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.