News Do you want to stay tuned and receive the latest news with your email client or browser? Subscribe to our RSS feed! Carpentry re-installed Carpentry is back - a new round of bug-hunting is opened (do not really hope so).
Some hints shall help:
Take the leading tool into your hands, keep all needed ressources in your belt.
For we lack of some graphics, we used similiar items or a major item from the production-step before.
I.e. we need a graphic of a pickaxe-head, so we took a iron-ingot instead.
For bug reporting please use our flyspray as requested before.
Have fun with our new carpentry.
BTW: Beside the smithing-Skill there appeared a "blacksmithing"-Skill during the last days. This skill only came from a bug so it will be wiped during the next days. written by Falk on 16. May 2005 05:35 pm
Carpentery deactivated The whole economical area of carpentery will be deactivated from now on. This part will be scripted new. With the temporary deactivation we have to ensure that no longer users will no longer take advantage from those buggy scripts.
The duration of deactivation of this economic sector can't be predicted, but has to be included some days. written by Falk on 13. May 2005 10:40 am
Bug tracking tool We installed a bug tracking tool to more effectively identify, track down, and remove all bugs that we implemented earlier. We ask you, the players, to participate in that, because the more users we have informing us of what is wrong the faster we can work.
When reporting bugs, please make sure that the same thing was not reported before. Please describe as detailed as possible what is wrong and add comments if you feel that an existing bug report does not cover everything. If you are not sure whether something is a bug or not, post that also.
http://flyspray.illarion.org written by martin on 11. May 2005 12:27 pm
Huge Update Dear players,
We informed you several months ago that there will be a huge update which will require us to perform a complete wipe of all characters("charwipe"). This moment has come now. Along with that wipe (all of your items, skills and attributes are reset to zero!), there will be several changes (which, of course, made that wipe inevitable).
To start with, there is a new semi-automatic account system which means that there are definite accounts and characters in that account (5 at maximum per account). You can put 5 of your old characters into this account by yourself. Account management works on a web-based platform that can be accessed here (https://illarion.org/accountsystem/). In order to play now, you need to create an account (the account name is not necessarily related to the character's names!) and add your old characters. The next step is to redistribute the attributes (strength, dexterity, ....).Be wise and think about what you are doing; all of the attributes are used in one way or the other; a hunter without perception is a blind hunter! (You get the idea...) When this is finished, you can log into the game. Note that the password of each character is the account password, that means: Choose a good password and don't give it away! (We will NEVER ask for your password!) Once someone has access to your account, he has access to all of your characters. The approving of accounts will now work via a web-based interface for us as well, which hopefully leads to much faster account registration.
Concerning the distribution of attributes you should hold in mind what they mean. A magician will need lots of intelligence but not physical strength. A fighter will need a lot of strength and constitution, but not a very high intelligence. This should be common sense. However, there might be problems to determine what the attributes "essence", "agility" and "dexterity" mean:
Essence represents a characters "magical/mental" constitution. Agility represents the overall flexibility of the body. Dexterity represents how good your character is when it comes to crafting things.
A second important change will be the enlargement of the map. It is much bigger than the old one and it has changed therefore. You will have to explore everything and we wish you good luck and a lot of fun while doing that. There are lots of new places, hidden and obvious, and there is a lot to explore.
The next important change is the introduction of language skills. This was planned a long time ago and we were able to implement it now: There is a "common language" which all characters speak (and understand) from the very beginning perfectly. If you do nothing, nothing will change compared to the situation before the update. However, if you play a dwarf and wish to speak dwarf language, simply type the command "!l dwarf". From there, your character will speak with a dwarfen tongue (which is visible by the tag "[dwa]") until you type "!l common" again. (The commands are: !l common, !lhuman, !l elf, !l dwarf, !l halfling, !l orc, !l lizard)
Another change that will be of importance is the way you are able to interact with NPCs. You are used to "use" NPCs by shift-clicking on them. While we still have the option to re-introduce that again(it does not work now!), there is a new way for you to communicate: By language. You can simply type in commands and they will listen and talk to you. For example, if you say "Greeting", an NPC might respond with: "Greetings, stranger, how are you today? Do you want to sell something?". You may say "Yes, I want to sell 5 swords" (or anything else) and as soon as you say that, the NPC bought the swords, gave you the money and that's it. Furthermore, the NPCs have only limited amounts of wares and money, that means: If you sell or buy too many goods in a too short amount of time that can lead to a problem. However, most NPCs will also be able to tell you more or less interesting stories and so on, so listen to them carefully!
Furthermore, there is a system of item breakage/aging and their quality. This means that an item does not decay instantly but it has hitpoints. The more often it is used, the older it gets. This means that you might want to use your expensive sword only when it is needed in order to not destroy it. From a technical point of view, this is a deep cut because our old concept was that all items are stackable; now, most items are not stackable anymore.
