[Philz]

Fil dédié aux Development updates.

Citation :

Development Update - April 2013

Hello runners,

this time, we got some news on the balancing side of things! Enjoy!

Sparta - Balance Test Server
As a part of the balancing project, we will launch a new server in either May or June under the name of Sparta. We have chosen to implement this second test server as we want to keep any technical changes separate from the balancing changes. That way, the balance on Sparta can directly be compared to the balance on Titan without interference from any other alterations.

On top of that, we are working on implementing a system allowing us to dynamically make adjustments to stats of items and weapons, as well as general game settings. This will make it possible to change balance "on-the-fly", without the need to patch and therefore will allow for a far more continuous and flexible process.

In the last patch we took the difficult decision to address the most urgent of balancing issues by deploying adjustments to the Disruptor and AKs, however this is not how we want to proceed. We do not want to go forward adjusting small numbers of weapons at a time, nor do we want to create a huge balancing patch like Reakktor's Neocron Evolution 2.2.

Our first step will be to remove the comma value character stat system. The introduction of these values only made the system more complex without any benefits to gameplay. As the intended purpose of these values was never implemented, we believe a logical step is to remove those complex values as well. Beyond this we wish to create a well understood and easy to understand foundation to game balance (this foundation will be the initial state of Sparta). To be more specific, we will start out with weapon balance based on damage per second, or 'DPS'. To correctly reach a solid DPS foundation this will of course take into account parameters like frequency, reload time and damage over time effects, however it is certain to need heavy tweaking and further adjustment once it reaches Sparta.

Once this initial balance foundation has been established, we will put focus on different sub-topics and work on improving those. An item per item balance project is not an option in our opinion, as there are far too many dependencies. Instead, in a somewhat similar move to other development houses when balancing PvP, we will pick key-aspects/classes/certain play styles and rework them to fit into a broader/better picture of Crahn, the world, 42.

This process will surely evolve over time and we will say now that is will never truly be finished. Game balance is not something that can ever be "done" due to the complex levels of inter-dependencies in every facet of the game. However, we are eager to receive more feedback from the Community throughout the process.

Soul Light System
As you may have noticed with the last two patches we introduced the first bunch of changes to the soul light system. However, this is not yet the end result. Already during the internal stages of development and brainstorming some pretty interesting ideas have been raised. Beyond this even more interesting ideas were posted by the Community on the Brainport.

While players at the negative end of the Soul Light spectrum are outlaws, they also need a "home" and therefore we are planning a partial revamp the Outzone Jail (Sector 8) to cater for their needs. On top of that we also believe outlaws need a "home" faction, this need for a faction to call their own has made us consider the reintroduction of Anarchy Breed or even an entirely new player faction for the game. We have not yet reached a decision on this and would certainly like to hear your ideas in the Brainport.

On top of that we also have to adjust the Soul Light gain and loss system dramatically. The current system leaves too much room for Grief-play, especially towards characters with lower base-ranks. However great care has to be taken in making sure that we do not enable grief-play the other way around. There is still a lot of work to do in this area but be sure we are aware of the current situation and hope to address it as quickly as we can.

Storyline & Events
The major raid on Neocron by the forces of the Twilight Guardian on Sunday 5th May, was probably our largest event outing for some time. A number of elements had to come together for this event to be possible and we're thrilled with the results. While a few issues did crop up during the event we now have the relevant data to fix them. The stability of crowded zones was investigated in real time and server side fixes have already been deployed to address some of them.

We've now obviously reached an important part of Powder Keg. Neocron's President Jack Red was viciously executed on the steps of his own City Administration. NExT's technology was sabotaged preventing his resurrection by GenRep. The city is now without a President, emergency protocols have been put in the place and the selection of a successor has begun.

The City's war machine was slow to mobilise, few reinforcements were available to protect the inner city during the raid. What issues have befallen City Administration? Why do they appear so weak so recently after a period of near peace? Are there more problems at home than Neocron's citizens are aware of? Only time will tell.

