Viking Age: Odin's warrior
Update-
Firstly let me apologies for the lateness of the release. Having corporate issues never helped. We have secured a new level designer that has been helping me with a few things. We had a bottleneck on the gpu when testing the last update that had to be resolved.
When have been working on a server side database for all game stats and inventories, hopefully this will stop hacking and exploiting playerprefs. As most unity based games use playerprefs its easy to change the details and boost your character. So coupling sql database with runtime binary serialization will hopefully stop this.
We have implented a anti cheat system to that not only banns steam accounts, it also bans the cheaters ip address. Looking at other popular games on the marker and seeing the ban rate for these games. I believe I owe it to the players to ensure that we dont ever see these high numbers for bans. Because the higher the ban number the more legit players are interacting with cheats and wrecking the legit players experience.
We have worked on finalising the skill system including new ui and functionality.
We have random room function that joins a random server.
We have finished the persistant player function-
What this means:
We have planned to realese other maps in the future around the same 100 x 100 km size. These maps will run on different servers but players can go to those servers and explore to find items not found in the main map. This will help with the econemy and server load balancing. I have a vision of raiding parties from server A attacking a village from server F, server B then attacks them back. There will still be fights between villages on the one server but this adds some more danger to the mix.
In the not to distant future we will be releasing the server build, so if anyone has a server and wants to host their own world feel free to contact me.
best wishes guys and see you on the battlefield
We are edging closer and closer
Rob (the one that is left) does the finance and legal side of things, although he is good to shoot ideas at lol, So I have been killing myself to finish. But like I have stressed from the start, It wont come out till it passes my standard. So without further blabbing on, here are the patch notes of recent.
- Created and easier log in process.
- Built a test headless server to run the game on and got it working.
- Fixed some server side issues to do with textures.
- Created a new main menu (its a live main menu).
- Created server side load and save functionality, so you can join worlds persistently and take your character with you.
- Re-designed the ocean system, It now procedural generates saving fps loss.
- Starter working on the skill system to sync properly over the network.
As a side note * If you are a 3d artist and would like some work please dont hesitate to contact me either on discord or email.
Apologies for the lateness again guys and girls Im not giving up on this ever lol (It wont beat me no matter how many curve balls life throws ).
Happy hollidays
With that being said though.. I did do some sneaky work on the game whilst I was relaxing lol.
So with the new year upon us. I thought I would fill you all in on a few things happening.
#1
Over the holidays I developed a server build that will be shipped with the game itself. What this means is, you can if you would like, run a server on your computer or your actual server if you have one. Or rent space from a cloud company or whatever and host your own room. Simply fill out the document eg. room name, details, blah blah blah and follow the instructions and you can be all set up with your own world that others can join.#2
Buying land or renting houses in pre-made towns. Go and see the jarl and if you have the coin purchase land to build on.(The reason this was implemented was to stop people joining a server building a crappy base then bailing leaving the server cluttered and messy)The houses themselves can be rented for a weekly fee.
#3
for some reason we over looked syncing the weather system to the network so that has now been fixed.Again guys and girls thanks for your support and patience whilst waiting for the release. And trust me no one wants this out more than me. But it needs to be at a standard that will make you want to play it constantly and be our forever family. I will keep you all posted about the release...
Give me your feed back
I was thinking about adding other players into the story line. So each new player will have their main quest, but it might involve other active players on the server. So Player A joins and gets a quest to find his uncle and deliver a hat or something (so creative lol).
But his uncle actually turns out to be Player B.
What do you all think?
This will need to be a future update I think. I would love some feed back before i open that can of worms though.
Anyway merry belated x-mas and happy new year...
Pushed the release back a little
Firstly our team of 4 has dropped down to a team of 2. 2 of the other devs helping me quit the project after trying to force the release on the 20th. It wasn't quite ready, so there was a sudo-corporate coup.
Secondly the netcode we had written to make servers for this game. Has been depreciated. We are busting our arses to rewrite it all. hopefully with a bit of luck we should be right in 2 weeks time from now.
Sorry guys but it will be worth the wait.
Official release date
With that being said we have an official release date for PHASE 1 of viking age 20TH DEC 2018.
what is phase 1 you ask???
Phase 1 is a full working copy of the the networked combat system. This includes npc's(animal and human), towns and multiplayer battles. Players can host a room and or join their friend in a team or play solo against everyone.
