AC2:Announcements - 2004/09 - The Madness of Aun Tanua
Original Link (now dead) - http://ac2.turbinegames.com/index.php?page_id=269
September Teaser: The Madness of Aun Tanua
The moon was a thin crescent, the burial grounds smothered in darkness. Aun Tanua leaned against an outcropping of muck-slimed stone and tried to shut out the whispers around him. Of all the evil places in Dereth, this one pained him the most. It reminded him of all the centuries that had passed during his imprisonment -- of all the battles that had been fought and lost without him. And it reminded him that much of what had been lost could never be regained.
The old mounds and their monuments were filthy with neglect. Why had his kin abandoned the tradition of burial by fire? Had they not understood the purity of a clean ending in the flames? By committing their dead to the ground, the Tumeroks made themselves vulnerable to the Burun, and the Burun had robbed them of their peace. Since the Burun had desecrated this place, the swamps had slowly devoured the land, and the ground had grown spongy and fetid. The spirits of the dead wailed in agony--he heard them in his heart. And yet the Burun shamans continued to weave their curses. Tanua averted his eyes from strips of strange meat dangling from the branches, from spurs of yellowed bone protruding from the mire. Surely there was no worse place on Dereth to confront his new enemy.
Yet he would answer this blasphemous challenge. Enough battles had been lost in his absence. He would not fail to stand now, whatever the costs.
As the old warrior's fingers clenched around the vile thing in his belt pouch, a low birdcall echoed across the bog, followed by a second, higher call. He called back, relieved despite his courage. His faithful servants had not disappointed him. He would stand against Wharu tonight, and he would not stand alone.
"I have placed the wards and the counter-charms, sire," Del Tarion murmured. "The Burun curse is tied, tangled, and twisted upon itself. It will not trouble us in battle unless we fight until daybreak." At Tanua's nod of approval, Del allowed himself a tense grin. He was the youngest of Tanua's lieutenants, but a talented and imaginative enchanter when he could master his recklessness.
"And your report, sister?" Tanua inquired.
"Burun, a small clutch, an hour's run distant," replied slender Shi Kiriona. "Torpid and threatless. There are no Olthoi. I killed nothing. I sensed no watchers." Unlike Del, Tanua's best scout spoke no more than was necessary. Tanua privately thought he would rather have Kiriona fighting by his side than ten Del Tarions; her unyielding will was nearly the equal of his own. But Del was still a bright-eyed prodigy, untempered by pain. If he lived, he would learn.
"Very well," Aun Tanua replied. "Now I will show you what brought us here, and tell you what we must do." He drew the artifact from his belt pouch and held it forth. Kiriona drew in a sharp breath. Del Tarion leaned forward excitedly.
"What is it?" he breathed. "I've never seen anything like it."
"You never will again," Tanua answered. "It is the death-mask of a Tumerok shaman, which draws out his spirit in the last moment of life. It was given to me by a messenger." He turned the cracked, perverse thing over and over in his hands, trying not to flinch at the oily feel of the stone. "And it should not exist. By the ancient laws, such death-masks were always made of wood, and they were burned along with the shaman's body. This released the shaman's spirit to ride the winds until its next calling. But the Shi tribe fell into error and began to bury its dead. The Shi wanted their fallen elders to remain bound to the land, both in body and spirit; this comforted them in their sorrow. So the secrets of the death-mask were lost, and few alive remember how to craft them."
"I don't understand," Del replied. "If these masks were burned before the Tumeroks buried their dead, and never created afterwards..."
"That is the evil of this thing," Tanua replied. "This mask was not crafted by Tumerok hands." He held the grinning abomination at arm's-length. "It was crafted by someone who has knowledge of the ancient ways. It was crafted of cold stone, a blasphemy in itself. And it was used to imprison a fallen shaman. Against his will, he survives in this warped mask. And its face has become his own."
Kiriona flinched, but Del looked intrigued. "So why did we come to this place?" he asked.
"Because the mask yearned for it. The shaman's body rests somewhere in this muck. It is rotten and severed from its master, yet still in pain, as the spirit in the mask is still in pain. Neither can find peace until both are reunited. And that is what we are here to do."
"It's a trap," Kiriona said distinctly. Tanua knew she was asking a question, not pointing out the obvious.
