I’ve composed a press release that starts like this:

Wurm Online to open the Epic Cluster on 28th Oct

The Swedish developer Onetoofree announces that their MMO Wurm Online will open the new Epic Cluster on October 28th 2011.

“The Epic code is something I’ve been working on for several years, and it feels really good to finally release it” says Rolf Jansson who is the main server developer and CEO of the company.

According to Rolf, the idea behind the Epic code is to provide the players with a full circle of purpose and something really big to strive for. Even if they don’t care about it, every player will be part of a chain of dependencies and every action they perform will be important in the long run.

If all you do is farm all the time on a remote settlement, someone some day will come by and ask for food, water or healing and maybe you help a hero in the making. Everybody affects the story in some way in Wurm.

“This is particularly true on Epic, where the gods battle on the moon of Valrei. You may aid your gods by participating in global missions that require the players to perform rituals on remote holy places or build religious sites. When a mission has been completed the deity and its faction receive various bonuses“

Multiple missions comprise a scenario, and when a scenario ends lots of other dramatic things may happen. Fantastic terraforming events such as a volcano appearing may take place or someone from your faction may get the chance to be elevated to demigod. If that demigod survives long enough he or she may rise to become a full deity with its own religion and join the battle.

When you accept, a demigod with your name and some of your characteristics will appear on the Valrei game table. You’ll keep playing the character but the skills on the Epic cluster will be reset and your character will be renamed on all servers.

…

It goes on a bit more but you get the idea. I interview myself. It’s one of those jokes every serious small business has to pull now and then. The press release should start appearing in about two weeks.

Now, here’s something for you – rough maps of Valrei! Somehow I’ll make it possible to stay updated on the positions of the deities as they move around.

I made one map displaying the area names and a better looking map made from the map editor of Battle for Wesnoth:

The chasm is really supposed to be a volcano as visible in the map below but the Wesnoth map editor doesn’t have a volcano.

You can join the Epic cluster on Friday the 28th by using portals that will be available on all the existing servers.

Since the early beginning of Wurm we’ve had issues with lighting. The specification for OpenGL says that there is only support for 8 lights. One of those is the sun, normally, and one is reserved for yourself.

These limitations used to be very apparent while walking around in caves since the client tried to figure out which lights were closest to you and it often caused flickering or total darkness around you.

Today as I log on to Deliverance I see this beautifully lit road. More than 30 light sources. Apparently we do some smart stuff with pre-lighting terrain but it shouldn’t affect structures or objects such as the Colossus. To me it looks as though every light source works properly and lights up objects around them. In any case it looks real neat:

In response to my previous post on the planned map sizes for Epic, a forum thread was created where most people agreed that 1024*1024 tiles would be too small especially if there are custom kingdoms.

The reason I wanted it small was to decrease travel distances in order to promote PvP of course, but 2048×2048 will do the job nicely as well so we’ll go for that. In case we need even more space we’ll open more servers along the borders.

I also had to tone down fence breaking in the latest update. The idea initially was that the wildlife should attack you and really strong creatures would break down walls and fences in order to hunt you the food down. If your settlement couldn’t deal with the wildlife you’d have to hire guards to protect you.

It isn’t always a popular feature especially since people keep valuables on deed. Even if most creatures avoid settlements, players have built their fences exactly along the deed borders which makes those targets for destruction.

Nowadays I try to accomodate more to what people like, so from now on only Uniques, Trolls and Lava fiends will break fences. I think it’s good that you will have to watch out for and keep your area clear of certain more risky creatures still though.

I promised to give more info on the Epic progress in a recent post so before I go home for the weekend I’ll spill some beans.

We’re receiving the new server to host the Epic cluster next week. It’s a Dell R710 with two Intel Xeon X5670 Processors (2.93GHz, 6C, 12M Cache, 6.40 GT/s QPI, 95W TDP, Turbo, HT), and 128GB DDR3-1333MHz memory.

Also, today I ordered 6 Intel 710 SSD 100GB disks. They are really really new. Here’s a press release about them: http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/intel_unveils_high_endurance_710_series_ssd_data_centers As you may note, the article is actually from yesterday.

We will put the disks in a RAID 10, which should remove any database bottleneck. The only real bottleneck remaining will be java garbage collection which is already pretty much under control.

The Epic lands initially consist of a cluster of three servers: two raidable home servers the size of the current Exodus and Deliverance servers (8×8 kilometers), and a wild server the size of the Golden Valley server (4×4 kilometers). The home servers will belong to Mol Rehan and Jenn-Kellon. These kingdoms will have starter cities on the wild server which is located in between. You will also be able to join Horde of the Summoned.

