Bane of Life

So many of you have been wondering what’s been going on with the Bane of Life project considering the very limited updates I’ve been posting over the past calendar year. When the previous emulated player vs. player server community crashed ahead of schedule, too many of the trolls arrived in the community causing me to spend almost half of my development time mitigating commentary rather than actually holding to my development schedule.

This premature competing community crash also removed the rush I was in to get the project up and running, motivating me to no longer spend 80-100 hours a week in project development. I also found that public testing was unproductive and moved my test realm to a very limited group of persons who were able to actually stay on task, thus removing the need to publicly post news updates which I were being cherry-picked by other servers. Thus, development cycles have slowed down to keep up with the testing requirements and architecture changes.

To support the client manager feature, server architecture required significant changes which were revealed during the second, larger alpha wave. This area has been the biggest time sink, as I found I had to stop and learn a few new technologies in order to do it properly, as to avoid an unstable server which couldn’t be automated. These architecture changes are still being finalized, at which point, the world design will be then finalized. Unlike almost all other communities, the world development is only a small portion of the development work in the overall time-line and can be introduced in segments to the community.

So, ultimately, the project is still under development and hasn’t been abandoned. Updates to the web presence will remain limited, as all of the current development is completely irrelevant to the public facing community. Hopes for a war in Norrath will never die.

• Characters not seasoned for player vs player combat will be immune to PvP while in their respective training ground. It should be noted these new characters will not be permitted to exit the training grounds until they have reached a higher rank.
  
  This change is designed to improve harassment conditions for new players while preventing the exploit of PvP immunity.
  
  
• The current zone a player is located in will no longer be displayed in /who searches.
  
  In the future, this will also include the inability to request an accurate list of players in the same zone where a /who is requested, provided the client supports this change in some fashion. This change adds privacy to a small world environment and creates a more challenging environment.

The list of open zones has been updated to reflect the changes in the new storyline. The server world is much smaller now, which will make the environment much more dynamic and manageable.

There haven’t been a lot of news posting lately for a two reasons...

Primarily, my time has been more limited lately. Development on the project requires large blocks of time for me to get anything done and there haven’t been too many of those due to working schedule the past two months.

Second, I’ve decided to go through with an alternate design plan that was written in May 2009. This design change requires that I scrap some of the work already done to ultimately create a server designed with the emulator community in mind. These changes encompass a smaller, more dynamic world and an optional guided player experence for those new to the community.

The storyline has been changed from what our beta testers observed in the first round of testing and will be posted on the website soon, along with a zone list change.

• Web Interface Rollout 2

• Added the most recent five forum entries as a hyperlink on the primary index page.
• The number of entries for each month are now displayed with the corresponding month entry.
• Added a server status widget to all pages with the exception of the forum pages which provides the status of the login, world, zone, and ventrilo servers. The status shown is in real-time and updates automatically.
• Enabled the zone list page to all users, displaying the list of active zones. The experience rate, quests, players, statistics, description, and status of the zone are displayed for each zone. The zone image and description has not been completed for all zones yet.

• Updated several guideline pages.
• New format for news releases to make them easier to read.
• Removed the drop down month selector and the need to click a button when changing month selection.

• Addressed and issue where some browsers could not render the AJAX based guidelines page.