Developer Log A.1.0

[chunky_dog]

A.1.0
20/04/2024​

Note: Developer Logs prior to this point have been archived. This follows new naming conventions and formatting. Hope you guys enjoy!

Gameplay

• Server upgrade! Following a major incident with rapid TPS drops last week, we switched server host providers to a new one. This saw a significant drop in TPS related issues. During this time, we took the opportunity to upgrade the overall server resources to address an expanding community as well as our growing suite of server features. Feedback so far has been receptive, with better average player latency.
• Spellcrafting overhaul! Although not a rework, several elements of Spellcraft have been changed. Firstly, casting has been buffed considerably, with massive reductions in turn-based restrictions for certain spells, this is to address concerns about spell scaling at later tiers. Secondly, conduit crafting has been redone. Although some elements of the crafting process remain the same, it has been reworked to provide better roleplay interaction and creativity; conduits now also have their own page that discusses all this, accessible under Spellcraft on the wiki. Thirdly, progression has been buffed to reduce the OOC time requirements, as we want players to focus more on the roleplay element of it without being burdened with watching a timer. Finally, the whole Spellcraft page on the wiki has been fully reformatted to be a much better layout, including separating more in-depth information to separate pages (conduits, runes, and transfiguration). Although this is still being expanded upon, so look out for future developer logs.
• You can draw…in-game! We have recently implemented an amazing plugin called ArtMap that allows you to draw pixel art on a blank canvas, which gets displayed as a painting. All of the materials and everything to get started is available in-game, but we will be releasing a guide on it sometime soon.
• New horse plugin! To replace the now-defunct old horse plugin, we’ve introduced a new one that comes with much better features and simpler user interface. All horse related items are also now craftable, and you can even get a whistle to ‘call’ your horse to you within a 100 block radius. Though all the features of this new plugin will be available on the soon-to-be-released amended horse page on the wiki.
• Some of you may have noticed our new afk system. A new symbol will be displayed in tab and above your in-game head to display AFK status, there are also new messages to prompt you when you enter and exit afk, including a title on your screen (and some secrets in these titles….). You can also manually engage afk by typing /afk but still run around, showing that you aren’t fully there in-game or in the headspace, otherwise afk status will initiate at an idle time of 30 minutes. You do not get kicked for afk either.
• New join/leave/first-join messages have been added. This was following some player feedback, and we wanted to make the messages flow better with our chat. We will be continuing to implement more player feedback regarding first joins.
• Minor addition, but you can now do /check (ign) to see another player’s character card, or type /card to view your own.

• For archaeology, the drop chance of runestone fragments have been increased for further balancing. A new update for archaeology is coming soon, and drop rates and loot tables will be reviewed again, with many new additions on the way.
• Stats underwent a bit of a recode in some areas, so you may have noticed that some of your stats have been reset. We apologise for the annoyance, but we promise it’s for a good reason! Stats will be tweaked some more in the future, but announcements will be made if you need to save your stats.
• The MOTD had a bit of an internal change, which resulted in a bit of a strange bug with how it displayed. This has since been rectified and will now display correctly at all times.

• The previous horse plugin we used has been removed. This was due to some poor optimisation and user interface issues that we could not change. This has since been replaced with a new plugin (mentioned above) that we think players will enjoy considerably more. In addition, this means the horses page on the wiki will be redone, so it has been taken down temporarily.
• The interactive map has been temporarily removed due to some major resource issues related to it. We aren’t sure if this is an plug-in update specific issue or an issue with the overall plugin itself, but if our current map system is not feasible we will look at alternatives. We want to ensure that we have an interactive map so that you have full access to the world of Athon!

Website

• New forums?? Yes! We are switching to a popular board platform called Xenforo. This is following some feedback surrounding our previous board’s editor, SMF, as well as our community growing. We’d also like to introduce you all to Optimus, our new web developer, who has personally been spearheading the Xenforo transition, and we appreciate all the effort he’s put into it. Huge thanks to him!
• A new policy has been added to the policy page, under Community policies. This is to do with plagiarism and falsification, which covers a broad range of issues. It was implemented following feedback to address skin stealing and the use of generative AI and claiming it as your own.
• New racial pages?? Yep! Each of the races are undergoing massive makeovers and reformats. Lizardmen, humans, and elves are among the first to receive it. The other races will soon follow, and will incorporate the same format. This should hopefully provide more context to races, how they work, and their respective histories, while also looking very nice!

• The homepage got a small improvement with how the hero image functions. It should now scale properly to all browsers and devices (some browsers were not supported previously). It should also load considerably faster now as well. The homepage will be undergoing a major makeover soon(tm).

Building

• Several builds are now underway for implementing the new NPC Factions, various event sites, and different atmospheric builds within the world. Huge thanks to the build team!

Other

• One of the more major announcements for the server is the memory leak issue that’s been haunting the server for the past half-week. Although we’re not fully convinced that we’ve seen the last of it, we managed to identify some suspects that were leading, or at least contributing to, the issue. These leak suspects have all been rectified, and we hope that the server should remain stable at all times now. We will continue to work on optimising the server to ensure this does not happen again. Apologies to all that it has interrupted.

Known issues

• Optimisation issues still persist. In searching for the infamous memory leak issue, I found several areas which can be improved and optimised to increase server performance and speed. A lot of these changes are quite time consuming and will take a bit of time to implement.
• There’s a bug currently with rolling multiple dice with the roll command, where 2d20 for example will only show one output. This is due to a variable not being passed correctly to the output and will be fixed soon.
• The issue with show item still remains where if you show an item, there is a small period of time (a couple minutes) before you can show a different item. Will be fixed soon.
• Issue still remains with pet renaming for certain pets. This only applies to a couple of them and is due to a name anchor. Will be fixed as soon as possible.