Alter Aeon 17th Anniversary

As of this weekend, it's been 17 years since I started on Alter Aeon. It all began with:

#include "stdio.h"

void main() {
}

When I started, I remembered so little C that I had to go look up what a structure was and how to use it. The game server code has since then landed me two good jobs and served as my final project for my engineering degree.

We're up to over three hundred thousand lines of source code now, with another twenty or thirty thousand lines of help files, faqs, rules, and other information. It's sometimes helpful to step back and see how far things have come.

This weekend, in celebration, we'll be having one of the rare scripted RP events that I occasionally do. These events are time consuming, with a lot of prep work and hassle trying to manage and keep everything working well, but they are hugely popular with the players. This time we have a storyline with a fairly plausible "end of the world as we know it" theme, and with any luck it'll be as successful as our 15th anniversary was a couple years ago.

Thanks to all the players who have contributed and help make Alter Aeon great over the years. See you all there!

-dentin

Year End Event at Alter Aeon

We'd like to welcome everyone to the year-end celebration at Alter Aeon!

Starting on the 21st of December and going through new years eve, we plan to have a number of things going on:

• The release of a new low level area near Indira
  
  As part of our ongoing efforts to give level 8-12 players more quests and areas to explore, we'll be opening a brand new area north of the Old Indira Forest on the island of Kordan.
  
  
• A major update to the troll caves on Archais
  
  Originally created over 15 years ago, the troll caves were recently taken offline and given a major makeover. We'll be officially opening the updated area, which should now be suitable for levels 24-30.
  
  
• The release of a new high level stone giant area west of Finspang
  
  This area, created by the original builder of the Undead City of Jo'Kerin, shows a different side of stone giants. If you're only familiar with the giants that reside in the Ash Mountains, you'll be surprised.
  
  
• An object creation contest, open to everyone (this is currently running and submissions will close on Dec 23rd)
  
  
• Daily gifts will be given out to everyone who logs in!
  
  
• Several different minor contests and activities similar to the famous Halloween Pumpkin Cannon
  
  

We'll also be running sales on various credit purchases in game if you're into that sort of thing.

I'll post a more detailed schedule closer to the 21st. We hope to see you there!

Playerbase and Userload

When it comes to growing a playerbase, I've become more convinced than ever that it's got to be a staged process unless you have a LOT of money to blow on it. Having a lot of money is in fact how a lot of big MMOs handle growth - when they officially open, they basically go to full capacity overnight. This means that they can focus all of their development effort on one specific expected player load, and don't have to worry about nursing a small user base through the various stages to become a large user base.

This whole staged growth process has become a lot more apparent to me over the last couple of years:

• When the player base is very small, it attracts a certain class of isolationist explorer player, one that doesn't need much in terms of a help system, documentation, or maps.
  
  
• A bit larger and you start to get power levelers that like to compete with each other for in-game prestige.
  
  
• Larger still and you start to get quasi-social players, players who like to group with others and help out. They don't show up earlier because explorers don't like to group, but with power levelers there's someone to group with and someone to help. This stage is an easy place to stall at, because these quasi-social players do not have the thickest hides and are less competitive than the power levelers; if they are abused by the power levelers, they will simply leave.
  
  Power levelers tend to form small cliques with these quasi-social players, and then drive off all other quasi-social players not in their clique. This appears to happen because the power levelers in one clique, competing against those in another clique, try to get an advantage by driving off the other clique's support staff.
  
  If restrictions, rules, and code are not put in place to protect them, the quasi-social players will never reach critical mass and will cycle out as fast as they cycle in.
  
  
• The next stage brings in true socialites, players that typically gain levels only as a side effect of being in a group that is running experience while they chat.
  
  True socialites are another huge rats nest of problems. They tend to be drama queens or drama magnets, and are as capable of stirring up political *CENSORED*storms as they are of keeping other players interested and happy. There isn't a lot that can be done about this, other than to shutdown flamewars and ensure that rumors about admin 'unfairness' are killed immediately.
  
