http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?t=594525

Friday with(out) Means - Oct. 14th, 2011: Pumpkins Incoming

Hey guys! Means is on his way toward a wedding this morning (got one to head to myself in a couple of weeks), so I'm in with your Friday update today - Things are a little quiet on the floor at the moment as we simultaniously breathe from releasing the last patch and scramble around to get the next update together and ready for the live dimensions, and that whole "no rest for the wicked" phrase is proving so, so true these days. XD

Speaking of the incoming update, we have a special preview of the incoming Halloween festivities (and loot!) up on the main page and I gotta tell you that in terms of cool goodies? I think I'm more excited this year than I have been in a long time - The artists have all really outdone themselves creating some cool new Halloweeny items *and* we'll even have some special new seasonal content incoming from Genele and brand-new-designer Michizure! Tons of great stuff - Hopefully you guys will be as thrilled as I am. =)

I also wanna make sure you guys drop by and check out our annual in-game Halloween party, with ARK Community Relations and the boys and gals of Gridstream Productions holding it down correct - Music, prizes and the whole nine yards always equals to a good time, so I hope to see everyone there! Dates/times are as follows:

    October 29th 17:00 GMT to October 29th 20:30 GMT on Rimor
    October 29th 20:30 GMT to midnight (00:00 GMT October 30th) on Atlantean

And with that, I... am gonna get back to it. XD Still lots of little things to polish up for Halloween *and* the new Pandemonium encounter, both of which will be hitting the servers soon (™). Hope you guys have a great weekend, and we'll see you back here next week!


__________________
Brad L. McAtee / Kintaii
Senior AO Designer & Jack of All Trades

http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?t=594291

Friday with Means - October 7th, 2011 - Patchtastic

An obviously busy week that has kept us *mostly* out of trouble and prevented us from doing anything truly terrible with our time.

Big News this week:

1. The 18.4.8 Update went out. Closely followed by the 18.4.9 Update. There was an issue with the 2nd boss in the new instance that made it impossible to defeat..and as we were going for "difficult" rather than impossible we were uncomfortable with our over-achievement in this new area. I understand some of you have managed to defeat it already. Lies...I refuse to believe it.¨

2. Super exciting news for us here in Montreal is that we have hired a new member of the team to start sharing our suffering, nightmare, technical disaster workload here in the office. The new member of the team is Henry Senger who some of you might know as Michizure on TestLive. "Michi" has been working with us secretly on TestLive for a period of years now and despite that still was very interested in joining the team. We are very happy to have him here in Montreal getting used to the workflow and working hard on making a new fun seasonal encounter to be enjoyed by all for Halloween. I've wanted to see this one in for years so I am really looking forward to seeing Michi's first thing hit the live servers.

Thank you to everyone who applied for the position. It was incredibly difficult to choose between all of the very knowledgable and qualified applicants this time around. I'm certain Michi will work obsessively to prove that he was the right choice over the next while. I certainly feel good knowing that the next time we have an opening there are so many good and qualified people out there in the community to choose from.

3. Nano Cans are now available in the in-game store. The cans that are available are limited to those that will not be a significant factor in PvP but will merely be a convenience purchase for those wanting to do some twinking.

4. Last week we published some screens of the water and people complained that the water looked like ugly blue goo. They were right. There are many tweaks and settings available for the water in AO and those have now been adjusted for Tir...and are obviously attached below for your viewing pleasure.

Have a great weekend everyone!
Attached Images

tir_water-5.jpg
tir_water-1.jpg

__________________
Colin Cragg
This "Means" Cake
Game Director/Producer

http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?t=594106

Friday with(out) Means - Sept. 30th, 2011: More Pictures? More Pictures.