Make sure to keep an eye on the Neocronicle and in game to see how these threads progress. While sometimes it may seem like the story slows in parts, there is still a lot to come and further changes in the city and the wider gameworld are just around the corner.

Exploit & Harassment Reports
Lately we have received several exploit and harassment reports, however quite often key information is missing. Please remember to always provide at least the following when sending in reports of this nature:

Participants
What happened in detail
Date and time of the incident
Screenshots

Neocron Needs You! - Web Lab - Front End Web Developers
We are currently on the look out for a/some front end web developers to join the ranks of the Neocron Support Team. The responsibilities of these developers would be to assist in the creation of a new portal for the Neocron game and service. As you may be aware the main Neocron website (www.neocron-game.com) has been a place holder for quite some time.

There is a lot of exciting potential from our new portal which will take the website far beyond anything you have seen before for Neocron. We have the man power to create the behind the scenes bells and whistles for these features but require someone with a flair for front end design to bring it all together.

We require someone with proficiency in the following:

A massive love of Neocron
Graphic design skills
Experience in designing for extensible, fluid layouts
Knowledge of HTML 5
Knowledge of CSS3
Knowledge of JavaScript
Knowledge of ASP.NET MVC and of the Orchard CMS is beneficial


As with all positions on the Neocron Support Team and it's supporting laboratory initiatives, all positions are on a voluntary basis with no compensation. However, you do get to be involved in one of the most exciting community driven MMO projects on the web and get to give back to the game we all love, ensuring it takes further leaps and bounds to becoming the game we have all dreamed it would become.

If you're interested please forward a brief run down of your skills and profile, including any portfolio work/links you have available to applications@neocron-game.com

Sincereley
Your Neocron Support Team

http://forum.neocron-game.com/showth...ate-April-2013

[Evranick]

http://forum.neocron-game.com/entry....in-Pepper-Park!

Un retour des AB sur NC .

[kAzama<Off>]

Download en cours tiens !

[Evranick]

Personnellement impossible de retrouver mes log-on depuis que je suis passé sous Windows7 .

[kAzama<Off>]

Bah mail au support. J'avais ressorti des logs vieux de 5 ans comme çà :d

[Evranick]

Faut-il encore qu'ils répondent. 48h ça fait combien d'heures en allemagne?

[Philz]

Citation :

Team Expansion & Application Process

Dear Community,

It has now been more than a year since the voluntary team took over the day to day operation and development of Neocron. Together we have experienced many ups and downs, but nevertheless we have made steady progress in not just stabilizing Neocron, but also improving it. We are working hard with the resources we have to bring you the best Neocron ever.

However, we admit that on occasion progress can appear slow. Some people argue that the progress could be a lot faster if we expand and invite additional people to the team. We most certainly agree with that!

Unfortunately it is not all unicorns and rainbows when that idea is put into action. For the team to function well and progress be made, potential team members need to match a far longer list of requirements than for people may need to join a company. People need to have their heart in the right place. They need to be extremely dedicated towards the project and willing to sacrifice a significant portion of their spare time towards Neocron. They need to be prepared to work autonomously, be prepared to do the grunt work, the boring stuff, the stuff no one wants to do even if they're getting paid.

As developer you often here people telling you: oh I know where that bug stems from just do this and that and everything will be fine. Surprise, surprise, fixing a bug is not as easy as it sounds. Minor bugs might take days or weeks to fix and at a certain point it stops being fun but instead feels like work. People usually do not want to work in their free time, which is very much understandable. Members of the team may start out fixing maybe one or two bugs but lose interest in a matter of days, because everything feels like work and therefore again nothing gets done.

As with many things, looking in from the outside can make you feel like everything could be done so much better. Then when you get to the other side of that fence and a feeling of obligation kicks in, that enthusiasm can be sapped somewhat quickly. When things change from "you could do this" to having to actually get down to it and DO them it can be challenging for some to continue – the phrase easier said than done has caused a number of new recruits to burn out very quickly.

