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Have no fear, guards are here
Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:13:45 +0100 -- maever

well its about that time again, I neglected to post last week because there simply wasn't anything worth mentioning.
This week however next to the gamedesign document nearing completion we can give you a glimpse of our new NPC engine.

As I have previously announced, we were rebuilding parts of the NPC engine.
Since the previous implementation was somewhat similar to Ragnarok Online (where NPCs and Monsters are different entities) it was not possible for any NPC to interact with the world.

This now has changed!
NPCs will be able to interact with the world and monsters now!
To demonstrate this new feature we have setup 4 guards , a couple of lupins and a couple of blue slimes in our testing area. then we have added AI commands to the guard to only attack the blue slimes.

The result can be seen here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xd3c-exTB1M&hd=1

Currently this is just one of the few things that npcs will be able to do.
Later on we plan to have guards attacking monsters within a certain area (keeping a town safe!)



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mapformat finished, long way to go
Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:35:39 +0200 -- maever

Ok, so as promissed here is my weekly update.
I'm, afraid I don't have much for you this week.

Server
The good news is that Borf got the mapformat fully implemented in the server.
The bad news is that there is little I can show you of the actual results as the server is unusable for the next part of our development roadmap.
This next part consists out of implementing instancing and map localized data transfers.
As we can't simply send location data of all the monsters in the worldmap at once we first need to determine where a player is located and what npcs/pcs are in his range.

Client
sadly our designer Kevin had no free time last week as he had a couple of exams.
But luckily he did manage to make a few graphical improvements to the test map.
As you see, we now have mountains!
http://www.excalibur-nw.com/forum/index.php?act=attach&type=post&id=2830


Design document
I updated some parts relating to character-specific attributes.
Also confirmed our current classes for the actual game.




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Yet another weekly post
Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:26:30 +0200 -- maever

Trying to make it a habit to do a weekly blog post,
going well so far

Sagramore is becoming a real motivation to work on these last weeks,
Seeing the progress we're making, I see us nearing completion each time.
Our current open beta date is set on the 22nd of February 2010.


Yesterday I was busy with filling in various elements of the game design document while Borf worked on inserting the new mapformat in the client.

Mechanics
Currently i'm working out various game mechanics concerning stats and skills.
Most of the game mechanics content that was worked out on the wiki has been redone in the gamedesign document.
Though most changes are small they do have a major influence on the final game.

for example:
For deciding on the active skill system we compared 2 options
1. Ragnarok Style
Where a class has a set of skills which you can assign skillpoints to.
2. WoW style
Where you actually buy the skills based on if certain requirements are met or not.

Though my roots lie in Ragnarok, the WoW system has more appeal for a few reasons:

1. It allows for better manipulation of the skills system
   As a skill simply can't be obtained if certain conditions are met.
   this allows us to focus on an area-to-area basis during development, less room for unbalance.
2. Quest rewards
   It grants us the possibility to assign certain elite leveled skills as a reward for a quest.
3. Higher customizability of classes.
   Not directly being limited to a skill "tree" sturcture

The same goes for our "talents" system, which is initially a concept used by World of Warcraft.
Talents are basically a tree structure of passive skills.
Seeing as we needed less expandability in the passive skill system we choose for a tree sturcture.

There is a lot more to it then first meets the eye.

New map format
You've been hearing loads about it and seeing nearly nothing of it.
As there simply is not much to see yet. The work borf is currently doing are required steps to allow our mapdesigners to make maps with more freedom.
When you think of it in terms of general common sense, it seems only natural to want a huge (almost) never ending map.
But in terms of IT there is no such thing as "infinite", our current worldmap file is currently takes up over 100Mb of server memory, and its completely empty! Good news of this is that it wont get much bigger in size for the server as we start building it.
Publishing the entire worldmap with the mapeditor (10240 x 10240 tiles) takes about 6+ hours to render completely.
This does require us to look at more optimized means of publishing as waiting 6 hours to submit worldmap changes is a bit too much.

more next week and possibly some actual screenshots





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Final touches on the mapeditor
Mon, 05 Oct 2009 16:48:53 +0200 -- maever

Today whilst eating vast quanitities of 'peppernuts' we mainly focussed on completing the mapeditor (for now).

Mapeditor:
To complete the editor we needed to add collision and collision-override support to the mapeditor as well as "water" collission type.
The water collission type opens up the possibility for us to allow ships to sail and pets to swim in them.
Since the new mapformat is different (and larger) from the old one, we have the next 2 weeks planned to implement those properly in the client. afterwards you'll be seeing some more visible updates in the game client

Graphics restyling
Last week I gave away the hint that we were doing some "graphical updates" in the game.
We decided to redo the entire graphic-set within our game (because we simply thought that this would better match our target audience).
Here's a small sneakpeak on what our artist (made for our new syle).
http://www.excalibur-nw.com/forum/index.php?act=attach&type=post&id=2827



For those who wonder what "peppernuts" are, they look like this and do NOT contain pepper
http://www.excalibur-nw.com/forum/index.php?act=attach&type=post&id=2826

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It's a big world after all
Thu, 01 Oct 2009 16:45:00 +0200 -- maever

Hey guys,

It's me again, with some cool news updates.

We've been working hard on the new mapeditor as well as the game design document, the mapeditor is as good as done.
Also the first steps to redesigning some of the graphics of the game has started, but this will remain a suprise for now.

