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I stepped into the bar, shaking the rain from my cloak. The moon shone through
the window, exposing me still to the cold, eerie autumn night.
Weather has now come to the game, something long overdue. Instead of rooms
having fixed descriptions of the sun reflecting off of the fountain, I think
you are all owed something more involved. Various weather patterns will travel
through the regions of the game, and each section of the world will have its
own system.
You will notice it, when it starts to snow, or when you are stepping out into
the rain. Lightning may strike the plains of Solamnia and start a spark. The
day and night will interact with the weather as well, providing an immersive
experience everywhere you go.
You will also be able to look at the weather in the top right corner, along
with the time and day.
The Steam client changes are available right now via the new Beta channel on
the store. You can switch over in Steam to see the new look and feel. This
will roll out to the web and main channel in a few days, once I have vetted it
more thoroughly in more different kinds of conditions.
The Steam app can be downloaded at:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/5105580/Genesis_Remastered/
Please feel free to contact me with any feedback. Any reviews on the Steam
store page are also appreciated.
Z
I have added one last big feature before we go live with Steam tomorrow.
Every domain in the realms now has a sun/moon/calendar system. A few share
clocks and calendars - Sparkle, Calia and Terel are together, since that seemed
like the most natural fit.
You can see details of the current time in your current domain, on the right
side of the menu bar. It will show you the position of the sun and moons (or
at least the moons that show themselves to you), as well as their phases. The
date, and season are also visible. Syb'arus, being deep underground, shows
what you can expect for a place of the Idrys.
You will notice the sun and moons rising and falling throughout the day, and
also when the seasons change where you are. You can use the 'time' command
globally, as well as examining them to get more detail.
As you travel across realm boundaries, the clock will update to show you the
details of where you are. This includes boats, as well as flying from place to
place. Note that this is a slight shift from before, which was inconsistent
based on the boat you rode.
For those that may walk the night and curse the Daystar, please note that
Sparkle now runs a proper set of hours, and night-time now properly exists in
those places. Calia and Terel used to use the Krynn clock for sunlight,
strangely enough. Raumdor still provides its darkness via cloud cover, but the
cycles of the sun will still affect your strength like it would in any other
realm.
With a proper contingent of moons in game now, this also opens up the
possibility of guilds or abilities that are lunar-based.
It took quite a number of changes to make this happen (I had to update 8000
files), but I think it is well worth it. This enables things like seasonal
soundtracks (like different day/night sounds for forests).
I hope everyone enjoys this update, and I look forward to seeing how the new
players react with the big Steam launch.
Z
I am proud to officially announce the upcoming launch of Genesis Remastered on
Steam.
Here is the link to the game:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/5105580/Genesis_Remastered/
For those that have the language filter on, you can find it at
store.steampowered.com/app/5105580/Genesis_Remastered/
This will provide you all of the features of the web client, as well as some
new extra bonuses:
Achievements in game are transferred to your Steam achievements list
Screen shots, video recording, friends list
Steam Workshop for sharing aliases, triggers, custom data
This includes custom tags for each of the occ/layman/craft guilds
Full screen mode (with or without your taskbar)
Log downloads go into a Genesis Remastered folder in your Documents
Better control of idle connections (browsers can drop them)
The final Steam approvals are complete, and I am vetting the launch build now.
Licensing checks, security checks, safety checks, and many other pieces were
reviewed by them in getting this done. I am feeling quite good about the
process, and don't see any roadblocks remaining.
I will be aiming for a Saturday launch, some time after Armageddon. I am
trying to finish up one last big secret launch feature to include in that, if I
can.
I want to give special thanks to the beta testers, who helped catch some minor
issues and have made me more confident that the launch will be a success.
Once the game is launched, I will be shifting more heavily to advertising and
outreach in order to scale up the user base. I feel that this will be the best
platform to invite many more people into the game.
Very exciting news!
Z
I have made a change to how much combat experience is given, specifically when
the player is larger than their foe.
At some point, a few decades ago, the wizards were unhappy with the growth of
players that were grinding in areas with small NPCs. Some players grew large
on mass-killing rats and other messengers, for example. In order to prevent
this from being a growth mechanic, the formulas for experience were changed to
heavily penalize these cases.
This meant that the bigger players were effectively forced into much more
limited areas as to where they could grind. For today's game, only about 2.5%
of all game content is myth-sized, leaving 97.5% of the game with this penalty.
