The sprint presentation meeting was today and all the teams presented their work. The following activity report mainly deals with things included in this meeting.

Before I go on, a few words on the next expansion: It’s code-named Darkfall Arena internally, what used to be called Darkfall 2010, we called it that because in its original design the plan for it was to come out within the previous year. In practice this re-launch project grew a lot bigger than the original design and we are taking this opportunity, and the extra development time, to make more fundamental changes to the game. A major catalyst for these changes is the Darkfall community’s feedback and player data we’ve collected over the past two years. Back to the activity report:

In this last patch we sped up skill progression for all skills, except for crafting skills. We said we would, but we couldn’t get it in due to issues with it. We’ll get it in the next patch in about two weeks. Also, there were questions about when we’re planning to add stats to Meditation, and the plan is to start doing that in the next patch as well.

One of the fundamental changes about the next expansion has to do with the reshaping of the world itself. We’re using the data we’ve collected during the past couple of years and are applying all the lessons learned in this time to streamline the world, removing dead spaces, optimizing the terrain, bringing points of interest closer together, repositioning everything. Yssam is complete and Rubaiyat is on its way. The world-builders are done with the Ork area, they have about half of the Dwarven area finished, and they’re starting the Mirdain area. They’re also working on optimizing clan city layouts in the areas they visit.

All racial areas and getting a total spawn and environmental revamp. All subcontinents are also getting a spawn and environment revamp, plus every subcontinent will have its own epic monster, one unique to each subcontinent. At the moment, Cairn has the Red Dragon and Niflheim has the Ice Dragon. Niflheim will also have the new Yeti in the future. Yssam and Rubaiyat are getting their own epic monsters. The Ragaizan is one of these epic monsters for Yssam shown in the image at the bottom of this update.

Monsters are getting an overall art revamp, such as the Ogres, the Celestials and Infernal, the Oathbound, the Revenants, and more. We saw the finished work on much of this in the sprint presentation and everything is looking awesome. We saw new buildings associated with several of the monsters, like the Minotaur and we also looked at new animations for new and existing monsters. We saw the redesign work on the elementals and the Dragon lair in the wastelands.

There was a presentation on the progress of the updated player characters which are now being fitted with the new armors like the barbarian armor, and their animations are also being updated.

Upcoming changes to clan banks were presented: These changes allow clans to add permissions to who uses their bank. Right now the options are 1. Free for all, 2. Clan only, 3. Clan and Allies, 4. Everyone except enemies. Also, a change in political stance will result in people being booted from your bindstone.

Thirteen bugs have been fixed, including dungeon logging and the staff enchant bug. These are included in our test build, we’ll be testing them and we should include them in the upcoming patch. Restrictions to trial accounts are also something we’re working on implementing soon.

Fishing boats are getting special rewards for fishing in treacherous waters.

We were shown improvements to our internal world-builder tool, specifically an addition so that we can add waves to shorelines a lot easier. During this demonstration we were also shown new underwater effects which will give the players a more realistic feel for underwater swimming and a new capability for world-builders to add decals to surfaces in the game that could be used for a variety of purposes including events.

A new way of lighting is currently being integrated into the engine and it includes ambient and dynamic lighting and other lighting effects which make the game look that much more impressive. As far as the environmental sounds go, we’re painting the sounds to the world and it’s a work in progress. In addition, we have a lot of new music coming up which is area specific and based on situations, for example the music might vary depending on war or peace.

There was a very good presentation of the upcoming changes having to do with the new journal-map-clan pages – political map interface. This is a completely new system designed to be a complete interface combining all the information the player needs. It’s very responsive, it updates dynamically and it’s user-friendly.

The new GUI architecture is complete and ready to implement. We’ll start working on duplicating current functionality as a first step.

There’s a lot of research going on at the moment having to do with improving crafting skills like armorsmithing, tailoring, weaponsmithing, herbalism, alchemy, and enchanting. Some new crafting masteries may be introduced as well. Further research is being put into armors, not just the crafting aspect but also how they will influence player choice of gameplay.

Some investigation into server crashes led to faulty hardware which we had fixed. The multiple server control tools we’ve been developing for quite a while now are being tested. There were more hardware issues with our internal build machines which we have been dealing with and had to spend time addressing.

On Monday we’re having meetings to plan the next sprint.

Thanks for reading.