  True socialites are heavily looked down upon by the explorer and power leveler communities, and they must be given substantial protection from abuse. Unfortunately, socialites can tolerate a lot of abuse - unfortunate because when they take abuse, they dish it back out tenfold in the form of bitching to other players. One sufficiently pissed off socialite that isn't immediately shut down can crater the happiness and opinions of two dozen other players.
  
  
• The last stage that I have familiarity with is the 'true newbie' stage. This is where you get true newbies coming in, and your game has progressed far enough that true newbies are actually able to make some forward progress.
  
  True newbies are a huge problem. From a technical standpoint, they are generally completely ignorant of the game style, and the newbie areas must be very well built to retain even a fraction of them. This category also appears to contain the largest percentage of 'low functioning' individuals - I do not mean that as an insult, rather an observation. Not everyone has the mental capacity to be an explorer or a power leveler.
  
  These new players must be afforded additional protections that even the socialites did not require. I'm still working out the details of a lot of this, but a good chunk of it amounts to protecting these players from themselves.
  
  

These are just the social problems. There are also scaling issues, each of which presents a 'critical mass' hurdle that must be passed. Certain areas may require a minimum number of players to be handled; assembling a group of that many players may be impossible below a certain user load. In the case of Alter Aeon, many of the automatic control systems rely on statistical data to function correctly. With few players, the lag time on getting statistically relevant data may be literally months.

This kind of lag time really hinders the ability of a game to make quick and effective updates to increase retention. If you have a thousand new character creations per day, you can pretty quickly determine if a change is an improvement or not. If you have one new character creation per day, it becomes very difficult to determine if you're doing the right thing. I suspect this is at least part of the reason that MMOs take out funding in order to start big and improve the game quickly.

I think at Alter Aeon, we're past a lot of these initial hurdles, and could probably reboot the game from scratch pretty quickly; once you get the various protections in place, they remain largely functional even though they fall into disrepair at higher userloads.

That said, I know there are bigger, nastier hurdles ahead of us.  I just don't know what they are (yet.)

Halloween 2011 Events!

If you like vampires, mummies, demons and other things that go bump in the night...

Stock up on supplies and get ready for a fight.

Come see us on October twenty-ninth, it all starts at midnight.

This friday night/saturday morning at midnight, a new area will be opening in the land of Alter Aeon.  This place is known as the nightmare plane - little is known of it as yet, but if the name is any hint it sounds terrifying.

This new high level area, months in the making, consists of nearly 350 rooms, over 150 beasties and a host of new fame and fortunes waiting to be found.  Over a half a dozen new quests lines are available to explore.

All day sunday, we will be running arena and other events every few hours to give everyone a chance to participate and say hello.  We'll have novelty items and prizes for everyone.

On sunday night/monday morning at midnight, an invasion will begin, with incursions all day on Halloween.  There will be prizes for all levels outside of the new player zones.

New this year is a special quest zone to help stop the invasion and get a permanent deed added to your character.  This zone is set up to allow groups to progress at their own pace without interference from other players or groups that may also be trying to stop the invasion.

We hope to see you there!

wxWidgets keyboard handling

The cross platform code that isn't.

A couple of weeks ago, another piece of wxWidgets infrastructure in the Alter Aeon client was replaced with custom code.  This time, it was the bulk of the keyboard handling code that fell in battle.

In theory, the wxWidgets keyPressEvent is where you should trap out various key combinations; things like 'a', the escape key, and 'control-c' pairs.  Certainly under linux, nearly all of these worked correctly, and the ones that didn't were obscure and not really worth hunting down.  When I first ported to Win32, all that changed.

In Win32 builds, a lot of keys were not handled by the key press event.  You'd press the key combination, and nothing would happen.  It was like the operating system was trapping out the key combination and never bothering to pass it up the stack.  As it turns out, that's pretty much exactly what was happening.

