I started this post at 11am.
The AdventureQuest3D: Legend of LORE project is.... (and this is how far I got. -10 turns for AQ3D work related distractions.)
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The AdventureQuest3D: Legend of LORE project is.... (and this is how far I got. -10 turns for AQ3D work related distractions.)
It's the end of the week and there are lots of really fun releases coming your way!
Skyguard: Chaos on the Horizon! Bombs away! Hunker down in a hidden bunker Members! This week calls for a /disguise if you’re going to figure out the Master’s latest scheme. Then, the sky’s the limit! Be careful, though; after the Master infiltrated the SkyGuard High Command in his last plot, his thirst for Chaos has only increased! With Captain Stratos flying off the handle in search ofvengeance, this week the battle depends on your blade or Lore could fall to Chaos!
Don't forget to head to Yulgar's Inn to view our new Suggestion items! Players just like you came up with the ideas, and we are excited to put them in game! Both Dage and Nulgath have new gear in their war shops! See the Design Notes for pictures and information.
www.AQ.com
The end is near. Exile and Legion forces have nearly breached the Delta Vaults to seize the spoils of war and dictate the fate of Delta V! Leaked intel reveals plans of a deadly new weapon hidden in the Delta Vault. Known as the Infernal Android, this bot's special attack builds power the longer you wait to use it, making it a great finishing move for long duels.
Far from the heat of the mines in the Barrens Bazaar, the mighty Titan has crafted a delicious vehicle of his own design! There's a limited supply, so get them before Titan gets hungry!
www.EpicDuel.com
Wargoth's forces have been decimating the world of Lore. Will you be able to protect The Professor when Wargoth himself strikes?
www.DragonFable.com
Log in to say Happy Birthday to Maegwyn at the Knife and Spork, pick up a special new weapon for your swordfights, and then stop by the Soluna Museum to see Val for new missions on Liath, the Black and White Planet! You will get to begin exploring the corridors behind the Mysterious Balance room! This is the first of a two-part quest that continues the Artifact missions on Planet Liath.
www.MechQuest.com
Check out the Movie Plex to see the hottest new gear! And don't forget, the Daily Random Shop gets updated every day.
www.HeroSmash.com
It's War! During your reconnaissance you saved a creature almost consumed by the Truphma, and discovered a deity named Xov is involved! Now it is up to you and your fellow adventurers to stop them!
www.BattleOn.com
Are you like me? Do all of your best ideas happen when you are standing in the shower? Sometimes I think ideas must fall from the spigot with the water. Today I was thinking how much life was like a video game. I figured if life was a game, maybe we get a certain number of turns per day. It was only a matter of time until I started doing the math on how many turns I have used so far in life, and how many I probably have left. (Oh man, this is going to be one of those WEIRD design notes posts.) So how much time should a turn be? Most things we do take a half hour. For example it takes roughly a half hour to watch a TV show, eat a meal, play a video game for a bit, etc. So, to keep things simple, let us say that 1 Turn = 1/2 Hour of real life time.There are 24 hours in a day. So, you have a MAX of 48 turns per day. Everything you do costs a number of turns. For example, sleep. (Pffft. Like gamers sleep.) If you sleep for 10 hours... that is 20 turns! (New Game Rule: If you do not sleep, you become "sleepy" and doing difficult tasks will actually take extra turns.) Ok, before we continue... how about we take a comic break.
Mia J. Park posted this on her FaceBook page. If you are a fan of her music from the AQWorlds MerAngel event, be sure to give her a like.
That was random, yet adorable.
So I started breaking down all of the things we do into turns. Seeing life this way is really interesting... it also becomes a continious reminder that if you want to do something in life, you really gotta start doing it now!
Your Name: _______________________
Turns per day: 28 (Which is actually 48.... -20 for sleep)
List everything you did today and how many turns each thing took you.
These are my numbers, be sure to come up with your own!
