Bi-Weekly Update 8/11

[Saromus]

1) Update Overview: (TOC)

• Social Event Stress Test
• Medical Progress
• New Loot Table Manager
• New Player Punishment Zone
• New Items/Clothes on the Blue Frog
• Client Dev Team Update

2) Body:

8/9 Social Event Stress Test
The other day Lorrianna held a "Social Event Stress Test". The Cantina was packed with about 173 players online. The Stress Test was aimed to help find any Bugs in the Entertainer System, as well as test the Stability of the server. There was only one crash reported at the time. Oru had confirmed it was due to a "DeadLock".

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Medical Progress
cRush has been busy lately hammering down the medical professions:

-Numerous bugs have been fixed with the recent medical implementations.
-Doctor buffs now play a vital role on the Test Center, bringing back a feeling of nostalgia for many players.
-Cloning now incurs wounds as it did Pre-CU. Woundpacks have been introduced to counter the effect.
-Resuscitation Kits have made their way in game. You can now resurrect a player who has given you consent, or is in your group.
-Added new commands: /consent <name>, /unconsent <name>, /hasconsent, /diagnose, /activateClone
-Added new gm command: @revive - revives a dead player.

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New Loot Table Manager
Farmer_John has recently finished up the new Loot Tables, which are already on the Test Center. Loot is now loaded from DB, and all items currently static have been moved to the LootTable. Kellina will be updating the LootTable, with more items this week, and fixing drop %'s along with what drops from what etc. And also going through the Loot Area on the Forums to add all of what should be dropping from each creature/npc.

Here is an overview on the new Loot Tables:

-Loot has been moved to the database and is seperated into lootgroups.
-Creatures can belong to one (or more) lootgroups.
-Drop is now level and race controlled, so be aware:
--Nightsister biceps wont drop from a Worrt anymore
-We are populating the lootable and building the different lootgroups for all creatures.


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New Player Punishment Zone
Farmer_John has added a new feature called the Punishment zone, which is a viable option to ban evasion that is currently occurring on TC. Offending/Rule violating Players will be warped to the punishment zone and will be incapable of moving, speaking, or leaving, and it is up to the CSR to decide when the offender is released.

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New Items/Clothes on the Blue Frog
Lorrianna was kind enough to place nearly 100% of all clothing from Pre-Cu onto the Blue Frogs. So be sure to visit your local "Blue Frog" and grab some of those new clothes. Please note that not ALL of the clothes have been put on the blue frog yet, but all the clothes are in the source code. There are some known issues with Gender Restriction and players running around with every single piece of clothing on them. Devs are working on a fix for this. If you bump into Lorrianna be sure to thank her for taking her time to give us all these clothes!

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Client Dev Team Update:

Hey! Davin here, with some updates from the client dev team!

It's been a good couple of weeks for us with Sytner giving us an Alpha of his Snapshot editor which means that a couple of projects we've had on hold are now getting kicked back into action including Kashyyyk which Valkyra is working on and a brand new instance that I'm working on.

Kashyyyk
With Sytner's WS editor there's a good amount of progress that's being made on kashyyyk, the newest addition being the webweaver cave!

Entrance to the cave

Progress continues as Valkyra begins to add Kachiro!


New Instance
The new instance is the first SWG planet ever to be created completely from scratch outside of SOE and aswell as that it has also been achieved without the help of a terrain editor! This is a step in the right direction and knowledge I've learned from this will hopefully go into helping along Sytner's terrain editor making the creation of planets a lot easier and a lot more accessible to those who may have the creativity but not the technical knowledge that it currently takes to create a planet.

The new instance is fairly basic terrain-wise but not a lot was needed for what I was basing it on. The planet the instance takes place on is called Flashpoint and it once housed a research center (over 3500 years ago in the timeline) but that was destroyed; the planet also has an orbit that is incredibly close to its sun and so days pass by very quickly here, the proximity to the sun also leaves the planets surface covered with radiation which is certainly not healthy!

There's still some work to be done on the terrain itself (mainly giving the planet a couple more textures since at the moment there's only one texture noticeable) but I've now started world building so here are some shots of the basic layout I've got setup at the moment, there's going to be two more surface buildings that I haven't added yet:

Landing pad during the short night
The side of the landing pad with the scorching sun in the background
Shot of the entrance to the main bunker

Like I said, before, this is just a start but I hope you find it interesting

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3) Developer Perspective: ("Round Table")

Ramsey:

In the Open Dev forum, there was a discussion about NPC behavior. Here is what I said:

Part of the mission stuff are the npcs involved. I did an Action system where an "ActionCreature" would execute actions assigned to triggers like "onConverse", "onAttack" etc. The actions would include anything from carrying a conversation, to giving an item/mission to a player.

