last report from august.

Aright, so lets see... Here comes new infos!!!


This picture shows that the new "when the slope is too big" feature. When it is too big, this mark will be shown, and will stay on screen till you walk away from the problematic spot.

Woohoo Keyshortcuts! Now supporting only a few commands, mostly open/close windows, but soon will gain new commands like... target it, take it main target, drop target, reload all etc.

The open/close windows now gained buttons for easier switch, and filling some space in the topright corner. :)Ey, nearly forgot, that all the npc-s got some AI update, so now the little evils fighting much better. Don't even think about killing 4-5 in one time, even the smallest ones reap a heavy mech. Auch.

Here comes September, and with a bit hope, the time for open-beta is now much nearer! :)

Game concept.

I will now try to explain, what will you be able to do in the game...

For a good start, lets start with a basic mmo idea. You can get levels in it, you can kill mobs, do pve and pvp. You can sell stuff you find, maybe you can make your own items, and sell it to other players. Well... Not much more... No matter how we look in it, pvp will stay pvp in most games, no matter what you call it... Battlegrounds or Arenas...

This game will bring you a step closer to a free gaming experience. First of all, lets look at the skills, because it tells the most. There are skill types for fighting... For crafting, for community management, for gathering resources, for doing market business. So its possible to gain skills, that do not have profits in pvp or pve. Some people would say, yea you can pick it up to as secondary skills... But in this game, all of these skills are main skills. Which means, you can create a character that don't know how to use a rifle, but can trade hell cheap, or craft items like no one else. You don't have to kill... not even a single npc to be good in this game, you can do it simply by choosing some other game play.

Because fighting is not necessary, xp isn't gathered from killed npcs, or quests? Xp gained by time going by. Then when you got enough xp, you can spend it on skills. This way there is no Levels.. only skills. This xp system is called passive xp system. You get xp when you offline, too. So here comes the second big question: If every1 get the same xp, how can i be better then them? Well, there is two thing that can give you the chance to be... Better?! (Even how can we ask that some1 is better then the other, when they not focusing on the same thing?!) But lets say both of our friends are fighters, how can be one better then the other, if they gain same xp at the same time. Well, first of all, not your character gets Xp, your account has xp. This means, that if you start 3 character at the same time, you will gain xp for them, and then you can choose, which one to spend on the xp. But lets say both of the guys spends points on the fighter characters. There is still the 2 things: They Gaming skill wont be the same, they may use different strategy.. and secondly, Money is the key to everything in this game. (damn so real) If you spend more time in the game, you will have more money (by killing npcs, completing quests, crafting more things or anything else) So you will have better equipment, or simply more money for business(classes) skill users, that allows you to make even more business. And better equipment will do the job. There is enough difference between same type of weapons, by simply other named pieces... that there's even possible that one has 5-10% bonus. And if you are spent your money on your robot, and a high lev robot uses around 16 modules, that can be 160% bonus in pieces. Hey, that's fairly enough to pwn if you ask me.

Okay okay, so this game is have some nice ideas... But still need some tricks. Well first of all Piracy is allowed. This means, that if you die, you will loose your cargoes items. It will become loot. This way... You are always in the danger of being robbed. And this brings a whole new level to the game. You have to think, when and where to go, you may ask for some protection... There will be many items that can help pirates, you just have to look at EW modules...

Players trying to do Business will be the targets of pirates. Well, if you just think about Logistic work.. (i mean, checking one place where something is cheap, you buy a lots of stuff, bring it to a place where you can sell it for higher money...) This is some really serious and hard work... and can be a tough job.

ewewew!!! Forgot it! The game's main place is the bases. Every base has its own market stock, with its own items, and own prices. These prices will be defined in the start of the game... But will not be under too often check... Because if you buy some item there, there will be less in the stock. So the prices goes up. If someone saw it and did a business trip, sell stuff here, there will be more in the stock, lowering the prices. This way the players will be the controllers of the market prices.

The Corporations, where players can form groups... (corporation=guild=clan) will be able to do lots of things... And in the future, it will be allowed for players, to build buildings, (but in really high prices) giving the option to corporations, to try to own places, and defend it from other players. (Maybe just to control the area, maybe you want to build a pirate head quarter near to some high traffic road, maybe there are rich mines nearby... So you will be able to build a base, which can shoot at people you don't like, and defend your area, when you are not even online...