Hey guys! Means is out of the office this morning so just kind of a quick update from me; not a whole lot to report on as we're all pretty much busy prepping for the incoming update and getting AO's Halloween content ready for the holidays. As Means mentioned last week work on both the new engine and the remodeled heads are coming along swimmingly, and since when I don't have much to talk about breaking off a few shinies always seems to be the way to go forward today we have a couple of screenshots from the new engine, this time showing off the reflective water and some very nice HDR in Tir - Really, *really* pretty stuff. Likewise we have a few MAX renders of the new head models and an extremely... interesting... picture from the artist's corner - Any guesses on what it could be?

Gonna bury back into it and get some stuff done - Hope everybody has a great weekend!

Attached Images

tir1.jpg
tir2.jpg
fwmheads.jpg
twhw_screenshot01.jpg
__________________
Brad L. McAtee / Kintaii
Senior AO Designer & Jack of All Trades

You certainly don't have to sit on heckler OST/kite teams to level, that's just the lazy way out.  People in my org do hecklers every now and then to clear out some research, and to just be familiar with how those mobs are, and always in teams that take them on directly, no OST or kiting NT.

Teaming is not that hard, either, you just team with orgmates or friends you've made and do stuff with them regularly. If you sit around on LFT and team in PUGs, you'll get mostly lame experiences.  Last night, for example, we had a 4-person group of lvl 175-200 do a Dark Ruins run, followed by an AI City Raid Daily Mission. Then some of the european ppl we were with logged out and some US ppl logged in, and we ran a couple of RK missions with a lvl 126-150 team - lvl 195 mish, followed by a 225 mish (painful but good XP and required coordinated work).  Everyone got 2-3 levels or 1-2 research levels done from that.  No one in that lower group has any AI or OFAB armor, most have moderate Symbiants or imps on. 

If we need cash to buy stuff, the 150's farm sector 10, or have an alt tradeskill stuff like small Arul Sabas and sell them.  Lots of ppl just think they need the billion credits worth of gear because of typical e-peen talk on OOC and the forums but that can be left to those who've gotten 220's to farm stuff for lower alts and know what they are doing with the gear.  If you want to PvP, well, the hardcore vets will mop the floor with you regardless of your gear and the clueless loudmouths will fall easy enough if you have a clue how to fight.

http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?t=593944

Friday with Means - Sept. 23rd, 2011: Initiative Data

Update Coming October 5th:
The next update will be coming to the live dimension on October 5th. This version will include the final Dustbrigade instance, 30 new daily missions and a host of other changes both small an significant. I will be posting more extensive update notes during the day today where they should be. The Halloween update will of course be coming very shortly after that to be in time for my favourite time of the year. You can look forward to Kintaii's annual preview of the items in a couple weeks Some creative fun stuff this year.

Another Mystery Solved:
Imagine our horror in trying to produce a more challenging set of encounters for the new DB instance and discovering that initiative values in the game for monsters were capped at 1213. This little data cap was apparently implemented in 2002 as part of the build process due to a bug with high init values creating errors in the monsters DMS calculation that would result in the monster being chain-critted by players. Until now it has been possible to set a much higher value on internal servers, test it until we were happy, then discover to our horror that the number was different on live. As they added nanos previous to 2002 that would reduce the maximum capped-initiative value to below zero this was a perplexing decision...much like the fact that after the offending formula was corrected the cap in the build process was not removed. As much as our efforts to revamp systems has been way more work and taken much longer than we ever could have anticipated discoveries like this one make it pretty obvious that it was very badly needed and long overdue. Monsters will be having their correct initiatives in the next update...this will result in some higher damage from non-debuffed monsters...but it is quite safe to say that the overpowered nature of init debuffs will still be in force until the release of the new nanos...but not to such a great extent.

Engine Work:
Z-Fghting of the night/day sky, the proper reflection on multiple ocean volumes AND proper display of the grass map was corrected this week. Damn fine work by Mr.Parsed and some great help from the rendering group has got us well on our way to getting something quite filmable. Flaptoot and Mstrbstrd have also been working on the final versions of the heads and are 90% complete done the 390+ heads. This has been a very long haul but it is amazing to see the strides made every week now. I am "cautiously optimistic"...let's leave it at that.

Have a great weekend everyone!