"Yes," Tanua nodded, "it is a trap. A trap set by Wharu. And we are going to spring it. I will break the mask. Kiriona, you will stand at my side. Del Tarion, you must hide and be ready. Take no risks. Do not reveal yourself. When the time comes, you must act."
"What am I supposed to do?"
"I do not know."
"How can I tell when the time has come?"
"I do not know."
Del nodded solemnly, apparently satisfied, and took his position. Kiriona's eyes flashed as she steadied her grip on her spear. Tanua focused his complete attention on the mask, trying fruitlessly to guess what snare the enemy had laid for him.
Finally, there was nothing to do but act. With a hoarse shout, Tanua hurled the mask with all his strength at the stone outcropping. But the fragile-looking mask did not break. Instead, it bounced harmlessly off the rock and landed on the marshy ground. Kiriona darted forward to seize the object, but the mask had already vanished into the mire. It had been sucked down, or seized from below....
She looked up, wonderingly, at Aun Tanua. "What now?" she asked.
Then Del Tarion screamed. And the battle was joined.
Aun Tanua whirled around, drawing his twin blades in a single smooth motion. But Del Tarion was nowhere to be seen. In his place, a twisted golem made of shining red ropes staggered and writhed. Tanua leapt forward, but the swampy ground ruined his footing. His vicious double slash cleaved the air far short of his target. Before Tanua recovered his balance, the thing lunged towards him, trying to clutch him in its misshapen embrace.
At closer range, Tanua saw that his first impression was mistaken. The thing was not wrapped in ropes; it was engulfed in long, glistening worms. He hacked viciously at one of its arms, and felt satisfaction as his blade passed all the way through the flesh. That satisfaction turned to disgust as the worms instantly knitted themselves back together. Before the severed limb could fall to the ground, it was tightly bound to the monster again.
"Tanua!" Kiriona cried from behind him. "Don't kill it! It's Del! It's got to be Del!" Tanua spared a glance backwards, and saw that Kiriona was leaping and darting from point to point, somehow keeping ahead of the worms that writhed towards her from every direction.
"You cannot help Del now!" Tanua snarled. "So help me!" He spun and sliced, and his blades cut deep into the thing that had been Del Tarion. It began to retreat, flailing helplessly. Yet when Tanua tried to advance, he found that he was rooted to the ground. More of the worms were wriggling up from the muck, entangling his feet and legs. Wherever they touched his skin, it burned like acid.
“Kiriona! Where are you?" He tried to twist around, looking for his companion, but the worms held him fast. They left trails of crimson agony as they spiraled up his torso. He realized that they were seeking his mouth and eyes. And the featureless worm-beast was advancing towards him again. "Kiriona!"
"Behind you! Grab my spear! Quickly!" Aun Tanua flung himself backwards, knowing that if he missed his grab he'd end up on his back in the swamp, and that would be the end of him. But Kiriona had leapt to the top of the stone outcropping and found firm footing, and Tanua easily grasped her extended spear. "Don't let go!" she cried. With surprising strength, she began to haul him towards the stone.
Gripping the spear with one hand, Aun Tanua ripped worms from his face and neck with the other. At first, the struggle seemed hopeless. But as soon as Kiriona had hauled him onto the stone, the worms dropped easily from his body and squirmed back into the mire. He almost cried out in gratitude.
"How did you know...?" he gasped.
"They are things of the dead earth," she replied. "Their strength rises from below. From Wharu. They can't survive away from corrupted ground." She shuddered. "Look... now that they've missed their chance at you, they're leaving Del...."
"Only half-true. That is not Del."
As the worms crawled away from its head, the face revealed was that of the hideous mask. And as the worms abandoned its body, it was obvious that it was Tumerok, not Human, in shape.
Unsteadily, the thing rose to its feet and removed the mask, tossing it carelessly aside. Aun Tanua's gorge rose as he saw the ruined face underneath. It grinned, or tried to grin.
Kiriona found her voice first. "Who are you?" she asked.
"My name is Shi Manaua. Thank you for returning my spirit. And now we must speak, for my time is short."
Aun Tanua and Shi Kiriona leapt lightly to the ground, both wary in case the corpse-worms should rise again. But nothing happened. Tanua kept his swords unsheathed and his eyes firmly on his enemy. "What are you, Shi Manaua?
