Intro

The past two weeks have been pretty rough with school starting up for some members of the team while other real life concerns have been the focus of the rest of the team.

Winton has been pretty busy for the past week or so, hence why I’m the one writing the dev update.

Map Progress

We’ve been hit by some people leaving the staff team. The map creator originally creating the main world left because of real life situations which have been taking a lot of his time and because he doesn’t believe he can fulfill his commitment to complete a map that meets his standards of quality. The other designer only wants to complete what he’s started and then leave the team.

I’ll be picking up the slack on the main world, and have been working on it for the past two weeks. I’ve previously been working on a Fracture, which is now on hold until I get much further progress on the main world map. I expect to be able to finish it before launch however as it is mostly done right now. Creating the main world myself should be doable, and I think we will be able have enough unique fractures for launch even if we don’t pick up another map creator or commission a map.

I’ll see about doing some renders in the near future so people have an idea of what to expect. Right now stuff is a little too WIP for me to feel comfortable doing renders of, but I think you guys will be more than happy with the final results.

Development Progress - Programming

One of our developers, BMS, has also left the staff team. School started recently for him and he doesn’t foresee having much time to work on this project during the school year. He might come back at some point (and he’ll always be welcome), but I’m not going to count on it.

The other developer has been away from home for something like the past three weeks and hasn’t had time to work on much of anything.

In between sparks of creativity working on the overworld map, I’ve been working on finishing BMS’ multiworld implementation for HiddenOre. In short, there will be a separate HiddenOre config for each world. This will allow us to do some interesting stuff like having distinct ore gen per Region (world biome) rather than strictly per-biome.

I’m going to write up a short list of what we have left to do in terms of programming. Since it’s looking a lot like I’ll be doing all or almost all of this myself (on top of creating the main world), I don’t plan on adding much to it unless we pick up some more devs (more on that further down)

Here’s what we’re planning to implement:

• Multiworld support (per world configs) for RealisticBiomes

• Ability to override vanilla crop drops in CropCrontol

• A plugin to handle a few features required to do custom seeds

• Some Bastion mechanics changes to make sky bunkers less overpowered, specifics TBD

There are some other ideas I’m looking to implement, like a nation API (which inherits members from a “sovereign” NameLayer group for simplicity) that shows each player’s nation as a second nameplate above their username. I don’t want to promise anything further just yet though.

Development Progress - Features

While digging through the HiddenOre code, I was looking for an easy way to implement giving players bonus HiddenOre finds if they had the luck potion effect. I then realized that was already there but wasn’t in the default configs as an example.

We’re going to add luck potions into our brewing system and allow them to be used for bonus hidden ore drops. Players mining with luck potions will have an increased chance of finding hidden ore, let’s say, 20% tentatively. I don’t foresee many problems with the vanilla luck effect (someone please correct me if I’m wrong) as we’ll probably disable or drastically change some vanilla fishing loot and our MythicMobs aren’t affected by luck anyway (though we may look to add functionality like that). This should have quite a few benefits that help our economic goals for the server that I can go into more detail about if any of you are interested in the comments.

The new (potion) brewing system probably deserves its own post, but in short we’re looking to use a combination of Brewery and RecipeManager to add a multi-step brewing process using fully custom recipes. This will give us the flexibility to have many of the features that players enjoyed with Sov’s brewing system, while removing a lot of the mind-numbing frustration that came with it.

I’ve worked on a handful of MythicMobs over the past two weeks as well, most of which I don’t want to spoil (yet). Some mobs of interest are neutral (and occasionally aggressive) animals that are intended to alleviate some of that unending starvation during the first two weeks by rewarding players with a small food source if they take the time to hunt some of these rarer animals which fight back.

Release Timetable

It’s only fair to give you guys an idea of our timetable rather than leaving you in the dark forever. I hope everyone is satisfied with the pace of our progress so far.

My original timetable planned to spend about one month on the remaining assigned programming work, one month on resource distribution, balance, & lore. Maps and MythicMobs were mostly planned to be done in parallel with the exceptions of those I worked on myself. A third month would give time to work out some kinks, playtest some features in an open beta, add some new features, and pick a good spot in the “Civ Server Cycle” for a launch.

I still think we can more or less stick to that schedule. I’m planning on something like, let’s say, a Dec. 15th release. That looks like a good time for a lot of people with winter break coming up for students (as well as myself) to be able to enjoy the launch. That’s not necessarily an exact date but it will give people an idea of the time-frame we’re looking at right now.

Developer Recruitment

I’d really like to recruit an extra developer or two. If you’re interested in helping out with some of our GitHub repos just write a short comment below about yourself and what you’d like to do and I’ll PM you sometime over the next day or two. You are not barred from playing simply because you write code used on the server. The only people barred from playing on the server are those on the official “Dev Team” who have access to channels where we will be discussing sensitive things we don’t want spoiled like plans for events and resource distribution specifics.