Popular Post Kyu Posted July 1, 2014 Popular Post Share Posted July 1, 2014 Hello everyone! This is the first instatement of a "PokeMMO Development Blog". This is intended to be monthly or bi-monthly, and in the future, will contain concepts we are working on or have interest in working on. As there have been around 5 months of development with not a lot of indication of what we're doing, there's quite a bit to talk about. As has been said previously on our Forums, this update is primarily focused on handling our Kanto implementation's large amount of issues and preparing for our Emerald release later this year. Kanto Mechanics Polishing One of the main challenges in porting a single-player game to a multiplayer environment is reworking single-player-focused mechanics in order to create a sustainable gameplay experienced required for an MMORPG. This patch focuses on some of the worst offenders which would require players to create alternative characters for basic NPC functionality.Move Tutors Move tutors have always been a problem with old characters due to sometimes providing exclusive moves that can not be renewed except by trading to a new character. We've alleviated this by requiring in-game consumables for all Move Tutors and having them be able to be used unlimited times. Other regions' tutors have also been a subject of discussion, with us deciding to implement certain NPCs in the latter Sevii Isles areas which provide move tutor functionality normally exclusive to other regions. VS Seeker Rebalancing VS Seeker trainers have long been a source for extremely easy money gain due to the level disparities between an NPC and a normal player after completing the storyline. While this was acceptable in a single player game, it is not here. Rematch trainers' parties will now automatically scale to a level more appropriate to your character's progression, i.e. rematching a trainer with 8 badges will have you endure a harder match than that of a player with 1 badge. Money gain does not scale up from normal rematch rates, but EXP gain does, helping alleviate EXP grind woes of endgame players looking to build new parties. Dynamic Weather and Environmental Effects While this is not an especially large feature, dynamic weather is one of the many things that help a game's world feel more alive. It will now rain occasionally in the overworld, with each Island having different weather. Certain caves will now have thick fog effects. Certain environmental animations have been added as well, such as sand and beach effects. Direct Item Trading Direct item trading has been one of the primary limitations of the game's item-based economy, requiring you to attach an item to a party member before trading. This update alleviates this issue, with stacks of items being able to be traded directly. Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence has been a huge hurdle in creating difficulty in PvE content. The sheer complexity of the game makes creating meaningful AI a very difficult task, making this one of the main reasons why the current update cycle has been extended so far. With this, we will be introducing AI which: Uses attacking moves effectively Uses buffing moves effectively Swaps at appropriate times Choosing which party member to send out at appropriate times Utility moves are unlikely to be included with this update, but will be addressed in the future. This update provides us the ability to continue to create and tweak formulae which decide how NPCs react to player actions in real time. Z-Axis Support The Z-Axis is not a very utilized function in FireRed, primarily because it is a remake of an even older game. Proper Z-Axis support only fixes visual issues in Kanto (e.g. NPC rendering in the Fanclub, and certain tiles in caves) but is one of the larger server/client pre-requisites of our future Emerald preparation. Client Improvements Performance Improvements Memory management has been one of our worst issues, with various memory leaks in the rendering code causing symptoms like client crashing, visual texture bugs, and the GUI disappearing. Much of our time within the past few months has been spent working towards lowering the client's memory footprint and optimizing our existing systems. We've gone through, gutted most of our rendering code, and optimized it to the point where: The worst memory leaks have been resolved, where memory in use will no longer increase significantly over a player's session. This allows players to more reliably manage their memory usage via PokeMMO.l4j.ini, having the highest performance impact on very low-end systems with <768MB of RAM. Internal memory management has been heavily optimized, where internal garbage collection functions no longer run very often (causing lag spikes on extremely low-end systems). Memory management improvements also mean the removal of legacy code. This includes legacy GBA character colors from 2012, which will now all show as a standard sprite until custom Trainer Shots are created. While much of the optimizations are focused on memory management, small framerate-impacting optimizations have been done as well. Border rendering code has been improved to where borders will have very little to no impact on client performance. This primarily affected clients with unlocked zoom levels (a debug function), but had a performance impact for regular players where large amounts of border tiles were shown. Move Animation-related crashes have also plagued many of our players, but only largely began to be reported when commonly used moves' animations were implemented. This set of issues was commonly known as the "Swords Dance bug" but applied to every move animation. We have fixed many issues with move animations which would cause crashes on low-end systems during animation rendering. Many other crashes have been resolved as well, such as a very rare crash which could cause a player moving through a connection when performing certain actions to crash their clients. Most of the above issues do not affect a lot of players, but smaller memory footprints allow us to both support older desktop/laptop systems and reduce system impact for our future Android release. Extended Controller Support 3rd-party controller support has been one of the main features we have wanted to work on for the past few years. Our last update included basic controller support through the game client, but various GUI design flaws prevented us from a full implementation. With this update, we will be introducing controller support for all in-game GUIs except for the Chat and Settings functions as well as a wider array of controllers being detected. Community Suggestions and Other General Improvements Several small community suggestions have been implemented since our last patch including: Better shiny indicators for the "drag to chat" function. https://forums.pokemmo.eu/index.php?