There are many more plans, Lets hope that all of that i just wrote down here will be working soon. ^^

So skill options: (as i see atm)

• Fighter. Focuses on dmg.
• Tricker. Focuses on EWs, Sneaking, perfect pirate, or CC. (crowd control)
• Supporter. Heals, Buffs you.
• Miner. Yea let the drill roll! Brings you the first type of raw materials.
  
• Plant Gatherer. Brings you second type of raw materials.
• Crafter. Can make licences from plans, and craft items.
• Community manager. Theres lots of skills for leading groups, giving bonuses to them, or just leading corporation bonuses. Its important to give the leader role of a corporation, to a skilled person.
• Market Business orientation. Logistic business, transfer stuffs.
• Builder?! I'm not sure when this will be implemented, but its on the list.
  

And because theres even more content comes in (like now we can make geoscanner results...) who knows what new gameplays will be able. But... you have to understand this. What i wrote here does not means, what you have to pick a class, or choose a game play when you create a character. Im just saying, that the developers forming this game, in a way, that nearly all of the thing, that is possible in this game to be done... Be...

• Doable with profit.
• Maybe fun.
• And most important, what you do should be important to other people.
  

I just sayed some stuff, that can be done in the game.. That you can focus on. And what could be important to someone, who not skilled in that section. Like a crafter needs materials, he will ask the logistic guy to bring him the stuffs... And so on money will travel between people, bringing us to a living world where the rules not only set by GM-s...

The developers and the GM-s will work hardly on creating quests, instances, pvp places, new zones, places to control, to discover... The game's motto could be "We set you the world, but You set the world rules." As the corporations will rise, they will be bigger force in Nia then some pity high level boss... The opportunity is endless, the world will be huge... We only need the community now, so the only question is: Will you join us? ;)

EW modules + other goodies

All right so as I said, now I will write about the ew modules, that can bring fun to fights.

As in the previous article I told you, we have many stats, that can be important in a battle. Like if someone has lower targeting range then the other, it means that the person with the longer range has better chances, if it specces in long range weapons. (lasers do the job) But even if he uses short ranged weapons, he still owns the targeting from bigger distance, which still requires time for its oppenent, when he finally gets into range. The Ew modules base idea, is to modify these really important stats, by negative effects.

Sensor Ews.
We have some nice modules here.
Well first of all Sensor dampener. Its reducing the target's targeting range and highering the targeting time. Because these ew modules at the currents state can be stacked, with a few people focusing on a robot with sensor dampeners, they can blind their target, by reducing its targeting range to nearly zero. (But thats requires team work)

An easy counter modul is the Sensor Booster which can help you out from these situations, elseway, giving you bonus to these stats, so in standard situations, it can give you the upperhand. Please remember that nearly every EW module is active, what means, that to gain its effect you have to activate it, which takes energy from you.

Maybe its not you the one that need of sensor boosting, maybe one of your friend, so heres a support module, Remote sensor booster. Maybe im not telling too big secret: most of the useful boosters have remote types, giving a chance to create booster characters.

Alright, another tricky tool is Sensor Jammer(also known as ECM). It can hack your enemys targeting computer, and if its sucsessful, deleting all his target... so he have to retarget everything. Defense module to this is EECM, which gives you better sensor strength stats, makeing you less hackable.

We have the Demobilizer, which can help by slowing down your target. If you using this in a pack, can be the deadliest weapon... If lots of demobilizers aiming at you, you will wont be able to move.

Well these was the offical EW tools, but i think some more tool is belonging to here.

We have some energy tools too, like energy drainer, transferer and neutralizer. Drainer is simply stealing energy, and giving it to you. Transfer takes energy from you and giving it to someone else (support) and neutralizer is basicly takes much energy from you, and takes away same from your target. (can be useful if you think about it ;) )

We have some active resistance shields... Well you turn them on and they give you some kind of resistance... We have 4 for the 4 different resist, and one universal, which gives u less resist, but you will gain it for all the types of resist.

