As described on our forums we have just merged into a new updated build from Epic Games China, including the latest build of Unreal Engine 3.
What we are doing at the moment is extensive testing of the new build before we are going live with it. So far it’s been going pretty smooth and it’s a much easier merge than our last major merge we did before release. This build is vital for our game as it solves a few issues players are experiencing today.
What this new update gives us is the following:
• Updated visuals overall in Mortal Online
• New trees and vegetation including SpeedTree 5.2 support. (We need to evaluate this some more before fully going over to ST, to see how it impacts the performance.) You will still get new tree models even without SpeedTree enabled.
• Better server stability and performance, we can now support a few more thousands of players simultaneously.
• A fully working prediction/interpolation system which will make player position updates and combat moves much more accurate
• A new lightning and shadow system which should look better than what we use today, and the performance should be much better
• Flash support. The old GUI will eventually be phased out and replaced with a new one. This will significantly increase the speed and response time, it will enable us to make it much more coherent and informative, not to mention it will look a lot better.
We will also add a few things included in the above patch such as bug fixes and the next iteration of the fishing system for instance. It’s still hard to give an exact date for this patch, but we aim to test it live within 2-3 weeks. We will update under development section as soon as we have a bit more accurate date.
Overall status report (Mortal Gold)
We are going to have one last patch on our old build before we go over to this new build. This patch is supposed to solve any skill issues we have had once and for all. For you who are suffering from any skill bug, please take the opportunity to login to test to see if it’s fully solved, we plan to do this test tomorrow and it shouldn’t take more than one hour. Look on our forums for more information on this. To solve the rest of our current issues we have to move over to the new build.
It’s been two months of struggling and hard work for the team, but we believe you will notice the difference in the game in a positive way with our coming patches. We are as always grateful for your patience and support of our game. This has of course also affected you, the players, in terms of bugs and some annoying moments. We want to thank you again for the great feedback you are giving us. As soon as we have this new build in place and solved the issues we have left we will also start marketing for the first time in a larger scale. This means you have got a good head start before the masses of new players starts to enter the world of Nave, which is a great strength in a competitive sandbox game like Mortal Online. It’s too early to say if we are to compensate the first players in any way, we do what we can with still limited resources. And like we explained there were not many options for us to choose from when releasing the game. We wanted to stay independent and deliver the Mortal Online game core we have promoting since the beginning.
