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