Greetings fellow Istarians. Let me introduce myself. I am Amarië AncalÃ**mon, providing you the inside scoop on what's happening in the world of Istarian development. Some of you may have seen my recent patch preview over on Stratics. But I wanted to bring you more than just a preview of the most recent patch. And as it has been pointed out that today is the fourth anniversary of Istaria - Happy Birthday Istaria! - we thought this would be a good time to sneak a peak at some bigger picture items:


Terrain Client Update

The new client is nearing the point where the developers feel it is ready to be released on live servers. There are still some issues to work out, and a bright pink sticky note is on the side of our client programmer's computer reminding him to check a special discussion thread on our forums looking for feedback. We're getting close to where QA will be ready to put the “pass” stamp on the new client.

Unity Database

Many are anxiously awaiting the ability to transfer Unity characters from that database to one of the live servers. And we'd hoped to be able to offer this to you by now, but as with all things computer related, hope is not enough. This has been a multi-step process where we have reached many milestones. One of the early milestones was to figure out what state the characters on that database were in comparison to the US databases, and to confirm what patches had been applied and what had not, and to understand exactly what needed to be done to update each person's account and characters. A good example of some of the background work has been to quantify the number of the existing characters and ensure that if all previous Unity players brought their characters over, it wouldn't cause a negative impact on existing Order/Chaos populations. Also, we felt it was necessary to prepare for plots to be reclaimed, so that Unity players can truly find a home on Order/Chaos when they do arrive there. There's also been some legal issues that needed resolution. Many of these items have already been completed. Once they all are done, we will ask for “test cases” to be transferred from Unity to Blight to hopefully find any bugs that will only show up once we really start the transfers. Much of what we're waiting on is out of our hands. At this point we we're planning on starting to test in the new year.


Vista Compatibility

Another “big ticket item” this holiday season has been to make progress with Horizons and Vista. This is a very big job and we're working on it. For those of you with a background in programming, one of our bigger tasks is to complete the move over to Visual Studio 2005. After that is done, we can complete our Vista compatibility testing with our third party libraries (like Miles, etc) and baring any further changes, wrap up the needed Windows API changes for Vista compatibility. There's still work to do, but we are making good progress.


Tier Revamp

We've started looking at the next tier in our ongoing tier revamps, this time taking a closer look at the area around Dalimond and Chiconis. Start to look for more quests for adventurers of this level range, and land revamps similar to what was recently completed on Lesser Aradoth. As part of this revamp, we've begun testing some changes to spawns as well. I can see the developers planning to make the spawn system revamp something that spreads through all of Istaria, not just in this area, but there are many, many notes around their computers on how the changes around Dalimond effected spawns, and it appears this will be an ongoing process. I wish I could tell you more, but the notes were written in code, and I don't speak code fluently yet. Perhaps there will be a “Translating Programmer Speak for Dummies” book in my stocking this year, and I'll be able to tell you more in a future report.


Confectioner Revamp

And, of course, work continues on the Confectioner Revamp. With each patch more resource areas are brought in, and development gets closer to being at a point of testing. Sometime after the new year we hope to hold a big feast on our Blight Test server where we can all sample some new confectioner delights.

Horizons: Empire of Istaria marks our four year birthday with an exciting future for the coming year. We like to think of 2007 as the year of the Phoenix - we're working hard to make 2008 the year of the Dragon. Thank you to our player community for your support over the last four years. We look forward to working with you for many years to come. From all of us at Virtrium, we hope you and your families all have a joyous holiday season.

Merry Gnomekindle to all, and to all a good night.

Amarië AncalÃ**mon
Horizons Development Team

Discuss in the forums here:
http://community.istaria.com/forum/s...922#post168922