Five on Friday - December 15, 2006

"So, Ricardo's guilty, blackrock's creepy, and Inu's still crazy. Where is this all going?"
Well, the Ricardo plotline is wrapping up - there are a few loose ends to tie up, but we're mostly going to be moving forward with the larger plotline. Coming up, you'll start to see events that foreshadow great changes to our world, and offer the opportunity to do great deeds. (as well as the occasional silly event, just to keep you guessing :) )

"There are a lot of bugs in the Known Issues section of the patcher... when are those going to be fixed?"
There are quite a few, plus a few more that aren't critical enough to be on the patcher, that I can at least give you an update on:

Lanterns: We have a fix for this issue in with next week's patch. (There's a secondary issue, that isn't as critical, involving the Beggar's Lantern taking up a bracelet slot, that we have not addressed yet.)

Doom arties: We were hoping to get this one fixed for next week's patch, but we had to finish a few minor items that we thought you might want before we all went on break. ;) We'll come back to it after the holidays.

Multi-tiled item breaking: We actually fixed this, but it appeared that the fix might be worse than the bug, so we pulled it out to put on Test Center, then... didn't actually put it on Test Center. Our bad - we'll revisit this one after the New Year. It does not appear to be affecting many people, judging by the low number of complaints we get.

Items on Stairs: MrTact looked at this issue several weeks ago, and discovered it would require a TON of his time to fix. We decided to keep him neck-deep in Kingdom Reborn, instead, so this one also will remain a known issue for a while.

Shadow Banners: Like the Items on Stairs issue, this one requires programming time waaaay out of proportion to its importance. I did remove the line saying "This one will be fixed next week", which has been up there since October :)

Reindeer and Sleighs not animating: We can't leave for the holidays without making sure your reindeer noses blink... :)

"What the heck happened yesterday with Catskills, anyway?"
Oh, man. First of all, thank you soooo much to all the Catskills players who waited with infinite patience all. day. What happened was this: when the shard tried to come up after maintenence, it crashed. It kept crashing. We copied it to another physical server, and it... yup, continued to crash. At this point everyone who had a clue about code was working on it - after many hours of labor, we narrowed it down to a particular line of bad code in an obscure part of one system. We fixed it, tested it, patched it in, tested it some more, (at this point it was about 9pm our time) and finally got it back up.

As a token of apology for the unusually long downtime, and a thank-you for being such excessively good sports, all Catskills characters who were affected will find a present in their bank boxes or backpacks after next week's publish :)

"Come ON! Tell us some more about Kingdom Reborn!"
We'll be able to release more and more information over the next several weeks, but here's a few tidbits that you may find interesting:

This week we hit a pretty major milestone - it was the first time we successfully logged in to a production shard with the new client. If you see some noob staggering around in the next few months looking completely helpless, it may be a dev trying to remember how to cast spells in the new UI :)

You can now die (without crashing the client, that is). Darkscribe tested this himself by going out and promptly getting killed... by a mongbat. (He insists that I add that he later avenged himself and stood in triumph over the beast's lifeless corpse.)

The art looks fabulous - and very much like UO. (This isn't a technical note, this is just me gushing :) ) We'll have more of it to show you hopefully next week.

"That is not NEARLY enough. When can I find out more?"
Why, I'm so glad you asked ;) We'll be holding our first Town Hall meeting of the year next month, and we'll be debuting KR there. Details below:

WHERE:

Dave & Buster's
I-75 at Delk Rd.
2215 D and B Drive SE
Marietta, GA 30067-8756
(770) 951-5554

WHEN: Saturday, January 27, 2007 (3:00PM - 6:00PM)

If you plan to attend, please RSVP by visiting [www.mythicentertainment.com/uo/].

As for the runic text this week, just remember - sometimes the Britannian News Network isn't the only perspective out there...

- Jeremy