Ice Ocean changelog/2008-2

This page archives the changelog for the Ice Ocean for the second half of 2008. The complete changelog can be viewed at Ice Ocean changelog.

2008-12-12

• Prefer still-fighting zombies to those that have already been defeated when applying the zombie defeat and control bonus move in the Cursed Isles.
• Add more island scenes for the Cursed Isles.
• Keep pirates with long, flowing locks from showing up as bald in booty division after a hat change.
• Fix blue-screen in reconnecting after a disconnect in the Cursed Isles.
• Fix a huge number of punctuation and grammar inconsistencies. Thanks, Barrister!

2008-12-10

• Reduce the weight given to gunnery and defence of the ship in Cursed Isle payouts, and better spread out the number of chests given to everyone puzzling
• Fix misalignment of animation when labor is applied to an order
• Adjust graphics on playing cards to better line up
• Make one-on-one fights against saboteurs unrated
• Monkeys in male portraits are no longer double-jointed & able to hide their arms complete behind their backs
• Fix dock interface to stop it truncating vessel names so prematurely
• Zombie thralls lack the dexterity to wield swords and now go into battle with sticks
• When awarding sea monster charts, be more likely to hand out Cursed Isles maps than Atlantis ones
• When seeding gems to a market, set the price to an average of the existing gems at their lowered price and new gems at their normal price
• Navy ships now better understand what stations they have available when selecting where to go for a mission
• Randomize the order of items in skelly/zombie wagers
• Wait a bit before playing entrance music in sinking situations so the music doesn't overlap with the danger whistle
• Add a speed slider to gunnery to set a desired speed; the puzzle will run at either that desired speed or the speed based on your rating, whichever is higher
• Sounds in skirmishes caused by distant ships are now quieter
• Add a notification when logging on while a reboot is pending
• Fix the border on crew chat for certain cases, such as large-font mode
• Clarify messages for different ways saboteurs can board vessels
• New player-made holiday trinkets available for purchase in the palace shoppe
• Fix bug with booty division screens coping badly with wardrobe changes (especially removing certain hats)
• Don't play vessel ambient sounds while standing on a cursed isle

2008-12-03

• Puzzle Competition layout tweaks
• Fix performance problem when running on Java 1.6.0_10+ on Windows
• Fix a problem with pirates being unexpectedly logged off as if they had gone idle
• Fix problem with not all dragoons/zombies being pulled into the ship-takeover fray

2008-11-18 - Secret of the Ooze

• Cursed Isles board adjustments
• Updated translations
• Adjust cursed puzzle backgrounds
• Fix serpent display on pirate info pages
• Fix portrait booch with monkey's arm in male portraits

2008-11-18

• Fix rafts dumping extra boarders at the end of a turn.
• Fix swabbies being included in the forage reports in the gauntlet.
• Fix Bellator's Bane being handed out for defeating zombies.

2008-11-17

• Hook up the first set of player-designed Cursed Isle scenes. Thanks to Emerson for the large isle, Sseth for the small isle and Orsino for both designing the medium isle and managing the proejct. More player isles coming soon.
• Add Cursed Isle specific background in rumble, swordfighting and foraging.
• Add Cursed Isle sounds.
• Adjust the amounts in Cursed Isle payouts and add new items to the chests.
• Increase the number of boarders from rafts.
• Fix gauntlet foraging stopping after clearing a board.
• Fix bilge bonus pieces in the Cursed Isles.
• Fix the Cursed Isle zombie kill and control bonus not killing and controlling.
• Fix rafts often not dropping boarders when a sloop already had boarders.
• Fix that the gorgonyx and archelon didn't drop dragoons on player vessels when pulling up next to them. They were always intended to transfer dragoons in addition to their normal attacks. The number of dragoons spawned normally has been dropped to compensate.

2008-11-15

• Bring boarders from the raft to the island when landing and have them join in the initial gauntlet round.
• Fix returning to the vessel after disconnecting while it was in the gauntlet.

2008-11-13 Part 2

• Fix bug with showing stale duty reports
• Update some Cursed Isles translations and art
• Adjust size of boarding parties from zombie rafts
• Adjust Cursed Isle and Atlantis spawning in empty sections of the board.
• Adjust raft spawning.

