Artillery work in progress

Some features already done, some are still on the workbench.
Testing and polishing the artillery line of sight calculation.

DEV Crm testing the artillery calculations.

Red dots mark the flight path of the bullet, blue dots mark the points on the terrain to check for line of sight block.

Edit:

Dear players, please do not think that lightbots will have artillery. "Testing" means testing. :)

Banhammer strikes.

A-ha-ha!

Because this blog isn't official, I guess that means that I can troll around for a few minutes.
After a bit investigation, we successfully banned 15 accounts because of NIC selling for real money.

Many of you reported a large group of miners, mining for 12+ hours a day, without corporation and pretty suspicious.
It was super interesting to connect all those accounts together, and investigate their account, find someone who supposedly bought NIC from them, talk to the persons, confirm that these guys do what I thought they do... and then wave the banhammer.

I have to warn all of you, that such activities are forbidden by the EULA. If you receive cash from an unknown player, either send it back or immediately report this issue to a GM.

I was thinking by the way... How's this goes with other smaller mmos? Do they have the tools to confirm such issues? To point out the required informations? For us it's one of the most important things, to make sure that our game provides fair gameplay for every player. Do the other small mmos even care about such things as "gold farmers"?

Well, we do care. Take care guys!

Happy holidays! :)

Hello there again!

On behalf of the developer team I wish happy holidays and a happy new year to everyone!

Meanwhile, I thought that if I share some info about the new features that we are working on, features that will make you guys very happy. Of course this won't be a super detailed info package, as we are still working on these features. So what will we have in the new year?

• We thought that the Sequer may not be enough for your current freight transporting needs. A new mech will be introduced.
• Lots of people requested a feature that can log some nice data for you. Like who killed you or who did you kill. This so-called ‘Combat history’ will be a nice feature for sure!

After witnessing all those huge pvp fights, we realized that there's an urgent need for a way to deal damage in an area. So we plan to add these shiny new ideas into the game soon:

• Robot-death-explosion-damage. If you die, you actually damage everyone around you. Bigger robots will have bigger explosions.
• If you think about the previous feature as an actual weapon, go no further; we will create an item that allows you to play kamikaze, with bigger fireworks. But it will require some reactor and CPU, so no Intakt rush with explosives.
• Have you ever thought about dropping bombs? You deploy it on the ground, it starts pulsing... and then everything fades to black. Well well well... I'm quite sure it will cause some damage! Use it to separate yourself from your enemy by placing it in narrow passages, or if you're a spy in the flock, why not surprise them with something funny? Also, my mind has just gone crazy about the possibilities of such a basic item and some more work on developer side... And had a vision of a bomberman event.
• What would you do with AOE (area of effect), if you couldn't shoot it on the group; why is it necessary to shake hands every time you want to cause damage? Of course we agree with you - new aoe weapons. Slow cycle time, shot at somebody, collateral damage to everyone nearby that target. And hoping that you ain't nearby that somebody.

So these are the most interesting features that we are currently working on. I still remember a beautiful board in the office, written all over with features to be done. Stay tuned for some moar candy!

Servers down

Our ISP decided for some reason to die. We're... working on it.
Will be back as soon as possible.

Anything lost due to this unexpected downtime will be reimbursed.

Awesome pvp video!

Thank you guys for this high quality, seamless gameplay record.
Congratulations to the winners of the event, and thanks to the other side for their effort on the battlefield! I wish you better luck next time ;)

Release aftermath

It was nearly a month ago, when I was able to stamp the blog with the the "out of beta" post, foolishly thinking that the blogging on this site has been ended for me. Until recent past happenings, I thought so. Plan A was that we will have a nice blog under the official site. Until plan A succeeds, I thought there's place for a plan B too. :)

It's kinda frustrating feeling, when you say "release time". First thing that gets into your head, is to look at the selling statistic. After the first sold copy you finally can say "somebody thinks that what we did actually worth the cash". And it's an awesome feeling after 4 years of developing. (for the developers who actually started the whole thing. For me, it's just nearly 2 years of poking around, mass bug hunting, working on balancing, zones, missions and so on.)

The second thing that you realize is that you developed an mmorpg. Hurray, we made it to release; let's take a sneak peak at the general chat to make sure everything is all right*. And since, we didn't had one day that would go without a new bug reported. Then you realize that mmos require constant developing; you look around to see that everyone works just to stabilize the situation.
* There's no such thing as all right in mmos. Lesson learned.

Then two weeks go by, and you may* actually say that I have time to work on new things again. At moment my main task is to help the GMs, as I can't do nothing else at the moment. :(
*I'm speaking only in my own name. Everyone around me works on thousands of things.

In the past weeks, we realized a lot's of things: we needed better hardware, more hardware. The longer (1 hour long) downtimes are usually due to some hardware upgrade. As the whole game runs now from 3 servers, we hope that the players would experience less server issues. Our network connection also had it first test: around a week ago, there was an intrusion event with lot's of agents taking part of a pvp battle. 45mb/s upload does sound nice, isn't it? :)

Network issues however, such as lag or full disconnect can't be fixed such easily. Many players noted that our connection may not be as stable as they experienced it with other mmos. Until we can improve on this, I found a nice post from the forums from Kethir, who said that his connection is much better, if he turns on a free VPN software called "AnchorFree". Although I can't really tell too much about it, I have to say that the ping to australia from hungary is lowered by 200ms, if this thing is turned on. This may be a good option for people who try to play far from europe, and a very bad idea for everyone in europe (+200ms here, to the server)

We have been nominated for Best New MMORPG in 2010. It's nice to feel that even if we are just a small company, our product is racing against the big releases.

Oh, and I made some time-lapse thing when I had a bit time; I was amazed that our beautiful garden in the TM starting zone can be so cool.

Alright, I'm out of interesting topics. Don't worry: We already working on our first huge patch, that will include some new tools to play with. Of course, it still requires lot's of work, so I'm going to stay silent about everything... for now.

Beta is officially over

Dear players,

We wish to say our thanks to every player who joined us for the beta. It's been a long development, and we are proud that the game is ready for release.

I wish to say special thanks to all those players who took part of the community, either by working for or with a corporation, helping or trolling on the channels. It's been a great experience for us, and every one of you contributed to the beta feeling in some way. We saw great pvp battles, corporations working to gain new technology levels and outposts... annoying bugs. :)

We hope to see you guys again after the release.

In the end, I wish to show you some nice videos from the community. :)