Friday with Means - March 20th, 2009

burmese

Copied from AO forums:

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As we speak the build guys are preparing the next update for TestLive. We are hoping to get it to the Test dimension at some point this evening. I am looking forward to seeing the feedback on the 12 man instance over the next couple of days before we ship it to live. This version will also of course have the long awaited perk reset NPC and a great many small fixes that have cropped up in the last few weeks in almost every area of the game...you guys are keeping us very busy. Anyways...12 man/woman instance coming soon...finally. A complete redesign later...but finally.

Heads

Last week I brought up the idea of "new heads"...while perfection can never be achieved another tweaking attempt has been made and is linked at the bottom again. I think we might have the "feel" of it right this time. Damn those artists are good.

The Engine:

I joked last week that the code meetings were boring. It was a joke. Granted it wasn't that funny...but it was meant as a joke. That being said those involved are very serious about getting this done. In the near future we are adding another senior render coder to the team to help Enno and his minions get to the goal faster and prettier. As much as I understand that some of you would like posts from Enno on the progression of the engine I can't allow that as "faster and prettier" unfortunately would be delayed by the action of informing the community and responding to queries...this takes a lot more time than you might imagine...time that we all want him to use to bash out more awesome new engine code. I will not sanction any interruption of his work of any kind...no matter how much fun it might be. Optimization is serious and time consuming...focus is very important.

Coming soon:

We are currently working on a new "Orbital" apartment for the uber rich in game for a silly amount of credits, if you are a credit billionaire you should live like one. This apartment will also be available for paid points as it is a purely social content type item. At the same time we are working on concepting out a new social nightclub area in orbit as it has been a very long time since a new nightclub was added to AO...and I am sick of RKTim Picketing our offices for the opening of "Head or Tails" in omni territory. I think gathering in a new superclub in orbit would add style to our future events. The apartments are meant to be a part of the same spacestation facility...hopefully we'll see the both facilities at close to the same time. Before anyone asks this will not be in before instanced Pandemonium or Instanced cities.

Again...some of the concept art for the apartments are linked at the bottom of this post.

Next Week:

I'll be answering questions again as it has been awhile since we did that last. Feel free to include questions for others besides me.

Have a great weekend!

Colin "Means" Cragg

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