2008-11-13

• Better messages indicating what's going on during the gauntlet
• Fix bug with skirmish view getting out of sync while on Cursed Isles
• Fix bug with duty puzzles getting stuck between boards in Cursed Isles
• Fix some bugs with puzzle competition level categories
• Cultist captains have gone to mandatory workplace safety training and no longer take joy in shooting each other
• Layout cleanup on puzzle competition leaderboard

2008-11-12

• Fix boochy puzzle competition scoring.
• Allow people to win more than one prize during a performance bracket competition.
• Display cursed isle-style chests on the gauntlet foraging duty report.
• Allow trashing of sticks.
• Various other bug squishing.

2008-11-11 - Take Two

• Fix bug where only one person's foraged goods would count on the cursed isle.

2008-11-11

• Add a leaderboard for puzzle competitions.
• Show a duty report after foraging on a cursed isle.
• Remove cursed ship captains' fear of ships larger than theirs.
• Adjust cursed isle payouts. These are still not final.

2008-11-10

• Increase the speed of rafts.
• Lower the effect of fog on small vessels.
• Allow cursed vessels more freedom in moving about the board to attack.
• Lower the CPU usage of fog while special effects are off even more.
• Fix Cursed Isle boarders being laughably inept rumblers.

2008-11-06

• Add a progress meter on the Cursed Isles scoreboard showing distance from the isle
• Islanders chase off people trying to raid their island multiple times in a skirmish (fixes bug where some people saw rocks in the isle's entrance after entering once)
• Scale fog's impact more based on vessel size
• Animate fog movement; a new option for controlling visual effects has been added that can disable it for systems that can't keep up
• Fix a bug where sometimes vessels leaving the cursed isles would freeze the board
• Fix a bug that would cause fog to be rendered in the wrong place/not at all sometimes

2008-11-05

• Fix bug with old clients being unable to connect to the server & update themselves.
• Fix bug with Treasure Haul breaking skirmishes (causing a variety of bugs: stuck in haul, stuck on cursed isle, etc.)
• Fix bug with bonus pieces and bilge (which resulted in various bilge boochage)
• Completely disable shipwrecks in Cursed Isles
• When a ship departs a Cursed Isle, reset its move tokens to the initial set for a skirmish
• Revert sound libraries to an older version; the newer one performed extremely badly on some windows machines

2008-11-04

• Cursed Isles
  • Cultist ships fill these waters, defending their domain
  • Beware the noxious fog that chokes the seas
  • Witch doctors and their zombie minions attack from their rafts; avoid them, fight them off, or create a special maneuver to enthrall their ranks so they fight for you
  • Brave the isles themselves to fight the cultists and plunder their fortunes!
• In puzzle competitions, don't consider puzzle sessions started before the competition
• Fix booched non-scaling border around skirmish view
• Change border around skirmish view on sinking battles
• Skellies/zombies no longer take maps other than sea monster charts
• Skellies/zombies no longer take injury repair potions
• Skellies/zombies no longer take mostly used whisking potions
• Don't swap ships between safe zones when exiting & reentering sea monster skirmishes
• Add chests hauled to the score board in Atlantis
• Lots of internal cleanup; please be on the watch for broken behavior in all aspects of the game

2008-10-15

• Rolled back earlier sound library change.

2008-10-13

• Fix bug with ordered-navvers charting courses.
• New limited edition portraits: Bootlegpatch's Night of the Living Pumpkins, Ickessler's Skellies, Merethif's Fruit Manor, and Nordenx's Dragoon Kin.
• Bring back Halloween portraits: Ye Dread Dead, Jack O Lantern, Nordenx's Skull Island.
• Fix bug with cannons auto-clearing on the Attack Brigands mission - that is only supposed to affect the Gunning mission.
• Fixed problem where some scenes would not load (and some pirates could load very few scenes
• Atlantis monsters now will respawn to fill in as you've defeated the monsters in an area a bit quicker so that less waiting around is required.

2008-10-10 Part 2

• Fix zombies showing up as normal humans.
• Fix vessel, building and crew records appearing in reverse order.
• Fix gunnery boards changing after cannons are fired.
• Fix duty puzzles stopping after the first few pieces in blockades and Atlantis.
• Fix sound in Java 6 on Macs.