Nothing getting done is another issue. For a team to work flawlessly people need to be reliable. The work of one member or group of the team usually depends on the work of others and vice versa. In case someone decides that he does not want to do the dirty work but instead just the fun stuff, the progress of the whole team will slow down. The 'dirty work' is there and it must be done to ensure we can keep marching on.

Skill sets are also an important factor. Neocron's code base is far beyond that of a simple "Hello World" program, it is old and has suffered over the years as numerous developers have passed through. As such a solid grounding in C++ is essential, it is always easy for those on the internet to declare they are the most skilled programmers and bug-fixers, it happens in every community when a product has issues. However when faced with Lambda-expressions or reflections they may suddenly go silent. Getting individuals with the right skill level is essential, if we need to spend time fixing their code and making it readable before making use of it, progress is slowed even further. In some cases this could result in even more work than starting over and rewriting everything from scratch.

To try to avoid this, we have started more thoroughly training people, but this is a time consuming process. We are more than happy to have members of the team with less developed skill sets, who are eager to learn. However at first to make use of these resources it is the less glamorous work that needs to be done. Teaching people to work autonomously and gather information autonomously is an important point for us. In today's companies people quite often get their projects split up in many parts so that everything is pretty clear already. They just need to fill a few bits and pieces in between. On our end however, the people have to break the projects down into pieces themselves they need to investigate different options, plan, lay out and implement and especially they have to get used to agile software development!

The second to last point when considering an application is the application itself. A short application which lacks concise overviews of an individual's skill set will usually not be considered further. This lack of detail comes across as the application being a brief thought, that perhaps the dedication we need is not there. One should take the whole process seriously from start to end! An application that lets us immediately see where we can use an individual, is just as important as the work they would do as a result.

The last point on the list for us which we have to consider are possible conflicts of interest. People working for other software or even game development companies might be problematic. Why? Because their company might find out about it and might not like it or try to sue, trying to accuse us of stealing their secrets or poach their talent.

So to summarize, recruiting people is not only a time consuming process, but also needs us to look very closely. People need to be trustworthy, reliable and dedicated towards Neocron, not to mention that they need to be skilled and be able to work autonomously. We have already extended the team quite a lot, you do not see or hear much from them as of yet, but trust me, you will!

Part of this expansion are the lab initiatives (for web and art development) we started some time ago, to recruit new people and find fresh blood devoted to Neocron. These labs are a platform for us to begin development of assets external to the game's source code. They also act as a proving ground for those individuals to become a part of the main Neocron Support Team.

We still want to expand. We want more people to help us make Neocron the best it has ever been but as you can see there is a lot involved to ensure we can do that in the best possible way. We have to protect the materials we have been entrusted to develop futher.

If you believe you have the skills required to make Neocron better, please let us know via a formal application.

All applications can be sent to applications@neocron-game.com, be sure to list the skills you have and examples of your work and we WILL get in touch with you. We have responded to every application that has landed in that mailbox. Just remember, there is a LOT of hard work ahead of you if you have the skills we need.

Sincerely,
Your Neocron Support Team

http://forum.neocron-game.com/showth...cation-Process

[Philz]

Citation :

[R#184-T#188] Test Server Patch Notes

Dear community,

here we go again, the next patch in the R#184 releases. Taking a more agile route in terms of feature development. Instead of developing features completely at the drawing board, implementing them and in the end releasing them just to notice that they are s... uboptimal, we will in the future realease new features earlier, while being still on the drawing board. This means that new features we implement will feel incomplete, because they are! We want to gather your feedback as early as possible, to adjust the route new features take as early as possible to be as much fun as possible!

To quote Michael Buffer ladies and gentlemen, let's get ready to rumble! This patch adds a new feature called Faction Warzones!

FACTION WARZONES
​Faction warzones are a new feature which allows whole factions to work as a team, capturing sectors of the gameworld to reap the benefits. However, benefits have not yet been implemented. We are still discussing on how an what kind of benefits should be implemented. For now only ​Dome of York Sector 10 is a Faction Warzone. We limited the number of sectors to one to focus testing. To conquer a sector 4 security layers will have to be hacked. No access to the hacknet is required for now. The members of the owning faction of the sector should be notified in case someone tries to take over their sector.