Work or School: 18 Turns
Eat: 1 Turn (Not eating will result in a -15 turn per day penalty)
Talk to someone about something: 1 Turn
Sleep: 20 Turns (Not sleeping will result in "Sleepy" which increases how many turns an activity takes)
Working out: 2 Turns
Watch a Movie: 6 Turns
Go to the Mall: 6 Turns
Write a design notes post: 3 Turns
Jamming with the band: 4 Turns
Play Games for a little bit: 2 Turns
Play Games for A LOT: 8+ Turns
Writing the plot for an AQWorlds release: 8 Turns
Drawing 1 AQWorlds Monster: 8 Turns
Animating 1 AQWorlds Monster: 8 Turns
Getting distracted on the web: 1 Turn (Happens a lot!)
Creating a simple Game Design Document: 32 Turns
Designing a Card Game: 280 Turns
Building a MMO Multiplayer Game Engine from scratch: 2,400 turns
... add your own!
Some other thoughts included... caffine gives a temporary +1 turn speed buff. However, each usage of caffine lowers your caffine resistance ultimate resulting in a heavy -turn penalty. Being sick gives a -Turn penalty depending on sickness type. If you are part of a party, you may get +Turn bonuses if you work well together, but people working against you will definately cause -Turn Penalties.
If you actually take the last week of your life and write down what you did and how many turns you used... you may find the same thing that I did. I have A LOT of wasted turns. I also do not have enough turns to do a lot of the big things that I want to do myself. That is... if you spend all of your turns doing one thing (like building a MMO game, writing a book, drawing a comic, building a website) you will achieve it faster than if you spread your turns doing a little bit of everything. Do not take my word for it -- add up your turns yourself.
What is really scary is, after work or school is over... most of us only have 10 turns left in the day. But we use 2 of those for eating so there is really only 8 TURNS PER DAY to do stuff you want! We need to use them the best we can. If you have a dream of doing something.... use your 8 turns to do it. Do not wait. Because if you waste a turn, there is no getting it back.
P.S. Also, respawn does not appear to work. The Life RPG appears to be in "Hard Core" mode.
P.P.S. Oh, and if life is a game.... remember to HAVE FUN!
QUESTION: Comment on this post and give me a breakdown of your turns from today or even the entire week. I would love to see how you spend your points.
If you have not been able to access your AdventureQuest Worlds account because you have been hacked or had some other problem, you are in luck! The beautiful and helpful Nythera, and her team of real life, living, breathing, actual people right here at the lab (Zazul, Lady Tomo*, Memet & Neveya) have full time jobs to help you and other players fix account problems. You can contact them by using AQWorlds customer support. Well, you can actually contact them using ANY of the support links on any of our games. Every once in a while we have a special "player support event" day like we did yesterday where several hundred accounts were fixed. But, LOL, that is no different from what Nythera and her team do every single day. I do think having the special event raised awareness on how to get your account fixed though. So if you are unable to access your account, contact player support! (And, remember, posting a comment here is NOT contacting player support, so make sure you go to the right place where we can and are happy to help you!)
* Lady Tomo is actually not at the Lab. We do not know where she is. She may be answering player support requests from the far reaches of space or another theoretical dimension -- like Canada.
Um... click on the screnshot below to load the 3D Animated Monster Viewer (Unity) that we put together for you! Then read the story of how the Trolluk was named below. For those of you who have been watching our progress... we have come a long way from that initial sketch and black and white model.
