Wurm Team Blog » Game Development

Roadmap for the upcoming weeks

rolfjan — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 13:03:41 +0000

Premium account numbers are sinking, and I think this is because of three or four reasons:

1. A lot of alt accounts are being scrapped

2. People are playing new other games such as Skyrim and SWTOR

3. Lack of PvP and unpolished missions on the Chaos and Epic servers

4. Lack of new stuff for the Freedom players

To me, the main objective is to get working on number 4 asap by starting to code multi storey buildings. This should make the game more interesting in many ways.

When I start doing that, it will break the current server code and as I don’t know how well I can keep different versions of the code at the same time there is no telling when the code will be fixed again. So I want to fix number 3 first – the lack of PvP and polish the mission structure and reward system on Epic.

Since I have to do this asap, I am already at work with this by creating a sort of PvP game that will take place in a PvP zone. The alliance structure will also change. The code should be done by tomorrow and hopefully we can run it live this week. More info to come when it’s done!

Collada progress

rolfjan — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 16:50:35 +0000

You may remember that Alex started looking at the new 3D format Collada last autumn and wonder what happened to it?

Basically he had to move on to learn other things since he was in school and this was his internship. Now however we’re making good progress again. We’re going through the system together sorting out problems and bugs.

We’ve gone through the model and animations loading and are now rewriting things so that pretty much everything can have animations
and even play many at the same time. Finally some water in the fountains can be possible!

Since the system affects joints and bones in the models, it should allow for the shield arm to be raised when you walk and swing your sword simultaneously. Several times every second all active animations are applied to the model. Every time we apply an animation we lock the joints we have used. Subsequent animations will not affect locked joints.

Movement and idle animations are played in the end which means your shield should stay raised when you move. We release the locks for the model when all animations have been applied. I have no idea if this is how you’re supposed to do it and we’ll see if it works. At least that’s the theory.

There is still a lot to do before the system works but hopefully the new client guys can try to make some progress during the summer. Make sure to pester them about it!

Then there’s all the new models we need so the artists will be busy as well:) If we get this working though, things will start looking a lot better after the summer!

Epic completed and Cryptik joined

rolfjan — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 08:44:13 +0000

I have some good news, and those are that the Epic code has been finished for something like a week. I still have to debug it but it’s all there and it’s ticking and humming nicely when I run it. We won’t be releasing it before the summer but you’ll get a date after the vacations. The closer we get to release the more I will explain it.

The client code also supports the Ericsson in-game voice communication system. Together with Ericsson we decided to wait until after the summer to release that as well but it will happen pretty early in the autumn.

Also, Cryptik joined the client development team. The more the merrier!

Hiring new artist team leader

rolfjan — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 12:07:34 +0000

Starting the first of August Emil Norrman, or Wox as his nick is, will be going to head the art team. Emil is an artist at heart with a lot of 3D modelling experience. There aren’t many gaming companies in this area so ever since the one in the neighbouring city downscaled he has been teaching game development here in Motala. He also used to run his own flash-game company years ago.

MrBloodworth has been informal leader for something like two years now, and has done a tremendous job as many of you have recognized.

Even though MrB has been very productive and responsible I feel more comfortable with hiring someone. Employing MrB from the US wasn’t really an option I considered either since I wanted someone in place. Emil will work here in the office with me and Alexander which will help both him and us with productivity.

The other members of the artist team will initially be MrBloodworth, Saroman and Kinoss. MrBloodworth is still crucial to the project as he has been setting the art direction and has all the expertise when it comes to how the systems with things like model name mappings and pack updates work.

In between these fight system changes I’m trying to help Alexander sort out the Collada loader before we go on holiday for a few weeks this friday. It’s a new 3D model format we’re already supporting for nonanimate objects. We’re trying to get it to support animations and texture replacement. It would be good to have it in the client when Emil starts but we may have to finish it after the summer instead.

A week of bloodshed

rolfjan — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 13:56:30 +0000

Last week and a few days before I started tweaking the current fighting system. The old one had a few flaws: Armour type versus weapon type mattered too little, creatures were too weak, and you easily ended up staring at eachother amongst other things.

So I decided to try and address those before the summer. Now, I was simultaneously finishing off the Epic code and the Ericsson voice chat system integration so I didn’t really have time to test things. I made some changes on the test server in order to help people test there, but since I didn’t have time to lead the tests not a lot of organised testing took place.

This means that I make people aware that changes are happening on the live servers and we test there. Usually people get killed and of course there is a lot of grief. The alternative is to leave a bad situation on the servers for maybe months instead. We lose players that way as well so to me it’s a matter of picking painful progress or stagnation. Of course I would like to have time to do it right with proper tools, time and test cases.

People want me to test the old “pre-fight-fix” system we used a few years ago. I will try to get it running on the test server but I’m not sure I can do it before summer. It will be interesting though.