Mapeditor
The mapeditor version 3.0, you've already seen a bit of it last time, but now we have some more to show you.
http://www.excalibur-nw.com/forum/index.php?act=attach&type=post&id=2824

To accommodate the client's new feature to support unlimited size maps we needed to make our maps in the editor at the very least, incredibly huge.
The worldmap for example is currently 10240 by 10240 tiles, considering a tile is 32 pixels that would make this map 327680 pixels wide.

For those of you who used the public map editor on the website.
The basic principals and features are still the same but because of javascript limitations we could not load an entire map into a browser.
Because of this the actual "editable" part of the map on your screen is a single "piece" of the puzzle.
To navigate this huge puzzle we needed a mini-map overview.

This is what it looks like
http://www.excalibur-nw.com/forum/index.php?act=attach&type=post&id=2823
(on the left, the black thing with dots)

The only step left now is to implement the new mapformat into the actual gameclient.
After that we can continue where we left off with general client progress.

Design document

I continued the design document and started describing some of the client components.
Nothing really exciting but it needs to be documented.

More updates soon

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Dawn of the new world
Mon, 14 Sep 2009 17:11:09 +0200 -- maever

Hello guys,

It's about that time again.
Again have been too lazy to make some decent update-posts last weeks.
But no worries, development has still been running smoothly.

Borf's been busy with the mapeditor, it's been entirely redesigned as 'mapeditor version 3'.
In this version we will be able to create a world that is limitless in size, it will be 1 big map instead of serveral smaller ones.
This is a big step in the right direction as this greatly improves the gameplay experience.
no more map long map loading times. Plus we now have the ability to pull scary boss monsters out of their foresty homes into a more unnatural setting (a starting town), in which it will reak havoc. (yaay!)

I have included a small video illustrating our new mapeditor.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJkXVC9UoNY


Also I've been very busy with our "game design document".
Figured every other company had one and we couldn't very well stay behind.
It does give some more perspective to what we're doing so it's not all bad.

Hopefully I'll get borf to make his own entry next week.

More updates soon!

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A day full of mysteries and disturbances
Mon, 20 Jul 2009 21:08:14 +0200 -- maever

Well it's about that time that I took the liberty of making another post here in our "blog" section.
I like to think of this section as a more "sloppy" informal developer's scrapbook.
So expect typos and lots of programmers/internet-slang.

Today me and Borf took the liberty of making a decent schedule for the completion of the sagramore beta client.
This schedule contains a rough list of what needs to be done in order to produce a decent game with some enjoyable content.
Currently it's looking like we will have a game to present to you all before the end of year.
This ofcourse still looks like something in the distant future and there have been a fair share of unkept promises before.
So what's different this time?

The answer: it's gotten more serious.
Now we actually have steady workdays for our company (Excalisoft) where our first product will be Sagramore.

Now ofcourse we don't spend all day thinking about what we're going to make, we got to working as well.
Borf Remade some javascript window components and skinning system which I started to fill with decent window elements.
This does mean that we will be able to provide sagramore in different skins perhaps even customs user skins (have to think about that one though )

We also we're quite puzzled by how choppy the gameplay became these last few months,
After some serious debugging we discovered that we were using the fallback "Flash Socket object",
This meant limitations datatransfer-wise.
The fallback is originally intended for users who have flash 7 or lower as last resort.
With the RIGHT flashobject working again, its completely fixed, the server responds much better and the ingame performance soared back to its former glory.

Hope you guys and gals enjoyed reading this.
More soon!

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16th of april
Wed, 16 Apr 2008 15:23:02 +0200 -- maever

Today and yesterday were the first days of launch.

We fixed some disconnection issues (where you couldn't login again if your internet accidently disconnected).
We updated our flash policy files so that the latest flash versions work with sagramore.
updated the URL to s1.sagramore.com , thought it looked nicer.
(also needed for correct usage of the flash policy file)
we also fixed the shop buying issue as well as fixing the data-saving issue (no more rollbacks).
We also added a small warning message when your unable to connect.

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7th of april
Mon, 07 Apr 2008 14:55:57 +0200 -- maever

Hey brace yourselves, got another update for you all.

Many things were done since my last update.
we now reached a stage where we have all the basic parts done for a true mmorpg.
We are now working on the very last details of the alpha public demo.
Adding some final quests and adding a small plot for the actual storyline for our beta.
Over the last week we implemented Defense rates for armors and monsters.
we also added a lot of new clothes and items.

Yes yes, I know this is what i've been saying the last 20 posts too.
But progress is hard to judge as we are only a 4 manned team.
some big things go fast, some small things take ages.

A good indication of our progress is the Todo list,
which can be found on our wiki:
http://www.sagramore.com/wiki/index.php/Todo

also I've made another video for those who are interested.
I only uploaded a WMV format this time as the Flash format was just way too choppy and big (100mb).
while the WMV is 17mb.
it can be found here:
http://www.sagramore.com/?page=movies

Enjoy, feel free to leave comments.

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22nd of march
Sun, 23 Mar 2008 00:44:03 +0100 -- maever

Yes there have still been many updates concerning sagramore.
and i'm happy to say that a public demo is no very close.

These are some of many things we fixed.
1)Monsters walk bug -fixed
2)char stats-window -fixed
3)npc-graphic support -fixed
4)Sagramore logo in loading screen -fixed
5)skill casting with SP usage & skill lvup -fixed
6)z-indexing of chars -fixed
7)mobs chase-mode recalculate player-location more often -fixed
8)sounds -fixed(though not in atm)
9)invisible npcs(for things like signs and hidden warps) -fixed
10)const variables in script language -fixed

THe game is getting very close for a public demo.

no eta yet but This really cannot take much longer.

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