Bi-Weekly Update for 9/28/08

[Ramsey]

1) Update Overview:
-Host Transfer Status
-Quality Assurance
-Temporary Feature freeze
-New Spawns and Caves
-Guild 2.0
-NPC AI Updates
-GM Command Updates
-Structure Placement
-New Forum Theme
-Medic/Doctor Cleanup
-Packaged Community Portal (PCP)
-Fixes
-CSR Notice

2) Body:

Host Transfer Status:

In order to meet the needs of our expanding infrastructure, we will be moving our web server to a more capable environment.

The DNS has began to propagate and the majority of ISP's should have records pointing to our new web server. The support site is back up.

Because we are changing DNS records, subdomains of swgemu.com may fail to function properly for a few days. Here are the IP addresses of important services we provide that you can connect to if the DNS servers are down:

IRC:
irc.swgemu.com - 69.147.228.41

Test Center:
chicago2.swgemu.com - 66.90.104.117

The downtime over the next few hours/days should be the last web related outage we will experience. Please bear with us as we attempt to restore full functionality.

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Quality Assurance

A new team has been added the SWGemu staff, headed by our Lead QA Thrin. The purpose of this team is to help improve our ability to quickly and properly fix bugs in the major systems of core3. The QAs are responsible for testing, logging and reporting on any and all bugs in all of the game’s systems (travel, banking, guilds, dungeons, spawns etc). The QAs have been given ingame travel and protection commands on the Test Centre to assist in their testing.

The New QAs are:

• Saromus
• Acau
• Karas
• MelikStarsider
• Webbwbb
• Arcticfox1984 (Smoki)
• Malthol
• Eorustyfan

Please join us in making them feel extremely welcome, and support them in any way possible with their testing efforts.

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Temporary Feature freeze:

To ensure our Quality Assurance push will be as effective as possible, we will be pursuing temporary freeze on _completely_ new Core3 facilities in favor of improving & polishing what we have.

The profession reps, led by TAfirehawk, will be condensing in size into a more tightly knit team. The profession team will be working with our Quality Assurance staff to fix and restore the professions we have already started.

We will be performing rigorous testing of current features. The guild manager has been hammered over and over thanks to community testing over the last two weeks. Features that have already been implemented will be looked over, improved, and fixed until we can do no more.

The feature freeze does not mean NOTHING new is coming. It is simply a restatement of the mindset we have always tried to pursue here, quality of quantity. We are at a point in time where we feel there is a need to reevaluate the code we have written and make sure it meets our standards.

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New Spawns and Caves: Lok and Endor

Learningdisease and Kellina have been hard at work creating new creatures, spawns and populating dungeons for immediate implementation on the Test Centre! This exciting update includes Jinda Ewoks, the Korga, Orphan Marauders, and of course the Death Watch Bunker and all of its inhabitants.
Learningdisease is also working on Lok’s spawns and its five dungeons, which should be completed in the coming week, along with Thrin’s population at Nym’s Stronghold.

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Guild 2.0

Farmer John committed a major update to his original guild code, which he affectionately dubbed Guild 2.0. This update fixed almost all of the outstanding bugs from the Guild 1.0 code, including bugs in name length, timing, guild mail, general functionality and much much more.

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NPC AI Updates

Kyle has been hard at work making NPC Artificial Intelligence smarter and more challenging. Creatures should now no longer run around confused when attacked by a group of people, NPCs with “killer� status should now death blow players, and kiting should now be harder for ranged players. The eventual goal for AI is to have a group of much more challenging, smarter and more realistic NPCs, which perform impromptu and unexpected things, and are able to turn the table of combat with their strategies. All extremely exciting prospects for the weeks and months ahead.

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GM Command Updates

Kyle and Farmer John have expanded on some old GM commands and added some new ones to help improve the ability of staff to run events, manage guilds, and manage NPCs. Kyle added an all new @spawn command, which allows staff to spawn creatures for events. He also expanded @kill to allow staff to instantly kill NPCs, to help protect players and allow annoying trivialities such as krayts spawning in clone centre to be easily dealt with.
Farmer John, in tandem with his “Guild 2.0� update, also added guild management commands, which allows staff to become the temporary leader of a PA, to help manage and moderate guilds (Changeset 733).

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Structure Placement:

Tow'lin and McMahon were able to implement structure placement in Core3. They posted a video on youtube which you can view here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJ_UZnNpdSM

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New Forum Theme
This week, we introduced a new Forum theme to the SWGEmu Forums. This forum theme brings a more consistent look and feel to the website, matching the home index (http://www.swgemu.com/).

If you are having problems seeing the new forum, go into your User CP and manually change your theme their to "Evo (fluid)". Then, change your theme back to "Default". Save the changes and reload the forums. If you don't like the new forum theme, or find it hard to see in comparison, the old themes are still available via the drop down menu at the bottom of each forum page.

The theme is still under development, so you will find some elements that don't seem to fit the theme. Just ignore them as we are aware of these problems and will be fixing them soon.