__________________
Colin Cragg
This "Means" Cake
Game Director/Producer

Filmed in 70's "tall-vision"
 

http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?t=593721

Friday with(out) Means - Sept. 16th, 2011: Little Shinies

Hey guys! Means is a bit busy this morning (and honestly so am I XD) so just a quick one from up here in Montreal. Today we're showing off a few shinies from the artists corner - Can you guess what all of these are for?

Have a great weekend everybody!

fwm_mstrbstrd_turntable-render.wmv

Edit: German Translation!

Attached Images

fwm_flaptoot_conceptart.jpg
fwm_cube_render.jpeg

__________________
Brad L. McAtee / Kintaii
Senior AO Designer & Jack of All Trades

I post them when I get the time and energy

http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?t=593529

Friday with Means - September 9th, 2011 - Who will be first?

18:00 GMT - Be the first team on TestLive to complete the new Dust Brigade Instance!

There will be prizes for both the first European and North American teams to complete the instance first.

For those who have not copied characters to Test Before:

1. To get the TestLive client download the duplicator and follow the instructions from this page:

http://www.anarchy-online.com/wsp/an...1003,1007,1105

2. To copy your character to TestLive log in to your Anarchy Online account and under "All Paid Services" on the left menu select "TestLive Transfer" and the character you wish to copy. There is free.

Winners and Prizes will be announced after the event

See you there!
__________________
Colin Cragg
This "Means" Cake
Game Director/Producer

Filmed in 70's "tall-vision"
 

Thumbnail sketch of the story background

http://www.anarchy-online.com/wsp/anarchy/frontend.cgi?func=publish.show&template=content&func_id=2431&table=CONTENT

Exactly. The server-side stuff is in place, but only the Devs appear to have the necessary alpha/beta client to see all the new shinys.  People logged in using the regular client get fed the 'claissic' resources.

Note that the screenshots are taken on the same Testlive server that anyone can log into - the Devs just use an alpha client to see things thru the new engine.

http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?t=593354

Friday with Means - September 2nd, 2011 - Engine Screenshots - Tir

New engine screenshots this week with the new resources made for Tir mostly in place. I have to keep shooing the rest of the team away from Parsed's desk...this is probably a good sign.

Attached Images

tir5.jpg
tir6.jpg
tir7.jpg
tir8.jpg
tir10.jpg
tir4.jpg
__________________
Colin Cragg
This "Means" Cake
Game Director/Producer

Filmed in 70's "tall-vision"
 

http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?t=593166

Friday with Means - August 26th, 2011 - Tir work

Just a quick one this week to showcase some of the work done recently upgrading the buildings in Tir. Only one significant building left in this city..then only the small little things to complete the overall look. The "important step" work this week has been taking "old" animated statels and producing new versions of them rigged in the new system to make the animations work...the first test item for this was the "pumps" at the side of the FAIR-trade building in Tir...seeing this work and getting a process in place for these items has been difficult but an important learning experience for the team.

Attached Images

clan_building2.jpg
clan_building4.jpg
clan_building3.jpg
__________________
Colin Cragg
This "Means" Cake
Game Director/Producer

Filmed in 70's "tall-vision"
 

http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?t=592971

Friday with Means - August 19th, 2011 - Progress

Next Version and Pande Instance:

Should be a new version coming to TestLive today with more significant tweaks the new Dust Brigade instance and the new swath of daily missions. The Pandemonium instance will not be "Live" with the very next update as we feel we want it better tested before its open release. That being said we will be having it available on Live for some event-style testing. Getting together then numbers we need to really give this a go on the test dimension is difficult and will be fun as an event anyways. Who is going to be first on each server? We'll absolutely know.

Battlestations:

There was a fair amount of discussion this week and last about the Battlestations. I took some time to speak with people who were *ahem* hostile concerning the current mechanics in place. After some discussion some modifications were settled on:

1. Regular conditions entrance time slightly increased (by 3 seconds).
2. Repeated trips to the Decontamination room (repeated death inside 90 seconds) will result in a longer "respawn time" of about 36 seconds (about 16 seconds longer than normal.)
3. The "Healing + Nano" HOT stops when you exit the decontamination chamber.
4. It is no longer possible to Cap points during grace period.

