Throne of Destiny Weekly Status Update 6/24

[Ibn]

Hallo! Welcome to this week’s update on Throne of Destiny’s development. Not much to talk about this week, no real news unfortunately…

What am I talking about?! We launched Open Preview this week!

Wednesday was a very exciting day for us all, we were thrilled to watch people running around on the Halaetans, exploring Sanamar and trying out the new quests. Obviously there were a number of challenges on Wednesday as well, as we discovered issues with our Billing and Authentication servers that prevented many players from being able to sign up and log in to Preview as well as the live game. After Wednesday’s billing downtime and yesterday’s brief maintenance, things are much improved.

Since that time we’ve been having a blast watching you play the game. Many of us have been spending time cloaked and following players through quests and dungeons. So who knows, when you’re fighting those Ruschk there might be a Dev standing right next to you, cheering you on!

We’ve been getting some great feedback so far, on topics from game balance to UI to video performance. We’ve shifted most of our resources from August development to AC:TD development to address this feedback before we launch on July 18. We’re working especially hard on the usability concerns that have been raised – UI issues, graphics corruption and the like.

Some important Preview news:

• I’ve started a thread listing known issues in Preview and will update it periodically as I get status updates from the team. That thread can be found at http://forums.ac.turbine.com/showthread.php?t=22918.

• If you need to change the default ports that AC:TD uses to connect to the servers, you can edit them by editing the UserPreferences.ini file. For more information, see our Fuze article at http://www.fuzeqna.com/asheronscall/consumer/kbdetail.asp?kbid=1083.

• The level 100 Turbine Vendors have been placed in-game! Additional Vendors will follow next week and will be announced ahead of time.

• Lead Artist Scenario will be running a quest this evening for Destiny players! Be logged in to Destiny at 6PM PDT / 9PM EDT and watch for the world broadcast. The quest has multiple level breaks so anyone level 40 and up can participate.

• We expect to do another prop to the Preview world on Tuesday morning. This will address a number of the known issues in the link above.

We’re all very excited seeing the feedback that you’ve all been posting. Again it’s important to note that while this is not a Beta, the game is not final yet either – we are still making improvements for launch. You’re previewing the game – not “reviewing” it.

Also a reminder – as this is a Preview and not a live world, we do not have 24/7 operations support for Destiny. If something unexpected were to happen and it was necessary to bring Destiny down over the weekend, it is likely that it would stay down until Monday. We’re confident that this won’t happen, but I wanted to let you know just in case.

That’s all we’ve got for today! Have fun this weekend! See you in Destiny!

- Ibn

[teh-frozz]

All I can say, is if it happens to go down say....3am tomorrow, and not up til monday....


That would suck. :(

[Ibn]

Obviously I agree with that sentiment. We expect that things should be stable over the weekend based on everything we've seen since Thursday morning's maintenance.

[Peter]

What about the skill sellback/spec timers? On Wednesday you said you'd have more on it tomorrow, I presumed you meant in the weekly update.

[proudcdn]

The game itself seems to have many nice features and upgrades ...

The lag however is horrendus.

I understand that there is a load on the server ... but at what percent is it running at?

What I mean is the server running at 100% capacity?

You had mentioned that the number of people allowed on Destiny at any one time would be limited. What is it limited to?

I remember when LC would have 1500+ people on and the lag was not nearly this bad.

[Protes]

Thank you Scenario for taking time out and the leading the quest this evening. I was there for the first half of it.
Though I couldn't get in a fellow, I was following you through and imperiling all the mobs for the melees and missile characters :)
I thought it was funny when Scenario realized he didn't have his axe & shield buffed :p

Unfortunately when we were in the last room with the Captain my PC crashed due to graphics lag. By the time I got back in game everyone had moved on. I got a Helm and text off the ground though before exiting (I forgot about the summon portals that were there :o )

From what I experienced it was a fun event. I hope you or the other Live Team members run some more events like this in the near future. I know I would enjoy to see more of this :)

[Iapetus]

I have to agree with the insane amount of lag. Most of the time it will get so bad that I completely freeze. So usually I'll try to log or close the program via alt+f4. When I log back in the lag is practially gone (the massive mob of people had moved on).

I also noticed during this dev run quest that the new client was consuming over half a gig of memory. Is that intended or is there some setting i possibly overlooked? :confused:

Anyhow, what possible reasons could be causing this lag?

My computer specs:
2.2ghz pentium
128mb geforce 4 ti 4200
1gb of ram
3meg down cable modem

Not sure why I should be lagging so hard with specs like that, especially when I read from others who are playing saying that don't have much lag. i.e. able to play thru it.

[Zero_Washu]

Please reconsider ya'lls refusal to put mouse look back on the 2nd mouse button.

How DARE you take a feature away and make it unusuable to so many players. It wouldn't be a total loss but you do not allow us to reconfigure the first or second mouse buttons.