Check out the Trolluk in our 3D Animated Monster Viewer (Unity)
Loth, the adventurer who is credited with first seeing a Trollulk, commented in an exclusive interview, "It's been nearly a year since I first discovered the Trolluk. Well, I didn't discover it. Little Figgy the moglin saw it first. I remember it like it was yesterday. He raised his little finger, pointed up at the approaching monster and shouted 'TROLL'... and as the club suddenly came down on his head he let out a pretty squeeky 'UK!'. By the time our healer inquisitively asked, 'A Troll-wha?' I was already running away so fast that I barely heard the sound of that club flattening him into a pancake too. Barely. I have a new adventuring party now. We mostly just hide in the inn playing parcheesi now. What? Don't you dare give me that judging stare. Only adventures with a death wish would want to go up against a Trolluk!" We have yet to find another adventurer who has survived an encounter with a Trolluk. Loth was last seen at the Inn, bragging about a buff gave him the narrow adventage he needed to win a tricky game of parcheesi. (The "UK!" sound first appeared when you shoot a moglin in Robina's Monster Hunt)
Often referred to as the "Awwwww man... the world did not end.... AGAIN!? calendar" we are working on the official Artix Entertainment ALL GAMES 2013 calendar. As posted on my Twitter earlier today, we would like to try something new. Instead of using existing game art to put together the standard 12 page calendar, we would like to put the artist dream team of Dioz, Mido & Dage together and let them go ALL OUT to create a massive calendar poster. (The last thing you saw them do was the Dage vs Nulgath - which set our all time record number of likes on Facebook.) The theme, would be celebrating our 10 years of adventure which begins this October. Someone on Twitter mentioned it should be like those crazy Capcom Streetfighter mashup posters... and we think that is a GREAT IDEA! So we will try to feature as many heroes and villains from all games as possible. Dioz is doing a thumbnail sketch so we can show you what we mean. But we could use your help.... what heroes and villains would you like to see on the calendar!? Comment on this post and let us know! (Login in the upper right)
On Wednesday, a reporter from the local FOX News channel came for an interview. He found out about us because last Friday we were on the cover of the Tampa Bay Business Journal. This is not a visit he will forget any time soon. When he pressed the button and the doors opened, he did not know if the metallic suit of armor in the elevator was just for decoration or not. When it spoke, "WELCOME TO ARTIX ENTERTAINMENT. ALLOW ME TO ESCORT YOU TO THE LAB." and pressed the button, he was caught off guard. But not nearly as much when the elevator reached its destination and the doors opened and he saw another fully armored knight, two machine-gun-weilding ninjas and the lovely Kiara -- who, in stark contrast, was wearing jeans, a black t-shirt and holding some sort of official looking clipboard. The Knight in blue offered him a fresh bottle of water.
We conducted the standard tour of the lab... which is a fun and cheery place full of creative energy. (That is, if you overlook all the chains, prop skulls & bones in the development server room) Another group of guests, including some very young children, were also touring... everything went well. Mostly thanks to the last minute encouragement from my friends on Twitter. Thank you... and I love you guys! We do not normally post pictures from the lab, but it is Friday and you deserve a special glimpse behind the scenes.
This is "The War Room" where I work. You can only guess at who the two girls are on the far side of the table. The guy in armor and the girl in pink do not have "game names" yet... so, I guess you could call them "Phantoms of the Lab." Anyway, this is the War Room, a super long room that features a large table that seats up to 10 people. Different people work in there with me every day depending on the project. For example, the other day we were working on the 3D game so Zhoom, Yergen and Xero were in here with me. There is a giant TV on the opposite end of the room that we plug our laptops into so we can share what we are doing. Also, notice everyone is working on a laptop. This allows us to play musical chairs between the various rooms in the lab as projects require us to work together. A truly high speed collaborative work environment! Oooooh.... You can just barely see my computer on the right of the screen with the little red glowing light. That is where I am sitting now. The wall that you cannot see is made of glass. Not very effective defense against ninjas or zombies. But that is why we have swords mounted on the wall.
Even with the current "not so stable" version of the game live, we were suprised at how many people found it, downgraded their their flash player and logged in. Again, I would not reccomend downgrading your player because Adobe has a new version coming soon. Because a few people have asked, I would like to remind everyone that you are not missing out on anything. We will not be doing the cool stuff, or giving out AlphaPoints until the game version is not crashing/failing. Also, you will be able to become an AlphaKnight at any time during testing... and testing will last a long time! While we wait, I am working with Yergen & Korin to build you a monster model viewer.... then we can post some 3D models of the monsters and animations right here on the design notes! (I think.)