Hopefully these changes are a step in the right direction.

Engine Progress:

This week Parsed managed to both get the tilemap textures to line up perfectly for the first time ever but also got the ground (heightmap/mesh) to be perfectly reproduced for the first time. Both of these were huge.

First off - the tile map:
There is texture blending in the Conan engine for all ground tiles making it impossible for us to do something you would consider commonplace...place a straight edge between two textures. As a sci-fi game we have many sidewalks, paths, metal plates etc on the ground that we don't want blending with their surroundings. In Age Of Conan and straight edge you see on the ground is in fact a mesh object that has been placed there. So very significant for maintaining the look and feel of AO to get that to work...and now it does.

Height Map/ Ground Shape:
This was incredibly important as the visual and physical aspects of the ground, while close, were not perfect. This would result in floating buildings, fences, and where the ground did not match previously generated collision floating players. There are some locations where you can see this in current AO where the collision of the mesh does not match the visual representations of it. Without this great work by Parsed this week this would have been a very significant problem going into the future. This was the source of by far the highest number of visual bugs in the new engine....and now it is gone. I'm very happy about this week's progress.

Nano Changes and Documents:
As it would be fair to say this process is taking longer than expected, one of the more annoying nanos "Defeat Righteousness" will be getting a change in the next update to become "Shade's Caress". Included in this post are the icons made by Docaholic and Genele to replace the icons of all the old nanos...I think they look great and can't wait to see them in. See if you can guess which icons are for which nanos

Have a great weekend everyone!

Attached Images

AllIcons_WIP.jpg

__________________
Colin Cragg
This "Means" Cake
Game Director/Producer

Filmed in 70's "tall-vision"
 

The AoC engine update he refers to happened in March.  Once that was in place, they did the final port over to AO (it had been ported over and working before but had some issues left unfixed until now).

http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?t=592801

Friday with Means - August 12th, 2011- Press Q to Attack

Again with the vacation..sigh. Genele and Macrosun are visiting New York this week and I hope they are having a good time. Genele has begun the process of discussing some of the other aspects of rebalance work (ie: ACs, NR, Caps) with the professionals and will make these ideas public when they have been well discussed.

Before he left Macrosun completed some a great "on screen text" feature we will be using in the New Player Experience. The ability to put a large message on the screen out of the chat will come in handy during a tutorial process...looking for needed messages in the chat while playing isn't exactly ideal.

Press "Q" to Attack!

Parsed has been busy the last couple weeks integrating fixes we have received from the central rendering group. With the latest version of the Conan engine out and stable on the Conan live environment they have found a lot more time to work with us...which has been greatly appreciated. Work the last couple weeks has been on trying to sort out some minor differences in ground geometry between the old and new clients. The actual collision used is generated in the old version of the engine (all gameplay mechanics are still adjusted in the old systems) so if the ground isn't a good match it makes for floating buildings/people etc. Part of the problem was stemming from triangle diagonals in Conan ground being parallel while being alternating in old AO. (AO's system is better!) Shadows have also received a first go at optimization. Go Parsed, GO!

The version that was supposed to hit TestLive last week was finally deployed yesterday with a huge number of fixes to daily missions and adjustments to the two new single team instances. Nice to see this enormous update getting closer

Have a great weekend everyone!

__________________
Colin Cragg
This "Means" Cake
Game Director/Producer

Filmed in 70's "tall-vision"
 

The servers look pretty busy to me now - lots of lvl 40-60 chars all over the plac and, as Funcom pointed out in a press release yesterday, the server populations have quadrupled since F2P was initiated.

