Developer Update Some coming game changes, and a new Dragon

[Seiichi]

It's been a little over a month since the last development update and I figured it was about time to write up a new one.

The most controversial change is that I will be changing expansion cards and daily reset tickets so that they cannot be transferred through the housing system. Daily reset cards have been temporarily removed from the Surprise Box of the Master (and replaced with Draconic Influence potions), but they will be re-added after the change goes into effect, as well as the addition of them back to the shell market. This is a change that has to be done due to how excessively alt farming has been abused, and continues to be abused; a quick look in the logs show people who have 60+ expansion cards or daily resets, the majority of which come from alt farming. This change will mean that the shell market can be properly equalized and that things that have been left off of it will be able to be added (potentially even a James Brown Flute).

This change will likely go into effect in September, so I will recommend using or removing any stored expansion cards or daily reset tickets in housing storage.

Secondly, I have been asked or reminded to change the Kindred Wheel quite often, and it is simply something that Hater and I both hate doing because it's more annoying than it should be. So rather than having to constantly change the Kindred Wheel, we will just be replacing the rewards with custom made gacha. One such gacha has already been completed which separates each Dragon Family or Model into it's own gacha, and rewards over 200+ dragons. 2-3 other gachas will be made to take up the remaining slots on the Kindred Wheel, so that players will still have some variety in what rewards they will get. We may also do something similar to GM event rewards, though Hater will still throw in some of his random rewards. This will also probably happen sometime in September, though it depends on when I can get it completed as I have been busy with the following update.

Now the important news... The new Dragon: Galactic Storm. This was originally just a test while Aiden got use to a workflow in creating dragon textures/recolorations, but it looked too good so we made it official. We have showed a few previews on our Discord (Join the AdeptGamer Discord Server!), but the completely dragon is currently being finished up, and we hope to have it released either this month or beginning of next month. We have also started working off a concept piece for a second Dragon, but that one is still in the early stages. I'm not going to preview the Dragon just yet as we're still working on the final details of how it looks, but it will be announced as soon as it is completed.

We have decided to start with a recolor of each model so that we can setup a foundation for retexturing all models (and figuring out our workflow), and then applying what we've learned and done to creating our own models when we finish up the tooling for that. All in all, this should be the quickest and most stable way for us to deliver new Dragons.

There are some other things that are coming or have been worked on, which has been why updates have slowed down a bit, but those are still in need of testing or some finishing touches before they are released.

 

[Dragon Protector]

Sweet. Keep up the good work.

 

[dragon Blood]

keep going don't stop
ohh just ask Seiichi can fix that skill replacement to was before ?? or you decide to stay like is ?

 

[Seiichi]

keep going don't stop
ohh just ask Seiichi can fix that skill replacement to was before ?? or you decide to stay like is ?

The skill is abusable so it'll remain as it is.

 

[dragon Blood]

ye you can say this on normal server eu where is 300 (Germans) players but here??

 

[LordFanthom]

It will definitely be abused again since strategies are known by players and you can't monitor every player . Some will obviously abuse .
So yea the logic choice is to keep it like this .

 

[Seiichi]

ye you can say this on normal server eu where is 300 (Germans) players but here??

Abusable skill is still abusable regardless of where you live, how many players you have or who is using it.

 

[dragon Blood]

ok thank you

 

[Dryadia]

...So rather than having to constantly change the Kindred Wheel, we will just be replacing the rewards with custom made gacha. One such gacha has already been completed which separates each Dragon Family or Model into it's own gacha, and rewards over 200+ dragons. 2-3 other gachas will be made to take up the remaining slots on the Kindred Wheel, so that players will still have some variety in what rewards they will get...

But the dragons will be random? I might get a dragon that i already have
I don't like to spin the wheel unless i know what dragon i might get...i have saved up so many points right now...waiting on a dragon i don't already have...

 

[Seiichi]

But the dragons will be random? I might get a dragon that i already have
I don't like to spin the wheel unless i know what dragon i might get...i have saved up so many points right now...waiting on a dragon i don't already have...

Sadly it's not possible to make people happy with every decision. I will say though that you are more likely to get a dragon you do not have with this change than you were to be if I changed it every month, as we would have used the same pool of dragons from the GM events.

 

[Lalolalo9]

Will there be more shell shop items restricted from being transferred by housing system?

 

[edemilsondp]

Hello Seiichi, could you bring an update of the progress of the next map release, new equipment, or even new level for the characters, can we expect any news later this year or are these updates scheduled for next year?