The argument that killing rats to grow being bad is reasonable, but we have two
other systems in place that already penalize growth - the brute system, and the
large exponent that is applied when converting between experience and actual
stats. Too much of the game (such as the recently revamped war system) is not
visited due to the depth of this penalty.
Going forwards, this penalty has been dramatically reduced. Smaller NPCs still
earn less, but your size will play less of a role in modifying that. This will
take the effective penalty from roughly an aggregate 30%, down to an aggregate
of about 10%. This should make areas like the war plains of Krynn more
profitable for experience, leaving less of a gap relative to the half-dozen
myth-sized NPC areas in the game.
Hopefully this will make more of the game, more enjoyable for everyone.
Z
It is time for another update. The new achievements system is now live. This
finally adds a long-missing feature from the game.
You can see your achievements through the "achievements" / "achieve" command.
There are a half dozen different categories, and I am starting off with 65
different goals to accomplish throughout the game. The web client has a new
'achievements' tab next to the Chat tab (you can also disable it through
settings if you don't want to see it).
I will be adding more achievements as we go. Note that there will also be
HIDDEN achievements, that will show in the counters on the achievements summary
page, but you cannot see the details. If you unlock those, they will show up.
Please note that some achievements will not be fully available until post
Armageddon. I recommend waiting until after that before trying to accomplish
them.
With this in place, the two major pieces of work that I needed to complete for
the other project are now live. I am awaiting some approvals, and hopefully
should have some exciting news about that in the next week or so.
Z
In order to provide for a safer community, I have rolled out a set of updates.
These are designed to help protect players from unwanted content and
experiences.
"Options intimate" has been updated. It is now gated behind an adult
verification. In addition, only other players that are in your friend list can
actually perform any of these emotes on you.
There is a new "Options language". Any communication will be filtered for
profanity. If you want to disable the filter, you can use "options language
off". This is also gated behind adult verification.
There are two new commands that have been added, "mute" and "report".
Mute allows you to block any communication from another player. You can mute
them by name (online or offline), or description (if they are in your room).
They will not be able to target you for any emotes/communication, and their
mail/messengers will be blocked. They will not be able to attack you, or steal
from you. There is one caveat on this last part - if you have attacked
them/stolem from them in the last 30 days, they can continue to attack/steal
from you. Attacking guild NPCs will also limit your attack/theft protection
(this will be added shortly, with a warning of its impact on your attack
protection).
"Report" allows you to make a harassment report on another player. It will
automatically include any communication/emotes/messages/mail that the player
has sent to you for the past hour, and will track any messages for the next
hour as well.
These tools should help protect players, in particular anyone that is under the
age of 18. It has been one of my core stated goals that this game must be a
safe space, and I hope that these will help make that even more of a reality.
Z
It is time for another update!
There has been a lot of work going on, much of it under the hood, some of it
already announced here. The pace feels like it is quickening, as we run
through summer.
I have started to actively work on season 1. The storyline is largely
developed, and I expect to have a few dozen sub-events which each tie into a
larger season-event. Your goal will be to seek out the these events, put
together the pieces, and figure out what ties it all together. My goal will be
to make sure the puzzles are tricky, unique, and leave you scratching your head
as you work to reach the finish line.
Work continues on the client, with some new major features. You can now add
keybindings - press F1 to kick off a command or script, for example. I just
added sound support as well - this means you can easily set up javascript
commands to easily play audio files. It comes with some presets, which you can
also override as you like. Oh, is that a quest_completed audio preset?
Curious. Volume controls have also been added, and both the music and sound
systems should play well together.
I have also added some simplified triggers so you don't have to write as much
javascript code. This should help for some of the more basic kinds of triggers
many people write. You can also choose your font, from a half-dozen different
options, in the spirit of configuration. I added the ping/connection time
tracker and full-screen mode, and some quick-click buttons to make some actions
a little easier.
At this point, my goals for the web client have changed. It is no longer about
"is it better than the original", but rather "how does it compare to the more
advanced MUD web clients available on the Internet? How does it compare to
Mudlet?". This is a major paradigm shift. This may have some people asking
themselves "why?". I think you know why. I look forward to announcing.
I continue to actively develop the website, and you'll find the Player Guide is
more fleshed out. I hope to fill out some of the few remaining pages. I am
also dotting the I's and crossing the T's on some of the gnitty gritty that a
project like this merits.
I have made big strides on a new craftsman guild, which will launch (and you
will need to discover) as part of season 1. Something else to look forward to.
I continue to work on filling out the remaining missing maps as well.
Let's see what we can get launched in August. Full Steam ahead.
