News: Higby on Roadmap and GU05 Update

[Hamma]

http://www.planetside-universe.com/n...pdate-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

[Ghoest9]

They still havent fixed the lost attachment bug they introduced with VR.

I suspect account wide unlocks will be full of ugly bugs.

[OctavianAXFive]

Originally Posted by Ghoest9

They still havent fixed the lost attachment bug they introduced with VR.

I suspect account wide unlocks will be full of ugly bugs.

Optimism. You could use some.

What I'm itching for is that Test Server. I want to hear more about that.

[Koadster]

Originally Posted by OctavianAXFive

Optimism. You could use some.

When a patch comes out that DOESNT break something then you can use that Optimism.. Since beta im yet to see a patch that hasnt broken something. People forgot those patches that completely broke base turrets or the one where tanks did no damage!


The thing im annoyed.. Feb update had alot of features coming.. They are now disappeared, not unscheduled they just deleted them!

[Riekopo]

Umm, so they're not implementing a form of continent locking?...

[Dragonskin]

Originally Posted by Riekopo

Umm, so they're not implementing a form of continent locking?...

No not yet. They want to see if their new system will entice people to move to other continents without cutting them off from others.

Anyway, always appreciated when Matt Higby can send out any kind of update on the development teams thought process and where they are trying to go with the game.

Trying to decide if I want to get some SC this weekend for the Striker or if I want the Lancer more.... hmmm. Leaning towards Striker since I don't have an annihilator and my VS already has the first series of AV lock-on launchers.

[typhaon]

Hossin won't be finished within the next 4 months!?!?!

I want an endgame that revolves around a global war... not 3 entirely separate minigames.... Planetside: Indar... Planetside: Amerish and Planetside: Salt World

[Monsta]

edit: Good stuff

[bpostal]

Excellent. I know Higby cares enough to keep us as informed as possible to keep our (sometimes unfounded) fears at a minimum but it's always nice to have it confirmed.

It is with this faith I'm not going to stay up all night switching back and forth between cursing, hoping and despairing about the change (replacement) to cont locking.

That said. HossinHossinHossinHossinHossinHossin!!!! I still can't wait! (it's gonna be so badass)

[o Solei o]

Those "minigames" are many orders of magnitude larger than other "full" games.

Thanks for the heads up Higby. Like others, I was hopin' to see more, but I totally get wanting to make sure something as huge as "WHERE'D ALL MY SMEDLEY-COINS GO?!?!" is actually bug-free. It's appreciated.

Real question though that's not in the FAQ posted recently: What about those of us who may have purchased the same CP item on different characters? Will the system be capable of seeing how much we paid for them and reimbursing us the difference?

[DirtyBird]

Why dont they just remove all of the individual months if they are going to shuffle/reschedule them all the time?

I don't care if they are shuffled its the fact they bothered to allocate them in to a particular month.
They are now classified as Game Updates and the monthly part of it has been non existent since they started calling them GU01, GU02, etc. and then tried to roll them out on a 2 week cadence.

Just give a weeks notice of what is expected in the next Game Update then no one has any real expectations of getting something that you will in all possibility have moved to "unscheduled" anyway.

We never know until a week or so beforehand as to what is actually planned.
Even the forum updates on the progress of the next GU gets changed a week out.

I look back at the original Roadmap and each Month has completely changed now.
And here its confirmed that the final piece of February is now solely GU05 when we probably expected the first half of March to be included as well.
But to get around that they just reschedule the last bit of February to March and move March to April and beyond.


So just ditch the months in the Roadmap imo.

[greenberetdelta]

when is the new territorial system coming?

[bpostal]

Originally Posted by greenberetdelta

when is the new territorial system coming?

We're all thinking it so I'm just gonna say it.

Soon!

[FireStormNova]

Originally Posted by bpostal

We're all thinking it so I'm just gonna say it.

Soon!

HeHe yea this! I hope the new map will be more troop friendly = i miss the mines/caverns *wink*

[Falcon_br]

So, most people here were right when they said that the particles weren't vanishing and that was causing the fps drop.
And people complaining that flying is still bad, are also right.

But it is funny to know that this bug happened because of the cloaking liberators we were "not" seeing them in GU 04 cloak bug.

I just want to know what is going to be done with players unlocking grenades in the VR to use in real battle, I just think they will lose the grenades and will be the end of it, but I think this bug is nice because you can field test the grenades before this bug is fixed.

Also, I am still always respawning in load out 1, sometimes I really need C4, but I respawn in load out 1 without them! Also, you need to reload the nighthawk, because with extend mags it is coming just with 6 bullets, and you can reload it from spawn!