UPDATE: I just got a message on Twitter telling me that if you log into portal.battleon.com you can see your AQ3D account and the number of AlphaPoints you have. Max is currently 450. If you are not at 450, wait unti lthe stable version comes out then you can get your points.
The folks over at Adobe just sent us a pre-release of the new version of the Flash player which fixes the Memory leak. We are super excited!!! Now we are just waiting for our friends over at Unity to send us the Beta invite to Unity 4.0 *crosses fingers*
It's Friday again, and lots of stuff is going on!
Disloyalty is NOT an option! This weekend, your battling will decide which Evil Commander gains control of the Underworld!
Choose to fight for Dage the Evil, Nulgath the Archfiend, or yourself... no matter which side you choose, you'll get awesome loot! Will Dage rise as Nulgath’s shadow falls? That is up to you and your fellow warriors!
www.AQ.com
The end is near! The final vault door is poised to fall and the Legion and Exile forces are massing in the Infernal Mines to be the first to breach the mysterious Delta Vault. Will the Legion claim the vault and wipe the Exiles from Delta V or can the Exiles seize control of Baelius' most carefully guarded secret and change the course of the war?
www.EpicDuel.com
This week, the Professor and Xan need your help! Are you strong enough to help break Jaania's crystal prison?
www.DragonFable.com
Visit Maegwyn at the Knife and Spork Diner on the West side of Soluna City this Friday for a NEW challenge! Level 33 is recommended. When you complete this challenge, the 2nd place shops for Maegwyn's Advanced Contest will open to reveal a reward weapon inspired by one that was suggested on the forums!
www.MechQuest.com
Have you seen any movies that came out in the past year? Are you itching to put on gear from your favorite movies? Then come check out the Blockbuster Movie Fest! And don't forget to check the Daily Random Shop every day to see if you can get another chance to buy that rare you missed out on last time.
www.HeroSmash.com
With the Truphma setting up camps across the west, you must venture deep into enemy territory and try to discover their plans! This week's release features a fun, new water-based armor from AQ artist/animator Clyde!
www.BattleOn.com
The less traveled path is often more dangerous. Right now, we are on the cutting edge. We can tell. Mostly because we are getting cut a lot. Cut deep by a never ending sea of technical glitches, bugs, crashes, and oddities. Things are going to get a lot better in the very near future. I know it will. But today, *wipes brow*, we are going to need some bandaids.
Immediately following our last test of the AdventureQuest 3D walk/chat/multiplayer server engine, we announced that we were going to return to focusing on getting it working in Flash. This was mostly because of Adobe's announcement. Tomorrow was our deadline to get the flash version of AQ3D online. While we are aware of the extension, we continued pushing through the nights and weekends of the past month just as if the deadline had not changed. So, knowing us, it will not surprise you to find out that a Flash version of the game engine (which, as previously stated, does not actually work in the newest, current version of Flash) is now complete. WHAT!? Yes. We stealth launched it earlier today. Before I give you a clue to where it is and you go hunting for the mysterious 3D game that only crashes your web browser unless you downgrade to a potentially dangerous old version of Flash, there are a few things you need to know...
Knowing is half the battle!
But there is good news!
A FOX News reporter is coming to the lab tomorrow. I am really anxious to show him our new... oh god.
"The glass is half... AWESOME!"
Sure, things look grim. But this is what it is like being on the cutting edge. It is only a matter of time before things magically flip and everything suddenly comes together. For the moment, we are sitting on the edge of our seats, waiting for the updated version of the Flash exporter to be released. I appriciate how wonderfully patient you are. Yergen suggested that we run some sort of monster designing contest while we wait. Thyton already has a stack of monster concepts a mile high, but it would be cool if the winning original entry became one of the 1st monsters in the game. It would be a drawing contest, so Xero would do the 3D modeling. What do you think? (Log in and comment below)
Here's what's going on in all the games! I'll be playing them all, but the question is which game to log into first - should I take down the final Vault door in ED, help a pirate princess get her treasure in DF, inspect a strange door in a cave in MQ, investigate the mysterious activity in AQ classic, or play through simulations of AQ, DF, and MQ to see the Chaos Lord's big reveal in AQW???