MISSIONS

Further tweaks have been made to the Twilight Guardian Epic Mission.
Twilight Guardian VERY EASY and EASY CityCom Missions have been adjusted to reflect new mob availability in the Canyon Facility Caves.
Further tweaks have been made to the Reza's Calling Mission bringing the German and French versions up to date.


GAMEWORLD

Further tweaks have been made to the Twilight Guardian Guards placed in the Canyon Sectors of the Wastelands.
Canyon Facility Caves have been renamed to Canyon Caves Lvl 1, 2, 4, 6, 8 and 12 to reflect new mob loadouts.
Mob selection, distribution and density has been modified for the Canyon Facility Caves.
CopBots have been removed from the Pepper Park Subway Station.


MISC

Terror Leapers now drop suitable loot. Rare Parts have the same drop rate as found on Warbots.
All varieties of Cave Crawler are now physically smaller.
Several fixes have been made in the Dialogue of Master Hunters.
Removed the "jumping" when applying passive effects to players. Meaning: no more falling down mountains while being buffed.


Known issues:

The signs distributed over the sector to indicate who currently owns this sectors are a little bit too short, therefore long faction names are cut.
In case you have downloaded T#188 between thursday and today 17.15 CEST, you have to reinstall your testserver client. You can verify whether you downloaded the correct T#188 patch by looking at its size. You can find a fille called cp000188.pat insed the patches subfolder of your testserver client. In case it is around 1.1MB in size you are fine! Sorry for that mess!



As always, in case you have any comments and/or suggestions, head over to the corresponding discussion thread which can be found here

Sincereley,
Your Neocron Support Team

Alduin
Neocron Support Team
N E O C R O N . C O M

http://forum.neocron-game.com/showth...er-Patch-Notes

[Evranick]

Impressionnant.

Je ne suis pas spécialement pour cette zone de combat entre factions vu l'état dans lequel le jeu est et le non-intérêt total sur la faction dans laquelle quelqu'un peut-être mais à voir.

Je vois qu'ils update carrément la version française, c'est le genre de subtilité qui me fait sourire quand on compare à anciennement...

Quelqu'un a testé tous ça ?

[Philz]

Citation :

Development Update - July & August 2013

Hello Runners!

It is time for another Development Update! This update covers our activities over the course of July and August. Going forward you can expect these Development Updates every two months, due to the changes in our Development Strategy we explain below.

Neocron & Agile Development
We want to go a little bit into detail about our general Development Strategy for the future, we hope this means you will have a better understanding of where things are heading.

Going forward, instead of the 'classic' method of releasing larger patches now and again, we want to shift towards a more modern agile development approach. After the release of R#184 we will try to shift to a more rapid release process – trying to release early and release often. In the video game world you may be familiar with this as the "Minecraft Method" of development.

On average patches will become smaller in size and the list of changes per patch will shrink. However you will receive patches more often so over time the same number of changes should occur.

So why do it?

The idea here is to retrieve feedback from the Community as early and often as possible, allowing to you to have your say and help shape the course of Neocron's development. An example of this is our new feature, "Faction Warzones", a feature which we introduced the basis of with the latest patch on Vedeena.

There is of course a downside to this approach, new features may feel incomplete upon initial release to Vedeena and may not give you the full intended experience - However! - Getting your feedback at this early stage, will save us from developing features in the wrong direction. This also offers you the opportunity to make Neocron an even better place, by providing us with constructive feedback and discussion at this conceptual stage.

This more rapid deployment of changes is the reason we're adding more space between formal Development Updates; instead of reading about where we're going, you'll be able to see it for yourself.

Sparta & Balancing Neocron
Such a shift in our Development Strategy will of course have consequences for Sparta, the Neocron Balance Test Server. Instead of supplying you with a large mixed overhaul of everything (think Neocron 2.2) we will start out with a smaller, more concise and defined, set of focused modifications.