Things tend to be pretty swaying though. These are the changes made the last ten days or so in chronological order. It’s not beautiful reading:

Horses should now be properly affected by wounds, armour penalties and encumbrance
Minedoors off deed is now 5 times faster to destroy in order to curb gatehopping
The “prosperity bonus” for deeds was removed
We will evaluate a partial loot system in order to promote taking risks and testing pvp for a week:

The difference is that you now get to keep most of the items you wear on your body
Previously you lost everything, but now you only drop the items in your inventory, as well as your weapons, your shield, any containers worn and one piece of armour when you die
The effectiveness of res stones and the magranon bonus were reduced to 12.5% each, so accumulated 25% instead
BoKs work as previously
The reasons behind this change have been discussed in the forums. We’ll see how it feels and what the real effects are

The partial loot system was abandoned in it’s cradle and full loot is reinstated with some major improvements to armour instead:

Each armour type has a set base damage reduction affected by quality and the rule of 70 which means it has 91% effectiveness at quality level 70.
Armours have a glance rate depending on they type of weapon that tries to penetrate it. This should make various types of armour more interesting.
Favor gain was increased by 15%, but armour now affects favor gain speed (using speed reduction formula). Cloth has no penalty and wearing studded leather has about the same gain as before.
Weapon parry, dodging and shield use was also tweaked.
Since we are not able to mass test these changes unless we put them live, your feedback is important so please test and discuss in the forums.
Two handed weapons get a speed bonus when used in aggressive mode
Some damage tweaking is still needed but hopefully it’s within fairly sane ranges.

The annual official Wurm meeting date is set to friday the 26th of August in Stockholm. More info in City Hall in the forums at www.wurmonline.com/forum.
Leg wounds speed reduction was increased again
The increased improve rate for armours made it too hard to gain skill and was removed for now. The rule of 70 effect and the new changes should be enough to ensure you can get hold of good armour easily enough.
Creature wearable items such as saddles and horse shoes are now as fast as armour to improve.
Lockpicking on enemy deeds with at least 10 guards now give “risk” skill gain bonus even if they are dead
A bug where animals would not return from being offline when you got a new pet was fixed
Debugged leading creatures around mines so it works a lot better and no animals are lost
Small carts should no longer visually stay beneath ground when you walk on top
You may now use a “last gasp” ability on your body to drag yourself out of the water which allows you to climb without slipping for two minutes.
Weapon skill now affects weapon swing speed maximum 10%. So at weapon skill 50 you have 5% faster swings and at skill 90 you have 9% faster swings.
Swinging now has a floating value, so you may swing on average every 3.5th second instead of like before every 3d.
Armour glance rates were modified and balanced.
If you have achieved and use your mastery title when improving armour or creature wearable items, you now gain improvement speed bonus. The reason behind this is that the demand for armour is very high compared to the time it takes to improve it, especially on PvP servers.
Lockpicking boats have been made harder
Drake, Dragon Scale and Plate armour received some more damage reduction
Foot and leg wounds are again a bit more severe
The lockpicking penalty to boat locks was lowered a bit

Dominated and charmed creatures now have half the Combat Rating
Strongwall can now be cast on entrances while outside
Creature spawns now give skill again on the wild server
Shield bashing now has a cooldown
Creature attack rate was lowered
The rate at which your secondary weapon is used increased
Shield effectiveness was increased
Aggressive stance deals more damage
Defensive stance now deals a lot less damage
Defensive stance gives more bonuses when parrying and using shield
Normal stance gives a bit higher Combat Rating so you hit easier
Fungus and Fungustrap casting cost was lowered approx 25% since the combination was weak compared to Fire/Icepillar
The max number of guards a settlement may hire was set to 50. No existing settlements currently have more guards.
Axes now do more damage per second since they don’t parry
Weapon speed for twohanded weapons in aggressive mode was set to 90% instead of 80%

Some java ssl nerdity

rolfjan — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 12:05:29 +0000

Like I’ve previously hinted, I’m coding support for Ericsson In-Game Communication.

It will mean that we will support proximity, p2p, team and lecture voice chat. We have to select the business model to use. I think it will be an interesting experiment to have instant voice chat and automatically hear the players close to you. Apparently the sound may vary with the environment but I don’t know how well it’s supported in Wurm.

I do the server side, and have no idea how it sounds yet. The guys at Ericsson has implemented it in the client though and says it works fine. They are finishing off the code now and hopefully we can launch it before I take some vacation.

Now, here comes some technical stuff for all you java and maybe c# developers. Hopefully it helps in case your application has to communicate using https with some other server.

Our server talks to their server using a REST interface over https. Their server has a self-signed certificate. Our server doesn’t trust that certificate because it can’t be verified in the trusted certificate chain, so our server refuses to communicate.

The normal solution would be to get hold of their certificate somehow and import it to the default keystore cacerts using keytool. My problem then is that I have to do that on all machines, and also not forget it on any future machines. I resent that. I want things to be automated. I am pretty scared of all things that has to do with certificates or SSL especially with java or in any sort of code. To me the whole signing/encryption certificate situation on the internet is a big disaster with lots of incompatibility, misguided paranoia and special cases. Or I am ignorant.

In any case, I found that people have figured out a way to add those self-signed certificates to the keystore automatically and programatically! Which means you can too!

The post that explained it to me is here.