Z
I have made an update to how haste bonuses affects swing speed.
For decades, haste bonuses would reduce your swing speed at a fixed rate - so
going from 5 second swings to 4 second swings would require just as much haste
as going from 3 second swings to 2 second swings. This meant that haste would
give more and more bang for your buck, the higher it got. This was typically
capped, but occasionally bugs would show up - at one point the Shadow Union's
fling would instantly reset, with high levels of haste, for example.
The vampire guild of the early 2000s provided a haste boost. When combined
with the runed falchion (which provided double the vampire benefit), players
could have a consistent 2 second swing time, or 2.5x as many attacks and
specials as a player with no haste. The guild code can be see in the open
source repository at /d/Emerald/common/guild/vamp/ for those that wish to see
these details. Other equipment, such as the serrated obsidian halberd, gave
higher levels of haste, enabling players to reach these levels.
In an attempt to nerf these bonuses, the AOB team at the time decided to
significantly reduce how much haste any equipment would give. They also added
logic to add up each individual item's contribution to haste, in an attempt to
reduce its usefulness. They left the underlying scaling formula in place,
which was the core issue. In order to neuter the value of haste, they both
halved the strength of the strongest haste items, and also halved the strength
of all haste boosts. The exponential swing speed of up to 2.5x remained in
place.
This is unfortunately an example of what happens when a wizard in charge cares
more about nerfing things that they don't like, than figuring out what is
actually broken and fixing it. It was that same person that added the 60
second delay between herbs, taking them from being much too powerful in large
quantities, to being largely worthless.
The net result, up until now, meant that small haste boosts underperform their
expected combat aid. It also means that two small haste boosts would give you
less improvement than a single boost of double-size. It meant the weakest
haste imbuement has been significantly worse than the strongest haste
imbuement.
It did not need to be that way. At the time, the admin in question was highly
focused on nerfing the vampire guild, instead of fixing a formula that scaled
poorly. He was on record at the time of explicitly saying that this was his
goal. It is exactly that kind of motivated reasoning that led me to create
this game.
Going forwards, the overall haste formula has been updated. A 10% combat aid
boost will scale your hit rate by 10%, and so forth. Many small haste sources
will no longer be penalized. Most haste sources will give you a faster swing
speed from before. NPCs that are hasted may also hit faster (though some of
these were already at a cap).
With this now properly scaling, I can reevaluate whether some of these
double-nerfs (halving of their raw haste values, and the halving of what haste
provides) and potentially increase haste boosts on some items again. I will
put up a separate post regarding that if I do. For now, you should be able to
enjoy your haste items a little more.
Z
It is time for a major update. The Krynn commodity system has been greatly
expanded. This includes a series of changes.
For those that aren't familiar, Theros Ironfeld in Solace constructs masterwork
equipment from various materials, and he is also paid with steel coins and
gold. He also needs the materials, which can be sold to him. Some of these
materials were various metal bars, which also had to be processed from raw ores
by a separate seller in another area. This equipment has special gem slots,
where various gems that are dropped from the Krynn warfare system could be
inserted into them, giving them additional enhancements. There is also an
underlying commodity system, where buying and selling prices are dictated by
how much ore/bar inventory is on hand. There were a limited number of places
where the ores could be mined.
Going forwards, the custom armor and weapon makers will also be working on that
system. Bubba in Gelan, Calcamil in Minas Tirith (and his counterpart in Minas
Morgul), and Phinia in Avenir will construct their equipment from those same
materials. They will each need to be brought the appropriate bars (or raw
ores) in order to make these items. The two top tiered armors made by Calcamil
will have a random chance of being imbued, as will all of Theros' masterwork
equipment. Phinia will require a sybarun coin in addition to her current
price, but her customized gear will also have a chance of being imbued.
The Smiths guild has been updated to use these same iron bars for forging.
These will continue to be sold by Bores and the few others, but are no longer
be sold by them in unlimited amounts. Most blacksmiths throughout the realms
will buy the raw ores, and convert them into bars that can be purchased back
from them for use in purchasing custom equipment. As I mentioned, buying and
selling prices are affected by inventory, so you may find better deals from
different locations. All bars and ores will recover in your inventory as well.
Coal pieces can also be mined, and they can double as light sources. These
should work like the coal in Avenir, and are also ingredients for the custom
equipment.