It’s time for Chaos! Return to The Span in AQWorlds this weekend to visit a city of half-remembered faces and monsters that seem familiar, but aren’t. The golems there tell stories of a mysterious Master and hint at the dark plans he has for you. But just how dark ARE they? Adventure through simulations of AdventureQuest, DragonFable, and MechQuest as the clock counts down to the Chaos Lord’s big
reveal!
There are also 3 new war rewards for Dage the Evil's loyal followers AND 3 new rewards for Nulgath's warriors in the /evilwar map!
www.AQ.com
The third door has fallen! Who will be first through the fourth and final door to the mysterious Delta Vault and claim the bounty within? This week, explore the deeper story behind the Infernal War by visiting Ulysses or Valestra in the warzone to start an epic quest chain loaded with prizes and intrigue. Also, stop by the Heavy Mechachillid who will be offering 6 new credit weapons and a limited-quantity Om Nom Bomb for massive damage against the Vault!
www.EpicDuel.com
This week, the pirate princess needs your help! Are you brave enough to help the princess rescue her most valuable treasure?
www.DragonFable.com
Dan has been communicating with Val and the House Leaders about that enormous door in the cave, and meanwhile, the airship patrols have been reporting evidence of volcanic activity since you were last there! We need your help! Travel to Planet Liath with your mecha to assist in the investigation.
www.MechQuest.com
Make sure to log in every day to check out the Daily Random Shop!
www.HeroSmash.com
The lands to the west have long been shrouded in mystery. After the devastation caused by Lady Tomo they have seemed desolate for so long... until now. Activity has recently been stirring and you'll need to track down Eukara Vox and Lady Tomo for answers! You'll have a chance to interview Tomo personally or seek out the story from Eukara, with one of the paths having bonus rewards! Features new, player-suggested reward!
www.BattleOn.com
This year, our 10th anniversary year, is our most ambitious and by far our most challenging. As you read this the AdventureQuest Worlds team is recoding the game to fix the lag and bugs then moving on to creating guilds and guild PvP, DragonFable's Chapter 2 finale is less than a few weeks away, MechQuest is getting ready to start its grand finale, "Galaxy at War", we are getting ready to continue the tests for the new 3D game we are developing, AdventureQuest 3D: Legend of LORE, meanwhile several members of our team have been stolen by EbilCorp to create another new game, Oversoul. Additionally, we are working on the AQWorlds Artbook, the 2013 calendar, Drakath, Cysero & Galanoth action figures, and.... *takes a deeeeeeep breath* ... we are finally going to do what we set out to do three years ago. Create a unified website for you and ONE LOGIN TO RULE THEM ALL! (Secret: It is going to happen right here, on www.Artix.com)
I was taught, and believe "the only way to fail is to quit." The famous inventor of the lightbulb, Thomas Edison, made 1,000 unsuccessful attempts before he finally created one that worked. When interviewed he said, "I didn't fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps." Of course, you already know that about us and you are a part of it. That is why you are reading this right now. Sure, everyone likes seeing us epically mess up and fall on our faces... but the truly fascinating part to watch is how we always get right back up and keep on going until we get it right. So I want you to know we are are fixing all of the problems you have told us about at Portal.BattleOn.com by building a bigger, better website right here.Our goal is to have EVERYTHING.... upgraded forums, unified player support, all game management, cross game achievements, gamer pages, etc. done by summer next year. We will be starting by releasing the new site design in about 2 weeks along with the AdventureQuest 3D Beta website. Then, just like how we evolve our games, we will begin upgrading the features of the website one step at a time.
