The West Dev Blog

… is it already that time again?

Time flies and from nowhere the western citizens evolved an individual Appearance and increased their social skills and learned the meaning of a word: Friends.

Strangers became Bandits and were feared, some of them have Titles.

Also they discovered their preference to collect stuff and were happy to have some Achievements in their lives.

To manage hard times and have some fun a game named Poker has been invented, since then it also costs a few lives because cheating is not appreciated.

A bean that accidently felt into the soup pot, which tastes good, aroused the idea of starting cooking,
besides that citizens found out that riding a horse with blankets is not that hurtful.
Blacksmith’s developed new recipes for forging new weapons.
Crafting experimental items from miscellaneous objects were also a favorite pastime.

Last winter was cold and the citizens thought it can’t be that they are freezeing that much on the lower body, so the Pants have been invented.

Most of the Buildings started to ruinous and a Redesign was important for continued existence.

That and a few more things happened in the World of The West this year.
We hope you had as much fun this year in the game as we had in developing it.
We all want to thank the players which contributed to improve the game and helped us to spot bugs.

So for now we all let everything cooldown and refresh our energy for the next year to have a graceful start with the next version.

The West-Team whishes you Merry Christmas, tons of gifts and a Happy New Year.

(Dear Trolls out there… be aware of the punish-rod.)

We made changes to the layout of one of our basic component which you meet everyday (maybe unconscious).
Times are over that you get that angry red box which is trying to tell that you or we made a mistake!

I proudly present our new MessageDialog:

Isn’t it great?
Besides you can now prevent the message (the upper box in the picture) from fading when you move the mouse over it, just to read the text in there slowly, after you’re finished click on it
to close it, of course the box is resuming fading when you moved the mouse away from it.

Hi guys,

i am actually working on some inventory changes as you may noticed on Beta. We have several problems with the inventory because the actual inventory system is a whole mess :’(. First of all we always request the whole inventory by every inventory request which really really sucks for both client performance and server performance. In my first changes already live on Beta i changes this and just request the inventory once if its not loaded and then just exchange the changes on the inventory insetad of loading everythin again and again. The second thing which i every dislike is the sorting. All items are sorted by itemid but if we buy something or have changes in inventory there going on some serious choking on the actual Beta version i commited its even more worse. Third problem if you craft something or reward an item it will not be added to your inventory. Its there after reloading inventory. On Beta version i already implemented some listeners to get items more “live”, so if crafting finished the item should be instantly added to your inventory if its opened.

Why all these changes or what we want to do with that? Well my dream is we just have one inventory / bagback instead of hundreds copies for every single traders. I think it will take a while to change everything but my vision is to have one inventory where we can change all things which happening during the game and we are able to make it more “live”, using less performace on server and client.

What you gain? I think we can reduce the amount of loaded items and stuff which will make the game more smooth and i also think it is much easier to handle just one inventory instead of a whole bunch.

What it could look like?

I know already you will hate the numbers for different pages, but if there are big inventories its a mess to render every item at one view for every browser and thats one reason why inventory is really slow for people who have big inventories. Please keep in mind that its a preview and the tooltip won’t be implemented like that its just a dummy. Our plan is that the inventory can be docked to traders or your equipmentwindow, but maybe it will become his own inventory place we are not sure about it now.

Hi all,

always when i look on the dev Blog i realize that i make to less posts But at the moment i can’t tell that much we are doing a lot of backend Stuff in 1.33 and trying to get out more server performance and we have some good results already achieved. In Frontend development there a lot of old screens transformed to the new layout some are good some are still bad and need some work, so we made a lot of rollouts on public beta and had a lot of bugs then we did a lot of bug fixing, rollout etc. But after that more maintain version 1.33 we want to implement some more cool stuff

Stuff like the new Town overview and Building placement. I think zet posted some ideas long time ago and finally we have a concept but its not finalized yet so i can’t tell you that much. But you will be able to build your “own” town which means different graphic sets, you can place your buildings on other locations, you are able place stuff like trees, seas and some new things you will need some material for it. The other new thing to the town is our plan is that buildings can get damaged over time and you have to repair it or you will loose a whole building I have also one screenshot for you guys (notice this is an really early screenshot and it is not completly )

