News

The latest announcements about Antilia Currently: 86 Topics, 1575 Posts

Alpha Test - Saturday & Sunday, February 25 & 26!

	Jeff Leigh Lead Developer It's been a while since Antilia received a sizable update - so to close out February we spent the entire week making improvements and adding new features! Status: The test is complete, and the server is offline. What's new in Antilia 5.5.5 Performance Scene Optimizations: I've added what is known as a 'quad tree' to help speed up visibility and ray testing in the scene. New Detail Options: Two options are now enabled in the "Detail Settings" window - "Enable Highres Meshes" and "Object LOD Bias". Characters, trees, and most scene objects have now been given multiple detail levels, and these settings determine when the high-res versions are replaced with low-res counterparts. On the low-end systems, "Enable Highres Meshes" can be turned off completely for maximum performance. Additional Improvements: Eight additional performance optimizations have been made, resulting in an approximate 30% improvement on our systems, and higher potential gains with the lowest detail settings. Minor: Changed the default settings to be a bit more mid-range, and turned clutter off by default. Chat Window Improvements Colors: Names and special messages can now be displayed in various colors. Emoticons: Added support for emoticons, and several emoticons have been added to get us started, including all the emoticons available on the forums. Re-sizable: The chat window can now be moved and re-sized to the user's preference. Minor: The text entry box only appears when the window has focus, providing more space for reading incoming messages. Minor: Fixed the scrolling issues the previous version had, so browsing the chat history is much smoother in this release. Minor: The chat entry box now prevents you from entering more characters than can be posted at once. Moderator Features Moderation Functions: Moderators aren't just names in blue anymore, and now have access to several moderation-related functions. Announcements: Moderators can make global announcements - this will primarily be used to announce planned server restarts or special testing needs. Improved Website Integration: Improvements were made to the the server's website integration, reducing complexity and making it easier to implement several new moderation features. These improvements also pave the way for some new features - such as in-game mail and a friends list which may be added soon! Miscellaneous Whisper: Added a '/whisper' command that allows players to privately communicate with one another. (Also available as '/w' and '/tell'.) Simpler Minimap: Changed the mini-map to display an image-based map similar to the teleport window. Minor: Fixed bug where buying multiple stacks at once would result in complete stacks in inventory. New Content Two new cooking ingredients have been added. Eleven new fish have been added, including the brackish water fish. Note: Support for Shader 1.1 has not been included in this release, but should be added soon. New Feature Documentation Whisper To whisper to another character you can use /whisper, /w, or /tell. They all do the same thing. The command looks like this: /whisper playername message The player name should not include the player's birthplace (da'Ariiel, da'Alenfay, etc.). Emoticons All of the emoticons on the website are supported using the same codes, as well as some short-cuts to make them easier to use in conversation: Using :), :P, :O, and :o will be automatically converted to emoticons styled to your character's primary bloodline. There are now shorter codes for all the character emotes. Simple smiles can be made with the first two letters of the bloodline (i.e. '[vu]' for a vulan smile), and 't', 's', and 'v' can be added on the end for tongue, surprised, or veil (i.e. '[luv'] for lupan veil). While these are still a bit archaic, they are much faster once you get used to them. Several colorful crystals have been added for whatever creative use players find for them. These are created by simply putting the color in brackets. Colors include [gold], [green], [blue], [purple], [red], [white], [grey], and [black]. Known Issues and Limitations New: Currently the chat window can only be re-sized by dragging the bottom-left corner of the window. This is a limitation of the GUI, and will be improved in a later release. New:There isn't yet a smooth transition between high and low detail trees, causing a 'pop' when they change details. This transition will be smoothed out in the future. New:The current set of characters were not designed to look good in the low detail mode. The new characters will be designed to look better when being rendered low-res. It's come to our attention with this test that if there are a lot of people in an area like the base camp, it can make it difficult for new players to log in. New players will just get a black screen. We've added this to our high-priority to-do list. Because the swimming pattern of fish was significantly changed in recent versions, there are many places in the world where fish may not be properly positioned in the water - causing them to swim underground or in the air slightly. Some areas were touched up - such as the lakeside near camp and Maulei beach, but most areas have not been fixed yet. Teleporting can occasionally crash the game. Clutter causes memory fragmentation, and will eventually cause the game to crash. GUI windows sometimes do not appear properly until clicked on. Some NPCs - mostly Jidou - can get 'stuck' in the scene while crossing pages. Teleporters and Markers that have been clicked don't always light up properly, although they are still 'known'. The window settings don't specifically recall if you were running the window maximized or not. Equipping both a fishing pole and an axe will result in only the last item equipped being displayed. Un-equipping either will remove the visibly equipped item, resulting in invisible equipment. Bugs Reported in this Test The minimap can occasionally get 'stuck' showing the entire Isle of Kasau. This can be fixed by toggling the minimap off and back on, but we'll fix this in an