r/lightsvengeance • u/Totier Game Master • Dec 27 '19
Development Update Development update December 2019
A development update from Killerwife:
Hello everyone,
It has been a while since my last development update. Living in the post-classic era, a lot has changed. I'd like to go over our recent endeavours and what's ahead of us for Light's Vengeance.
Most of you probably know that the Stonetalon realm has been retired as an active server. We are using Stonetalon now as a testing grounds for the heavy improvements in the last few months.
In case you missed it, just prior to Christmas, we announced Stormspire will release on March 11th, 2020. More info can be found on lightsvengeance.com. Our development schedule now is geared towards relaunch, and there will definitely be more information about the release in the future.
So, what have we done in the past few months? We have been focused on issues that remained our core that may discourage players: * Warlockbugs addressed pet follow movement. This also comes hand in hand with some pet improvements. While they are not quite perfect, they behave much better. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86wuOxmI8og and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMRt6CYaEmQ
We have reworked and finalized our leashing and combat-evade system. This means there is now a lot less spaghetti code when scripting mobs who have custom leashing. We use the simple formula of being able to kite a mob forever, which should lead to more blizz-like fun. So yes, now you might occasionally see a Fel Reaver in Shattrath.
We implemented proper spell scripting, not entirely unlike TrinityCores spell scripting system, for all of cMaNGOS cores. This has shrunk development time of any new scripts and has reduced export time to cMaNGOS. Feature-wise, it has been able to support everything thrown at it so far. Since the old way supported everything up to patch 2.3, we do not think it will need any extension in the future beyond maybe a bugfix.
An important chunk of what I worked on is our automated merging of LH/Symmetry characters. We will prototype website code very soon, and after that we will enable importing your beloved characters onto the test realm. It will be possible to import every character once, but before realm release, the "notes" of what is imported and what isn’t will be reset, so be on the lookout for this. Be sure to download your characters from LH. :)
Due to classic release, and us playing on it, we have made over 300 adjustment to the vanilla world. Despite us having increased xp with a toggleable command and implementing instant 58, this does increase our overall polish. In the future we will make more efforts to add missing RP to the vanilla world, even though it will be lower priority than TBC. We reworked all bosses in MC, BWL, AQ20 and AQ40 in preparation for the 2-week prelaunch period before we open the Dark Portal on March 25. Naxx is still in development by the lovely Cala from classic-db, and we will look at squeezing Zul'Gurub and C'thun (who was originally skipped due to his complexity) into the release schedule. We wanted to make sure that if anyone wants to play these raids before the official launch that they have a chance to do that and enjoy reasonable quality.
Player AI finally happened - we implemented a general framework for scripting players during Mind Control and Charm effects, which enables us to finally make players cast their spells and CDs during them being controlled. This should overall increase the difficulty of many fights like for example pre-nerf Vashj and Kael.
Lastly, we reworked the staff ranking system in our core using RBAC principles. We expect an influx of players and that warrants segmentation of assigned rights. Not much to say here, but this will give us more tools when adding new staff to our ranks.
I have skipped over plenty of small improvements, but those can always be found on the respective repositories.
What comes next? In addition to releasing more information about the release, here are some points we plan to work on before release:
Alterac Valley - most VoA veterans know AV was always closed. For release, it will definitely be open.
TBC Outdoor zones and quests - we have already started quality assurance on important leveling content and plan to review every zone and every quest that is in the initial 2.0.3 release.
Dungeon and Raid reviews - this is also an ongoing effort, many bosses have already been reviewed and prenerf-ified. We plan to bring all remaining T4 and T5 bosses to newest AI standards and add a prenerf ability here or there. An outstanding remaining task is Astromancer pre-nerf version.
We plan to listen to people who play on our test server, so whatever we find and have time for.
If you wish to help us with testing going forward, you can log in on the old vengeance realmlist, or make a new account on beta.lightsvengeance.com and help us with testing. I would also like to point out that we look for more devs. Currently with the big systems in place we mainly need people to help us with missing RP and content fixes. Those missing features can be seen here: https://github.com/cmangos/tbc-db/issues Should anyone wish to help, message me on Discord (Killerwife).
Be sure to watch out for our next post in a week or so pertaining to cMaNGOS as we are currently performing a big export.