We even have Shield system, but i wont tell now all of its modules. Lets just say that a basic shield is nothing else, then a channeling between your energy and armor. You wont take damage, but you take energy for every damage taken by your shield, so its really important to understand when you should use it. Further more, with basic shields... you cant shoot trough the shield with weapons. (haha, if everything goes well, that "basic shields..." is just going for basic shields using, but wish us good luck for creating some extra fun stuff for you, maybe some new not foretold modules. ;) )

I hope now i was able to tell you about the funny and tricky modules, that you can use to gain suddenly upperhand in a battle. But there are many modules that you can use to raise your stats, giving you some other kind of chances to win.

I wish to tell you one more thing... I started writing about the battle system first, because most of the people I first met in the game, their first questions was directly aiming at this part of the game, because of its complexity. This game hold Much More then just fighting, and i will tell you about all the things, that you shall know about the game's features, what the game will be able to give to you... what experience, what feeling, exactly what type of contents will be await for you in this great game.

News about the newest features ^^

Before I write the next article about the EW modules, I taught that I shall tell you what the developers did last week... So lets see ^^

One of the things that the hud, that places on every player (as I marked on the picture "effect hud", but I'm not sure what we really call it...) has gained a bit update, as it was shown, now telling the players name and our relation to them, making it easier to understand the situation. Tho it was a bit buggy, the name was often get on top of the effects, becoming unreadable, so it was fixed.

The guys made some update to the character creator screen, now the big planet is no longer shown from the huge distance. Also, with this screenshot i attach here, I'm showing you some not yet finalized content from the character creator, about one of the ICS's chooseable schools.As some of you may remember from the last beta stage, the terrain was very rough, and because every robot has a maximal slope it can take (called slope capability) and because the terrain had many spikes, many robots was able to suddenly stop at positions where they felt too much slopes. Because of this, the map generator has been updated to generate much more smooth maps, givin us much less headache ^^

One of the newest gui add-ons was the scannerbox, which now works very well and capable of telling results coming from the different scanners, we wish to use. (we have 3 type of scanner at moment: Geoscanner for mining purposes, chassis and cargo scanner for checking the enemys weaponry and items in their cargo.)

The mining and the harvesting (which gives us the materials for crafting) now are in pretty good stage, mining now runs with only a few bugs, and harvesting is started gaining helpful tools, like the Landmark infobox tells us what type of material does the targeted plant holds, and how much could be gained from it.

Combat system

The Combat system... It has many things that has to be calculated with, resulting a really complex system. Lets see a sample, and i will comment it with the things that happening in those moments. I hope this article will help you understand the working of the whole combat system...

Okay we walking the planes with a nice and huge heavy mech, called a seth. First of all, its a really heavy mech, resulting low movement speed. Smaller robots can move faster, Bigger=slower. It can go with 30kph. We seeing an Intakt, which is a small ew (electronic warfare) robot. Ew robots use less weapons, more ew gadgets, like sensor dampeners, demobilizators and stuff. For some unknown reason, we want to kill this guy.

First we have to target him. A double click will do fine. Now the Targeting computer starts to target him. The Seth heavy mech locking time, which giving us the target lock time is 7,5 sec. And we wait until we done with the locking. As we start locking, the Intakt's owner can see on his hud that we targeting him. So guess what, he will target us back too. (intakt has same 7,5 sec in this case)
Targeting also have a maximal range. Seth's locking range is 337meter. You can target only under this, and if your target moving out of this range, you automaticly loosing it.

After the locking is done, we can finally shot at him. The target will take damage if:

• There's no object between you and him. Line of sight working. Any plant or rock piece can be used this way as a shield. These terrain objects have hp too, so if it takes enough damage, it will collapse, and it will no longer annoy us...(but there are many plants, trees, rocks and decors...)
• Tracking speed. In our case this can be a headache. Every robot has a tracking speed. Its always represented in an angle/sec. So if you standing in a position, and you aiming at your target, if your target runs in circles faster than your tracking speed (which gives us an angle) then you will miss. Plus, the intakt runs at 61kph, which is double of ours... So he just have to move faster around us, than we can track him, and he can toy with us. damn.
  
• It has to be in our weapon range. Every weapon has an optimal firing range, after that, its dmg will lower (depending on range) and then becomes zero. Its called as falloff. Rockets dont have falloff. Their dmg becomes 0 after optimal range.
  
