Artix
Thank you for letting us know! Oh boy.... our new release is NOT live yet. But things we are working on keep escaping the matrix and leaking live before we are finished with them. We plan on releasing the new quests and rewards tomorrow.
Going to use this one word while we still can... "ALPHA"
The idea of things escaping the dev matrix is pretty comical. It is late and a bunch of us are still in chat working on tomorrow's release and also the upcoming Undead Invasion of Swordhaven. I will make story time short.
We have a pretty slick pipeline for AQ3D. All code is built on a code server. All content is built on a content server. The result of code & content are merged and pushed onto a Stage Server where we can test. Once everything looks good, we run the Cloud Builder to build for every platform and roll everything to the Live Servers for everyone to play. Each one of these steps has their own database. Here is a recap...
Code & Content --> Stage --> Cloud build for all platforms --> Live
The downside of this, is the process is really slow and eats almost an entire day of our week. Which is A LOT considering we only get 5 of them "days" each week. So, we really want to make things faster here in Infinity
The original AQWorlds was built a long time ago and uses a much simpler system. It has a single database. We "staff flag" items so they do not appear until they are ready. The Flash files themselves do all of the work... so we build them on our content server and when we are ready, we simply "roll the flash files live".
Content --> Live
So, in this new game, we understandably attempted to combine the very best of both worlds... we have special code and content servers. But we have a single database for simplicity. We took the heavy lifting away from the way we did it in Flash and had the database do that stuff so we can update things in near "real time". For example, in the original AQWorlds the NPCs, their text, their buttons are all hard coded/placed into the flash files. In order to update them, you need to get the file, make changes, publish it, and upload it to the server. Also you need to add a number at the end to break your browsers cache. Your browser LOVES to horde the files and not let you get the new ones. Well, we improved that in Infinity by moving all of the things the NPC's say into the database. Not only will this make it possible to translate those things in the future... it means we can update it on the fly and just restart the server... or run a command to fetch the latest text... and it updates instantly. Buuuuuuuut.... what happens when the live server reboots before the release is ready? Well, you just found out. (And so did we.) We currently do not have a way to "staff flag" NPCs or their Text. So when the coders restarted the servers for a stealth patch, the quest text, npcs, and other unfinished things just magically appeared in the maps. O_O Whoops. At least we do not write naughty things in our placeholder text. (Actually, someone did do this way back in 2008-ish and I got really mad at them. Never write mean spirited things in the placeholders, in the comments of code, or frankly anywhere. The same as I would get mad if anyone ever talked badly about the players. It is unacceptable behavior and just not part of our fun and friendly culture.) The Infinity issue was a comical perfect storm... because everyone working on this project either came from AQWorlds or AQ3D. Each person at a gut level assumed it worked the same way we had always done things in the project we came from. Neither of these issues are likely to happen in those games. It is a uniquely Infinity problem because we merged the best of both worlds... and ironically got the worst edge case of each world too. :D So the solution, is "simply" to add auto staff flags to EVERYTHING by default and have a single button to press to turn them all off when we are ready to go live. It is going to take a while to do this, so expect to see this happen a few more times before then.
Assuming it actually releases tomorrow, not Friday :D
J6's Pirate Bounty Hunter armor (see I can leak things in the design notes too.) and quests! More Captain Rhubarb Alpha Pirate Quests!
Thank you for reading. Hope I explained this with the correct level of detail and you got a laugh and learned a little bit about our process too.