"I was a shaman and a protector of my people," he replied through rotten lips. "And I still am."
Kiriona spat. "Wharu is no protector."
"Oh, but he is, child." The decaying Manaua gestured towards Aun Tanua with his single arm; the other had fallen away with the worms. "Last scion of the pure-blooded Aun, you are wise in the old ways. I ask you a question: who feeds the hunger of Dereth? Who keeps the land itself from starving? On which of the Great Spirits does life most depend?"
"On Wharu," answered Tanua immediately.
"That's right," Manaua smiled as Kiriona gasped in dismay. "And what would happen if Wharu were struck down?"
"Wharu cannot be struck down. Your question is meaningless."
"I concede the point," Manaua said, smiling broadly. "But if he withdrew his blessings?"
"The trees would wither. The crops would fail. Everything would turn to ashes and dust."
"Tanua? Is it true?" Kiriona asked, pleadingly. He would not, could not meet her eyes.
"Of course it's true," said Manaua. "Without decay and rot, Dereth's vitality would soon be spent. Wharu's hunger feeds us all." He extended a half-disintegrated hand towards Kiriona. "Join me, daughter, in thanking him for his bounty."
But Aun Tanua stepped between Kiriona and Manaua. "All you have said is true," Tanua said. "Yet one thing confuses me. Wharu always takes what is offered to him. When his Olthoi defeated the Tumeroks, he fed upon the Tumeroks. When the Tumeroks defeated his Olthoi, he fed upon the Olthoi. Our people have always been glad to send him Olthoi rather than ourselves. Why is your Wharu so bent on devouring our race, Manaua? And why are you so determined to deliver us to him?"
Manaua looked uncertain. "It's not important. Wharu is hungry. He must be fed. I understood this when I gave him my people -- all but one, a traitor. We must not be selfish, Tanua! We must sacrifice to the Hungry One! Will you struggle against your duty? Or will you join me in honoring the old ways?" Again he extended his rotten hand.
Without altering his expression -- without the slightest warning -- Aun Tanua lashed out with both blades. Manaua shrieked, but could not retreat in time. His remaining arm dropped to the ground. So did his head. His body was the last to topple.
“Run, Kiriona! Get to higher ground!" Aun Tanua knelt and grabbed Manaua's gibbering head by its topknot before it could sink into the swamp. He held it at arm's length.
"Fool!" it spat. "Heretic and fool! Wharu will gnaw your bones!" A horrible septic sound bubbled up around him, and Aun Tanua began to sink quickly into the muck. Still, he held his trophy fast.
"I have a question for you," he said calmly, as the sludge enveloped his legs and waist. It was colder than he'd expected. "And you will answer it."
"Why should I?"
"Because I returned your spirit to you, though I knew you were a fiend."
"No."
"Because the Wharu you serve is false, taking what is not offered and giving nothing at all."
"No."
"Because I am about to choke on swampwater, and the curiosity of a dying idiot may amuse you."
There was a long silence. Then, as the sludge closed over Tanua's shoulders: "Ask your question."
"The traitor. The only one of your tribe whom you did not give to Wharu. What was his name?"
Manaua began to laugh. "That's all? He was a no-talent. A nothing. His name is now Shi Tawapuh. I felt pity for him in my former life. Now I feel only contempt. How fitting that Wharu refused such a useless Tonk as a sacrifice!"
"Thank you, Shi Manaua. And goodbye." Tanua flung the cackling head of Manaua far away, not caring where it landed. Then he tilted his head back, barely avoiding a mouthful of sewage. "Del! Can you hear me? Now is the time! Now!"
A jolt of powerful magic struck Tanua's body. Then, with a lurch, he was pulled roughly from the swamp. Dripping slime and muck, he rose unsteadily towards a ragged line of healthy green trees. And, yes, there was Del Tarion, perched high on a thick branch, clutching the trunk with one hand and gesturing frantically with the other. Aun Tanua laughed. It was not easy to cast such spells one-handed.
"Impressive," he congratulated Del as he settled onto the branch. "I did not think you had survived the battle."
"I'm sorry, sire," Del whispered. "I did my best...."