• The last two important stuff(tracking&weapon range) can be viewed trough graphics, at here.
• The website also mentions a miss chance with turrets, so i will copy the whole thing to us...

  Turrets: Target size / Hit accuracy

  The quotient of the two parameters show the chance of hit. For example the target size of Your enemy is 5, Your weapon's accuracy is 7. Due to this formula, the chance of hit in one cycle is (5/7=0,71) 71%. In case the enemy's target size is 4, and Your weapon's accuracy is 4, the chance of hit is (4/4=1) 100%.

Now the second question is how much dmg it will take.

• Because im lazy i copy the following sentence from the website, which is the part of the Turrets: Target size / Hit accuracy. We have rockets too, and well... Rockets aint no Turrets. Plus, Rockets cant miss.

  Missiles: Target size / Explosion size

  A major advantage of ballistic warfare is that missiles always hit. Unlike turrets, where the denominator element of the quotient is given by the weapon, the explosion size is a property of the ammunition (the missile). The quotient of the target and explosion size shows, how much of the missile's damage affects the target. For example the target size of Your enemy is 5, Your missile's explosion size is 7. Due to this formula, the missile unfolds only (5/7=0,71) 71% of its total damage. In case the enemy's target size is 4, and Your missile's explosion size is 4, the missile has a full effect (4/4=1) 100% on the target.

• We have cycle times too. Its showing us how quickly a weapon can shoot. Not every weapon shooting at same speed, so maybe a faster shooting can be useful, but it will cost us more ammunition.
• Resistance...

Resistance. Well usually an mmorpg holds some types of dmg, like "fire, arcane... etc." If a wizard casts something at you, like.. fireball, than your fire resistance gets to work, helping you to reduce/resist the damage. In perpetuum, its much more complicated. The damage types(=resistances) the following: Kinetic, Thermal, Seismic, Chemical. The weapon itself does not containing the damage type. The bullets/rockets/cells has the damage type... and not only one! Every ammo has at least 2 type of damage. Like the Medium Photokinetic Energy cell damages 16 kinetic damage, and 28 thermal dmg. So, if someone shoots at you, at least two of your resistances will work. This resulting many things. First of all you cant fully resist a shot. Its nearly impossible. Secondly, you cant pick an ammo that will be fully effective against your target. We even have 3 and 4 type of damage containing ammo, The 4 damage type holding bullets usually named with some "multi", like Multifocal energy cell. (Chemical-8/Seismic-8/Kinetic-8/Thermal-36) This means that its just damn hard to resist. To balance it, these really powerful bullets costing you -50% optimal range. So you can go against all resistance, which will luckily be enough to kill any1, but you have to work on half range, giving them an upper hand.


Now we are happy, we know all that we need to know. Our seth can be beaten by the tiny Intakt if it comes too close, so we play for staying long range. Smaller robots can use smaller weapons... Resulting at this case no more chances for the intakt to win the battle. (and we are twice as heavy guy as him)

Well yea. This is how the combat system goes... basically. This article contains the rules, about the game system. But how will the battles to be win, what can we do with an EW modules, and how can it modify a combat, it will be told in the next article.

Quick lookover: Gui&Hud

In the first steps I will try to tell you all the stuff you need to know, to be able to fully understand the translated "just wrote" blog articles from the Hungarian blog. Its a quite hard job because i told many things to the guys there.. So lets get started! :)

Okay Gui, and hud. Gui is the Graphical user interface, which means that all the information you get, all the activity you can do in the world (except moving) is did trough that. Hud is the heads up display, part of the gui, aiming at telling you crucial informations.

If im correct the gui currently contains two Hud panel.
We got an Armour+Core bar, that's shows hp, and energy. Energy is what you using for anything... (from firing a weapon, mining, to support and repairing things.) If you out of energy, its nearly the same, if you out of hp. You are dead. (except if no enemy's nearby)

The second hud we have, we call it.. disco sphere. i think. Never mind, its a nice circle, that places on everybody, containing many things. It shows you if:

• You have targeted him.
• He has targeted you.
• Your main target is him.
• His main target is you. (You can only shoot at main target, other targets maybe only effected by other gadgets)
• Using gadgets on you. Support modules, Electronic Warfare(EW) modules. (i will attach a picture with a few comments.)