Everyone who joins the Epic cluster will receive inventories and skill sets unique to that cluster but with access to their money in the bank which is global. If you return to for instance the current Wild server or the Freedom cluster, you will use your previous inventories and skill sets.

50 people who join up together may create a custom kingdom with its own name, king, titles and nobility but you need to control 2% of the wild map in order to unlock certain combat bonuses. When you create a custom kingdom it will have to be linked to either the Jenn-Kellon or Mol Rehan kingdom template in style. This will have effect when it comes to Epic Missions.

Epic missions have a lot of different styles but it could be to build something or perform an action on an item in enemy land. Missions are linked to deities who are in turn linked to the three kingdoms of Jenn-Kellon, Mol Rehan or Horde of the Summoned.
If you are in a custom kingdom you should probably help the deities linked to your kingdom template since when “your” deity accomplishes a mission you gain bonuses.
When your deity wins a scenario you may gain permanent skill or faith bonuses and some enemy territory may spawn for instance a volcano or hordes of demons.

We expect to release the Epic cluster within a month, and I’ll release more information along the way!

The Deliverance server is still being settled, and I’ve decide to release even more land south of it. The Exodus server will be made available tomorrow at 18.00 CET.

The idea is that it will cater for those who felt they missed out on the soft spots of Deliverance. I think Exodus is a beautiful server personally, but I may be shooting off the target with it because it’s so infested with creatures that I fear people will die. Instead of successfully settling the land, they will respawn at the start village without their tools and weapons, surrounded by equally fragile newbies.

If you decide to go there, do not blame me for leading you on! I have tried to warn you. You will need to survive long enough to settle down. Then again, backing up into the water or onto the boat should suffice in most situations I guess.

What you who start as newbies somewhere in the center area will do I don’t know. I think you will have to slowly wear down the wall of critters with your own wall of meat and maybe build some towers to help clear the way.

Meanwhile, a fascinating project is taking place close to the start settlement of Green Dog on Deliverance. In the lake bordering the settlement, Dominus, Israfel and Youzy are already building a colossus. First they must have created an island with tons of dirt and now they freight all the stone required. Looks interesting I think:

Allright, two long evenings after launch date and I can finally relax a bit. The servers are up and running and Independence and Deliverance are connected via a shared border.

I don’t want to go into all the things that went wrong but it was mostly related to ships crossing the border between servers but there was also a hard disk that acted up. At least everything is in place now and we’re helping the last players who ran into problems or needed refunds after the rollback.

The good outcome of the hassle and stress is that sailing between servers is debugged now and we can add more servers quickly when need arises. Starhero apparently crossed the server border with more than 5000 items in his cargo hold which is sort of impressive.

The new server is very appreciated both for its looks and the mere fact that there is free land to settle in on. All along the coast there are small settlements like the ones in the screenshots below.
I don’t know how it looks inland but there should still be lots of free land to deed.

Due to congestion and the relative difficulty of finding virgin lands on the current Independence server, we’ve decided that it is time to release a new Freedom server. We shall call it Deliverance and it will be the new default server for newbies.

This historical land rush event – the first in several years – is scheduled next Tuesday at 18.00 hrs CET (the 6th of Sept).

We have yet to prepare a few things like linking the servers and making sure the operating system is up to date but most things are good to go.

The new lands will be located south of the existing Independence server and you will be able to sail there. The only portal that leads to it will be from the tutorial server.

All you have to in order to participate in this event is to create an account on the tutorial server and wait at the portal area, or hang on the southern border of Independence.

Most welcome everyone!

PS: The Epic server release is due in October. We need to debug some more and will try to get some new graphics going before that. DS.

Time to head out to vacation!

I’ll be back in a jiffy, in mid August. I’ve tried to prepare for an interesting autumn with lots of improvements and stuff to release. We’ll coordinate things and do a big push some time before winter arrives. It will be very interesting to see how far we come, and if the push gives good results we will have resources to expand further.

Thank you all players who have stayed with us or joined this pretty uneventful spring as I have been coding things that hasn’t been released yet. As it turned out, the big changes come during the autumn instead. I think a lot of us are looking forward to making the game look better and adding functionality that we have lacked for years.

Thank you all you on the team who have supported me and kept the game running through the turbulence and lack of communication. You’re accomplishing something extraordinary. I hope you get nice tans wherever you are.

I know I will!