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I spoke last time about looking towards pets and spawning. That isn't really any further forward, and is on hold at the moment as we have a feature freeze on while we work on the stress tests.
What this basically means is that no new features or major changes are allowed until we have completed the current run of stress tests to the teams satisfaction. Everyone has been working very hard on cleaning up the core and fixing bugs. If we were to add new stuff into the mix, the wheel would fall off pretty fast.
To get an idea of the improvement - here's some stats Sostrata posted on IRC earlier today related to new/fixed bugs: http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g138/Sostrata/summary.jpg
We recently had what we termed a 'Friends & Family' preview which let previous testers and devs who are now inactive the chance to come along and see what's going on. The test went well as Sostrata's Scoop says http://www.swganh.com/anh_community/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=276. Four separate crashing issues we had not come across before were found, which although annoying for the players, was invaluable feedback. The first was due to an invalid database entry causing problems with structure cleanup, another was due to a specific situation where Sostrata went LD just as her band started playing.
So far, I've talked about what the team has been doing, and what I'm *NOT* doing...but I haven't said what I have actually been doing myself.
Over the past two months I have mainly been fixing bugs mainly related to buffs and the blue frog. I completely rewrote sections of the code for both. In terms of Buffs it was all back end stability stuff - pretty boring; but the frog has changed significantly on the front end to make things a little more friendly for testers as we were heading into the preview. We also now have different sections of the frog available to CSR/Devs.
I helped Sch out with some of the problems she was having with item rotations in structures (as did quite a few of us). I can't really claim that much credit, as she had the correct quaternion formulas, but I managed to stumble on the fact we weren't normalizing correctly! Apathy has been taking this all one step further by re-factoring and streamlining all the maths code in the core (didn't envy that task).
I also updated the server to allow us to lock the server to players on the fly while still allowing CSR/Devs to zone in. This is invaluable for the previews as it lets us bring up the server, jump on and test while making sure no external players can jump on before we are ready.
While re-factoring Buffs, I have also identified parts of the HAM and Skillmod systems which need a look over, and will be working on those. In addition, I intend to make the blue frog item list more easily edited by admins while maintaining a nice clean end user interface. Its a shame that ultimately all this frog work will never be seen on a mainstream release server like most other features! Finally, now that I have buffs very stable, I am looking at working on buff overwriting and hooking up more crafted items to buffs so that food/drink etc is a little more useful!
It has been a little difficult to code in the past few weeks as I am doing a lot of coding at work right now. When I get back, the last thing I want to do is fire Visual Studio back up!
In other news, with the increased free time since finishing my Masters, I have got through a significant amount of DIY and finished Assassins Creed II, Bioshock II, Godfather II, most of Alien vs Predator and a fair chunk of Dragon Age. It feels good not to have any assignments to complete!