There were only a few dozen specific locations where one could mine these ores
previously. Going forwards, there are over 1000 rooms that can be mined for
ores. Each region has its own mix of available materials, as expected. These
will provide a whole new system to make money outside of the herbing and
looting systems that most people have relied on for years. Given the
possibility of using these materials to craft high quality, potentially imbued
equipment, I anticipate that there will be a lot of action in the auctions for
these as the player base grows.
In addition to these ores, there is a chance to find uncut gems in the mines as
well. These gems can be brought to the various jewelers throughout the realms,
and for a fee they will be cut and polished into the typical gems found
throughout the game.
You will need to find mining gear to do the mining. The proper gear will wear
down very slowly, while a random dagger or sword will wear down quickly.
These changes will roll out in full at Armageddon, along with the previous herb
changes.
Enjoy!
Z
I have made a few more fixes as well.
Multiple people can simultaneously search in the room (such as searching for
herbs). One person searching will not break the other.
When magicals items are broken, or destroyed, the odds of them being spawned
will increase to account for the lost item. This more closely matches the
original behavior of how uniques were handled. Note that throwing an item
into the sea may cause it to fall to the bottom, not explicitly destroy it, so
be careful in how you attempt to dispose of these things.
These should be two important quality-of-life fixes. Both will go into effect
after Armageddon as well.
Z
I have made some updates to the herbing system, to make it a little more
friendly to guilds that have very high herbalism skill. Previously, only a
maximum of 3 herbs could be found per room, regardless of size and herbalism
skill. This reduced the value of having high mastery levels of herbing. There
are a few herbs that the highest skills are required to search for by name, but
that is not of much value.
Going forwards, there will be a chance of finding more than 3 herbs per room,
and those with the highest skills will have the best odds of finding more. In
addition, the gardeners guild (both craft and layman) will receive a bonus,
giving them better odds to find 3 or more herbs of the hardest to find types.
This boost will depend on their notebook quality, as well as their guild stat,
so those that garden a long time will have the best opportunities to find the
rarest of herbs.
This change has been rolled out, but most rooms will not be affected until
Armageddon. The Gardener boost is now in effect.
Z
It was the best of Bree, it was the worst of Bree..Oh wait, there are two of
those too?
Much of the work this month has been around cleaning up maps and code, and
trying to get better map coverage throughout the game. You can see maps for
every single ship now, and I am starting to add maps for regions that still do
not have them in the original. My end goal is full map coverage, along with
music, and in the longer term graphical maps.
During the Bree cleanup (oh, hello Hin guild code!), I spotted a major feature
missing from the mudlib. You know those ambient messages you see, birds
chittering, orcs nearby? Every single domain had to build their own
infrastructure for that. But now that I have more effective tooling, I can add
the feature globally, and move every domain over to it. Then I can start to
assess which domains have the least flavor, which areas and rooms, and then
figure out how to add more character to them. This is 30+ years of old code,
and quality standards shifted a lot over the decades (while leaving many areas
simply untouched). Its not showy like adding a new area, so it got ignored.
This one new code feature affected nearly 2000 files. This kind of change was
effectively impossible in the old game. And it rolls out at Armageddon. I have
run tests to verify that it all loads well, and I believe it should go out
smoothly. And each project like this makes it a little easier to attempt the
next big project.
On the web client side, there have been two major releases. First, there is
battle music (can be toggled on/off in settings). This is directly tied to
when you're in combat, and the music ends when your adrenaline fades.
Different regions have different sets of soundtracks, and I will be adding boss
battle music for some of the more memorable fights over time as well. Not all
areas have battle music yet, but I will work on full coverage shortly.
The other big web client feature is the dual-split window. This should help
you go through scrollback while still keeping tabs on what's going on
immediately around you. This can also be toggled on/off if you don't like it.
I am also trying to track down any other lingering bugs in the UI since moving
over to the unlimited-scroll window - if you see something weird, let me know.
My next big focus (beyond all the map work) is going to be on the Season
launch. I am starting to write up the specs and details, and what it may all
entail. I am also considering tying the launch of a new craftsman guild to the
community successfully completing the main quest line. I am also getting to
the point where I need to start thinking about how the game is going to evolve
in terms of new content going forwards. This may end up being a hard fork away
from the original, but I do not want to make major changes for the sake of
major change. I would love to hear from all of you about what you'd like to
see happen here.
I continue to enjoy working on this project, and hope that I am putting enough
focus on high-visibility changes that make the gaming experience better. I
recognize that growing the size of the community is going to need some
significant effort, and am building out the website documents, as well as
setting up social media accounts so I can start engaging with a larger
audience. This will include other players of the original, so there may be
some fireworks in the upcoming months.