Second upcoming change will be to improve the market i know a lot of ppl ask for it days? months? years? I don’t know but the good news are we will do something We have a really great list of improvements which are requested by the players and we hope we can improve the market so that everyone will like it (In the next days i will write more about it, this is my hint to not forget about it)

First: Yep, I am leaving the The West team soon and made mostly clean up and minor improvement works in the past month. For example, the reload and minimize buttons for the new window gui is working now properly, I added a combobox GUI element and I’ve added some other minor stuff.

I am not so happy to leave the team now as there are still features that should be added and updated, like a new duel system, the character migration, and a new multiplayer event thing similar to fort battles and I would have really liked to do that myself. But after 2 1/2 years in the team, a project switch could do me good and gives others to step up.

So long then, I am looking forward for new updates in the game, I am sure there’s much to come in the future!

– Zet

Hi all,

i am very sorry for the lack of news lately. It was vacation time In future i will try to post more often and keep you more informed. My first announcement for today isn’t the best thing for The-West: zet will leave our Team on the 1st of September, he will still work for our company, but on a different game. In order to keep the game alive 2 new guys joined our team. Marcel, our new Frontend Developer and Hilko started his study at our company, he will support us in Backend-Development after some time of adjustment to his new job.

In the future we plan to make The-West more stable and optimized. Because of Zet leaving us we’re losing a lot of experience and because of that we can’t implement that many features for now. But i think it’s not a problem because we know we have still lots of bugs and unbalanced things in the game. We will take the time and try to get the game more user friendly, stable and optimized

There is one new feature planned for the next update i would like to show and introduce: The Friendlist

With the friendlist you are going to be able to invite friends to The-West or add friends who are already playing on your world to your friendlist. In the Friendlist you can see some details about your friends like online status, level, town, class. There will be also a lot more achievements regarding this feature.

Hi there,

sorry for our long absence, but we have changed some internal processes. For everyone who cares about we changed our development process to scrum. Our 1st sprint is done and we are in the middle of our 2nd sprint and of course we have already some results we want to introduce.

1st we finished the screendesign and technical part of the new achievement system

2nd we are still busy with redesign old screens and fit them to the new layout

And last but not least the avatargenerator is nearly done

Our plan is to update the public beta this week there will be a lot more features, bug fixes and content. Looking forward to your comments

After releasing the patch 1.31 on german markets we figured out that we have to make some changes to the crafting system.

1. The cooldown of all useable products will be reduced to 10 minutes (written before)

2. We will reduce the difficult of the starting recipes that means you will need less products to craft the start items until a skill value of 100

3. We want to add some more start recipes which will build an own chain for example: You do a job to get leather after you found one leather you will be able to craft it to “better” leather. This “better” leather can be used to create “much better” leather with “much better” leather you will be able to create an item to use. As you can see with that chain you will be able to find just one leather and craft 4 times. (These chains are planned for every profession until a skill value of 25 or something like that).

Changes in crafting frontend:

I have made some changes to crafting frontend. First i converted it to the new screen layout. Second you will have a better overview about what products you need and which you already have.

Here’s an example for 60 different avatars that’ll be available when changing to the new system (click on the picture for a larger version).

There are of course many more combinations (there are over 70.000 combinations possible already and there’ll be even more!) available, so there’ll be plenty of possibilities to customize your character the way you want.

And btw: Cooldown times for reusable items are going to be set to 10 minutes – not the 2 hours we’ve started with.

After successful release of the patch 1.31 on some german worlds we started to work with 1.32 (of course we also doing bug fixes in 1.31 ). With 1.32 we want to convert as many screens as possible to the new screen layout and window manager, some of them will just converted others will be completely reworked in order of that i have two screenshots for you. 

For your information about the updates we started to translate 1.31 for all languages. We will finish the updates on german worlds this week. After that we will update other markets when their translations done.