upcoming release. Some mouse clicks are being ignored (mouse clicks are indeed buffered, but are not being processed right.) The login system now uses a 'rolling passcode' when "remember me" is turned on for enhanced security. As this system is new and untested, there may be times when it asks you to enter your password even though you have 'remember me' checked. At a few very specific spots in the game, objects disappear. This is likely caused by a slight error in the quad-tree visibility calculations. If this is your first time testing... Antilia's alpha tests are open to everyone - all you need is a forum account. Once you have created an account and logged in, you will see a large 'play' button in the main header menu at the top of the page while the test is in progress. Click on it to review the EULA, system requirements, and download the game client. (If you do not see the large 'play' link in the main menu, it is likely the test hasn't started yet.) Hope to see you all there! Friday, February 24, 2012 8:24am Jeff Leigh - Lead Developer - Right Brain Games In-Game: Tait da'Ariiel, Ziliia da'Lynnar Finadan Moderator Wow. Lots of great features coming this release. Hopefully that "higher potential gains with the lowest detail settings" applies to me; I'd love to have 30%+ performance increases. Granted, that'd only mean my usual fps of 7-ish goes up to 9-ish, but, hey, I'll take every fps I can get. Also, I see there's a (currently empty) section for New Content. I wonder what that could mean. Probably new fish, since me and Argentii(and probably several others) have most, if not all, of the types of fish. *waits for the addition of 3000 types of fish, 2001 of which can only be caught by one specific skill out of the 1000 new fishing skills, the rest each caught by one of the remaining 999* And woo! Moderator stuff! Now we're safe from That Troll-Filled Website Which Shall Not Be Named- once, you know, they find out about us. o/ Friday, February 24, 2012 8:58am Fynudan da'Chalei Liska Moderator I'll again have to second Finadan on this one: Wow. THIS is some release! Lots of improvements indeed. Nice to see the chatbox finally getting some serious attention. And the new minimap, while not as detailed as the old one, well...I actually like it. The optimizations are also coming along nicely. Hopefully this'll help players like Fyn and Sly get better fps than previously. And you Mods finally get some tools! That's definitely a plus. Now you can announce when the server's coming down without having to teleport to EVERY area of Kasau to let scattered players know about it or have them return to camp in the hopes of catching you to find out when its coming down. All in all, this looks to be a really interesting test. Can't wait to test tomorrow. @Finadan: An empty 'new content' section eh? Hmm, guess we'll have to wait and see what gets put there then! Friday, February 24, 2012 10:07am Alpha Characters - Argentii da' Ariiel and Tiiani da'Tasiiama Finadan Moderator Quote by Liska: @Finadan: An empty 'new content' section eh? Hmm, guess we'll have to wait and see what gets put there then! Cooking ingredients, it seems. They're probably fish that we have to go out and catch. Friday, February 24, 2012 1:00pm Fynudan da'Chalei Korban3 Cool, that %30 potential improvement sounds nice on my end as well. Can't wait to do some more explorin'! Friday, February 24, 2012 5:21pm Indie game development at http://www.wingedpuma.wordpress.com/ Liska Moderator Quote by Finadan: probably fish that we have to go out and catch. Looks like we now have 12 fish to get now thanks to the addition of 11 new ones. Guess we'll be bouncing around Kasau again trying to find where they are and what to catch em with. *grin* And yep, two new cooking ingredients too. Guess we should expect more recipes to show up soon. Friday, February 24, 2012 10:43pm Alpha Characters - Argentii da' Ariiel and Tiiani da'Tasiiama Aureus Vulpes The new minimap alone should improve performance by roughly 40%. The lack of the GUI needing to render 2 maps 3D should be a massive improvement in overall performance for most machines. While I understand the dev team wanted the minimap to be different than other MMOs, this is probably the best way a minimap can be done. It doesn't need to be overly detailed, just detailed enough for the player to be able to figure out where they are at a glance. This also gives way to more minimap options or improvements in future, should you decide to make additions, such as dots for nearby characters, mouseover support, or player-set waypoints (something that only that player can see, sort of a local client option). I know you liked your 3D map, Jeff, but I honestly think this is for the best. :) As far as the other stuff, WOW. Whisper support, finally! I see that a friends list is coming soon too. Nice. Saturday, February 25, 2012 2:08am Was Aureus Vulpes in Earth Eternal. Is Aureus da'Chalei in-game. Lv20 L-Blade/Lv12 Hilt Lv45 Chop Wood/Lv41 S-Pole/Lv41 S-Blade Teriha That new minimap is really nice. Also, I haven't been able to join in for a while now, so definitely looking forward to trying all the new stuff this weekend! Saturday, February 25, 2012 3:16am Nooblet68 Have you updated the ingame map? Saturday, February 25, 2012 5:49am Direlda Volunteer Quote by Finadan: Wow. Lots of great features coming this release. Hopefully that "higher potential gains with the lowest detail settings" applies to me; I'd love to have 30%+ performance increases. Granted, that'd only mean my usual fps of 7-ish goes up to 9-ish, but, hey, I'll take every fps I can get./ Yeah, I'm hoping that will help out my poor netbook, too! I once had an fps above 10... but I've had an fps of 0 more often than an fps of over 10. At least it usually stays around 5-7 fps. I guess the low fps means that Antilia is so awesome my computer doesn't know how to handle it and can only stutter in amazement! ^-^;;~ Jeff, I'm glad you are taking the time to make a quality game. It's something I wish happened more often. Keep up the excellent work! Saturday, February 25, 2012 6:05am May God bless you and may a star shine down upon your path. Direlda lives here: www.direlda.net

Page: 1 2