I did eventually get the Win32 builds to work by intercepting a handful of keys at the keyDownEvent and keyUpEvent layers.  When I finally found these, it was hugely helpful; in the end, I trapped on the order of 30 key combinations to do away with things like annoying system beeps and idiotic behavior of the default keystrokes, in addition to handling our own special control combinations.

Enter Mac OSX.  Enter a whole new raft of keyboard weirdness.  I hacked on this for about an hour, and quickly realized that I was on the path to madness.  The code was becoming a rat's nest of ifdefs with key combinations trapped out in multiple different layers in different operating systems.

About the only thing that could be called consistent between any of the operating systems was that the keyDownEvent and keyUpEvent were always reliable.  The solution then seemed obvious:  move everything down into the keyDownEvent, and ignore everything else.  Intercept the keyboard control -before- wxWidgets could do anything stupid with it.

Keyboard control now works consistently and reliably on all three platforms.

2011 Cleric Class Update

The 2011 Alter Aeon "Cleric Update" is now live!  This update contains a lot of changes to improve traditional cleric spells, add a new mode of casting for mages, and clean up other spells and skills that have traditionally not been as awesome as they could be.  Here's a list of the most major changes:

- Mages now have the ability to 'channelcast' (ccast) certain elemental spells in combat.  Channelcasting takes longer than regular casting, but is interruptible and costs substantially less mana.  This feature allows mages to become a true 'blaster' class without compromising healing mana.

The channel casting skills are 'fire focusing', 'ice focusing', 'lightning focusing' and 'crystal focusin'.  The fire plane is easiest to reach, and hence it's the lowest level and easiest to channel.  The crystal plane is much harder to reach and only high level mages will be able to channel from it.

- Added a necromancer spell 'bone dragon', which allows you to fly around over the landscape.

- Ice imprison and crystal prison have been updated.

- Ward good and ward evil are now more powerful.

- The charm spell has been updated to make it easier to land and to use control points similar to controlled necromancer minions.

- The peace spell has been improved.

- A level 19 curse, 'overconfidence', has been added.
- A level 19 spell, 'hold undead', has been added.
- A level 28 spell, 'sacred touch', has been added.
- A level 29 spell, 'solace', has been added.

As always, you can use the 'spell find' commands to find the teachers or trainers for new spells and skills.

For those of you who don't know anything about us, Alter Aeon is a multiplayer text-based game with a lot of features and settings to help make it blind-friendly. Over half our playerbase is blind or visually impaired, and we have blind builders and staff helping to expand and improve the game.

Everyone is welcome to play, so if you're new to the game feel free to stop by and check us out.  For more information and soundpack downloads, see our web site at:

http://www.alteraeon.com

Happy hunting!

I'd like to announce the release of the Alter Aeon client version 1.089, which makes this the first official 'non-beta-numbered' release.  An awful lot of updates and effort went into this revision.  Here's a short list of the big feature updates:

- Full, non-beta MacOSX support, including versions of MacOSX from 10.5 forward.  Unfortunately, we don't support the older PPC macs, just newer Intel based ones.

- We've submitted the Mac version of the client to the Mac App Store, and hopefully you'll be able to get it there for free in the next few days!

- The graphical rendering system has been pretty much completely gutted and rewritten.  This makes the client faster and more consistent between different versions of windows.  This got rid of a lot of bugs with different service packs.

- The keyboard handling has been rewritten to use low level keyboard codes for pretty much everything.  This also gets rid of a lot of service pack bugs that we could never track down before.

- Lots of performance and memory optimizations, to make things run faster and more smoothly

- You can now change the font on buttons and the map

In a lot of ways, this was a sort of 'maintenance' release, where we weren't trying to add features so much as make the existing features work as smoothly and correctly as we can.

Of course, this means the next release will probably start adding features again.  We have a lot of neat ideas queued up, so expect to start seeing some of them here in the next few months.  Until then, you can download the new Alter Aeon 1.089 client version at:

 http://www.alteraeon.com/AlterAeon.exe

Happy hunting!