This initial set of modifications has been discussed at great length and we're excited to bring you more details on these modifications in the next few weeks.

As you know patching will not be required to adjust and tweak the balance of items on Sparta, instead a more agile system has been implemented allowing us to quickly and easily make changes. When we apply each "batch" of changes to Sparta, players will be given a few days to test the changes. After this brief familiarisation period we will hold a PvP event. There will be at least one PvP event per change "batch" applied to Sparta.

After these PvP events it will be up to you, the Community, to provide us with feedback. We will try to make this easier for you by supplying you with as much detail about the changes as we can. Once we reach an initial "post-2.2 state" we all feel is better than the current one, that balance state will find its way to Titan.

After the release of the initial balancing patch to Titan, the more interesting work on overhauling all classes and play styles will begin. Although, some parts of these class/play-style overhauls might find their way into Neocron via a normal patch, to be tweaked and brought into line later on.

We will release more details about Sparta and the Balance Project over the course of the next few weeks!

Launch of Sparta? Before the end of September!

Retail Patch #184
A considerable number of changes are currently available on Vedeena, the Public Test Server. At the current state most of these changes will come together as Patch R#184 which we hope to release alongside Sparta before the end of the month.

We'd like to take this opportunity to encourage our Community to get on Vedeena and help us ensure the release of R#184 will be as smooth as possible. Every test report and piece of feedback is graciously received. Providing feedback on each patch that lands on Vedeena, is the greatest way you can help move Neocron forward. We often see players asking how they can help us – this is how!

Soul Light System & Improved 'Bad Guy' Experience
Our work on the soul light system, which we started months ago, is heading towards a big step forward. The Outzone Jail (OZ8) will soon become the new 'unsafe heaven' for lawless characters and those who enjoy living amongst the underground of Neocron's society.

As a place to call their own, the Jailhouse will offer lawless runners several things; Missions to lose further Soul Light by working for Neocron's lawless factions, and missions to regain Soul Light by helping the NCPD as an undercover agent, while still being able to relax with their fellow criminals.

This is not all though, we will have more information on the Jailhouse Revamp Soon™...

CityCom Missions, Newbie Dungeons and Mob Variety
With the release of R#184 you will notice two things with regards to CityCom Missions. First of all Twilight Guardian have a new set of VERY EASY and EASY missions to enable a better low level experience in the faction's new Canyon Facility home. Secondly, the CityCom will serve up 100% more missions every time you perform a mission download. Yes, 6 missions to choose from instead of 3!

Changes to the Twilight Guardian missions are the first part of a much wider CityCom Mission and Newbie Dungeon overhaul. At the moment most factions have a large number of missions which players are simply unable to finish. In most cases this is due to the density and availability of mission mobs being incredibly poor or that they simply do not exist in the gameworld.

To address this we intend to review the "Mob Loadouts" of levelling areas, proving a wider variety of mobs but also ensuring they exist in mission suitable quantities and locations. At the same time we will be adjusting the missions available for each faction. Each faction will receive missions suitable to the locale in which those factions start and these new missions will be mapped to locally available mobs as per the Mob Loadout review.

At the moment you'll find most low level characters in the "Aggie Sewers", with these changes we hope to make it more appealing to try new levelling paths.

Basically (deep breath!), you'll have a wider variety of stuff to kill, a wider variety of dungeons in which to kill it and a higher chance of easily finding a mission to kill that stuff. Some mobs will remain rare of course and there's a chance you'll still get missions to kill those mobs, but if that is the case we'll be sure to make it worthwhile.

This is just the start of improvements to CityCom Missions. We'll tell you the next chapter once we begin to deliver the above.

Neocron's New Art Department
As we hope you're aware, not everyone in the world is a programmer. This means there are many artists in the community, artists we asked to join us a while ago, who have wanted to improve Neocron in a visual way.

Today, we're pleased to tease you that you will soon get to see some of the fruits of our Art Department's labours. Stay tuned for more news on this in the future.

In Conclusion…
We hope the above has given you an insight to what is currently going on behind the scenes, what is coming in the future and the direction in which we are heading.

