of the player's head that rotates around. It shows the selected hairstyle, hair color and face style. The hair color can easily be changed with red, green and blue slides. While there's currently just one face-texture, there's plans to add more eventually. This system will allow a lot better customization of characters. Currently this mode only works with the shader mode, and will most likely remain so as the old non-shader mode is too slow for smooth hair color changes.

Once player has created the style they like, they can buy the style for 2k gold coins. The price is relatively low to offer this service for new players as well.

New Trees

The New World used to have a lot nicer trees than the currently running version. However, for some reason the tree generator that was used to make them, always made the medium level of detail model kinda horrific. All the brances were flying in the air etc. While something like this could've been expected from the Old World, I'd rather avoid such things in the new one.

After some evaluating and thinking, I came to the conclusion that it's better to do a small investment and get trees that will look good in all levels of detail yet still have the same or smaller polycount than the generated ones. The trees have now been replaced in the New World with a lot nicer ones that were even made in such a way that I can use most of the old trees' textures in them if I so want to.

Even something as minor as trees can have a hyge impact on the overall graphics of the game.

Changes to the user interface

After some user interface testing (a month or so ago) and trying several free MMORPGs, I came to the conclusion that Gekkeiju's user interface still requires some major changes. Mostly to make it a lot more user friendlier.

The first change was to move the skill chanting counter from the upper left corner to the bottom center part of the screen. I also added a text to the counter showing what skill/action the player was doing. This was definitely a big help for everyone as tracking the skill timer has been kinda problematic.

Other change was first suggested to me by my brother few months ago. Gekkeiju is actually missing a simple x-button in the windows to close them. This might not seem too important but after thinking about it some more, I noticed that I also seem to search somekinda closing button from the upper right corner. Addition of this should make the interface a lot more friendlier.. at least for windows users.

Finally one more change that I came up with was to make the current energy bar smaller by at least removing character's name from it. There's not much reason to show the character's name as player usually should be aware of what character they're using. The energy bar could also contain the player's level but that may also not be necessary.

A new gathering profession, Herbalist

 The gathering professions in Gekkeiju Online are professions that harvest different kinds of resources that spawn randomly around the game world. They can then process the resources into something that is usable by crafting professions.

Gekkeiju Online has a plant system planned that basically spawns different plants around the world. These plants can then be used by the sage-profession to make different kinds of potions. At first I was planning on making sages able to harvest the plants as I couldn't think of anything the plants could be processed into. However, I finally figured that they could be processed into plant bundles. Thanks to this, I can now implement a new gathering profession called the Herbalist.

Herbalists will be able to buy harvesting and processing tools from their crafter npc in the crafting halls. These tools can then be used to harvest the randomly spawning plants in the same manner as ores and wood etc.

Worshipped Deity and Astrology-system

In Gekkeiju Online it's possible to choose the deity the characters worship. The choice of deities is based on the characters' alignment so good characters cannot worship evil gods. This feature has, however, so far not done anything except added some roleplay-factor to the game. Quite many players have been wanting for it to have some effect in their characters so I have planned up a new astrology-system.

Basically each deity in Gekkeiju has its own constellation. The world also has 3 major elements in the sky: sun, and the moons, Luna and Selena. The astrology-system will basically calculate how these 3 major elements are lined up with the deities' constellations. This will affect the player either positively or negatively. For example the moon, Luna, increases negative effects while sun and Selena have positive ones.

To make the system less confusing, there'll be some sage npcs placed around the continent who will be able to tell the players' horoscope for the next ingame week or so. There are also plans for Astrology-skill than can tell how the elements are lined up. This skill, however, will not tell how they affect the player.

The astrology-system will be implemented into the New World, hopefully before the opening of the public beta.

Tier 1 Weaponsmiths operational

All the missing tier 1 weaponsmith recipes were added yesterday. The patch added weapons such as Flammenschwert and Tjunkuletti. I wonder how much trouble our players will have pronouncing those names (as most cannot even write the game's name correctly).

After this patch we now have tier 1 ready for tailors, armoursmiths and weaponsmiths. This is of course only a small part of all the crafting professions. However, I think it's a good time to start implementing advancement quests.

When player maxes a tier in crafting profession (not a collecting profession), the tier won't be advanced automatically. Instead the player will need to finish an advancement quest. With some professions the first one will be something as simple as finding some NPC in some other town and talking to it. However, some quests can go as far as requiring the player to craft some specialized item.

Addition of these quests will finally allow players to start crafting tier 2 items that quite many of the testers are already requiring in order to keep advancing.

Customizable chat tabs

Customization of the chat tabs has been a feature I wanted to add ever since removing the additional global chat window from the New World. This should also help everyone who does not want to see global-channel while trying to concentrate into killing monsters somewhere.

The customization will basically allow players to choose as many or as few tabs as they want to their chat window. They can then choose what channels are logged to which tabs and whether to include timestamp or not. This allows the global channel to be easily excluded from the All-tab, and instead shown in its own window. Or maybe combining clan, party and tells into their own tab.

This new feature should make the chat-system even better than the dividing into multiple windows like before. The patch will be put online later today so I think the reactions will be found out soon.

Welcome!

Hello everyone and welcome to Gekkeiju Online's development journal. I'm Suvi Aalto also known as Lamex in Gekkeiju Online. I'm the founder and lead developer of the game.

I used to keep a development blog about the game several years ago but stopped doing it because of the lack of time. However, now I think it's about time to restard this as it'll also work as a diary for myself later on, and no doubt will be of great help.

I'll be posting development news about Gekkeiju Online and possibly some rants and what not about the game.

To those who don't know what Gekkeiju Online is or found it just a while ago, the game is a free-to-play, fantasy-themed multiplayer online role-playing game. The game is playercount wise still too small to be called MMORPG while technologically (server side) and content wise the game is enough to be one. The game has been playable since early 2002 (the game turned 7 years few months ago) but it has been redone almost completely several times already.

Gekkeiju Online has always been a hobby project for me which is why I have almost single handedly coded it. Of course a very big thanks goes to all the Open Source libraries, like Genesis 3D, Jet3D and Irrlicht, that were/are used in the game. Without these I couldn't have made anything playable so quickly.

The game started with a very small public beta in 2002. It was way too early which I had to learn the hard way. The graphics were ugly and people kept leaving because the game was simply too unfinished. People who end up leaving games this way usually never return because they think the game will be the same even after years. Sadly I learned this only some years ago when I noticed people having some horribly wrong ideas about the game in different discussion forums.

Currently I'm in process of, yet again, redoing the game almost completely. This project is called the New World (we call the old one the Old World). The project was first planned to be just a bigger update of redoing the area maps into bigger ones but eventually it turned into a massive graphics and content update. Many of the old features, like crafting, were completely redone, and some older features, like fishing, were added back. Also many new features have been introduced and many are still under construction like the Auction House-system. The newbie-friendliness has also been the top priority of the project.

So far I have mostly worked alone on this project with the exception of getting some level design help during the Old World from one of our admins. Some community members also stepped forward to donate all kinds of models and other resources for the game which was also helpful. However, during the development of the New World, I got a graphics artist to help me with the game. This has been a very huge help as I have now been able to concentrate on the coding side and not have to make textures myself all the time.

During the development of the New World I have also noticed how horribly the Old World and other previous versions of the game went wrong. I'll most likely be writing somekinda small post mortem about them at later time.

But welcome to the blog :) hopefully you'll enjoy your stay here.