The West Dev Blog

Here is just a another new Preview for upcoming Graphic Changes some things are still unclear

Some things changes i am looking forward to read your feedback

Another Thing i started with is Crafting

I wish i could show you something about that, but i am still doing Backend Stuff for Crafting and there is not many i can show. The concept is still not really final for the whole Crafting thing, but there will be some professions and you could choose one of them, when your character reaches level 20. After that you are able to craft some components. You will need them later to craft real useful items. For every crafted item or component you may get a skill point for your profession, for now we thought about a max skill of 150 still not clearly. To craft items or components you will need to learn recipes. Recipes will be dropped in jobs and you will be able to buy them at the player trader or in a town shop.

Hi there to keep you informed i will spoiler some new graphics …

Please keep in mind it is neither complete nor final yet it is just a preview for you

We have hotfixed the servers with some duelsearch and duel changes. First player who sleeps, found a fort or aliance member will not longer shown in duelsearch. Second fix is duelist will no longer be able to abuse their action radius with standing at fort and signing on for it, defender will now get their time to strike back.

Poker is doing nice progress. Been denting out bugs all day even till evening. I want to see this thing stable soon – and I don’t have much time left before my vacation starts.

I had a nice poker round on beta this evening with a few friendly players – I think poker is really gonna contribute to socializing. It’s much more entertaining to chat and play at the same time and without stress like during fort battles. Here are two new screenshots of an entertaining session:

As you can see, I also added some simple graphics. It’s for the artist who’s going to make the screendesign so whoever is going to do it knows what it’s going to look like about. At least this is roughly what I had in mind.

The game itself is running by now pretty smooth I would say. There are still issues left, but in general, it’s already pretty nifty. Had one crash this evening that took my 10k winning row away :(. But fixed that thing and improved performance a bit and it seems to run faster as well right now. The question is how it’ll behave on a large scale system with 2k players online. Could happen anytime that once we activate it we have to deactivate it instantly to prevent any damage. I hope that won’t happen though…

And I have to check if a straight starting with an ace is OK in poker (think so) – because if it’s “official”, I have to consider it in the logic (which I don’t do right now and it’ll “complificate” a few things a bit).

It’s on the beta 😀

and it seems to work … well, I’ll go over the crashlogs on monday to figure out what’s been going wrong over the weekend…

I’ll let speak the picture for itself

For all the english guys it will be a new Feature which allows you to create Item Sets for Jobs, Duelling whatever you want. You have just to put on your equipment and then you can save this setting. After that you can load your saved setting and switch your equipment by one click.

Programming isn’t visual at all most of the time. It needed some time and nerves, but the poker game is making progress:

Basically it’s functional right now: One can create and leave tables (well, kind of) and the poker game progresses automatically when bets are done (or if players fold).  The UI is primitive but functional enough to test the game. There are lots of bugs right now to fix, but it’s starting to be fun. I can’t await to make a graphical frontend… (it’s the least amount of work …. well except for animations, but that also shouldn’t be too tough). As soon as it’s in a playable stable state with most functionality covered, it’ll go over into the beta. Or at least I am hoping so.

Btw.: In the first implementation, poker is going to be beta state; that means that it’ll also hit the productive worlds in a not yet finished state: It won’t use your money for the game and the games won’t be persistent (if the chat server restarts for some reason, the poker game state is not restored). This phase will be used to test if the game works in a large environment with lots of players and also to dent out possible errors (it’s nearly guaranteed that there’ll be rule bugs in the game) that shouldn’t affect players too badly. When we consider it stable enough, we’ll add persistence, so game states can be recovered and are permanent. Once that works, we’ll use your character’s money to play (so yes, if you’re good at poker, you might be able to gain a fortune at low levels… however, there’ll be a fee for playing, so this’ll be another money sink for the game).