"You did well! Had you acted a moment sooner, I would know nothing of our true enemy. Now I know something. I know a name." Tanua grinned, savoring his victory.
"She didn't make it out. She was halfway to the trees when something dragged her down. I tried to help, but the curse was too strong.... The swamp took her, Aun Tanua."
Rollout Notes
Original Link (now dead) - http://ac2.turbinegames.com/index.php?page_id=268
September Guide
SYSTEM CHANGES
- Many solo monsters have had their XP yields raised. Note: these changes apply to solo monsters only (not group monsters). Look for more detailed information on these changes next week.
- Personal Mining Assistant: Survey checks are now marked on the minimap. Each time a player uses a surveyor’s map, a colored diamond will appear on their minimap marking the attempt. Diamond color will determine the proximity of the check:
- Red: “somewhere within the map’s borders”
- Orange: “not too far”
- Yellow: “close”
- Green: “very close”
- When you have located the mine, the minimap will be cleared.
ITEM CHANGES
- The drop rate for all Rare “purple-text” Items has been increased.
- The drop rate of one-time use Rare “purple-text” Items (such as the Sangog Brothers) has been increased within the three versions of Sigil “cache” chests.
- The Rare Item "Magroot" is now stackable up to 50 units and restores 200 Focus instead of the former 100.
- A bug in one of the treasure system tables was making it impossible to find Hero loot with low Arcane Lore on most monsters. Hero loot should now possess more reasonable AL requirements.
- Some Armor-reducing effects on treasure items were not working correctly, and have been fixed .
- Aconite is out of season, and will not be as common a sight on the landscape.
- The pre-August stats for Sclavus Scales have been restored .
- The drop rate has been increased on Moarsman Fins and Reaper Horns.
- The drop rate has been increased on Reckoning Gems, and they also now appear in the three Sigil Chests.
CONTENT CHANGES
- SHRETH Base portals are no longer portal-tieable or recallable.
- Players should no longer become stuck when falling in the Message from Home Dungeons.
- The Rifts, Golems and Shadows found on Omishan have had their levels reduced. These monsters now range from level 24 to 28 for solo monsters, and 30 to 34 for group monsters.
- The Gauntlet quest has been given a makeover:
- There is now a separate quest for each level band: 20-24, 25-29, 30-34, 35-39, 40-44, and 45+. Different level bands start their quests fighting different level monsters so as not to require higher level players to fight monsters far below their level.
- Alternate monsters from level 25 to 45 have been removed, so each successive monster is 2 levels higher than the last until level 45. A new level 65 monster has been added, and two of the mid-level monsters have been replaced with new combatants.
- Players are not penalized for going on to defeat successively more difficult monsters no matter how high level the monsters are compared to the player. None of the experience awards are modified by "challenge level."
- All Gauntlet quest experience rewards have been revised using a consistent percentage-of-level system. Many lower level awards have been reduced, but some of the higher level rewards have been increased.
- If a player fails to teleport to the next monster in the sequence when they defeat their opponent, they can go back to the beginning and use the Gauntlet Portal to re-enter at the correct stage of the quest.
- Problems "leaving pets behind" after a victorious player teleports should be fixed.
CRAFTING CHANGES
- Craft XP rewards have been improved for all Weaponcrafting, Armorcrafting, Toolmaking and Spellbinding skills. Trait costs for these recipes have been adjusted to conform to the new reward scheme. Practice Recipes should now be the best way to grind Craft XP regardless of the player’s skill level.
- Trait Vendors will now offer starter tools in their shop inventory.
- Quest Recipes have been organized by category, and frequently-used recipes like Saddles and Mana Charges have been moved to the top of the list.
- New Practice Recipe trinkets added.
MISCELLANEOUS CHANGES & FIXES
- Improvements have been made to the physics of missile attacks, and players should see an increase in accuracy.
- Fire FX should no longer torment players eternally.
- We've fixed a portion of the Lightless Breach where players could get stuck behind a wall.
- The Tumerok Invoker's Ancient Malediction and Tormenting Gale skills were not taking Major Max Damage into account. This has been fixed.
- The Tumerok Invoker's Ghost of the Past and Astral Hunters skills should no longer be blocked by their pets.