Z
.-~-. ...-----~~~~~~~--------.........--------~~~~~~~----... .-~-.
| | | ___ ___ _ _ ___ ___ ___ ___ | | |
| `--' / __| __| \| | __/ __|_ _/ __| `--' |
| | | | (_ | _|| .` | _|\__ \| |\__ \ R E M A S T E R E D | | |
| | | \___|___|_|\_|___|___/___|___/ | | |
| | | | | |
|.-~-.| |...-----~~~~~~~--------.........-------~~~~~~~----...| |.-~-.|
|` '.__.` '.__. |
| |
| Ironstones |
| |
| |
| Ironstone imbues will now provide proper dulling and breaking |
| protections to armours and weapons. |
| |
| The different tiers of stones will provide varying |
| levels of protection, providing nondull at intense |
| imbuement. In addition, weapons will now notify |
| their wielder as they dull, like armours. |
| |
| The effects of this change will take place at |
| Armageddon. |
| |
| Thanks to those involved in helping with this improvement. |
| |
| Enjoy! |
| |
| |
|_______________________________________________________________________|
May has come and gone! It has been a whirlwind of activity upstairs, though it
may not always seem like it. For those that aren't constantly active, I want
to catch some of the things that have been going on.
Content updates
I have started taking on limited requests for guild improvements. Drow can now
summon spiders, and the dragonarmies have their intimidate ability restored.
Quality of life remains the focus, so if there are things that improve your
gameplay, please reach out.
All the game-wide messengers have all been updated, they now play well with the
chat window, and the there should be less difference in behavior between
various messengers now. If you hit one that acts up, let me know so I can take
a look.
The launch of the ogre event is a sign that I am starting to shift from fixing
issues and cleaning up, to adding new things. I'll make announcements as
content is added, and I do have some very fun plans for the launch of Season 1.
I've got an active project to fill in the gap the missing maps throughout the
game, with a specific focus on the ships. My goal is to get much closer to
100% coverage on the ascii maps. I am working on better tooling for the
graphical maps, so those are still delayed a bit.
I have much better tooling in place for the music, however. This coming
Armageddon should see about 80% coverage of all mapped areas. This is up from
about 20% this prior Armageddon. I added about a dozen new themes, and am also
exhancing places with room-specific sounds (like waterfalls). There will
continue to be some big improvements in this space.
Gondor should start announce its night/day cycles again next Armageddon too -
this was something long-broken. Its amazing just how much of the old code had
been broken for years/decades.
Web client updates
The web client has actually been much of my focus, even with all these other
updates. I have cleaned up the interface on aliases/triggers, make viewing
your custom damage more manageable, and upgraded the export package tools so
you can bundle even more up. The settings window now lets you control a whole
lot more. You can set up your client to auto-download your logs when you
disconnect, or when you close your window. Control-S also lets you save at any
time, like before. And scrollback is largely unlimited now, with a new search
bar. Oh, and aliases/triggers has a search bar now too. The APIs are
published onto the website, and I have been adding more features so your
scripts can be even more powerful.
I have also launched a separate export tool, for those that need to import
their scripts (including maps) from other places. You can see the instructions
here:
https://zizuph.github.io/genutils/
If you have friends that would like to visit, but dread starting from scratch,
I am doing everything I can to lower the entry barriers.
Finally, a word about Seasons.
Much of the game can be a grind, and the end-game experience is something very
front-of-mind for me. My long term goal is to have major episodes that cross
over all of the domains. Think of events on steroids. I have the basic
storylines worked out, and am putting the pieces in place that I need to make a
major storyline happen. There will be goals to achieve, special rewards, and a
bigger plot to try to solve. As I get closer to launch, I'll try to share
more.
Its quite a bit going on! Changes here have just begun.
Z
We have been launched a few months now, and it is time for an event!
On this Sunday, the event will begin. Head to the Village Green, and check out
the work of the Army of Darkness. They have contributed a massive gift in
their long-standing goals to collect more skulls for the Harvest. Come see
their handiwork, and help them out with their quest.
Anyone who collects 100 skulls or more will be given the chance to dig into
their big pile of skulls for buried treasure. There will be even more chances
for 1000 and 10k skull collections. In addition the top three collectors for
the event will get more changes to find more loot.
The event will run through July 15, since the ogres assured me that they need a
significant number of skulls. Any skulls found will also count towards your
total skull count if you do choose to become an ogre in the future.
Enjoy!
Z