2008-10-10

• Pirates ordered to navigate may change the ship's course.
• Brigand kings holding islands show their power on the blockade board.
• While in a safe zone, vessels will no longer generate special maneuver tokens (double-move, etc).
• Layout change to the palace shoppe's top area - won't be so evident on Ice
• Playing poker at high-buyin tables now requires some poker experience
• Navy vessels no longer show might rings and radar blips.
• Hearty name underlining now applies to names with faces as well as in-scene.
• When you fill all four cannons in the navy gunning mission, fire them off so you can fill em again.
• Vessel Speed indicator now reads in speed relative to maximum for the vessel - this means that a frigate at max speed will now show a FULL dial.
• Fix some issues with the Notice Board News page, especially relating to the Home/Houses button.
• Atlantis treasure awarding now better takes into account how long pirates were in Atlantis
• Fixed bug where a brigand king taking over an outpost could cancel already-finished orders in a shoppe on the outpost.
• Fixed bug that sometimes sent errors to chat while in foraging practice mode reminding them (repeatedly) that they cannot get commodities
• Fixed bug with intro mission navy payouts.
• Fixed bug in drinking where we would sometimes report inaccurate final scores.
• Fixed bug where users whose chat circle has disappeared while on board a vessel didn't go back to vessel chat automatically.
• Fixed sound bug in java 6 on macs.
• Increased time before users are auto-logged-out after idling.
• The Return of Autumn Leaves
• Some underlying changes to management of swabbies/bots - shouldn't have any affect, but if you see any bots acting weird, file a /bug

2008-09-23

• Server-side performance improvements.

2008-08-28

• Send a notice to the vessel when the forage offer changes.
• Don't allow pirates without the ability to forage to take forage offers.
• Fix garbled text in labor reports.

2008-08-27

• Various sound tweaks and fixes.
• Password no longer required for pirate deletion, since you've just entered it.

2008-08-26

• Ambient sound for vessels.
• Adjust a few volumes of the ambient sounds to better match.
• Fix a bug where puzzle competitions on notice board would show as "starting in less than a minute" when they were already started.
• Make the foraging ant animate a little while walking.
• Include newer colors on the cake trinket colors list.
• Fix bug where monkey boat would sometimes fail to steal your stuff when they won.
• Fix some weird cases with foraging practice mode that were causing the board not to properly reset
• Fixed a bug where some stalls could not retrieve their labor reports.

2008-08-25

• Make gem thieves more aggressive.
• Fix bug that could duplicate furniture.
• Note to vessel records when a ship loses cash to a non-sinking flotilla or other such situation.
• Ambient noises
• Tweak foraging sounds some more
• Don't automatically switch out of practice mode when an hour of labor is suddenly available (fixes bugs with the hour of labor being consumed despite empty crates appearing on the board)
• Allow pets to join pirates in portraits.
• Disallow officers from engaging in swabbie ship transport or trading voyages since it removes money from the hold which they normally shouldn't have access to.
• Fix boochery with puzzle competition countdown times.
• Allow the newer colors to be used on trinkets and wrapped presents from the palace shoppe.

2008-08-21

• Large piles of gems on board vessels have attracted a horde of gem thieves. Any boat with large numbers (where large is currently >= 50) of gems on board may be subject to these rampaging menaces, who will take a percentage of your stash. (They are similarly invisible/intangible to the gem thieves who take your gems if you abandon your boat)
• Take foraging notices off the notice board properly when the boat is full.
• Volume slider in options now has more levels of granularity.
• Fix the bug causing job offers to become stuck on the notice board.
• Shorter foraging chest-cleared sounds.
• Fix a sporadic bug with auto-divvying booty at server shutdown.
• Fix a bug where offers could be posted in markets and forts for gold ore.
• Fix a bug where gem prices could drop to (just) below their intended sell price.
• Activate the foraging stat trophies.

2008-08-20

• Add a mute button for the initial music.
• Add foraging job offers: first officers and vessel owners can post offers to pay jobbers to forage commodities for them.
• Raise the initial market sell price for gems and have it descend slowly to its old starting price.
• Respect the last pirate's volume level when playing the intro music.
• Don't show jobbing offers from muted players.
• Move the new sound system onto its own thread to fix skipping. Please /bug any snaps, crackles, pops, skips, burps or other untoward sound artifacts.

