Announcements

Hello Runners!

It's been a while since we made an official status update and recap, so we thought we give you a little something-something for the summer hole.

Lets start with the beginning of the year. In December 2014 we pushed hard to release you the first of the community created runs. For us this meant a lot of crunch since this required an upgrade of ye ol' mission system. To put it simple, there was only a limited amount of unique runs possible to be supported by the game. Those are the type of runs that can only be complete once per character, like Epic missions or the Tiki run. So, in order to implement the community written runs we began writing a new mission system and the "NCPD has an Eye on you!" run by Hell Deamon was our first test run for that new mission system.

Unfortunately, after that crunch we hit a wall with our development efforts in January, as some of you might have noticed with the account expiration issues. To clear up the situation about that: currently all the rights of the intellectual property and the brand of Neocron belong to Kirk Lenke, whom we have a gentlemens agreement with about Neocron.
This agreement allows us to operate the game and develop it further, yet, what happens with the brand beyond that is not our call.
So in case you where wondering why we don't go on Steam or anything: Kirk has the say in that matter, not us.

Part of our development process are also regular talks to coordinate our efforts between Kirk and Zoltan. We always only receive permission to operate Neocron for a set amount of time before the agreement gets a renewal. This also includes the game accounts. Approaching January there was a radio silence for some time before whenever we tried to contact Kirk. This silence was what has lead to the expiration issue at the beginning of the year, without any word from the IP holder we where simply bound to let the accounts expire as we had to assume that there was no renewal of the agreement.
As you can see, we decided to renew the game accounts on our own accord, indefinitely for now.

So, the year started with a big question mark and the development work ceased for a while as we where waiting for Kirk to come back at us with news. When that didn't happen we decided to continue on our own from that point on with the development. However that does NOT change the fact that Kirk still holds all the rights over Neocron and it's his decision to pull the plug if he wishes so.


But obviously more happened since march, aside from team members finding new jobs and other real life changes, aside of constant DDOS spam from zombie bot nets - there where also improvements to the game!

HA! You didn't think so, did ya?

A lot of that happened behind the scenes, in the code. Thats why you might not feel or see those changes but they are there. First of all a lot of work happened to the game mechanics concerning weapons and the balancing project. Unfortunately, due to a lot of redundant code and other troubles, the first attempt of balancing failed our expectations and calculations - mainly due to modifiers and variables implemented by the previous coding team, *cough* KK *cough*, at unforeseen places.
Speaking of the balancing, we finally got rid of the commas for the implants!

With Zoltan digging through the engine's entrails anyway to bring the games code up to speed since 2013 now, we could clear up those roadblocks on our path to the next round on the balancing carousel. Really, all those numbers can make your head spin...
Alongside came further improvements for our tool set, so we don't have to edit all definitions and variables with notepad anymore. Wohoo!
Aside of that there have also been improvements on other places, thanks again to Zoltan's reworking of convoluted code strings into something less messy.

Tucked away under all those band aid fixes from the days of yore where quite surprising features actually. For example, did you know Neocrons engine had the ability to load different textures depending on its language settings all the time? That means we can load different decals for things like adverts or directional signs, and provide you with translated versions. We only recently found that feature so this is only coming to Titan at some point in the future though.

Other byproducts of the ongoing work in the background are things the new health bar for Mobs introduced in R# 189 [T# 199]. Netcode has also been improved, allowing for a smoother movement. More changes include the tracking of kill stats for players, we are working on making those available for you. How does a ladder-board for NC sound?

With the recent patch on Vedeena, a bunch of new textures came along too, so keep your eyes peeled. Connected to the work happening around the weapon mechanics are also new visual effects for Fire and Poison by the way, just in case you wondered where they come from.


If you have been following the patch notes for Vedeena you know that a few more things happened, but the question is, when will this ship to Titan?

Currently, we are working a few more things to deploy for Vedeena. There is still a lot more to before we can wrap all things up in one package. The refactoring and rework of the weapon mechanics is still not completed. Drones and PSI modules have their very own calculation construct, so they are currently not properly affected by the balancing tools. Hence we first have to bring them on parity with the rest of the weapons, code wise, before we can go anywhere with the next balancing stages.
We hope we can get this done until after August, seeing as player numbers usually drop during summer we hope we will be ready with a set of new features when people come back in autumn.


So long,

Your Neocron Support Team

Hallo Runner!

Seid Ihr aus der Umgebung von Hamburg und möchtet eure Mitspieler gern einmal persönlich Treffen? Dann ist der 25.07.2015 vielleicht genau der richtige Tag dafür. Unser Community Mitglied Ressorator hat für dieses Datum ein RL-Community Treffen organisiert, bei dem neue Gesichter gerne willkommen sind. Details zu Ort und Zeit, sowie Anmeldungen findet Ihr in diesem Forum Thema.

