Good-morning! Writing you a quick update on bug fixes and this week's upcoming update. We just finished the weekly AdventureQuest 3D team meeting. Here is everything you need to know.
The Red Dragon Server shall rise again!
...tonight.
Broomtool found an issue in the newest boss fight that was creating server lag. This issue was responsible for the server lag we have been experiencing. It started the week prior to New Years. The boss fight was rebuilt and will be released later today. It should make the server operations in the fight at least four times faster. Also, once the patch goes live today, the Red Dragon Server will be back online. This is one of those issues where the only way to test it is to put it live under the full wrath of boss smashing players. So please do join us by logging and helping us test the fight later tonight.
This week is Winnie's birthday. She is a 3D artist for the game. She does modeling, texturing, and helps Xero with some of the more tricky things. For her birthday we told her she can do whatever she wants. >_> She says... it will be "magical".
I am horrified.
Map Editor Tools
Snorticus (Programmer who joined us during the past year) is almost finished with the newest spawn editor tools. These are going to be a game changer for all of us on the content team. These tools will allow us to make new adventures, faster, bigger, and with less bugs. The project started late last year with Spider's Spawn Editor tool. Snorticus has been expanding the tool to include all of the common features & machines that we need to build full adventures and challenge fights. I will be joining Yergen & Zhoom in a review of the new tools later tonight.
App Store issue with the new Game Client
Behind the scenes, the programmers lose a lot of dev time to surprise "issues". That is the case right now. The latest version of the game client (do not worry, this has not been submitted yet) crashes on startup on iOS devices. Baht (programmer) is currently investigating.Once these issues are fixed the newest version of the game will be published. You will know when it is live as it will replace the snowy holiday title screen.
Playing through the game on mobile
This weekend I did a play through AdventureQuest 3D on an Android tablet. I created a new character and left the settings on default. It was one of the few useful things I could do through the weekend. I was sick and on the couch. My notes on early game things that need fixed and improved were pretty lengthy. The #1 being.... we need to bump up the texture quality on Android. The faces of the characters are so blurry it was horrifying. Increasing the texture size will hurt some older lower-end devices. If we want to improve the quality of the game, phasing out 7 year old devices is an inevitability.
Photoshop says goodbye to 3D
We had been using Photoshop for all of our 3D texturing. The workflow was really solid. However, with Photoshop's removal of the built in 3D tools the team has been scrambling to find a different solution that they like. No one here has really been a fan of Adobe's Substance 3D. Dage has been experimenting with some of the older tools that the AAA game studios have been using.
New Intro & Nulgath III
This week the team is building maps for Nulgath III while Memet writes dialog for the characters. Meanwhile Llusion is building a new intro map. Our newest content is our best looking. The older parts of the game need this treatment-- starting with the intro. The first hour of AdventureQuest 3D should be funny, fun, and memorable. I asked the entire team to pitch in their ideas of what we could do to make the first hour of game play unforgettable. There is an old saying, "burning the candle at both ends." This week we are simultaneously "building the game at both ends".
Other upcoming features that I am not allowed to talk about and 100% will not talk about because if I do the team will draw and quarter me..... seriously.
So we have been having talks about the most requested things from the community and how and when they will be created... and by who. Not sure if you noticed, but over the past year my posts have read more like stereo instructions than the weird, crazy, hype-filled posts I used to write. My natural state is to be weird, funny, and random. But in today's world, I think honesty and transparency is more important than anything. Over the past half a year I have really embraced and been living by "brutal honesty". My posts are transparent. I try not to talk about any new features until it is within sight of completion. The side effect is that, from a player perspective, it probably makes it sound like we are doing a lot less than we actually are. So in posts this like one I am adding more of the behind the scenes things that we have always done, but have not really talked about. A lot of the paragraphs above fit this description. I have also been doing this in my AdventureQuest Worlds: Unity posts. I hope posts like these are informative and useful to you. At some point in the future... I would like to write some funny ones again.
See you in game.
Battle on!
Artix
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