Merry Christmas everyone! Eat tons of food and get very drunk (if you're old enough of course). That's an order! =D

It's starting to get close to Christmas/New Year now and honestly I don't think I'm likely to be able to get anything else significant done until the new year. I still haven't done any Christmas shopping yet and I've got a ton of various family and friends to visit over the next couple of weeks. So it's going to be really hard to fit much work in.

Though, I will at least try and fix some more bugs, and hopefully reduce the lag/framerate slowdown issues to a more manageable level.

P.S If you didn't already know OAs have been released.

Just writing to let you know that I'm still working on the new event system. Obviously it's taking a little while more than I originally planned, but shouldn't be too much longer now. If I can I'll try to at least release the OAs tomorrow evening.

Merry Christmas

To celebrate Christmas 2010 I've released a new set of limited edition items - Christmas Gifts. Each gift contains one random piece of equipment, which is guaranteed to be worth substantially more than the cost of the gift itself. There are two types, standard and elite which are now available from the Credit Shop.

This amazing deal will finish on the 1st of January 2011, so hurry up and get them while you still can!

As most of you have probably already noticed, there has been a pretty significant change to the looting system. Instead of every car, body and misc object being lootable, it is now only possible to loot a handful of these objects per screen. Each object which can be looted will now be highlighted in yellow, and have a question mark appear over it. The trade off for there being less items, is that the chance of finding something is now a lot higher. Infact you'll probably find that the vast majority of highlighted loot spots have something.

The idea of this new system is to make looting more fun and rewarding. Previously you would only find something about 10% of the time when searching. In my opinion this made the game play very frustrating. In addition, the previous system gave players little reason to explore the areas as there was plenty to loot in the streets. The new system should fix/improve most of these problems.

A few other changes:
- New grenade explosion. Not only does the new one look better, but it also causes less client side 'lag'.

- Rounding errors when calculating the damage which armour takes when hit with a low damage bullet (like a single shotgun pellet) has been fixed.

- Layout of the city tweaked. You'll find more urban areas now.

- All the various forms of the exp loss bug have now been fixed.

- A bunch of other minor bugs fixes.

Slight change of plan

In my last post I stated that I would be finishing outpost attacks and lootable bosses very soon. However, in the last couple of days I've noticed that the implementation of these two systems has a lot of cross-over, since they will both essentially be global events that happen at set times and places. After a bit of thinking I came to the conclusion that it would be better to combine both things into the same system, and expand the design further.

A lot of people have mentioned that one the major things lacking in DF is a proper storyline. I had always planned to make some kind of story-based missions in the future, but it was something I was going to put off until "all the other crap is done". Now, with the way that the other systems are shaping up, I've come the realization that putting a decent story into the game wouldn't be so hard. At least not on a coding level anyway.

So, my new plan is to take what I have with lootable bosses and OAs, and combine them into a single events system. I'll then make it so each event can have it's win conditions, rewards and area 'effects' heavily customized. Finally I'll set things up so each event can be given a proper plot.

Once complete we'll have a mix of random daily events (like OAs, and boss spawns) combined with hand designed, plot driven, mission style events. Hopefully it will give Dead Frontier more goals and purpose, whilst also making the game world come to life. I want to make Fairview feel like a real place.

The hardest part in all of this will be the actual writing for the plot. At the moment I'm leaning towards the possibility of taking submissions from the DF community, but I'm not totally decided at this stage. The other option is that I convince Ian (Xaelath) to do it, since he did such an awesome job with the Outbreak mini-games.

Of course expanding the design will mean more time, but not too much more. As I mentioned before, some of the work is already done so I'm thinking it'll be ready in 2 weeks. Please don't lynch me if I'm wrong though.

Bunch of updates

Unfortunately my house move took up far more time than I expected. The biggest problem was that it took forever for the internet company to setup a connection in the new house. I was travelling back to the old house to get some stuff done, but it's a good 2 hours journey in each direction so was hard to do it often enough (especially since I can't drive and had to rely on other people for lifts). The new connection finally came up on the 10th of this month and since then I've managed to get a fair bit done.

Recently I've been working on:
OAs
Boss loots
New enemies
PvP improvements

I'm aiming to at least have OAs and boss loots complete by the end of next week, and the rest in the week after that.

Oh, and if anyone is wondering why I've chosen to do these things first (rather than interiors and barricading for example) it's because I feel these are the updates that will provide the biggest "bang for your buck" in terms of time. IE, they will add a lot to the game and won't take me a very long time to implement.