All the very best,
Your Neocron Support Team

http://forum.neocron-game.com/showth...mp-August-2013

[kAzama<Off>]

En passant sa y est on a un nouveau patch sur le serveur... nouveau patch... nouveau...NOUVEAU PATCH !!§!!!!

http://forum.neocron-game.com/showth...84-Patch-Notes

Et en plus c'est double XP !

[Philz]

Citation :

Development Update – December 2013

Dear Community,

We’d like to take the opportunity to provide you with our next Development Update just in time for the Holidays! The below should give you a good indication of our activities over the last few months and into the future.

Sparta & Balance Project
Some time has passed since the last deployment to our Balance Test Server, Sparta. While to the outside world this could indicate a lack of progress, please rest assured that this is not the case.

Since the last deployment a lot of work has gone on in the background to address a number of issues restricting our visible progress. As you will recall some of the changes implemented in our initial deployments had unintended side-effects. As we continue to crunch numbers and adjust formulas in this fashion we’re also making significant progress in our Balance toolset.

If you recall the Evolution 2.2 balancing effort, the previous developers spent a lot of time unravelling some of Neocron’s older systems to streamline and improve the change process. With our new toolset we’re aiming to take this much further so we’re able to make more changes more quickly and easily. The idea being that in future we’re able to easily manipulate the state of play as and when new items are added or we fine tune the play style of a class or profession.

All of those things will rest on the outcome of the remainder of the Balance Project, which will continue in the New Year.

Visual & Graphical Upgrades
As with all of our work, we have learned a great deal about Neocron’s graphics engine since the beginning of our tenure. So we could familiarise ourselves with the quirks and particularity of Neocron’s graphic development pipeline, our first project was the complete recreation of a huge amount of decals, hologram and logo textures in high definition. We also took the opportunity to add further new textures to increase Neocron’s visual variety. This initial project is our first step to a more up-to-date look for the Neocron world.

The resolution of these new textures is significantly higher and contain far more detail when viewed from up close. We have also implemented some technical changes in terms of formats and features, while the new textures will make it in game first, these other new adjustments will be utilised later™. Once these HD textures make it in game, you may still experience some noisy or blurry details at a closer view, as a result of current texture compression.

As we revealed last time, we now have an Art Team who will try to enhance Neocron visually with each future patch. However as you already know Neocron's codebase is rather old, improving the visuals further is a huge task and brings a lot of challenges we have to be deal with. Those challenges are something we’re sure to overcome and we already have a lot more than high-res faction logos in the pipeline. Once we can reveal more about those plans we are sure you will be very excited.

Storyline & Events: Continuing Powder Keg
At the start of this year we announced a new chapter in Neocron’s storyline which we dubbed Powder Keg, this came to a significant cliff hanger earlier this year. For a number of reasons this has not progressed beyond this point as we had intended. Unfortunately for much of the latter half of the year our Chief Carebear, Trivaldi, was unable to contribute to the project. The personal circumstances around this matter are now hopefully resolved.

The storyline will continue beyond the current state. Neocron will see the instatement of its next President in the future but right now we simply want to acknowledge the slow progress and reassure that there are plans which will come in time. As this storyline progresses there will be further updates to the game world which will reflect the changing landscape of the story.

There are plans for the future of Neocron’s storyline which span well beyond the current conflicts and interests and we hope to move on those plans in the New Year.

General Content Improvement
We have done a lot of learning this year. Our tool set is now much improved over what we received when our tenure of the Neocron Service began in the late spring of 2012. All of this is set to allow us to improve a lot of Neocron’s content offering in the year to come. With improved tools we are now able to create more detailed environments for you to enjoy and we hope you will appreciate these more granular details as changes are introduced.

Last time around we mentioned improvements to CityCom Missions and Newbie Dungeons (along with mob variety) as experimented with in the revamped Canyon Facility. From the feedback we have received it appears the new experiences in this location have been well favoured by the community. This feedback is very reassuring and allows us to confidently begin the work required to expand those changes across the game world.