Basically, take this class and change the main method to a normal method with standard arguments. Remove the code that tries to create a special keystore. Instead, make sure that the cacerts keystore is used using the password ‘changeit’ which is default. Remove the command line bufferedreader and add certs[0] to the keystore file.

Now, before making your https Url connection or the first time you connect to a new site, run the method. It will import the cert to the cacerts keystore.

But alas! Your connection may still fail because of

Caused by: javax.net.ssl.SSLHandshakeException:
    java.security.cert.CertificateException: No name matching whatyou.connectto.com found

Where whatyou.connectto.com is the host you are trying to connect to. Their self-signed certificate doesn’t match the hostname I think.

However, that also can be solved. Here I found this solution:

static {
	    //for localhost testing only
	    javax.net.ssl.HttpsURLConnection.setDefaultHostnameVerifier(
	    new javax.net.ssl.HostnameVerifier(){

	        public boolean verify(String hostname,
	                javax.net.ssl.SSLSession sslSession) {
	            if (hostname.equals("whatyou.connectto.com")) {
	                return true;
	            }
	            return false;
	        }
	    });
	}

Make sure to set it for only the connection you make to that host or all your other Https connections will fail. Good luck!

Budda joins the team

rolfjan — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 09:17:14 +0000

Today I received the Non-Disclosure Agreement from Budda who will be joining the client team. He lives in Australia and has already contributed to the project by creating a couple of tools for Wurm: the WStats that keep track of skill progression, and the WPlanner which is a more modern mapper.

You can find them on his website at http://buddat.net

There he also features this timelapse of Wurm which shows off a lot of the games’ features:

I really like the choice of music for that one.

Personally, I’m finishing off a couple of things: the integration of Ericsson In-Game Communication support, and the Epic code. Not much work remains on either. While debugging those things (in a week or two) I’ll get to work with Haradur on the new animation system.

Various projects

rolfjan — Wed, 18 May 2011 09:34:08 +0000

In case anyone’s wondering what’s going on, these are the things I’m currently (man)handling:

I’ve finally managed to clean my desk enough to start getting some time to continue the Epic coding. Right now I’m finishing a “random massive mission” generator that creates kingdom wide missions. An example would be to build a Shrine in the northwest. The Shrine must be on a flat, slabbed area at least 200 meters above sea level. Another example would be to cut down a specific tree outside an enemy village. Stuff like that which makes more or less sense (aiming for as much as possible). At least they are one-timers and won’t have to be done over and over.
Coding support for Ericsson In-Game Communication
Finishing off the shares issuing to team members. I made the payment for the shares yesterday and need a special receipt from the bank to send to the proper authorities.
Preparing for Alexander/Haradur who will become an employee of Onetoofree on the 1st of June!
Playing table hockey
The usual bugs/payment support/general problem reports

I don’t know when we’ll be ready to release something big new and shiny. A lot is sort of 90% done. History has taught me to stay away from ETA’s.

Aww Easter postponed

rolfjan — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 10:20:22 +0000

Like I’ve written earlier, the server has undergone changes that requires a client update and vice versa. The client issues are pretty much sorted out but there may be something left with full screen modes.

I’ll get up to date about that on Monday and hopefully we can update both the server and client early next week.

Anyways, this means that the current Easter dates in the server code are from last year and the Easter Bunny still thinks Easter is over and won’t show:/

I’m thinking we can have a pseudo Easter the weekend after we update the code instead. It’s not a good idea to make a major update just before a big weekend like this one.

Enjoy your Easter anyways!

Holding off the client move

rolfjan — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 13:47:29 +0000

As it seems, there were a few semi-blocking issues with the unstable client so we’ll hold off the server update and client change at least a week. My wife’s giving birth to our third child next week so I’ll be away until the week after.

There’s a new feature being debugged on the test server as well – a duelling ring. These will be created by the GMs close to the start cities on wild and within 20 tiles they should provide a full same-side no penalty pvp area just like normal duelling does.

The most important feature though is that they provide a way to get rid of any unwanted ruler.

Once per week the people of the kingdom may challenge their ruler to appear at the ring.

In order to make it hard to abuse either by the ruler so that he challenges himself with an alt, as well as make it hard for enemy kingdoms to challenge him by switching sides, or forcing the ruler to appear at a time he has no possibility to attend it’s a pretty complex procedure.

10 people from the kingdom are required to challenge the ruler between two server restarts.

The ruler may decline this challenge, and once more. If he declines a third time he has failed the challenge and people are allowed to go to the ring and vote. If 10 people vote for removal during the next week he is removed.

If the ruler accepts the challenge, he decides upon the date. It’s at least two days away and no more than a week. If he answers the first challenge he is protected for three weeks, and two weeks if he accepts the second challenge.

He must appear at the ring at the time he decided upon and stay half an hour. If he doesn’t appear, or dies, or leaves the area within half an hour he has failed the challenge and a vote begins. Needless to say he should bring as many bodyguards as possible.

I don’t know if a vote always should begin if the ruler dies in the duelling area but I’ll ask around now that I’ve explained the basics.

The ring can not be deeded or built upon. Terraforming should be prevented as well.