- Ride the Anger is no longer overwritten by the Spirit of Volkama.
- A number of skill descriptions that were incorrect in August have been updated with the correct description.
- The Sclavus Hierophant was getting "stuck", resulting in an unfair Unfair Fight message, and non-advancement of the quest. This has been fixed.
Letter to the Players
Original Link (now dead) - http://forums.ac2.turbinegames.com/showthread.php?t=9402
Lttp: September News
Hello again! I haven’t had as much time as usual to post on the boards; I’ve been very busy with the billing system. It’s a very frantic time here as we iron out last minute bugs and issues. Much coffee and late-night work is being had by all. But I felt I needed to step away from that for a bit and give you some updates on how things are looking for AC2.
They are, in fact, looking quite positive from our point of view. But here’s the conundrum that we’ve seen before: often when we’re making great strides, the community will not see all of the details, and we will see player morale drop when there’s no good reason for it. The best explanation I’ve heard is that there’s two times when Turbine is more quiet than usual: when we’re working on good news, and when we’re managing bad news… and our players always assume the news is bad.
However, the news is good. Some of it is a little too unpredictable to talk about quite yet (for instance, Hero 2.0 is still changing all the time), but you’ll see a whole bunch of new stuff very shortly. Let’s get right to it.
New Billing System
If you haven’t heard, the new billing system will soon be in place for new customers; existing customers will be migrated a little while after that. See http://forums.ac2.turbinegames.com/...read.php?t=8769 for more information.
We’ve been working for over a year to develop a world-class billing and support infrastructure; the result is a resilient billing solution which I’m confident will be well received. The basic structure of our system is now complete, and we’re about ready to roll out the billing system and the new launcher. But that is just the first stage of features; other systems will come online over the next year: better customer-support tools, improved authentication servers, new price plans, and new game features such as web-integration, character migration, and extremely powerful chat channel features.
But all of these features start from billing, which is the most important part of the infrastructure. The QA department is subjecting it to yet another exhaustive battery of tests over the next few weeks before they certify it ready to go. In fact, because our QA department is spending so much of its time testing the billing system, we’ve pushed our September update back to the 29th, so that they have a bit more time to allot to testing our update. However, this shouldn’t affect our schedule for future months (the content team has already moved on to the next month.)
Jolt
We’ve partnered with Jolt to run Asheron’s Call 2 in Europe. See the FAQ at http://forums.ac2.turbinegames.com/...read.php?t=8293. We’re really happy about this, because we just don’t have the presence in Europe to make AC2 all it can be, and Jolt is an expert at it. Jolt is extremely excited about the game and what they’re going to be able to do for it – and their plans are very aggressive. The details are still being hammered out, so we can’t give you a lot of particular information yet, but I think our European players are going to be very pleased.
Treasure and Crafting Changes
Hero-level treasure has been tweaked in September by renormalizing the damage and lore values for post-50 weapons. There were some bugs that kept the weapons from being as good as we intended them to be.
The crafting system has also been updated. Players will now get more CXP for crafting items of most levels. The CXP yield is actually reduced a little bit for the early levels, but it soon starts to outpace the old amounts, and by the time you’re making level 50 items, the reward is more than double. Level 60 items return nearly 300% of the CXP they used to.
I can guess what you’re thinking: “Great, item creation needed a big boost, but why did you bother nerfing the CXP from low-level item recipes?” Well, we’d like to eventually allow you to earn CXP for making low-level (“green”) items. That way, if your customer needs a low-level sword, you’ll earn at least a little CXP for making it for him. One of the steps we need to take for this is to make sure the trait-to-CXP ratio is fair for all levels. Right now, if we allowed you to earn CXP for green recipes, the best way to earn CXP would be to do the newbie recipe over and over forever, because that gives you more trait-per-CXP than any other recipe does! So we made some small adjustments to close this loophole.
We’re planning to allow you to earn CXP for green recipes starting in October or November, unless we notice other snags in the meantime.
We’ve also made mining a lot more intuitive by adding visual cues to your mini-map whenever you mine. See the September guide for details. Check out the mini-map on this developer screenshot; it shows hotter/colder information based on the color of the dots:
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Monster Changes
We’ve made some changes to Monsters in September as well. I had expected the changes to be more sweeping, but we needed to clean up some of the underlying systems first. The first step is being able to tell what types of attacks monsters are actually using.