Over the long weekend, eagled eyed forum users will have spotted the return of Vedeena. We teased the return of our public test server on Twitter last week and now the server is back online and feeling fine - complete with new test patches!

The new patches bring fixes as well as new features to Neocron Community Edition. Further patches will hit Vedeena as we continue to tweak and adjust the changes already delivered. Head over to Vedeena and get testing, through your feedback and comments we can make this another great step forward for Neocron.

To install Neocron Community Edition ready for Vedeena, you can use the latest version of the installer using the Test Server option. This new installer version also resolves some issues experienced with the last few patches by new and returning players.

One of the best ways we thought to shed some light on how Neocron is developed, is to bring you some information on the guys and girls who work on the project. You may think the list of us is quite long but with all the areas involved in running Neocron - never mind further developing it - we wanted to show where all the man power goes.

To shed some light on this our About Us page has been updated with information on current members of the team.

You can discuss this post on the Official Neocron Forum.

As we move forward looking at different aspects of the game we want to improve their impact on game play, usability and balance. To make sure we consider all the options we want to invole the community in the process as much as we can.

Currently we have four topics open for discussion as we work to improve those areas in future patches.

Head over (or sign up) to the Official Neocron Forum and have your say on:

• Tier 3 Implants vs Rare and MC5 Implants
• Holo PA
• Drugs
• Class armour strengths/weaknesses

It's really important we consider all the options when making changes to improve Neocron, so get involved and help shape the game for the better.

Titan is back online.

Having been alerted to a game play vulnerability Titan was briefly taken offline in the last 30 minutes for investigation. The server is now back online after a server side update was applied. Please note that some sectors may be slow to respond as all sectors were taken offline and reset during the brief maintainence period. Characters effected by the vulnerability will be rolled back briefly to repair their associated data. We will continue to monitor the situation.

Thank you for your patience during this unexpected but neccassary downtime. 

We're pleased to deliver a hotfix patch to address broken team pointers which were deactivated with a change introduced in R#192. Along with a new feature in the same area, the patch fully commits changes made via soft patch recently.

Specifically Patch R#195 & R#196 addresses the following items:

• Team pointers have been reenabled to display the health of team members in the same sector
• New Feature: Clan pointers have been added to display the health of clan members in the same sector
• Clan pointers can be toggled using ALT+J or with the /set ctrl_showclanarrows command. This toggle is available as we appreciate high quantities of labels may be problematic for larger clans.
• CopBots have been equipped with new rifles which deal increased damage and have a slight stun effect
• A number of high level monsters - including warbots, doom harbringers and other high level encounters - have more health and deal increased damage

and Patch R#197 addrsses the following items:

• Health bars for NPCs with particularly high health now display correctly
• Remote repair tools should now function again as normal

You can discuss this patch on the Official Neocron Forums.

A soft patch has been applied to Titan reducing the maximum level of NPCs to 120.

NPCs which were beyond this level range have been reduced to level 120 temporarily. The most notible NPC effected in PvE scenarios is the Genotoxic Nightmare. Other effected NPCs exist but these are largely mission and interaction NPCs, rather than monsters to hunt.

Temporarily reducing all NPCs to a maximum of level 120 is required to counter an XP calculation bug associated with NPCs above that level. After investigation we have discovered this bug has existed for a number of years, it is the recent activation of Triple XP for the festive period that has brought this bug to a detectable level.

We'd like to take this oppurtunity to thank the players who brought this to our attention so promptly. We aim to fix the bug and return effected NPCs to their intended level in a regular patch early in 2015.

You can discuss this news post on the Official Neocron Forum.

Another one of these already? How time flies. Your Neocron Support Team would like to wish you all the best for the year to come in 2015 and we hope you all have a fantastic Christmas.

While we know this time of year is busy with friends and family, don't forget about your frenemies in Neocron! Like last year we've decided to give you some incentive to slope off toward the computer and fill each other with festive plasma!

We've enabled Triple XP through to December 26th, you'll then be able to enjoy Double XP through to January 5th.

Consider it a little extra present from us to you alongside the shiny new Patch R#192.

Merry Christmas!

We're pleased to announce the release of Patch R#192 to Titan. This patch contains a huge number of changes including new graphics assets, tweaked weapon balance, interface updates, new missions and improves the quality of life for negative soul light runners.

To ensure your Neocron client is prepared to run with the latest patch, you will need to download the latest run time version from Microsoft. Details of where to find this are in the patch notes.

You can find details of all included changes in the Patch Notes, we also welcome feedback and discussion on the Neocron Forum.