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 :)