2008-08-18

• Update background and star meter to be more visible in foraging
• Fix bug with foraging ratings and lack of duty reports
• Fix bug with foraging not functioning properly on free days
• Fix bug with pausing foraging right before a duty report booching things
• Fix bugs with shovel and machete animations
• Shorten the earthquake sound
• Add foraging to the puzzle board
• Ants now animate when moving
• If a pirate doesn't have enough labor to complete a full set of bananas when starting a foraging session, pre-fill bananas
• Fix "First Gold" trophy to be awarded after the first gold nugget
• Fix typed letters showing up in chat area when configuring puzzle keys
• Change underpinnings of sounds to use OpenAL - linux users may get better performance by creating ~/.openalrc containing: (define devices '(sdl alsa native))

2008-08-12

• Glue faces on the monkeys.
• Allow crates to force their way onto the forage board whenever they're available instead of waiting for space to become available.

2008-08-11

• Rapacious bands of monkeys have been sighted on the oceans. Early reports indicate they target ships battling amongst themselves while heavily laden with commodities.
• Emboldened by the arrival of his comrades, the monkey from foraging now sparkles while he dances.
• Play sounds when starting or ending a foraging puzzle and whenever an item is foraged.
• Adjust treasure haul scoring.
• Break every piece of gold ore in existence into 10 gold nuggets. Adjust recipes, foraging and stats for gathering ore accordingly.

2008-08-08

Foraging:

• Fix earthquake related bugs
• Remove the practice button when the duty report shows up
• No longer rate games if no moves are made
• Instantly end game after practice button is hit once board clears
• Add background
• Add vessel records for foraged items
• Tweak images to be more distinguishable for the colorblind

2008-08-07

Foraging:

• Forage report tells you if you just finished using your labor
• Decrease length of monkey sound
• Decrease volume of earthquake sound
• Adjust scoring
• Adjust special piece probabilities
• Foraging is free on Tuesdays
• Clicking the practice button jumps to practice mode as soon as the board is cleared of crates
• Fixed some practice-mode related bugs

2008-08-06

• Fix foraging status icon.
• Fix practice mode consuming labor.
• Fix ratings boochery.

2008-08-05

• Unveil the foraging puzzle. Art and sound are still in progress.
• Play a little song when the drinking puzzle starts.
• Fix Bumblebeard getting confused when jumping through tutorials quickly.

2008-07-30 Part 2

• Add an award mode to puzzle competitions to complement the existing category based mode that awards prizes to 1st-4th places.
• Reduce the score given for loading only the cannonball in gunnery.
• Competition ahoy fixes: show an appropriate message for joining before the competition, stop rounding minutes off long competition times and only show the ahoy once again.

2008-07-30

• Allow puzzle competitions to paint portraits of the winners.

2008-07-28

• List upcoming and active puzzle competitions on the tournament board.
• Calculate incredible, excellent and so on in multi-puzzle competitions relative to the competition scores so the 'best' category isn't needed.
• Fix bug in puzzle competitions preventing prizes from being given out to lower performance levels if no one qualifies for a prize in a higher level.

2008-07-27

• Add puzzle competitions using the overall score from multiple types of puzzles.
• Add a 'best' category to puzzle competitions that gives awards for the best score regardless of performance level.
• Fix ahoys not appearing for pirates logging on in the middle of a puzzle competition.
• Fix ahoy showing up multiple times for a single puzzle competition.

2008-07-24

• Add ocean-wide duty and crafting puzzle competitions.
• Fix bugs in Bumblebeard tutorial that cut off his chat bubble, started the puzzle while the tutorial is still visible and prevented the use of dialogs while he's visible.
• Fix bug where commodity options on the buy/sell interface other than the relevant ones were unselectable.

2008-07-23

• Fix bug causing pirates to start at seemingly random locations (inns, vessels, houses) rather than islands.
• Don't erroneously show the league tracker when you're not on a boat.
• Fix bug with the mission board not working while at sea.
• Various internal cleanup.

2008-07-22

• Fix problem with some pirates encountering fiery death while trying to log on.
• Add a button for the Puzzle board on the newbie ahoy panel.
• A whole pile of under-the-cover cleanup.

2008-07-21

• Add a new in-game tutorial system starring Bumblebeard.
• Add the league tracker to show how far along your vessel is on its course
• Complete the the Japanese text translations.
• Allow items to be placed on clear portions of bar segments.
• Require Java 1.5 or greater.

2008-07-01

• Fix starting tournaments after incompatible changes to stored game configurations.
• Fix the chat entry bar not appearing in scenes in Adventures.
• Fix swords dusting to foils instead of sticks.