The visual appearance of monster projectiles is extremely arbitrary; in most cases it was chosen by the whim of the artist during development! If we’re going to have more distinction between magic, missile, and melee, we obviously have to be able to tell them apart.
When a Gurog throws an axe at you, it’s obviously a missile attack. But what if it’s a cone of blue energy? That could mean any number of things in our game. It’s not intuitive. So we looked over most of the monsters in the game, and, if their attack wasn’t already intuitive (like a Gurog axe), we made it more obvious. You should be able to tell magic projectiles from missile ones now. Here are some examples of magic attacks:
http://ac2.turbinegames.com/files/10/89/46/95/328.jpg
Notice that there are several different colors of each. These are different types of attack: normal, acid, ice, energy, fire, lighting, and water. (The colors look a little weird in a static picture, but make more sense in the game.)
And if it’s a missile attack, it will LOOK like a missile attack. Here are some example projectiles.
http://ac2.turbinegames.com/files/08/71/89/34/329.jpg
These also correspond to particular types of attacks. The two leftmost are basic damage-dealing attacks; the others are:
Top Row: Bile, Numbing, Shock, Harming, Disease, Poison
Bottom Row: Acid, Ice, Energy, Fire, Lightning, Water
Again, they look very boring here, but they they have particles attached to them that make them look more interesting and distinct in the game.
In addition to this, we also made a huge number of the “lesser-loved” solo monsters yield more XP. This should make solo hunting more rewarding for classes that have a hard time soloing nemesis monsters.
We will continue to work on monsters in the coming months; we’ve created a Monster Team to tackle all of the issues in a methodical manner, and really take our monsters to the next level.
Skill Changes
The new projectile improvements we talked about are in. This affects the Ranger, Raider, and Alchemist. These classes’ attacks will “Miss” less often – if the projectile lands within a few feet of the target, the game will count that as a hit. In practice, this improves accuracy by 20-30%; it’s pretty noticeable. Note that this only reduces Misses; Evades will still happen as often as before.
Hivekeepers can’t take advantage of this new feature, because their attacks don’t fire in an arc. So if they miss, the projectiles end up landing a very long way away. This feature can only be used for arc-based attacks. However, in the future we’ll find a way to improve the Hivekeeper’s accuracy a bit.
We have purposefully omitted the hammer, spear, and wrench skills for now, but we might add them at some point in the future. We have also omitted the Claw Bearer, but we have no intention of giving this power to them… Claw Bearers have plenty of power as it is.
Just to be clear, this change does not affect monster skills. We might have it affect certain special monster attacks in the future, but nothing for now.
On a different note, we had intended to adjust the Dark Side Alchemist tree’s reset timers this month, as our August changes turned out to be a slight nerf, rather than a slight buff. But this slipped the September schedule and will be done in October. My apologies.
Game Issues
It’s been a while since we talked about bugs, so let me bring you up to speed on where we are. There are four major technical issues that we plan to address (or are addressing right now); I call these the “big four.” (There are lots of smaller issues, of course, and we fix several small issues each month.)
The big four are: server lag, rubberbanding, monster/pet pathing, and sound problems. Our engineering efforts have been diverted by the billing implementation, but we’re starting to have more resources available to address these problems.
Let me talk about each issue briefly.
Server Lag
We’ve seen more server lag and “lag spikes” in the past few months than before. There are two possibilities: players are doing something new and different, or our code is doing something new and different. In this case, it appears to be a combination of both.
Despite popular belief, the issue isn’t tied to just Cacophos or other content, nor is it tied to having a certain number of people online. Those are catalysts, but not the real underlying cause. Something is using up our server resources in a new way. Players can sometimes do Cacophos without trouble, even at peak load times. So there’s a missing piece to the puzzle.
This is considered the #1 “bug”, and we have been investigating it for a while. Although we haven’t found the underlying culprit, we’ve decided to start adding in smaller optimizations we’ve found from our performance analysis. Some of these optimizations are going in for September – for instance, if you have a lower-end computer, and the game seems to freeze up every time you select an item or use a skill, you’ll likely see improvements on Wednesday.