My #1 goal was to at least get these actionCreatures working to fulfill their role in missions, and I would then later expand them to take on other roles like BlueFrogs.

I worked out a conversation system that can be scripted in LUA (or the future scripting languages we may adapt in the future). The other actions like giving an item/mission will come tonight.

Which brings me to...the prerequisite stuff . For the NPC to REALLY interact with players around it, it needed a way to check for conditions in players. Conditions like "does the player have"; an item, specific skill, this mission etc. I am saddened to say that after many rewrites, I still do not have a satisfactory prerequisite system that can be used in LUA script. The biggest problem has been the fact that there are so many things you should be able to check for in the player, you pretty much need to share the entire player class with LUA. Writing functions in the action class to return vars in the player class would only serve to bloat. So for now, I just hardcoded prerequisites so the action creatures will work with basic missions. Hopefully Oru's new scripting language will be a bit more flexible than LUA, and we'll see some growth in this area (at least in this implementation).

Since other devs are also writing their own versions for interactive npcs, I don't know what the longterm impact of the actioncreature will be. It's current role is to get missions off the ground with room to expand into a more general tasks. It's very beneficial to have multiple people tackling the interactive NPC issue, as it will eventually build a much stronger implementation in the future.

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I have completed the Action & ActionCreature class to a point where it'll function with some of the basic hardcoded missions. The mission manager has been done for quite sometime now, and I'm just tieing together the script portion of the creature manager to work with Actions & ActionCreatures. Once that is done, I'll begin picking out random people in IRC to help look for bugs before the SVN commit.

cRush:

These past two weeks, I have received a tremendous amount of testing results from the community, assisting in the squashing of several nasty bugs pertaining to the recent medical implementations. Again, I want to thank the community for the outstanding job that has been done in this regard. Keep up the good work, and this project will be done before you know it! My focus going forward is going to be finishing off the Doctor and Medic profession entirely. I want to graduate to Combat Medic, and revisit the Cloning process. I will be implementing Curepacks for Poison and Disease, as well as introducing State packs for Dizzy, Blindness, Intimidation, Stun, and Fire blankets. I will also be completing the doctor skills which do not require medpacksl. I want to encourage all community members to drop by the IRC channel #swgemuheal and congregate with others as we finish off these two necessary professions.

Special recognition to the following exemplary testers: Antisnow, mrtopas, ashur, and karas. These members have found numerous bugs and given excellent feedback helping remedy the problems. Thank you all who submitted feedback! Without you, none of this would be possible!

Sytner:

I've made some considerable progress on both of my editors in the past few weeks:

The snapshot editor is currently being tested internally by Valkyra and Davin, who encouragingly haven't reported many bugs so far! Before getting it to them, I re-wrote almost everything from scratch, so there are still a few bits that need updating to the new system. The end is definitely in sight though now.

The terrain editor is still in its early stages, but progressing well considering I only started work on it properly a week or so ago. The main task I have now is figuring out all of the remaining unknowns - any help on this is very welcome!

Here are some recent screenies from both of the editors:

Terrain editor
Snapshot editor
Snapshot arrays
Snapshot tools

Over the coming weeks I hope to get some videos up of the editors in action and my work on Taanab.

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4) Closing:

A Note from the CSR Support Team:

Just a reminder, Kellina has created a Test Center Status Update system that allows the CSR Team to manually and with one command simultaneously update the current status on: LPE, #test, and #swgemusupport . We hope this reduces the number of "Is it up?" inquiries. Please note current status on LPE or in #test!

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(Note: Devs if you have anything else to add, please feel free too.

[Valkyra]

FIRST!

Nice update!

[Saromus]

Enjoy guys, devs feel free to update if needed

[DragonSage]

Sweet! I can see the Punishment Zone as a [GM]Dave kind of thing...*GLEE*

Things are looking great guys, keep it up.

[Saromus]

Originally Posted by DragonSage

Sweet! I can see the Punishment Zone as a [GM]Dave kind of thing...*GLEE*

lmao

[Kouto]

I love you guys <3

Good work with this, it keeps getting better and better.

[Sti1garWormrider]

im excitede

[Valoram]

Dang, I'm soooo excited. I never played SWG, so I have nothing to compare this too.....which means that every update brings a host of new things to try out

I'm like a kid in a candy store!!!

[Phoenix Icecold]

Great job guys progress is coming along really well. Keep up the good work!!

[goldcrud]

I can't wait to see new planets in SWG . TY Sytner, Valkyra and Davin. Over all awesome update all the devs are /BMOC.

[Macrona]

ballz.

[Quinlin]

Very sexy

[259fol]

Good job, Another good update.

[thecapn2004]

Great!

[Danag]

I always look forward to the bi-weekly update.

Excellent work!