MedievaLands Forums

Hail all! I have a couple of announcements to make. Let's get into it.

First off, I am working on a complete revamp of the item system. There has been a good deal of chatter lately about diversifying the types of items found in the Dungeon. Currently the game is limited to only the original 255 item templates found in the source game files. This rewrite of the item system will allow the server to inform the client of an infinite number of item types, which will enable, down the road, more fun items to find, crafting systems, companions, and who knows what else. Most of this will be be invisible to the player, but you should see the first neat new items in the middle of next week.

Second, I have a firm date in mind, finally, for the general Twinion release. I am very thankful for the twinion testers who have tried out this sequel thus far, and helped me find and fix bugs therein. The game has been solved by Bluelite down to Level 5...

... and I am finally confident enough to say that the game will soon be ready for public testing, and following that, a general release.

So here are the dates:

* March 6: Twinion testing goes live for everyone, and I email the 50 or so testers who asked me to let them know when I add more features to the game (I haven't reached out to these folks since May 2019 - I hope they'll be happy to hear from me!).

* March 27: Twinion grand release. I reach out to the 100 people who asked me to send them regular updates (again, I haven't touched base since May... but that's another story for another time), plus some online game forums, retro gaming websites, and press outlets.

I hope you're as excited as I am at the prospect of a reinvigorated tavern!

In the meantime: I will be out of town Feb 20-24 and March 2-5 for vacation and work. I may not be able to respond to bug reports during that time - but I promise you, I'll be back soon.

Good luck down there.

This sounds great! We've been talking recently about new items and all, and I wasn't aware there was an item limit in the game.

Ah, the wonders of game modernization.

An update on the item refactor: this was a difficult thing to accomplish, but where there's a will, there's a way. The client no longer knows anything about item templates - it only receives data describing each item. This means that the transmitted size of an item has jumped from just 6 bytes (the item's serial identifier, byte type, and byte charges) to around 60, but I also took this opportunity to optimize when item data is sent to the client. The end result is that there's a larger initial payload, but then after that this new upgrade is a net savings on net traffic. Not that these things matter in an age of everpresent broadband, but it's a neat detail nonetheless.

Neater still are the doors that this improvement opens. This unlocks the opportunity to start adding all sorts of things: new items and weapons, pets, and potentially down the road crafting and who knows what else.

I'm off on vacation. Expect me back next Tuesday.

I'm at a conference for work this week. Will be back on Thursday.

I'm continuing to work on the new item framework. There are some exciting things upcoming, but in implementing these, I've realized that I've had to rewrite more of the original MedievaLands server to get them working.

The issue arises from my original implementation of MedievaLands: something designed to run Yserbius, and Yserbius only. I refactored a ton of the code between October and January to add Twinion, but still, the engine was designed to only run a game exactly like Yserbius.

And Yserbius has some pretty limiting constraints. There are only 253 item templates in the game (indexed to valeus 0-255, not including 0 or 255). So if I'm going to add to that, I need to rewrite not just the code that defines items, but also the code that handles items on the server and displays them on the client.

Adding new properties has proven similarly difficult. The original game allowed flat modifiers to stats, or use of a spell or skill...

... and that's that. What if I wanted to add a percentage modifier to damage, or a healing over time, or a game effect not defined by one of the original game's spells or skills.

As an aside, this is likely why the original game, the first sequel Twinion, and the second sequel Cawdor all had the exact same selection of races, guilds, spells, and skills, and the items all had the same types of stat boosts: the original game design was hard coded into the engine. Changing it would have proven quite difficult (particularly if the original game was memory constrained in some way).

Well, back to work. I'll be back Thursday evening, and then will deploy the Twinion game to everyone on Friday. Hopefully I'll have one more big feature addition before Friday.

Take care!

Hail friends - I've just turned on Twinion for all players.

I was at a conference for work for four days thus week and so did not get as much done as I had hoped to do. I'm disappointed in myself. But I also know that the Twinion game is strong and stable, and ready for the kind of thorough testing that only a larger playerbase can bring.

I'll be reaching out to the MedievaLands tester group early tomorrow morning, and look forward to welcoming them back this weekend, and over the next three weeks as I continue to improve the game in preparation for a 'grand release' of Twinion in three weeks.