We'll be posting something this week. Ooooh, it's gonna be sweet.

steve

We've been working hard to get things together for our next build and future builds. As you know, we lost a large chunk of our development team recently and have been getting our act together since. Here's what we have in store for you:

We've continued to update our graphics engine a bit and have added a full-screen glow effect. This effect is only available for folks that have shader support (which is most of you). It makes the game look softer and prettier. Hooray for graphics updates. This will be in the next build.

We've also been adding more specular lighting to areas and items in the game. Woot! This will be in the next build.

We've updated our complier suite from Visual Studio 2003 to 2005. This allows us to take advantage of more recent features of the complier. What does this mean for you? Not too much, except that the game will be getting more optimized in the near future. Faster code FTW! This will be in the next build.

This new build has a major rework of our item data to support some coming features (i.e. item sets and socketing). We've removed some cruft from the item data in preparation for a major item upgrade coming soon. You shouldn't really notice much of a change if we've done our job right. This will be in the next build.

We're working on monster skills and behaviors to add more flavor to the various critters in the game. Pretty nice stuff. Some of this will be in the next build.

We've added some new procs to the new build that allows special events to take place when someone resists an attack. This is making its way into the improved monster behavior and item data. Some of this will be in the next build.

Code support for traps in the dungeon has been added. Designers are working to take advantage of this new support.

We've added three new skills to the game. More details will be coming on these skills shortly. Two of the skills are ranger fire skills and one is a new mage shadow attack. This will be in the next build.

Two full new armor sets have been added to the game. I'll scrounge up some pics of this and post them soon. This will be in the next build.

Work is being done to add a level 100 boss gauntlet to the game. This will be a new way to farm bosses for level 100 groups. New boss tokens are being added to the game that you will only get by farming these level 100 bosses. You'll need to farm one boss enough to get geared to access and farm the next boss. Special items that can only be found through this system will be available. This won't be ready for the next build, but it's coming along well.

The Dungeon Runners team is getting access to support our website directly. This will allow us to fix the game-generated blog RSS feeds. As of now, we're relying on another internal web development group to handle this. We're currently not very high priority for them. Once we get access to the website, it'll take us a few days to get the blogs to work. This will be in the next build.

We're also working on making the game a streaming download to help new players try the game more easily. This streaming download will be much smaller (about 20MB) and will automatially download new content as players move around the game. We lose about 40% of potential new players that never get past the 600MB download. We'd like to put a stop to that.

I expect that we'll have something to our QA group next week. I'm working to ensure this can be put on the PTS at the same time it goes to our internal test group. Once tested then we'll get it up live!

steve

This is the first build where our internal QA staff will be testing with you on the PTS! Hooray for faster turnaround and better coverage!

We've reworked the particle rendering for the game to improve batching and increase performance. Some sorting artifacts are present because of this and we are working to resolve them for the final deployment of this build.

We've added a light bloom effect to the game. There is also a new option in the graphics option page to control this. Pretty lights.

We've added 6 new skills to the game with this build: Shadow Words: Bad Touch, Cold Snap, Oh Snap!, Dungeon Inferno, Fire Shot and Gosh's Glorious Shower of Gold.

We've fixed some crashing issues with the group server and posse features.

Two more armor sets have been added to the game. Also, a mythic katana has been added. Also, a new mythic snowman hat has been added.

Shivery has been reenabled with a new quest line. Enjoy!

A major rework of the data organization for items has been implemented for this build. You really shouldn't notice anything, but if your character doesn't load, let us know!

We've added a new PvP queue to the game. Talk to the Pwnston Commander to enter this queue. It is an unrated queue that doesn't require balanced teams and will rebalance your character if outnumbered.

We've changed how the rated PvP match works. This match will now only last up to 5 minutes and no respawning is allowed. If you die in this match, it's game over and the other side wins. If you are part of a group and die then you will become an observer until the end of the battle. Timing for rewards on this match has been changed to compensate for the rapid pace.

Here are the detailed patch notes for the new skills we've added to build 151:

Shadow Words: Bad Touch (Mage Trainer)
You dig long and deep within your psyche to release a bunch of your pent up teenage angst. Doing so causes several dark tendrils of Shadow energy to emerge from your soul and randomly grow. Any enemy that is inappropriately touched by a tendril will take Shadow Damage. In addition to that, the damaged enemy has a chance to be stricken with a curse that increases all Shadow Damage they receive for a while!

Fire Shot (Ranger Trainer)
You have only one itching desire, for enemies to stand next to your Fire... Shot! Just play with this and your target might get burned for some amount of Fire Damage! Each successful hit has a 25% chance to explode, scorching nearby enemies that are diggin' it too close to your target. Mover over Rover and let the explosion take over! Each enemy will get swept off their feet if the target explodes and they will take some Fire Damage too!

Dungeon Inferno (Ranger Trainer)
Burn, baby, burn! Dungeon Inferno! Your shot is lettin' loose a fiery chain reaction that sparks up a 3 meter radius Dungeon Inferno! The initial target will take some Fire Daamge. The heat is on! Any enemies that boogie into the Dungeon Inferno take some Fire Damage for each second they remain. Smokin! Also, they have a chance to be cursed for some time, taking more damage from fire!

Gosh's Glorius Shower of Gold (Mage Trainer)
You call upon the Almighty Gosh to intervene and aid you in vanquishing your heathenish foe. Gosh will see to it that some glorious golden rays of light shall rain down from the heavens all around you. Each golden beam will release its Divine energy at the time that Gosh's Plan calls for it (aka. randomly). Any enemy close enough to an exploding beam will take some Divine Damage. Each beam can damage up to two enemies! On top of that, should an enemy survive the initial barrage, Gosh sees to it that his follower's enemies will meet theri maker (Him of course) by potentially placing a curse upon them that increases all Divine Damage taken for a while - in accordance with His Plan (meaning there is a good chance it won't happen). Ask and ye shall receive!

Cold Snap (Mage Trainer)
You create a magical ice storm at a location you target that randomly spews out 12 frozen ice crystals in a circle. Each shard of ice dishes out some sweet Ice Damage. The crystals will also heal your Chill Bill!

Oh Snap! (Mage Trainer)
Place this in your skill tray to improve your Cold Snaps. Every time you cast a Cold Snap you have a 66% chance that it will spew out double the number of ice crystals!

Looks like the operations group can't deploy this build until Monday morning!

steve

The operations group is deferring this publish until tomorrow AM:

Looks like they didn't start the database copying last Friday and are waiting for it to complete...

steve