If you pay by the year, the cost is under $10/euros a month - pretty much the same approach all such subscription MMO's run.

http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?t=592569

Friday with Means - August 5th, 2011 - Magnetic times

After a blessed two days of vacation last week I came back to help the team continue to work through the two new instances and big pile of new Daily Missions. We are hoping to get a new version up on the Test Dimension later today and we are very grateful for all the great constructive feedback we have been getting to polish up the instances and missions. Other time this week was spent trying to locate the cause of 12 disk failures on the team's machines in the last 6 months..we are beginning to think it might be a power line in the floor generating a small magnetic field...but it is beyond being a statistical anomaly at this point so we need to find a cause.

One small interesting thing to note is that Macrosun spent some time with me this week on a *very* old issue...and in the next update Notum Wars towers should once again explode properly as they used to. This always bugged me but it was always hard to find time to get to it...we made time this week...thanks to all who have been writing me to remind me of this issue. I always thought that this was one of the best visual moments of the game and it will be great to see it again.

Have a great weekend!

__________________
Colin Cragg
This "Means" Cake
Game Director/Producer

Filmed in 70's "tall-vision"
 

http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?t=592381

Friday with(out) Means - July 29th, 2011: Time Keeps On Tickin'


... tickin', tickin', into the future...

With the last week of vacation time coming to a close things are still rather quiet here at the office - Most of the team has returned now, with MstrBstrd and Means both taking a few days (and myself grabbing a couple at the start of the week - finally got myself moved into an apartment \o/), and it'll soon be business as usual yet again. =)

Both Genele and I have been making some additional tweaks/adjustments to our respective instances which should be on Testlive fairly soon - Initial feedback so far has been really great, and with the refinements & polish incoming it shouldn't be long before the new content is ready for the live dimensions. More feedback is always welcome, though, so we encourage you guys to head over to Test to check 'em out. Lindelu has a new batch of Daily Missions incoming as well that are available for testing which I think you guys will enjoy - Always fun stuff from Linde. =D

In the shinies department this week, intern extraordinaire cube has been putting in some time working on really awesome new social gear headed to the Anarchy Online item store, including new shoulder pads, hoverbots, helmets and much more - You can check out a sneak preview of some of the goodies down below. =)

Lastly, I want to pose you guys a question. We've been doing some impromptu storyline Q&A over in the Fourth Wall forum this week, and it's gotten me to thinking about story *structure* in games, and how different writers can approach the same project in vastly different fashions. AO in particular is a game that's been under the storyline direction of many people over the years (first with Ragnar, Gaute, and Tommy Strand up to launch, then Runar & Jon Thorainsson joined Gaute for Shadowlands, Marius for AI and Znore/Sil/Bacchante for LE, with Aythem after that, and now myself, Linde and Genele), and you can see each person's individual influences and styles showing through in their work and methods of writing.

Story and setting in a game, regardless of how you may feel about things such as roleplaying, *are* elements that help tie the player into the 'concept' of what they're playing, even if they're not something that's directly prevalent in the player's view. Take a game like Minecraft which, while not having a running narrative of any fashion, still has a unified setting and 'feel' - A deliberately low-tech environment, a sense of logic behind even some of the game's stranger mechanics; the game and its world make sense in its presentation, even without having a story directly presented to the player. Conversely you have games such as the incoming Deus Ex III, which focus very heavily on their story and writing, making it one of the main attractions and selling points behind the game. Both styles of game are still giving a form of 'story' to the player, even if one is only the story that we ourselves make up due to the presentation we're given.

My question to you guys is this: What makes a good story in a game to you? Is it the writing? Is it the *style* of writing? Is it the atmosphere, or the immersion? What is it that ultimately makes you feel a game's story is worth investing in or not? Does the lack of a written narrative bother you when playing, or do you prefer a completely open-ended world without any background or setting at all? Answer if you want. Or, y'know, don't. 'scool either way. Meantime, I'm out - Hope you guys have a great weekend, and we'll see you back here next week. Later!

German Translation!

Attached Images

fwm_7-29-2011.jpg

__________________
Brad L. McAtee / Kintaii
Senior AO Designer & Jack of All Trades