The gui on the terrain... contains 9 things:

• Radar (mini map)
• Landmark information (telling you mini information about the currently targeted object)
• Modules (Letting you use all your weapons and gadgets)
• Landmarks (telling you all the objects, robots and other "yetnotimplemented" stuffs distance, type, in a range)
• State indicator (aka: armour+core)
• Targeting computer (hold the list of the fixed targets. [you can only shoot those, later i will describe])
• Squad box (Yet not working)
• Combat log (Logging all that's happening to you.)
• Scanner Box (Brand new stuff, containing all your scanning datas)

Plus to this we have a menu, which shown everywhere, and we have many boxes, representing base features, infos. I shouldn't forget about Chat box ;)

So here's the picture about "this is that and that is that". I wrote some comments to every box, we will talk about every box later. Sorry for the lazy font choose, but my launch is waiting.. and I'm hungry!

See ya later! :)

Screenshot galery from the past, filled with comments.

I take a look around in my screenshot gallery, presenting you the best shots i made in the past few months. Take a look around.

Old building renewed :)

New Base: for Pelistal!

My favourite robot: Intakt in front of the new base. Lights ON

Terrain, Sun goes dooown :)

New Teleport building

Other new base: Numiqul

Screenshot from the logo creator

Laser fight... yooo! :)

A brand new Kain. Check out the lights+shadows on the dock!

Best shot of the last month: Gropho with full shadows.

Nasty picture from the dock, preparing to run some circle around the base, and playing with production windows.

A new robot incoming: Termis!

Rocks gained shadows... now looks like much better!

Current Beta state

Well, I taught that first i should talk about what happened in the last few months, after the open of the closed pvp beta test.

First stage was pvp beta:

• Weapons&Modules testing, bug fixing.
• Reloading, Firing problems fixing.
  
• First graphical eye candy, jammer got the awesomeness.
• First view to named weapons&modules.
• New module: armour repairer tuning.
• Weapons take side ways: each weapon has a long range-less damage and a short range more damage type.
• Extra hud for checking the enemy's support/ew techniques.

Corporations testing

• Ahoy there Corporations! Lots of log fixes, because many things wasn't shown, or shown in a bad way.
  
• The new corporation storage system implemented, a bit fuss about the different rights to the storages.
  
• The corp. logo system gets a new creator.
• The corp. rank system get an update, to reduce server work.
• Relations between players and corps now displayed on the map.
  

And in the last 2 month:

• Weapons get reload/load options trough fitting window.
• factory, labour, recycling, refinery is now implemented, working.
• The first working version of the new map system is now implemented.
• The map gets a huge update, changes in the map generating methods.
• New buildings, teleport models.
• Working mining.... tho' still under development.
• Shadows implemented, now working with everything, from terrain to plants. (rocks, buildings, robots etc)
• Skill system reformed, new characters get limited skills and xp.
  

comment: i just quickly though about what happened in the last few months, maybe some stuff are missing.

What are we looking forward to come...

• Quest system. The developers spending much time on creating npc-s and quest lines.
• performance boost on shadows and graphics. And we will need some polish on the terrain system, about the terrain object sight radius. i mean its now really sharp how they pop up from nowhere :)
• We looking forward to see terrain decorations. Forgotten buildings, scrap metal pieces and other goodies.
• New robots. Around 6-8 will come till the next beta stage.

Everything else, is sadly... not public. :)

Welcome!

Hello World!

This is the beta-blog of the Perpetuum-Online, an Mmorpg, wich takes place in the future offering you some scifi experience, while using robots equiped with lasers and hightech stuff. Or something like that. Lets hope if you get here you already been on the game's website... ^^ http://perpetuum-online.com

This blog is a clone of the Hungarian language based Perpetuum-beta blog, giving you folks all the information that has been leaked out from the game. My current plan is, that first i will translate all the yet written articles from the other blog, (which will take quite some time) and after that the articles for the two blog will be released at same times. :-)

I wish you good surfing, and i hope you find interesting informations about the game... :-)

Mancs