We have more optimizations going in for October and beyond, but these will probably not be the dramatic lag fix we’re looking for. We really need a smoking gun that tells us what’s at the root of the trouble. I think we’re almost there – we have a lot of information now, and should be able to put it together shortly. So I’m pretty optimistic about this issue – much more than I was a month ago, when we were floundering for lack of evidence.
Of the “big four” issues, I expect lag to be cleaned up first.
Rubberbanding
Rubberbanding is when you’re walking along, and suddenly you bounce back to where you were a second ago. This happens because the client and the server disagree on where you’re supposed to be standing. When there’s a disagreement, the server always wins, so you bounce back to where the server thinks you should be.
Rubberbanding is partly caused by server lag. Whenever there’s server lag, the server isn’t calculating your position as quickly as the client is, so they get out of synch. Boing! However, there’s more to it than that – certain objects and places in the world cause rubberbanding regardless of server lag. These are the areas we’re most intrigued by.
This bug has, of course, always existed in AC2. We first assumed that this was caused by problems with the art data, but we’ve eventually ruled that out. Players claim to experience a lot of strange behavior that we can’t explain yet. So I’m not terribly optimistic that this will get fixed in the next few months. But we do have some clever “quick fixes” that we’re going to try; if those work well on the test world, we’ll get those in for October and hopefully mitigate this problem to a lesser issue.
Sound Issues
Our sound system works great for many players. I have a mid-level Creative Labs card and have no issues – it’s rock solid. Yet others insist that they can’t play unless they turn off sound. What’s the deal?
Well, Asheron’s Call 2 was developed using a Microsoft DirectX technology called DirectMusic. Most games use the older system, called DirectSound. But we wanted to take advantage of the new features, so we decided to use the newer tech. Unfortunately, sound card and driver developers have not jumped on the bandwagon as much as we’d hoped. Even now, a year and a half after the game shipped, several of the most popular cards do not support Direct Music very well.
So we’re considering our options here. We can certainly gut Direct Music and replace it, but we have to look at what features we’d lose by doing so, how long it would take, etc. It may make more sense to add new user-controls, so that players could better choose how much sound support they wanted. We’re not sure how useful that would really be, though.
This issue has been on the back-burner for a long time, so we’ve only recently been able to start looking at our options. When we make a decision, I’ll fill you in.
Monster/Pet Pathing
We have a pretty cool AI system under the hood, yet all our monsters tend to stand around and do dumb things. In many respects, they’ve been lobotomized. This is largely because they can’t reach their targets efficiently. Pets suffer from the same problem. We’ve made some code breakthroughs here that have improved the issue in many dungeons, and we have some more code improvements on deck for October/November. But there is another aspect to this problem: some dungeon tile sets are just not good for monster pathing. The physics are too complex for monsters to get through. Heck, a lot of times PLAYERS can’t get through the dungeon without getting stuck on the walls, and we expect monsters to be able to do it? Obviously, these dungeon pieces have to be simplified. (In the world of computer art, it’s often a lot easier to make things complex than it is to make things simple. So they’re overly complex because the artists didn’t have time to make them simpler.)
We’ve been planning to replace these dungeon pieces with better ones for a while now. Then we went and tried to do it, and hit two snags. First, it takes a long time for our artists to fix the dungeon pieces – it can take up to a day per dungeon piece, which means it will be many months before all the dungeons are redone. Second, the pieces don’t fit together in quite the same way as the old pieces. That means the level designers will have to go back through every affected dungeon and touch up the entire place. That will take a long time, too.
So there’s good news and bad news here. Bad news is that this will be an ongoing process for the next six to eight months. Good news is that we will be able to use the fixed-up dungeon pieces for new content pretty soon, so at least upcoming dungeons won’t be as problematic.
Consignment Vendors
As Keth mentioned over here at http://forums.ac2.turbinegames.com/...read.php?t=8898, October is a big month for us. This is when we will introduce Consignment Vendors. We have a pretty cool way for you to unlock them and get access to them. Not all the Consignment Vendors will be unlockable in October; others will become available in November.
Here’s a peek at some of the new stores:
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This is a lot of new technology for us, and we’ve certainly got big plans for how to use the Consignment Vendor systems in the future to provide lots of other features!
Conclusion