There is still a lot to do when it comes to content and we hope with the soon to be released Jailhouse revamp, coupled with our mission writing competition, to continue our journey to a more content filled Neocron.

Server Status & Infrastructure
While we have been unfortunate to fall victim to hardware issues this year, we feel we have made great progress in stability of the Neocron Server Application. Just recently we have implemented changes to re-enable and update Neocron’s grid architecture previously used during Neocron 1. This means we are now able to load balance the game world across more than one server, both increasing performance and adding internal failover systems.

While we are still hunting for the root cause of the ‘Bad World Data’ issue, the changes we have made now mean players can continue to use effected sectors as another server takes over, keeping the sector online. It is still possible that we will need to step in to restart the effected sectors but this new redundancy coupled with scheduled maintenance should reduce the impact to you, the player.

Further optimisations to the infrastructure and our back end services have also reduced the amount of lag experienced in game. These changes should also reduce the number of kick-to-login or bad world data events you may have experienced in the past.

Great progress has also been made in the automation of our test systems, allowing us to more easily make larger changes and perform additional Quality Assurance prior to player testing. This particular improvement should lend itself well to our more iterative approach when bringing changes to the community faster and more frequently.

We have plans to further improve our infrastructure in the first half of next year which will add additional protection and further improve stability. Specifically we will be investing in further hardware to significantly reduce, if not remove, the downtime caused by the kind of hardware failures we have experienced in 2013.

Finally for those that missed it, thanks to community feedback we moved our daily reboot to later in the morning (0830 UTC), in order to reduce it's affect on our none European player base.

All the best,
Your Neocron Support Team

http://forum.neocron-game.com/showth...-December-2013

[Philz]

Citation :

Mission Contest Winners

Before Christmas we opened up a competition allowing us to tap into the potential out there in our Community. We've always been a firm believer that the Neocron Community has some amazing talent - this contest proved us absolutely right!

Over the last few weeks since the contest closed, all entries have been under review by the Neocron Support Team and today we're ready to announce our winners. Now the winners have been selected, the work begins to implement the winning missions into Neocron.

In total we have selected four missions which were well written, fit fantastically into Neocron's atmosphere and that we believe will be fun for players to complete. You can look forward to these new mission being introduced in a future patch.

Each of our winners will receive their chosen trophy reward soon and their names will go up in lights in the relevant patch notes. Now it's time to announce our winners!

A huge well done and thank you (in alphabetical order) to:

Dribble Joy
Hell-demon
jj dynomite
LeoPump

We hope to be able to run more similar contests in the future. For now join us on the forum to help us congratulate our talented community writers.

http://www.neocron-game.com/announce...ontest-winners
http://forum.neocron-game.com/showth...ontest-Winners

[Evranick]

Toujours présent ce Dribble .

[Philz]

Citation :

New Feature! - Outpost Abandonment
Created on 12.06.2014 14:34:36 by Zoltan

We're pleased to present to you, the first version of our new 'in-progress' feature called "Outpost Abandonment".

Key Features:

Abandoned Outposts (defined as: no owner change for 7 days) will eventually be attacked by various mutants
Mutants will take over ownership of the attacked outpost
Fight back the mutants for glory, honour and last but not least the possibility to regain the ownership

Please keep in mind that this is only the first version and we will continuously improve this feature. Additionally we will add more features to improve your outer world Neocron experience.

We're looking forward to your feedback on the Neocron Forum.

Have fun!

http://www.neocron-game.com/announce...st-abandonment
http://forum.neocron-game.com/showth...ment&p=2227095

[Evranick]

Ca date du 4 août dernier, mais pour ceux qui ne lancent pas leur patcher ça peut toujours vous donner une idée.

Citation :

Hello Runners!

It's been a while since we made an official status update and recap, so we thought we give you a little something-something for the summer hole.