Also, you cannot put bags into bags hereafter to prevent unrealistic and infinite series of items put into each other. Moreover, the space in your depots is limited as of now.
The magic system has changed in some ways. First of all, the skill handling is different now, not every rune is represented in one skill anymore. Furthermore, there will be new and interesting spells, along with changes in the old spells. Also, there will be new magical disciplines: Bard magic and priest magic. Another change is the way you gain runes, but you'll find out yourself hopefully. The magic system will soon include bard and priest magic with numerous spells. Due to the short amount of time we had in preparation for this, the magic system is not entirely ready yet.However, it will only take a short amount of time until you can become a priest or a bard (within some days). If you want to play one of these two character types, we'd recommend to wait for the scripts to be implemented. As soon as this happens, we'll inform you.
Since NPCs now react on spoken language, here are some simple guidelines for communication with them: They react, as you may have guessed, on certain keywords or combinations of them. For trading, there are simple rules: "Can you give me a list of your wares" or "Can you list your wares" will show you the wares an NPC sells (or buys); note that not everything he sells will be bought and vice versa.
"What is the price of a [ware]?" will result in the NPC telling his actual price.
"I want to buy a [ware]." will result in buying a [ware] immediately (if you have the money and the NPC still has enough [ware] to sell).
"I want to buy 10 [wares]" will result in buying 10 [wares] at a time. The same is valid for "I want to sell..."
The NPCs will also react on other keywords and questions, but you will find that out for sure. They can give valuable hints on some things.
Some minor changes include: Depots are hereby opened by right-clicking on them, just like any other container. Some of the graphics have changed, hopefully the new female elf finds more fans now. Scripts only used to be invoked by shift- clicking earlier; there are a lot of new ways to start scripts now, meaning that there are a lot more scripts involved in general (server side). The file "itemnames.dat" became obsolete with this client. The client connects to a new IP, if you use a firewall you will have to reconfigure it.
Now we come to the technical changes: First off, you hereby connect and play on the new server hardware, located at the Technical University of Vienna, Austria. This means that we are now, for the first time, playing on the server hardware owned by the Illarion community, which is much faster than the old hardware. We already presented the technical details on that. Furthermore we changed from a MySQL-database to postgreSQL for some technical reasons, mainly because the old DB had some problems and we can keep the new DB consistent easily. The last change was to introduce a new, professional scripting language. We used to have a self made language, which was slow and inflexible by any means. Now we use "Lua", which is a lot more flexible in its usage, which is precompiled and which therefore is a lot faster.
To close with, here is a little outline on our next plans:
Firstoff, we are aware of the fact that a lot of bugs will pop out of nothing. This is not directly intended, however we produced them ourself and it costed a lot of effort to hide them.More seriously, we now have a tool, namely the new scripting language (Lua), which enables us to easily implement new features continously. More than that, we have a basic map editor which produces maps that can be read by the server, which gives us the opportunity to add new detail to the world from time to time. This also means that this was not "the change", but just the beginning of a period of frequent changes (remember that we had no updates for a long time now, which mainly was because of the changes due to the server switch, implementation of the new scripting language and switch to a new database). There is still work going on to produce a new client which we look forward to finish. We will also try to constantly add new features like a key- lock-system and things like that.
That's it for now, I think there is a lot of new things for you to find out and play with, we hope you enjoy the new Illarion. If you find anything that does not work as intended, please let us know.
The staff of Illarion
PS.: Our thanks go out not only to the staff members who helped preparing this update, but also to the numerous players who were a great help by designing the map, writing some scripts, contributing graphics, helped testing the account system, helped testing different things on the testserver and so on.
PPS.: The first thing you will meet is a new NPC. If you have no idea what to do, ask for "help". You will have to tell him if you want to become a magician, craftsman or fighter. Of course, you can change your mind later, nothing is lost by declaring that! written by martin on 24. April 2005 11:28 pm
Start of the new Account System The new account system starts right now. You can access it via http://account.illarion.org or the link at the homepage. Inside the system you can create an account which can be used to add up to five characters. Players who already have played Illarion can add their old characters (without answering further roleplay questions) after creation of an account. With browsers like Firefox or Opera shouldn't be problems, but Internet Explorer behaves strange sometimes. If you encounter white web pages so please reload this page (F5) or click the button at the right of the URL bar. If you have questions or get problems please send an email to accounts@illarion.org. You can only play with the new accounts after you have received another newsletter announcing the start of the new game server. The old one is online until the end of this (German :-)) day. written by Alatar on 23. April 2005 08:06 pm
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