Status Update

Events so far this week on Alter Aeon:

- The first pass of microleveling is installed. It's required to get to level 31 and level 32. We're still thinking about the best way to handle level 33 and higher. There's also a new mode for showing the who list that can be toggled with the 'set who' command.

- We got a new article up on the web, courtesy Morpheus: The Black Art of Poison Brewing, which talks about brewing poisons using the 'brew poison' skill.

- Minor additions and updates to the Mud Terms Glossary.

- Various web page updates, which I've been slacking on recently. One of the more interesting ones is the Alter Aeon Quests List, which is now sorted by geographic area. You can see which quests are on which islands, or on the mainland.

- A 'resurrect' spell has been added, which is effectively a more powerful summon using the corpse of a dead teammate. Resurrect ignores distance and various nosummon flags, making it easier to put a group back together after deaths. You must be grouped and have a corpse to use the spell, so there's not much potential for abuse.

- A new 'faq' section has been added, detailing how the in-game text editor works.

- A new version of the TinyAeon custom Alter Aeon client has been released, with hopefully improved screen and scroll handling. Even better, a new version is on its way and should be uploaded in the next couple of days.


There's also been a boatload of minor fixes, to everything from specp 25 (the shopkeeper reload specp) to channel replay. This week has seen a lot of cleanup and improvement to various things, though the microleveling additions spiked a lot of controversy. It's looking fairly good now though, thanks to good comments from lots of players.

I have returned!

After a rather hectic two weeks of travel and insane hours at my old workplace, I am finally back and catching up on Alter Aeon related work. The first things to take care of were various submissions and contributions from you, the playerbase (and godbase.) Thanks to everyone who sent me something; I'm churning through it right now trying to figure out the best place to put everything.

I've got some of these up already; in particular, a three-page guide to creating and being a tank, posted by Shadowfax, and a whole bunch of feedback on the newbie island thanks to Morpheus.

I also have an experimental audio walkthrough of the Outer Planar Ice World. This was really interesting for me to listen to, and gave me a view of the area from the outside that I don't normally get. Hopefully I get more of these; I'd be happy to host them on the server for blind and other people to use. If anyone wants to record walkthroughs of other areas, send them to me and I'll take a listen.

Newbie newbie newbie

Today, I spent a couple of hours play a newbie up to level 10. I went through nearly all of the Sloe quest area, including taking out the vampire and going through uffspigot. I did end up modifying a handful of things along the way, and there's still some stuff that's not the way it should be, but in general it was a pretty fun experience.

I also, for the first time in quite a while, got that weird 'this is actually fun' feeling when I was going through the first part of a new quest Morpheus has been adding. I never really thought that side quests would add a lot to it, but they really improve the feel of the game, and give it a real feeling of depth. I'm going to have to add some more stuff in here along these lines, it's just a matter of coming up with ideas.

(Regarding ideas, this is a reminder to myself to put Varjojen Vir, the Winter Wolf, up in the 16400 rack of northern Ash Mountains.)

The game play was really pretty balanced up to level 10 once I lowered the level of a couple of mobs. The waypoints even seem placed at reasonable locations. One thing I really did notice though is that having to go back to camp to level and learn skills was really quite problematic, because at these levels you might be able to gain five levels in the time it takes to complete a quest (the vampire quest, for example.)

One possible solution to this that I'm kicking around right now is to allow people to level up to ten or so without a trainer. This would make gameplay less interrupted by the need to return to camp and fight your way back to wherever you were. The skills are less important than the levels in my mind.

Either way, this is coming along nicely, and seems more playable every time I go through it. It really needs a few solid 8 hour days dedicated to it to get it ready for prime time; perhaps I'll start doing some of that on Sunday.

In other news, the new client has been on hold for a few days while I take care of other things. This morning, I used the 'upx' executable file compressor on the existing AA client, and managed to shrink it down from 8 meg to just over 2; this should make the downloads much more reasonable for people. I'll watch the client download stats from this point forward. It should be interesting to see if changing the download size actually results in more downloads.

Also on Sunday, I hope to boot in the new intro screen code, warts and all. It should be easy enough to revert if there's a problem, and the best way to find bugs is to open something to the public.