Lets start with the beginning of the year. In December 2014 we pushed hard to release you the first of the community created runs. For us this meant a lot of crunch since this required an upgrade of ye ol' mission system. To put it simple, there was only a limited amount of unique runs possible to be supported by the game. Those are the type of runs that can only be complete once per character, like Epic missions or the Tiki run. So, in order to implement the community written runs we began writing a new mission system and the "NCPD has an Eye on you!" run by Hell Deamon was our first test run for that new mission system.

Unfortunately, after that crunch we hit a wall with our development efforts in January, as some of you might have noticed with the account expiration issues. To clear up the situation about that: currently all the rights of the intellectual property and the brand of Neocron belong to Kirk Lenke, whom we have a gentlemens agreement with about Neocron.
This agreement allows us to operate the game and develop it further, yet, what happens with the brand beyond that is not our call.
So in case you where wondering why we don't go on Steam or anything: Kirk has the say in that matter, not us.

Part of our development process are also regular talks to coordinate our efforts between Kirk and Zoltan. We always only receive permission to operate Neocron for a set amount of time before the agreement gets a renewal. This also includes the game accounts. Approaching January there was a radio silence for some time before whenever we tried to contact Kirk. This silence was what has lead to the expiration issue at the beginning of the year, without any word from the IP holder we where simply bound to let the accounts expire as we had to assume that there was no renewal of the agreement.
As you can see, we decided to renew the game accounts on our own accord, indefinitely for now.

So, the year started with a big question mark and the development work ceased for a while as we where waiting for Kirk to come back at us with news. When that didn't happen we decided to continue on our own from that point on with the development. However that does NOT change the fact that Kirk still holds all the rights over Neocron and it's his decision to pull the plug if he wishes so.


But obviously more happened since march, aside from team members finding new jobs and other real life changes, aside of constant DDOS spam from zombie bot nets - there where also improvements to the game!

HA! You didn't think so, did ya?

A lot of that happened behind the scenes, in the code. Thats why you might not feel or see those changes but they are there. First of all a lot of work happened to the game mechanics concerning weapons and the balancing project. Unfortunately, due to a lot of redundant code and other troubles, the first attempt of balancing failed our expectations and calculations - mainly due to modifiers and variables implemented by the previous coding team, *cough* KK *cough*, at unforeseen places.
Speaking of the balancing, we finally got rid of the commas for the implants!

With Zoltan digging through the engine's entrails anyway to bring the games code up to speed since 2013 now, we could clear up those roadblocks on our path to the next round on the balancing carousel. Really, all those numbers can make your head spin...
Alongside came further improvements for our tool set, so we don't have to edit all definitions and variables with notepad anymore. Wohoo!
Aside of that there have also been improvements on other places, thanks again to Zoltan's reworking of convoluted code strings into something less messy.

Tucked away under all those band aid fixes from the days of yore where quite surprising features actually. For example, did you know Neocrons engine had the ability to load different textures depending on its language settings all the time? That means we can load different decals for things like adverts or directional signs, and provide you with translated versions. We only recently found that feature so this is only coming to Titan at some point in the future though.

Other byproducts of the ongoing work in the background are things the new health bar for Mobs introduced in R# 189 [T# 199]. Netcode has also been improved, allowing for a smoother movement. More changes include the tracking of kill stats for players, we are working on making those available for you. How does a ladder-board for NC sound?

With the recent patch on Vedeena, a bunch of new textures came along too, so keep your eyes peeled. Connected to the work happening around the weapon mechanics are also new visual effects for Fire and Poison by the way, just in case you wondered where they come from.


If you have been following the patch notes for Vedeena you know that a few more things happened, but the question is, when will this ship to Titan?

Currently, we are working a few more things to deploy for Vedeena. There is still a lot more to before we can wrap all things up in one package. The refactoring and rework of the weapon mechanics is still not completed. Drones and PSI modules have their very own calculation construct, so they are currently not properly affected by the balancing tools. Hence we first have to bring them on parity with the rest of the weapons, code wise, before we can go anywhere with the next balancing stages.
We hope we can get this done until after August, seeing as player numbers usually drop during summer we hope we will be ready with a set of new features when people come back in autumn.


So long,

Your Neocron Support Team