03 October 2008

Mules going live, server optimizations, new things

Well, the mules went live a few days ago, and now people can make them and their food.
I didn't see too many mules in the game, which is good, the last thing I wanted was everyone to become a mule. But there are many mule glyphs and pets food being produced by players, so there must be some demand for them. And because the creature food requires a refined vegetal mixture, a lot of people are using a lot of harvestible items that were previously not so useful.

The optimizations I made a while ago proved to be almost useless, there was no visible reduction in the server CPU use. I mean, the CPU works less because of them, but there are other tasks which tax the CPU much more, so they are sort of like a drop in the ocean.
I was a little dissapointed and mentioned it to Schmurk (the guy who implemented the arrows, finished the sky and the 1st person view, improved the camera movement and animations, etc.) and he gave me a really good idea bout how to optimize some stuff. And not only that, but he wrote a program to test it, so I am going to use part of his code (with modifications) to improve the server speed.

As I said before, there are two new (and secret) features coming in the game soon (this year). One of them is almost 90% done (still needs more testing), and the other is ~60% done. I hope that we will be able to test the first feature in a week or two, and the players will see what it is. I am confident that everyone will enjoy it a lot, it's been requested quite a few times. Unfortunately, they both require a client update, so probably we'll have them on the main server sometime in December (we need to wait for other stuff to be done as well).

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Summoning (mix) while fighting?? :)

Riding / running / moving at different speeds?

3/10/08 07:47  
Blogger Radu said...

You will see soon :)

3/10/08 23:07  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The Mules are great

A little painfull with the cost of food to level them, but I am guessing this was intended. One suggestion would be allowing player trading as a mule, at least one way trading, guildies/friends could "load" the mule. I think we can live without spell casting even harvesting as a mule. But would be very nice to be able to use with bots (i.e. trade)

That said, I can still see the potential, even though it will take some time to get the mule level to take advantage of that potenital

Wiz

7/10/08 16:41  

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