Wurm Online Dev Blog

Disease bugfix, crowding tweak

• A bug where creatures got diseased too often was fixed
• Crowding when attacking should now block the last attacker instead of everyone

Creatures not entering deed, plus bugfixes

• Creatures should now properly avoid entering deeds and spirit guards should not usually hunt them outside either unless they bash
• The area below deeds are now properly calculated when it comes to creature ratio
• The creature ratio outside of deeds is always considered to be 10 which means more miscarriage and disease
• Taunting skillgain speed was tweaked down and sould depth gain removed. Some skills were reset to yesterdays values
• The usual catapult bugfix

More creatures, creature deed limits, and changes to Elevation

• Animal numbers were increased by 10 000 on most servers as cared for and bred animals now will move less often
• The tiles per non-human animal or monster on a deed is now considered. Disease spreads a bit easier if you have a lower ratio than 15 tiles, and you will see a bit more miscarriage. The ratio is shown for citizens in Village Info. Also in general, animals that just gave birth will not be in the mood for another mating for about 24 hours or the next restart.
• A bug with catapulting was fixed
• The following apply to the Elevation PvP server only:
• You may now threaten enemy merchants on Elevation when guards are dead. If successful this will make them drop their items. You can also start trading with them. This is in order to deal with them being used as safe storage. Threatening uses taunting skill initially.
• Settlement guards on the Elevation server now grows stronger the longer a raid lasts.
• On Elevation as test only: If there are enemies in the vicinity when you log off on same kingdom deed, you will remain in game for an hour. This is in order to deal with alts being used as safe storage and promote defending or running away instead.

Item count per floor level

• Item count now works per layer in a structure. Due to the rendering issues this may cause, you may only put 5 non-pile items (we call them decorations) per floor tile in a house.
• You may now rename gifts with the proper player name
• The creator tag length was increased
• You may now create a logon message to all your villagers in village settings

Sound development

We’ve recently recruited a new sound developer (Faeran) and a new client developer (Heroic) who’ll look into sound engine and make sure it works allright. Both are volunteers.

They’re just starting to look around and are probably a bit confused but eventually something good should come out of it.

Faeran is from factionalfight.com and made our unofficial trailer found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cxSN5zRarI

We’re also having new music produced so the whole sound situation in Wurm is being worked on over the next few months.

Catapulting fix, movement and anvils

• The reload bugs with catapulting have been sorted. Some skills were reversed and a few 3 day bans for exploiting handed out. There were no really bad cases of exploiting though - good job!
• Fixed a bug where leading creatures in caves would get them stuck
• Players should now be properly positioned on bottom floors
• Large Anvils can now be dropped properly again

Breeding update, crash bugfix

• A bug that crashed the Serenity server was fixed
• You may now breed typed animals again.

New terraforming options

If your game crashes when you log on, try disabling VBO in the Compatibility tab.

• You can now level an adjacent tile if the one you are standing on is flat!
• You can now flatten tile borders!
• It is currently not possible to breed creatures of special types. Next update a “bred in captivity” trait will be added which prevents fight skill gain from the creature.
• The Wrath of Magranon spell was considered overpowered and now only affects the target tile
• Boat keys should no longer disappear when you change servers
• There is now a option for moving items in village settings
• Planning and building is now better blocked when in illegal mode
• Archery on non-player creatures while penned or on another floor level now properly yields no skillgain since it’s too easy
• The bug where you could not remove build plans of two tiles was fixed
• Sprout in BSB’s now work
• Pristine portals no longer require you to be premium to travel to Affliction
• Chaos players are no longer converted to freedom when travelling to epic
• Tower guards no longer spawn in other kingdoms perimeter
• Using the portal from GV should no longer make it impossible to switch kingdoms for 2 weeks
• You can no longer light campfires inside structures
• Harvesting with a bucket no longer gives sickle skill
• Doing things while fishing no longer messes up the timer
• A bug that crashed the servers was found
• The bug where lumps had wrong icon will slowly go away
• Raising rock with concrete now properly sets data for the rock
• Catapulting messages should have improved and you now shoot the proper amount of tiles. Note that the parabel is calculated based on the height of the tile you aim at. We are discussing adding a some visuals for it or changing the system somehow.

Might update before the weekend

We have a nice update coming with bugfixes and some new terraforming options coded by Tich such as levelling tile borders and even nearby tiles. We were going to release them during normal maintenance today but we had to hold it off due to finding a crash bug in the client this morning.

We may decide to update before the weekend, otherwise this patch is going live next week and then with new nifty friends list functionality also coded by Tich together with Darkfilo.

Answering Beau on Beta

I just found this article that Beau Hindman from massively wrote back in December. I think it’s a very sharp and good article with regards to our 6 years old beta state:

http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/12/19/free-for-all-the-continued-confusing-misuse-of-the-beta-tag/

I agree with you Beau and we were even worse in that we didn’t put a big BETA stamp on the website. I’ll try to explain the reason for sneaking around then backstabbing by suddenly explaining that we’ve been in beta for 6 years.

When Notch and me started the game ages ago we didn’t have a lot of money and didn’t expect to need any really before we had a releasable game. Things dragged on though, and along comes 2006. Our coffers are being drained by hosting the game for free but it has potential and we think nobody else will do this sort of game if we don’t. So we decide to start charging for coins and premium time, introducing our freemium scheme. Notch thinks we should call it Gold and I sort of succumb to the idea although reluctantly because I suspect it may become infected and have no better suggestion.

So people think we’re in gold but.. I mean we lack animations, have horrible models, no character customization and lack lots of other features that I think should be in the game at version 1 like end game content.

Our website changes and the volunteer who designs it removes any reference to beta or under development. It’s a fairly polished site which obviously gives the wrong impression. I let it be for at least two reasons. I think our users deserve to be proud of their game and we need the money badly since I’ve started working full time and want to expand the team.

Aaand along comes winter 2012 and we have at least a basic version of the features I want, including multi storey buildings and character customization and I think it’s time to call it version 1. Still fixing bugs though.

An online world under development always means live testing and debugging for their users if it patches or updates the code. Testing teams always miss something such as the infamous corrupted blood plague in World of Warcraft or the examples in the article with comments.

Beta for online worlds today apparently just means “time before we reach release date” and hopefully more and more customers realize that. Live debugging and testing continues as long as the code changes because… the only option is to stop developing. Unless you’re just adding more of the same, things will eventually explode or at least go “poof” even if you test it thoroughly.

The rest is how customers react to problems and the way the problems are handled. Sometimes it’s a bank run and sometimes the game can compensate in good ways. It’s all situation dependant.

So are we still in Beta? Naah. I hope I didn’t say that!

Rolf