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Medic/Doctor Cleanup
The underlying code for Medic/Doctor is getting a complete overhaul. It was a bit to isolated and specific to these professions, although some of the abilities that Medic/Doctor use should be the same used by other skills and objects. An example of this is the wound healing ability of a Medic. This same type of underlying method should be utilized by Meditation, and it will be soon. Furthermore, once these changes are complete, they will make Combat Medic much easier to work on.

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Packaged Community Portal (PCP)
The PCP project has somewhat been on hold for the past couple weeks while the main focus of the project is on code cleanup for the SWGEmu server project. Anyone who wants to help out with the PCP still may. The project should pick up more steam again soon. Also, cRush will be looking into adding a method to send direct administration commands to the server from the PCP console that can have an immediate effect in game. Please contact cRush in #swgemuwebdev, or send him a Private Message on the forums to ask what you can do to help progress the project. Please have a strong understanding of Object Oriented Programming and PHP.

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Minor Fixes

• Bobius has fixed the issues with Ithorian base stats. Included in this was a fix for the bug relating to Ithorian stat migration, so that all newly created Ithorian characters can stat migrate properly. Please note that any Ithorian characters created before September 21st will need to be deleted and re-created for this fix to take effect. Contact any of the staff ingame (they will be marked with the guild tag <STAFF>) who will hold any items you wish to keep in limbo.
• Theed starport has been added and is now fully functional for travel. In light of this, Core3 is now able to create Ticket Vendors, collectors and shuttles inside Cells (Buildings, Caves) thanks again to Bobius. This will facilitate the rollout of the rest of the galaxy’s fully functional starports.
• Bobius also fixed a bug which caused ticket droids and vendors to spawn on top of roofs, most of the time stranding people across the galaxy.
• Farmer John has made vehicles now save to the database. This means that your vehicles will no longer dissapear after you log out. Vehicle deeds will also now dissapear after use.

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CSR Notice:

The tickets and bug reports we've been receiving so far have been really good, however we really want to implore most people to add more detail and clarity to their tickets. For those reporting bugs, we need as much detail as possible to help fix them. Bugs can also be subjective, so detail about your character, recent actions and location is also essential. For more info on how to write excellent bug reports, view this guide.
We also need as much detail as possible to provide accurate support for troubles you be encountering. Stating something like "I can't get onto the server and everyone on IRC says its up" is not nearly enough info for us to figure out what's wrong. Time and date, what troubleshooting you have tried, and filling out all the fields provided all help us solve your problems quickly.
Good job so far, but we still need more of your help.

[Ramsey]

3) Developers Perspective: (Round Table)

cRush:
I have been overwhelmed trying to finish off some web projects and manage school so I can get some time to finish off my Medic/Doctor code changes. The changes are approximately 60% done at the moment, but won't be much longer once I get the time to knock them out. Now that we are focusing on managing the features we currently have, and optimizing them, I will be moving on to fixing some of those bugs and problems once the Medic/Doctor code is optimized rather than moving towards Combat Medic. It is still on my list of things to do, however, and I will return to it after we get the go ahead.

panchjr:
Having returned from my break I am back into the swing of the new combat code. I am busy trying to integrate Jedi combat more tightly into the normal combat code to make a more efficient and understandable system. Once the attacks are working correctly I will be reintroducing defences and states.

Bobius:

With the feature freeze, I've decided to put my work with Active and NoBuild Areas on hold for a bit. I've finished the transport system for shuttles and starports, but I do still need some people to collect data for me, so that we can populate all the starports. Talk to Kellina about what needs to be collected and in what format.

What I'm working on now is really exciting, and you should start seeing the first parts of it some time soon.

Let's just say that Sirius is about to get really busy.

4) Closing:

The quality assurance team, we hope, will further complement the testing arena and speed up the number of bugs fixed per day. The quality assurance team is NOT a replacement for the support site. We value the feedback we get from the support site and will continue to use it as a main source for bug reports.

Polishing code is a procedure we will be performing more often as we get closer to a production quality release. With the CSR's and Q/A team, the polishing process will become more and more integrated into handling of community bug reports. Please help us by getting involved in the community and testing operations - an hour of your time really does help the project. We hope to see more of you on IRC and the TC!

-Team SWGEmu

[Ramsey]

reserved - staff feel free to add to the round table.

[Karas]

first good job guys <3

[AODTyrant001]

Second good job guys.

[spazz5391]

third XD

[Ashur]

4wesome

[lasvegasl337]

So exciting, great job!

[Arklari]

Awesome!

[Tow'lin]

Nice update! Glad to see the progress!

Regards,
Tow'lin Tow

[Quentin Taos]

Very nice. Every update is just one step closer!

[Slippy]

good news, happy to see you guys are going to focus on fixing bugs instead of adding in new stuff!

[mindl3s]

Death Watch!

[Joekak]

This is more exciting than popping a virgin!

[acau]

Excellent work !