Weekly Update - Testing Preparations, Crossbows, and Blunderbusses This week I've been debugging and preparing Antilia for initial testing, reworked the item selection code, and added decorative crossbows and blunderbusses!

Testing Preparations

My focus right now is on preparing Antilia for the start of weekly test sessions (check last week's post for more information on my testing plans). I've created a short to-do list of the most critical items and I am crossing them off as quickly as I can.

Below is a list of the items I crossed of this week. This first round included a lot of "low hanging fruit" such as disabling debug and development features that shouldn't be available to players.

• Disabled the Time Rate Adjustment Pop-up and Time Adjust Hotkeys
  
• Disabled the Taipii Character Spawners
  
• Disabled the "Spawn Object" window and server message (This may return as an author/game-master tool)
  
• Disabled Tree Felling - The NPCs are not picking up all dropped wood correctly, which over time accumulates. Tree felling behavior will be changed in the future, so it's not worth fixing right now.
  
• Disabled Single Player Game Options - In our first tests I want to focus only on multiplayer.
  
• Fixed Signpost Text - I fixed a bug causing text on signposts to appear without fog in the distance.
  
• Fixed Attachment System Bug - This bug was causing collision geometry to be oriented wrong for handheld objects. Quaternions are out to get me!
  

Here are the items that are still high on my list to get working before the upcoming tests. A few of these items I have already started working on, but they aren't to the point I can cross them off yet.

• Add Multiplayer Server, Invite Codes
  
• Check Launcher Status - Ensure that everything is still in good working order.
  
• Limit Terrain to the Isle of Kasau - There's no reason to distribute the full Antilia terrain right now.
  
• Disconnected from Server Message - Currently if you lose connection to the server the game client doesn't inform you, things just stop responding (could result in false bug reports)
  
• Exit Game Interface Screens - Fix the glitch that prevents exiting interface screens without clicking on background first
  
• Network Request/Response Batching - Batch up some server requests and responses to reduce network traffic.
  

World Building

With my focus on preparing for testing I haven't been spending as much time on world building. I did find time to do a bit of writing, and now have descriptions for 27 new NPCs that I'll be adding to the Isle of Kasau in the upcoming months. As I've been writing these new characters up I've been giving special attention to the relationships between these characters and with the original NPC characters from the MMO that have already or will be returning.

The  Isle of Kasau page includes a list of characters that appeared in the MMO event and which ones will be returning.

Decorative Weapons

And finally a couple more weapons sets were added in late this week so I would have some screenshots to include in this weekly update! :)

A small selection of crossbows have been added. When crafting is added to the game I imagine these will be among the more difficult Taipii weapons to craft due to their complexity.

These crude blunderbusses have been crafted by Reisuii gunsmiths to be oversized and simplified for clumsy Taipii to use! Their primitive designs tend to jam slightly less frequently than other Reisuii guns. Be careful not to shoot your eye out!

That's all for this week. Thanks for reading!