[Garak]

Yea the right mouse button for mouse look was a great feature and sucks to have it broke.

Ideal it would be set back and wed have middle mouse (mouse2 in the client) bindable to whatever we want, like something useful such as attack or select next target.

Very nice that the mouse3/4 and mousewheel is bindable tho. Guess with some work, all keys could be, thru directX.

Previews been mostly stable for me. Tho I did crash some 15 times, after trying 10 different driver version i've found one that works fairly well, still crashing on alt+tab, but works. 66.93whql forceware that is.
65.00 thru 66.50 resulted in hard-locks after 30 seconds or a few minuits sometimes.

Latest, 77.72 worked well at first, allowed alt tab fine.. But BSOD when loading allot of textures/data.. Such as when attempting to enter sanamar or the marketplace.. Couldn't even go there, crashed everytime, after a minuit or 2 orf loading. Well it worked once, but by the time it was done loading, i was portal stormed out.

Haven't tried the other drivers in sanamar, but the loading seemed ok in marketplace.

Got disconnected 5 times tonight. 1 was my connections fault, the other 4 the servers.

[Zaerik-MT]

The lag for me is actually so bad, its gotten to the point where I cant even log into a place because there are so many people around me, and I just stand there as a purple figure until I disconnect. Other wise that the game looks good.

[Dews_Pistol]

Portal Space is an issue - i get errors and booted too
I think everyone with an ATI card atm is having issues with that - seen y'all chatting about it last night in MT, so at least I know I am not alone on this issue.
I have not gotten the acclient.exe error with the girls' machine yet in TOD (where as in AC:DM, I do on mine but prior to this morning had gotten to be few and far between) the video issues with thier machine, ATI RADEON 9200 SAPPHIRE - fixed in TOD; not fixxed in AC:DM - what went on with the video card and the current game ... white shadowy blocks, black backgrounds in mountains and foggy. Turbine tells me ATI RADEON 9200 "off brand" not supported in thier game (ACDM tech's own words, I will not say here who he was.... (very nice guy) where it IS fine and everything looks AWESOME (did I say AWESOME ? I MEANT SUPREMELY AWESOME!) in TOD on 9200 machine. BUT my 9600 series is not support in TOD? WTH? Severe errors over and over - once a solid blue screen and kicked .... graphics having a hard time generating at a distance ... If I could stay in long enough to play with the panels and tink with the graphics support panel then ok - if I adjusted it or brightneded it - it went bananas as well. (earlier this morning I was able to stay in long enough to get to Hebian and check out stuff ... very very pretty!! - 9600)


Allegiance Break does not work .... however KICK does :O (rut ro)

Charceter Creation:
We used to be able to rotate the the creation characters remember ? now forget it .... hope you click the direction arrows fast enough to stop it so you can see what it looks like. They could have put more time into the appearances of the characters.

KEYBOARD OPTIONS accessible in the GUI ... nice but where's all our emotes, quick loot keys to configure etc ?

Passup points and level distributions:
no go. I tried the pass up deal with the gems and level 100s and cannot get the pass up to work.
AND
They do not give us enough points to distribute the skills, health, magic of characters that are at level 100. 1.4 billion isnt enough to configure 200 HP 200+ coord etc etc .... 290+ bow ... let alone if you chose a skill which required more distribution of points IE: Sword, Spear, MAGE (omg lets not go there) .... its a mess .... for a level 100 character

mouse move isnt configured right on one PC (the kid's) and so its an "invisible" block behind the scenes - I DO SEE IT IN PORTAL SPACE clear as a bell and moves nice....

AC:DM version ... now corrupted? I am having issues relogging onto MY "good, compatible, properly working" machine since I loaded this and get kicked from Pistol :( - (all this morning).

Sigh .. anyone else?

and YES THE LAG IS AN ISSUE! GOOD GOD FIX THE LAG :eek:

[Dews_Pistol]

rebooting cleared memory and I am abe to get back in to AC: DM

still getting kicked from ToD

[Heideggar]

I played on a CAD server here at work, and the system's specs are ungodly. Now, add in the T1 line, and I woulda thought that I would beat ToD lag... newp.

Ibn, if people can't participate/play the game, how can they enjoy Scenario's quest? No matter how awesomely designed it is, if people can't move, fight, chat, see, interact, etc. with the quest, it's all for nothing, and quite frankly, a waste of time.

[Archdruid]

well I will not be previewing it, turbine should have the dload on their site! I'm not gonna pay $ to dload the preview client from file planet that's just plain STUPID!

[Mordan]

well I will not be previewing it, turbine should have the dload on their site! I'm not gonna pay $ to dload the preview client from file planet that's just plain STUPID!

Err, you can download it for free from Fileplanet. Just register an account there.
You don't have to have a premium subscription to Fileplanet...