Within a year, you will be able to access all of the games with your existing Artix Entertainment "One Login to Rule Them All" account. Actually, you can test your login right now by clicking login at the top right of the webpage. It is the exact same login you use for Portal.BattleOn.com. The login box asks you to use your email, but if you signed up when we used to use account names, use your account name instead of email.
Yesterday, Cysero and I visited MOSI (Tampa's Museum of Science and Industry) and spent time with 22 young students taking the Summer Video Game Design camp. A bunch of us at AE volenteered to participate in their various educational summer programs. Because this was a game design class, I stayed up the night before and made a small 4 page guide for creating adventures "The AE way!" It is super condensed, but a great place to start when building stories and characters for your adventures. Many of you on Twitter were requesting to see it... so I posted the Video Game World Creator's Tips & Tricks as a .PDF right here for you to download! I hope it is useful to you.(You know, until I made this... I never fully appriciated all the things my teachers from school made for the class.)
Thanks to all of the amazing testers on the AQWorlds PTR server, Yorumi was able to find "THE CRAZY NaN BUG." I would like to share the nitty gritty details of this bug... but first, from your Twitter and Facebook messages I realized that many players do not know what is actually happening behind the scenes on the PTR (aka Public Test Realm.) and why it restarts so much. Really tricky bugs like the Crazy NaN bug do not appear on our normal staff-only test servers. In order to cause them we need to do two things: 1.) Have tons of players on. 2.) Create a special version of the game server which watches for specific things and then writes the errors somewhere we can investigate. So, everytime you have seen the server restart, you are playing on a new version of the game server which is doing massive bug hunting and testing. Because of this... by process of elimination.... we found the Great GrandDaddy of all AQWorlds problems: THE CRAZY NaN Bug.
If you played our older games you may have hit a monster for "NaN" damage. What is NaN? (not to be confused with the delicious bread at Indian Restaurants) NaN stands for "Not a Number." It is what happens when you ask Flash what 1 + "a" equals. That is not a variable, that is actually the letter "a." It breaks the computer's brain. In human terms it is sort of like asking someone what the color blue smells like. But how could this be a problem for us? We have gotten really good at protecting our games from NaN problems... REALLY GOOD. I mean we use a function EVERYWHERE that makes sure that nothing isNaN. That was not a typo, the function is actually called isNaN(). Say "isNaN" in a silly cat voice in your head... it is sorta cute. Remember the NaN Cat from the AQWorlds Meme release? Anyway... despite all of our isNaN checks, every once in a while some NaNs were still getting through and generating hordes of mysterious and unexpainable errors on the server. After two days of non-stop banging heads against desk, Yorumi finally figured it out. isNaN, as cute as it is, does not work in ONE very specific situation. To demonstrate, let's feed isNaN some things that are Not a Number and see what happens:
Is Not a Number?
isNaN("a") = True
isNaN("chicken") = True
isNaN("I like dinosaurs that shoot lasers out of their eyes") = True
isNaN(<null>) = True
isNaN("") = False!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!
WHAT!? How is nothing a valid number? This was flat out illogical & baffling! So there it is... because the isNaN function fails under that one specific condition, there are mabye thousands of tiny rare bugs that occassionally happen in AQWorlds, generating thousands of errors. Once we found the problem it was super easy to fix. Yorumi changed every instance of isNaN in the game to also look for empty "" values. This fix might actually speed up literally every part of the game server.... the PTR server is currently running the fix. Help us continue the tests!
I wrote you a lot extra today since I will be flying north on a short mission for the Secret Order of Undead Slayers. It is a shame the orders do not tell me what sort of undead we will be facing. The orders are delivered by ghosts oh phantom paper that disolves into the ether once it is read. I am pretty sure the creepy noises they make during delivery are just for atmosphere and not really needed. Until I return on Monday, Kiara will be posting updates on here and on my Twitter. Battle on!
Comments/Forum/Twitter/FaceBook Question: What features would you like to see on the new Artix.com? (Examples: A character page that shows off all your games' characters? Ability to hide PonyVsPony -- ok, that is my feature request. A screen that let you play multiple games on a single page?)