Yet another weekly post Options

[maever]

Trying to make it a habit to do a weekly blog post,
going well so far

Sagramore is becoming a real motivation to work on these last weeks,
Seeing the progress we're making, I see us nearing completion each time.
Our current open beta date is set on the 22nd of February 2010.


Yesterday I was busy with filling in various elements of the game design document while Borf worked on inserting the new mapformat in the client.

Mechanics
Currently i'm working out various game mechanics concerning stats and skills.
Most of the game mechanics content that was worked out on the wiki has been redone in the gamedesign document.
Though most changes are small they do have a major influence on the final game.

for example:
For deciding on the active skill system we compared 2 options
1. Ragnarok Style
Where a class has a set of skills which you can assign skillpoints to.
2. WoW style
Where you actually buy the skills based on if certain requirements are met or not.

Though my roots lie in Ragnarok, the WoW system has more appeal for a few reasons:

1. It allows for better manipulation of the skills system
   As a skill simply can't be obtained if certain conditions are met.
   this allows us to focus on an area-to-area basis during development, less room for unbalance.
2. Quest rewards
   It grants us the possibility to assign certain elite leveled skills as a reward for a quest.
3. Higher customizability of classes.
   Not directly being limited to a skill "tree" sturcture

The same goes for our "talents" system, which is initially a concept used by World of Warcraft.
Talents are basically a tree structure of passive skills.
Seeing as we needed less expandability in the passive skill system we choose for a tree sturcture.

There is a lot more to it then first meets the eye.

New map format
You've been hearing loads about it and seeing nearly nothing of it.
As there simply is not much to see yet. The work borf is currently doing are required steps to allow our mapdesigners to make maps with more freedom.
When you think of it in terms of general common sense, it seems only natural to want a huge (almost) never ending map.
But in terms of IT there is no such thing as "infinite", our current worldmap file is currently takes up over 100Mb of server memory, and its completely empty! Good news of this is that it wont get much bigger in size for the server as we start building it.
Publishing the entire worldmap with the mapeditor (10240 x 10240 tiles) takes about 6+ hours to render completely.
This does require us to look at more optimized means of publishing as waiting 6 hours to submit worldmap changes is a bit too much.

more next week and possibly some actual screenshots

[Pollux]

Looking forward to it Keep it up


Pollux

[Borf]

I wonder what we're going to do to atlas

[maever]

Added a few new things to the wiki's cities and landmarks section.


http://sagramore.com/wiki/index.php/Catego...s_and_Landmarks