Official:Release Nov06 PM

="No more elephants stuck in crows' nests"= - A Halloween and bugfix post-mortem

Ahoy pirates, fall is now upon the oceans and while the sun shines ever warmly, some pirates may find themselves changing their striped shirts and midriff blouses for warm capes and snug buccaneer jackets. Pull up a seat by the roaring fire (it used to be a poker table, until I lost 100 000 pieces of eight) and welcome to the post-mortem on the Halloween and bugfix release.

The Halloween event this year was brought up in a meeting a bit before the Events Blockade release. Each year Three Rings has made a point of adding a surprise to the game for Halloween. How could we top our previous exploits so that our players that remembered Halloweens past would not be disappointed?

A brief recap:

2003 - Pirates logged in and were turned to zombies or skellies (depending on the characters in their names) one day, and the other type o' monster the next 2004 - Masks were introduced, hiding the names of pirates when equipped 2005 - The popular masks made a return from the previous year, and a zombie competition was introduced to pit zombie against zombie in a contest for body parts.

One of the first things decided was that masks would definitely be brought back since they were quite popular the last two years. We'd had players that both loved the masks hiding names of pirates and pirates that petitioned oceanmasters asking if there was any way they could have their normal hats back and their names displayed like normal. How could we give the most players the fun of masks while allowing those that did not like them to still have access to their normal pirates?

We decided to make masks sold through the palace shoppe. This way, all masks, including the ones that were made of royalty-only items, would be available to all players and players that did not want to be masked did not have to walk about bare-headed. Furthermore, in the past masks were made of hats and the majority of hats can only be worn by subscribers on subscription oceans. Selling them as separate items would allow all pirates to wear all masks and not make them lose precious mask time by waiting for the labor to be finished on new hats.

The masks decided, what could we add to the Halloween festivities without just repeating the hot zombie on zombie action of 2005? The zombie contest was one of the first oceanwide competitions that we held, and went over quite well. The undead events were not for everyone though, as we'd had a number of players ask us if we could opt out of the zombie competition. It was a reasonable request and something we thought worth including this year.

The option to turn off all of the Halloween goodies would be considerably more complicated than the solution we'd implemented for masks. Cephalopod was the one who tackled the 'off' flag for the Halloween release (which actually ended up taking more time than the rest of the Halloween changes). It went through a few incarnations, first starting with only making the player appear normal to himself on his screen but still appearing as a ghost to others, to changing the red seas and all other holiday changes for that player so that he saw everything as normal. There were some funny steps in between as Cephalopod tried to get the tiles of water to refresh once a pirate toggled the off flag, since otherwise if one was sailing on a ship, the waters would be red, then suddenly large polygonal chunks would start popping up in blue.

One thing I found interesting was watching Cephalopod take apart the walls of a ship to see which tiles lay beyond. Below decks on medium to large ships, there are rectangular cannon ports that look out over water. As a developer, Cephalopod could remove the wall and the window and see which water tiles were placed behind it to make sure that the correct water tiles were colored to make the blood seas show properly through the window.

Other ideas were tossed out, and the idea of the seas running red sparked a discussion about an apocalyptic theme for this Halloween's release. This led to the idea of pirates becoming transparent and ghostly as a variant on the skeleton/zombie transformations and team competition we'd used in the past. I was still disappointed that we were not able to implement flaming skulls raining from the sky, but being able to do the ghostly transparencies was a pleasant surprise!

The final decision for the competition this year came from the recent conference of monarchs, and a number of comments in the forums asking for more crew-centered goals. As a result, the competition was made crew-based, so that crews would have a motivation to pillage with one another and work together.

All of these events were mentioned with the October newsletter, to help draw more pirates in to participate in the festivities. We've a picture here of artist Greenbones making the banner it.

And what should happen on Halloween? Players defeated the dread El Pollo Diablo! Yarr. This bumped a quick change to the Black Ship to the top of the list the very next morning, where Arcturus moved the skellie number up to 150.

Arcturus: "Weee! I'm being targetted by 150 skellies! Arcturus: "Ow."

Now with Halloween over and done with, we wanted to spend some time addressing some of the bugs present in the game.

Arcturus in particular had been talking about spending some time concertedly addressing some of the bugs that came from the recent releases and some suggestions that players had brought up that didn't fit in the categories of any new features that were being coded. The quiet after the Halloween event and the ramp-up to the winter season seemed a good time to take care of some issues that had been brought up multiple times by our existing players.

The use of a lot of white enamel to make the skeleton furniture a pricey item was causing some concern about the economy. Nemo, Cephalopod, and Arcturus asked the oceanmasters for some suggestions about the recipes, and the decision to add tellurium and chalcocite in the place of some of the enamel was made.

A few weekends ago, Notorious Fandango blockaded Eta Island on the Midnight Ocean and in the last very close rounds, noticed that the jobber pay was set at a maximum of 1 000 pieces of eight per segment. After asking Arcturus, it was found that it was just an arbitrary limit and that it would not strain the system to raise it. We then decided to raise it to 9 999, since in the rare circumstance that a flag would want to throw insane amounts of money at its jobbers we did not think it should be limited by the game mechanics, and limited at 9 999 from 10 000 so that people would not accidentally type in 10 000 when trying to pay jobbers 1 000 per segment. The changelog notes reads: "Change maximum job offer from the insane 1000 PoE per segment to the even more insane 9999 PoE per segment due to popular demand." -Arcturus

Visible duty reports for the person in the crow's nest was a long requested change as the officer in charge of a pillage is often up there watching for vessels to attack. The request was seconded by the oceanmasters and by event planners as duty puzzle bake-offs and other events often require a look at the duty report and if one is not at a station at the moment the vessel hits a league point, the duty reports are lost. The duty report coming up or being made visible in the ship interface was tricky because a button couldn't really fit anywhere-the Vessel tab was too crowded. A slash command was suggested by Sophocles, but Arcturus didn't feel it fit in as a slash command. We ended up placing it on top of the duty puzzle while pausing, as inspired by duty reports in blockades when there is a break. (Actually, the real conversation went something like this:)

Hypnos: We could put them over the puzzles when people pause, since that's what happens in blockades already! Arcturus: Hm... does it? I don't think that works that way. Cephalopod: I think it only shows up between rounds or segments, not whenever you pause. Hypnos: ... oh. I'm dumb. Arcturus: But we could put it in that way. Hypnos: Yay!

Hopefully, the changes such as the re-addition of jobbers to flag pages and the more visible duty reports have made event blockades and tracking easier for our players, as this should pave the path for the upcoming blockade duty puzzle changes. I've enjoyed seeing how these fixes and the release of the event blockades last release are laying the groundwork for some (ssh! sekrit) features that are coming in the near future.

Happy Halloween everyone, I hope that you are looking forward to running shrieking at the next release as much as I am. Bundle warmly and drink lots of rum.

Yours, Hypnos


 * quoted from Cephalopod in the code changelogs