Post#1 » 20 Apr, 2017 8:13 am

Fixed Exploit with Medic! Quest, can now only be finished once. (This will only be for NPC’s that spawn after the fix)

Visual is normally one of the easiest; locations of items, regions and scenery.

Anything that uses the database is also relatively easy.

Exploits - We want to try and fix as soon as we can.

Anything that makes the game unplayable for some reason - We want to fix as soon as we can.

Player housing regions being all broken and outside of the world are actually a high priority, but you will see more of them fixes in the future after patches start going.

Something just visual will usually be fixed on dev and take its time going down the line.

We hope you had a good Easter, this post was slightly delayed due to it, sorry! It’s also extremely technical, so it won’t be for everyone. If you are mainly looking for a team update skip to the end.I want to start out by talking about hot-fixes, how they work currently and what will change in the future for The Repopulation.A few hot-fixes have actually been done, the one which you guys will notice is this:This was a repeatable quest found that would take a single bandage and reward 150 credits and 2 items which were way over the value of a bandage. It was a simple fix, and was done to make sure the hot-fix procedures and methods work in the back-end.Other hot-fixes made are things like: Logging, Bug Reporting, and Mission Feedback all being Online again. Logging has actually been possible for a while, however the information wasn't in the easiest to read format and was also using 3rd party tools which we are not using. We are now able to read the information from logging easier, and will be improving the process further in future patches.Now, for Hot-fixes in general... At this point in Alpha it's not an absolutely overwhelming concern to get fixes out asap, (... for the most part), but we are working on getting a lot of the methods and the workflow ironed out for later in development. We know there are some additional issues similar to the one above and repeating quests, and some are fixed in the Staging build. As development moves forward you will see more hot-fixes being done.A few may be wondering what is meant by “hot-fix” in this case, so I will explain the overall patching method:Generally a normal patch build gets pushed through Development -> Staging -> Live Servers. So you create a patch in Development push along to Staging and Test, then push from Staging to all Live servers. A hot-fix is about doing a patch which works backwards, this actually takes more time and is a bit more technical, so is only usually done for critical issues that need to be fixed as soon as possible.The procedure for Hot-fixing has to be applied to every Live server then also to Development and Staging servers. This has to be done so to avoid conflicts with future patches. You don't want to do a hot-fix on a Live, and then apply a patch which removes that hot-fix, and in the case of code you don't want 2 scripts using the same name (Bad juju).As for how easy elements are for hot-fixing:When it comes to code, it can be done, but things get a little more complicated. Hot-fixes are usually only done for important elements, because otherwise you have to create a script for them and then run them on every server, this can be very time consuming and at this point in Alpha isn't such a huge worry. Our biggest concern is things that make the game completely unplayable.Our Priorities going into later versions are (doing our own patches):The next subject I am going to breach is how the engine code and game code actually works, but I won’t be going into an incredible amount of detail.Client is C# Orientated.Server is C++ Orientated.HSL (Hero Script Language) is the scripting language which bridges Server and Client so they work together. This is common within any engine, and the form of scripting differs from one to the next.UI is XMLCurrently we are not working on Engine code at all, in fact the Repop team won’t touch the engine code, we leave that to the HeroEngine team. (If this changed in the future it would be an interesting new technical post!)Having Source is a bit of a different matter, (Admittedly Repop doesn't really need Source because we have the use of the engine team when and if we notice an engine related issue), but what can be changed with Source is often misunderstood. Source is your very base engine, things like... DirectX, Renderer, how elements within the engine framework are used (eg server and networking). We actually use all of that as is, and if we find a major problem we report it down, it's a fix made to the engine source itself and that is pushed to the engine for all users and other teams of HeroEngine.Currently we are actually unable to patch all the way to the latest version of Hero Engine because of a few methods used within The Repopulation and parts we are going to adjust (To do with Replication, System Areas and Proxy work). After that we will update to the latest version, and should be staying up to date with it (or ever so slightly behind depending on our current build state as a Hero patch is released).So.. you also want to know what is going on within The Repopulation. Well I already mentioned the Logging adjustments, but we also have a whole new logging tool for the GM’s.There is also this whole thing about having new shaders... (yes we are repainting quite a bit, pretty much the entire world).This is what Mcindus has been up to:Before/After:[img]https://i.gyazo.com/5ec62f6d8425a6381156a3ce71b5f9e4.jpg[/img][img]https://i.gyazo.com/b7ba7a604bed673999e914fbb9cc51ce.jpg[/img]Before/After:[img]https://i.gyazo.com/1ece8a836d8fc8649b02ee4441461e69.jpg[/img][img]https://i.gyazo.com/589a2d9ad21f35644f62fa0b0bd8bd3b.jpg[/img]It should be noted that the ‘after’ screenshots do not have flora applied yet!The lore team is looking at shoring up a few things, getting a consistency and looking at future ideas.A new launcher is being built, this may or may not make 15.10.1, but there are a few inconsistencies to do with Steam/Stand Alone that we wish to sort out.Any questions, please ask!