This is a seudo battleroyal type deal, just without a time limit or that pesky blue circle. There are re-spawns, towns to loot, people to kill and gold to collect.
You will spawn firstly with nothing, run around and find some clothes and weapons. You can then choose to go look for trouble or fortify a town with the traps and defences you find along the way. The quest system will also be in place but only side quests because we have a surprise for PHASE 2 we are working on.
here is a sneak peak at the map from far out it might not look that big but believe me it is.
*note: We are working hard to rewrite the code to give us the ability to save towns at runtime. But because the terrain is so huge and procedurally generated we have had to take it back to the drawing board.
FEEL FREE TO CONTACT ME ON THE DISCORD CHANNEL GUYS IM ALWAYS HAPPY TO TALK. JUST DONT GIVE ME GRIEF ABOUT MY ACCENT LOL.
Official release date
With that being said we have an official release date for PHASE 1 of viking age 20TH DEC 2018.
what is phase 1 you ask???
Phase 1 is a full working copy of the the networked combat system. This includes npc's(animal and human), towns and multiplayer battles. Players can host a room and or join their friend in a team or play solo against everyone.
This is a seudo battleroyal type deal, just without a time limit or that pesky blue circle. There are re-spawns, towns to loot, people to kill and gold to collect.
You will spawn firstly with nothing, run around and find some clothes and weapons. You can then choose to go look for trouble or fortify a town with the traps and defences you find along the way. The quest system will also be in place but only side quests because we have a surprise for PHASE 2 we are working on.
*note: We are working hard to rewrite the code to give us the ability to save towns at runtime. But because the terrain is so huge and procedurally generated we have had to take it back to the drawing board.
FEEL FREE TO CONTACT ME ON THE DISCORD CHANNEL GUYS IM ALWAYS HAPPY TO TALK. JUST DONT GIVE ME GRIEF ABOUT MY ACCENT LOL.
Daily Update
Ok.. guys and girls, what we have done today is:
Things we have done
- Fixed a tree collider issue
- tweaked the grass and shrub view distance
- Started working on a rewrite of the inventory so players can trade and share their goodies.
- created better UI for the Main menu and splash screens
So not an overly massive bunch of things done today but we are getting there.
skol....
We are edging closer to a release date
What has been done today
- Done some tweaks to the main menu, we also added bass in the river lol.
- Tested some built copies of the game and fixed a spawn glitch.
- Tweaked some of the sounds and music volumes
- Optimised the textures of the trees to give a FPS bump.
- Created the ability to visit a tattooist and get some custom ink.
- Brain stormed a few ideas about the construction system network syncing.
The project is coming along nicely now, so I don't think we will have to wait much more to get the battles raging. Stay tuned for more announcements and
once again guys feel free to join us on discord. I personally love to hear from the community about their ideas and ultimately what they want.
SKOL....
Multiplayer is now working
Things we have implemented and changed
- Regional server selection.
- Room and host searching.
- Host your own room or join friends.
- Persistent data saving (spawning at last location even in new servers).
- Inventory and skill persistence.
- Binary serialisation to ensure safety from hackers.
- NPC network spawning and syncing.
- Combat RPC syncing.
Things still need to be done
- Character outfitting and network syncing.
- Networking the quest system
- Networking horses anf boats.
- Networking the town managers
- Adding databases to handle spawned in objects
Now further more to this we wanted the communities help. In order to handle the construction system and get the multiplayer working and playable for all the community. We need to implement a system that saves structures upon server shut down. The reason for this is because it is a player hosted server. So when the first player connects to a room they take host and when they quit it moves to the next player in the list. When no players are left on the server the server itself shuts down. So any built structures will be wiped. Now here is the problem....
Because the terrain is a procedural generated terrain and the shear size of the map 100km x 100km. we are worried that in order to save and load built bases will cause a huge load time. We are racking our brains at the moment trying to figure out the best way to solve this, but from experience this might take a while, because no one has done it with this engine, map size, and data needed. So we would like to put it to a vote in the community.
The options are
- Scrap the construction system in online games.
- make the construction system last only till the server shuts down (this will also require less effort to make the bases, materials and such).
- Do either of the above suggestions and keep working for implementation in later updates.
Head to this link to give us your feed back.
https://vote.pollcode.com/78862492
thanks for your time guys.
Our discord channel
https://discord.gg/VDNndsk
I have added a old norse and chill channel in the server too that plays non stop viking music. So I hope to see some of y'all in there.