 

[Seiichi]

Hello Seiichi, could you bring an update of the progress of the next map release, new equipment, or even new level for the characters, can we expect any news later this year or are these updates scheduled for next year?

Due to how Dragon's Prophet has been developed, until we have the source code completely sorted out I cannot really start on doing any of the larger skill development that we would like to do. The game is split up pretty precariously between scripting (Lua), binary data (the pak files), the database (MSSQL), and also there are some things in the source code. For example, when we tested out source code ~2 years ago, and people were not able to see Wings of Revenge, that was a source code bug, and not related to data as you would have thought. They also have a habit of hard coding restrictions into the source code; an example is there is a set number of zones and any new zone has to take up an unused ID rather than you being able to just create a new zone.

As far as we are currently at on the source; last year Dragon took over the overall development of Dragon's Prophet as Light was going to be going back to college this year (which he has done so). As part of that he started with re-writing the whole code base to be compliant with C++ 2019 standards, so that a modern compiler could be used with the code base. This has taken time because a lot of things that Dragon's Prophet did were not compliant with the previous 2008-2010 standards, and a lot of the time they choose to do things themselves, rather than work within the recommended scope. For example, they created their own memory handling system and it is very inefficienct in comparison to the C++ handler. However due to updating the code base, we also have to upgrade some of the middleware they use such as Scaleform, which is an Flash/Actionscript based UI engine which was deprecated and killed several years ago. Luckily we were able to get our hands on a recent source code of the engine, so we will be able to work on upgrading and hopefully optimizing the UI some more for the game.

Outside of the actual source development, we are having to work on the tooling such as the 3D Studio Max exporter, the map tool and still doing some refinements to our own data tool (This is probably about 95% done, but sometimes we find some issues). As far as the exporter goes... This is going to be one of the harder things to test as we have no documentation on it, and it is literally trial and error with non-industry nomenclature which causes confusion when we try to do an export. They also use their own rigging and skeleton system which is overly complicated, and we're unsure of if the exporter is exporting it properly. The map tool seems to mostly work, however we have not been able to do a full test with an exported map as the other elements are more pressing in priority.

We also took a pause from the above as we are trying to simplify the patching process; to make a patch it takes 7+ days if we're doing any character or mob textures. This is insane, and is mostly due to how inefficient the patch making process is. Dragon has been coming up and trying to work out a way so that we can do automated patches that are built through our version control system so that they can be made quicker, and so that we can take some of the work off of ourselves when developing new data and content.

tl;dr we're at one of those stopping points where a lot of things need to be done, but most of it is either boring or very technical so I can't really give estimates or any meaningful updates to most of our players. Work is still being done, but it's still a slow soul destroying process due to how Runewake decided to do things. I can promise we'll have new content before EU or Savage Hunt though.

Sorry for the book; a lot of this was going to be said in an actual developer update... but it's mostly words and I like to give at least some substance when I make those.

 

[edemilsondp]

I understand, thanks for the development update, it really must be very complicated the work you are doing, I will be awaiting new updates and keep improving my character, but once thanks for updating us

 

[Seiichi]

I understand, thanks for the development update, it really must be very complicated the work you are doing, I will be awaiting new updates and keep improving my character, but once thanks for updating us

Yeah most of the issues have been of 'what the hell were they doing/thinking' than of an actual technical problem; updating code to a newer standard does take time, but it isn't impossible (we've done the same with the Dragon Saga server that has also been in development with much more success).In regards to Dragon's Prophet they literally will throw out common sense or best practices and ignore standard compliance with the specifications of the language they chose to develop with (C++ in this case).

Our current plans after the holidays is to look at implementing Scaleform 4.x (the current version used is 3.3), which will give us better performance and flexibility for modern CPU/GPU functionality. After that we need to work on a rubberbanding issue that can either be the client, the server or a miscommunication with the packets, and then finally a few of the other outstanding bugs we had previously. That is probably enough to move to the new code base, but that depends on if we find any other major issues or not, and depends on the time it takes to fix the previously mentioned issues.

 

[Kitalia]

Much appreciated for all your hard work (Team) and our best wishes on your current . ty ty ty for all of it Hon (S)..we are very very happy to have this server and glad you all want us to be here with you..Happy Holidays to the team...(just a lil thing) any chance we can nominate Silkshoes as our Holiday coordinator for giving you a poke..or organizing the Holiday event's/furniture in market/pet's??
just a thought o/"