/topic/33216-make-shiny-pokemon-obvious-drag-and-drop/ Improving the interface for breeding. https://forums.pokemmo.eu/index.php?/topic/35943-show-more-information-when-retrieving-pokemon-from-the-daycare/ Displaying your own name for screenshot purposes. https://forums.pokemmo.eu/index.php?/topic/35999-option-to-display-character-name-and-team-tag-above-own-character/ Some other small improvements that don't quite fit anywhere else include: The Hidden Power diviner interface has been improved. After paying this NPC, your party member's Summary window will now display its Hidden Power typing to yourself and other players. Summary windows will no longer require you to move them to see, at a glance, how many Summary windows you have open at a time. Battle sprites will now render behind Substitute sprites, to more clearly indicate what you are facing in the case of things like Baton Pass. Implementation of Borderless Window Mode, allowing players to perform other tasks more easily while playing PokeMMO in a fullscreen setup. Various small textures have been improved to more suitably fit PokeMMO. Trainer Tower and Battle Points Trainer Tower The Trainer Tower was one of the least utilized features in FireRed's international version. Instead of implementing the cut-down FR USA version of the Trainer Tower, we have taken the effort to manually compile all information from the original FireRed JP release. This provides us with a robust PvE experience where players confront 9 levels of various battles, with each player receiving their own dynamically built instance. Battle Points Battle Points are a new currency obtained through the Trainer Tower. This currency allows you to purchase high-end consumables and can be used to purchase certain Event Moves for your party. In the future, these will be acquirable through PvP Matchmaking. We did not feel that Matchmaking was currently in a state that would allow us to tie rewards to its functionality. PvP Improvements PvP Balancing Many further generation move or battle mechanics changes have been backported to PokeMMO for balancing purposes. These include: Critical Hit rebalancing, including Critical Hit damage multiplications, chance scalings, stage increases for high crit-ratio skills, base powers for high crit-ratio skills. Sitrus Berries have been changed to be more appropriate for Little Cup-type tournaments (changing their HP to percentage scaling instead of flat HP increases.) Many Accuracy/Base Power/PP-related changes have been backported to apply to commonly used skills. End of Turn effects have been standardized to an intentional order. Additionally, various move-related bugs that were ported from FireRed have been removed (e.g. Overheat causing Contact). A full list of balancing changes is not present here, but will be available during the patch notes. Tournament Mode Improvements Several improvements related to Tournament Mode are slated for this update, including: Inclusion of Tiering in duels. This allows players to choose which ruleset they would like to play in a Tournament Mode duel. Match durations will now have an option to be capped at 45 minutes. This is decided on duel start. Public Test Server and Future Development Plans Public Test Server The Public Test Server has been mentioned on the forums over the past few weeks as a way to preview upcoming content and have players find the worst issues in it. This server will run the latest concepts created by us, and will be considered unstable. The Public Test Server is not a replacement for the Live Server. It will have the following restrictions set in place to minimize impact on the Live Server during testing periods: The PTS will only be available during certain times, announced prior to bringing it online. This will be focused primarily on weekends in order to ensure the highest number of testers possible. This server will have a limited amount of player slots allocated to free accounts. Accounts with active Donator Status will be able to bypass queue restrictions. The PTS will provide certain debug tools ("cheat codes") required for the test at hand. These will vary depending on what is being tested. Character progress on the PTS will be removed regularly. This server will begin seeing usage a few weeks after we deploy our next update. Further details on how to access the public test server and the content changes between Live and PTS will be released shortly before it starts being used. Future Development Plans We have several sub-projects in the works which are intending to see release by the end of the year. Some of them are: Character customization will see a major overhaul, including implementation of Trainer Shot sprites (shown in the Trainer Card). The PokeMMO Client GUI is being analyzed for both functionality and design improvements. It currently suffers from an issue known as "programmer's graphics". Our second region is planed to be feature-complete by the end of 2014, with Emerald used as a base. Some further details about integration with FireRed may be seen at https://forums.pokemmo.eu/index.php?/topic/42931-the-new-region-thread/?p=830926 Our first Android client implementation is planning to see its first public release in late 2014. This update is slated to be deployed shortly after Artificial Intelligence's first rendition has been completed. This is projected to be towards the middle of July. Thank you for your patience. PinkWings, YagamiNoir, Gunthug and 133 others 136 Link to comment
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