Hamma
2013-03-20, 11:22 PM
http://www.planetside-universe.com/news-higby-on-roadmap-and-gu05-update-2984.htm
Greetings Auraxians -
I wanted to post real quick to talk about the updates we just made to the Roadmap as well as give some info on GU05 and a heads up on what we've been working on since GU04.
First of all, on the Roadmap you may have noticed that we've shifted some things around and added some new items. If you haven't had a chance, please make sure you go check it out to see the new schedule. One of our primary goals with Roadmap is to keep you guys informed as accurately as possible with what things are being worked on and when they'll be released. Sometimes things will slip, sometimes they'll move forward in the schedule, sometimes they'll be removed entirely, all in line with trying to keep it up to date with the current development team priorities.
A lot of you have expressed concern that certain features have been moved into "Unscheduled" and questioned what that means for the future of those features. In most cases it means that they're being actively worked on by the exact same people who have been working on them, but that we no longer know exactly when they'll be released. As an example, we've moved the new continent Hossin into unscheduled. We still have our full environment team working on Hossin, in fact it's just completed it's initial primary design layout pass and has been handed off to the art team for their first cleanup phase, it's still coming and we haven't deprioritized development of it, but it probably won't be finished in the next 4 months, so it doesn't fit within any of the months on the Roadmap and so has been moved to unscheduled. Another specific task from the roadmap I've heard a lot of players express some concern with is the Continent Locks. We've got a new system coming with GU06 that will hopefully provide a lot of what people want out of continent locking, focused fights, reasons to relocate from your current continent and bonuses for doing so. Rather than trying to solve the so-called "Indarside" problem by locking the continent, we're going to try to do it by giving rewards and bonuses on underpopulated continents during metagame events. It should be pretty cool.
So, please don't assume that because something is in unscheduled in the roadmap it's not happening, in most cases it means that things have become more complicated than we initially thought, or that other tasks have taken priority, in many cases due to overwhelming player feedback. In general, those tasks are still being worked on or are scheduled to be worked on, when that's not the case, they'll be removed entirely, rather than moved to "unscheduled".
This week we're on track to release GU05. This update will consist almost entirely of the Account Wide unlocks. This is a huge change to our inventory systems and character storage. We don't anticipate any issues with it, and we've tested it extensively internally, but with any major change like this there is always the possibility of something going haywire. To mitigate the risk in this change we've isolated it into it's own update which we're currently scheduled to release on Thursday morning.
Empire Specific rocket launchers, which I gave a preview of earlier today which you can watch here: twitch.tv/las0m/c/2050655
These Launchers should be released this Friday barring any last minute issues found in QA. We've spent a lot of time and effort to make these the coolest items that have been released in the game so far, as well as the new gold standard to which all future item releases will be held up to.
Finally, I wanted to address some of the performance issues we've had since GU04. We introduced a couple framerate bugs into the game with this update. The biggest and most pervasive one was hotfixed on Monday, it had to do with particle effects which were not terminating properly. This was actually part of a fix to make some things work correctly with the new Wraith Module, but it caused an unforeseen bug with particles. There is still another one that we're actively tracking down which we suspect has to do with collision meshes being loaded into physics, but we're still investigating. This bug will show most frequently while loading large assets very quickly, for instance, when flying over a major facility. As always, we are working around the clock to track down and squash these bugs as they're reported, but these types of bugs can be very challenging to track down, so we appreciate your patience as our engineering team continues to hunt for the culprit. Lots of people have asked about doing another double XP weekend due to the performance bugs that put a damper on this weekends 2x XP - I'll see what I can do about that.
As always, we are happy to hear any feedback on any of this!
Until next time!
-
mh
Greetings Auraxians -
I wanted to post real quick to talk about the updates we just made to the Roadmap as well as give some info on GU05 and a heads up on what we've been working on since GU04.
First of all, on the Roadmap you may have noticed that we've shifted some things around and added some new items. If you haven't had a chance, please make sure you go check it out to see the new schedule. One of our primary goals with Roadmap is to keep you guys informed as accurately as possible with what things are being worked on and when they'll be released. Sometimes things will slip, sometimes they'll move forward in the schedule, sometimes they'll be removed entirely, all in line with trying to keep it up to date with the current development team priorities.
A lot of you have expressed concern that certain features have been moved into "Unscheduled" and questioned what that means for the future of those features. In most cases it means that they're being actively worked on by the exact same people who have been working on them, but that we no longer know exactly when they'll be released. As an example, we've moved the new continent Hossin into unscheduled. We still have our full environment team working on Hossin, in fact it's just completed it's initial primary design layout pass and has been handed off to the art team for their first cleanup phase, it's still coming and we haven't deprioritized development of it, but it probably won't be finished in the next 4 months, so it doesn't fit within any of the months on the Roadmap and so has been moved to unscheduled. Another specific task from the roadmap I've heard a lot of players express some concern with is the Continent Locks. We've got a new system coming with GU06 that will hopefully provide a lot of what people want out of continent locking, focused fights, reasons to relocate from your current continent and bonuses for doing so. Rather than trying to solve the so-called "Indarside" problem by locking the continent, we're going to try to do it by giving rewards and bonuses on underpopulated continents during metagame events. It should be pretty cool.
So, please don't assume that because something is in unscheduled in the roadmap it's not happening, in most cases it means that things have become more complicated than we initially thought, or that other tasks have taken priority, in many cases due to overwhelming player feedback. In general, those tasks are still being worked on or are scheduled to be worked on, when that's not the case, they'll be removed entirely, rather than moved to "unscheduled".
This week we're on track to release GU05. This update will consist almost entirely of the Account Wide unlocks. This is a huge change to our inventory systems and character storage. We don't anticipate any issues with it, and we've tested it extensively internally, but with any major change like this there is always the possibility of something going haywire. To mitigate the risk in this change we've isolated it into it's own update which we're currently scheduled to release on Thursday morning.
Empire Specific rocket launchers, which I gave a preview of earlier today which you can watch here: twitch.tv/las0m/c/2050655
These Launchers should be released this Friday barring any last minute issues found in QA. We've spent a lot of time and effort to make these the coolest items that have been released in the game so far, as well as the new gold standard to which all future item releases will be held up to.
Finally, I wanted to address some of the performance issues we've had since GU04. We introduced a couple framerate bugs into the game with this update. The biggest and most pervasive one was hotfixed on Monday, it had to do with particle effects which were not terminating properly. This was actually part of a fix to make some things work correctly with the new Wraith Module, but it caused an unforeseen bug with particles. There is still another one that we're actively tracking down which we suspect has to do with collision meshes being loaded into physics, but we're still investigating. This bug will show most frequently while loading large assets very quickly, for instance, when flying over a major facility. As always, we are working around the clock to track down and squash these bugs as they're reported, but these types of bugs can be very challenging to track down, so we appreciate your patience as our engineering team continues to hunt for the culprit. Lots of people have asked about doing another double XP weekend due to the performance bugs that put a damper on this weekends 2x XP - I'll see what I can do about that.
As always, we are happy to hear any feedback on any of this!
Until next time!
-
mh