Post#1 » 25 Jan, 2017 5:50 pm

Update for everyone with what's going on. (This post ended up longer than I expected.)



Firstly, something I would personally like to clarify. This team isn't a AAA team that has come in to take Repop, it's a team not very different to the original ABT team itself. It's still an Indie project, with an Indie team, but we are all experienced in what we do and the biggest difference is that it is now owned by IF.



Now to other matters:



'Upping the Server Plans'



I will say up front, this is not at all launch of the final game, it's basically going back in to Alpha stages. This means it will be buggy, broken in many places, annoying at times, and may even have downtimes. Essentially it is an unfinished game and will be for a while.



Off hand I believe the server version everyone was playing is .9.1, we haven't actually touched the code on the live server (this is bad practice, as many of you will know), but the reason they aren't up yet is actually due to 3rd party reasons and us wanting to be safe. An example is that Steam has many of the accounts tied to it, and the transfer from ABT to IF through Steam has not finished yet. This isn't the only element to wait on but it's a big example as to why things are taking a bit longer than some would hope, we want everything in line and handled before we turn them on.



When these Alpha servers are up, anyone who has purchased the game will have access to it. You should see 0 differences to before, so all of the same glitches, bugs and issues will be there tapping you on the shoulder and annoying you. We want to get you back in the game as soon as we can, and with the information below, we didn't want you waiting until the first patch.



There is a thread about a wipe with some excellent discussion, however I wanted to point out/confirm that there is no 'PLANNED' wipe for when the servers first come back up. We will '100%' be doing a wipe just before the game's final launch (not any time soon), and extremely likely do be doing more on the interim, we will have to check the economy and a number of other elements from a clean slate to get an idea of loopholes and issues. A reason for this is to wait until after collecting more data, and also having a bit more focus on the economy before wiping for it. On top of that we actually would like people testing all of the changes within 10.1 and 10.2 when we do that patch, so you probably wont see a wipe until after then at the very least. Please continue the discussion on that thread though, there are some excellent bugs and notes about things that need fixing.



'Patching Procedure'



What we were 'hoping' to do is actually patch up the 9.10 build and do a push to live, and then start implementing 10.2 slowly through a number of patches. However, after looking through what we have here, using some careful consideration, and seeing how much had already been put in to Staging, we had a small change in plans and things will actually be slightly different going forward:



We are working with and patching up the game as is with 10.2, we are going through all errors and major issues right now, preparing for a patch. When this patch is live, it will take you from 9.1 (old build from before blackout), up to 10.2 (new build) with all of the implemented patch notes on the site, and a large number of other fixes. This might mean the patch takes a little longer than expected as we make sure everything works, when it's playable and everything is going to plan, we will push that to the live server.



After that, you likely wont see too much content for a little while, as we will be finishing going over optimizations, bugs, and trying to get things a lot smoother on the whole. As such, 10.2 might have some really big things that are missed or broken, but we hope to have fast patches with bug fixes and very little additional content in order to get things running smoothly.



This however will NOT lead in to final Launch, this will lead us to a Beta of sorts. When things are smoother and we feel there is a good handle on this, we will start to do some focused questioning on certain elements within the game, and work on them in the back end. This could be: Tutorial; Inventory; Action/RP Mode; Balance of Crafting, and many many other things, but this feedback and so forth will help us in actually patching content for the game.



The feedback on the forums which we are already getting is vital and helpful, we are always looking in to these notes but as mentioned above, actual changes might not come until later, (Unless they are causing performance problems, or errors, or simply not working). On the subject of the forums, I have been asked to mention that when other transitions have finished, these forums will be getting a clean up (we all know they are a bit messy), some posts are where they shouldn't be, some are extremely outdated and so forth.



A last mention for this section, Microtransactions and in game shop might be slightly delayed because we plan on doing some communication with Steam on this front after everything in the current transition is finished.



Please note, there is absolutely no timeline here yet.



'So what's happening in the back end?'



The simple answer to this is... "A lot". I know I can't just say that, but rest assured a lot of fixes are being made.



We have been looking at the way ABT did things and had to learn a lot of the methods they used for actual development, this isn't really using the engine, more so what back end systems they have which are their own. We are also looking in to every system within the game and seeing how that works to understand it on the back end. But on top of that we are working on performance, bugs and less breaking/errors.



The artists/world builders are busy making adjustments to help performance, and clean up a bunch back end.



Along the way we do simple little fixes that don't really change the core game in any way, as an example; We have adjusted movement to be a bit more fluid, so strafing one way then the other doesn't cause you to not strafe at all, trying to make it feel less clunky. (Remember, this is in the 10.2 patch)



I hope this helps ease some minds.



TLDR: Waiting on 3rd party then servers going up with old build. Already working on next patch but bigger than expected. Be prepared for bug squishing.