Old style patches

[giga191]

Just randomly googling and i came across these patch notes for patch #193:


PSI
- Reduced range for Beam spells.
- Increased range on non-beam attack spells.
- Increased range on rare antisanctum spells.
- Reduced damage for Freeze spells, but the effect stays the same.
- Increased mana consumption for Freeze spells.
- Increased cast time for Freeze spells.
- Increased cast time for Resurrection spells.
- Increased cast time and Psi consumption for stun spells.

Weapons
- Increased damage for melee weapons.
- Reduced stamina drain from heavy weapons.
- Increased ammo pack sizes for 7.62 bullets to 16 and for plasma rifle ammo to 40.
- Added "HEW 'Slipstream' Plasma Wave" (TL 40) and "A&W 'Burning Air' Plasma Wave" (TL63) weapons (sold at vendors).
- Added rare Flamethrower "DEVOURER" (TL 98), drops as rareparts.
- Added rare Plasma Wave "RAVAGER" (TL 100), drops as rareparts.
- Plasma Waves now have their own ammo and mods.
- Changed the rare swirl colors for some weapons.
- Fixed Plasma Waves ammo consumption.
- Increased Plasma Waves damage.
- Increased range of flamethrowers.
- Reduced stamina consumption on flamethrowers.
- Increased serverside melee range by 10%.
- Combat rank is updated correctly now when using melee weapons.
- Increased ranking of all vehicle weapons except the tank gun.

World
- Fixed Escador Oasis GenRep
- Added Hometerms to TG clanapps
- Fixed errors in VR2, A_06 and F_13 (Gaia mine entrance) maps.
- Updated all Plaza, Viarosso and Pepper Park maps. This ranges from visual changes to CopBot and faction guard placements. Attention: The CityAdmin guards inside the Plaza 1 Medicare will open fire on all faction enemies coming through the Genrep!
- You can now get wasted at the Yagers Inn in the Canyon.
- Completed Tech Haven security update in all sectors.
- Added faction offices in public and hidden locations.
- Fixed a client crash when zoning to sector B_12.
- Moved "Black Lilly" (epic run NPC) to the subway entrance in PP2.

Implants
- Adjusted bonuses on Riggers Dream to 15RCL/15WPW and added a +8 bonus to transport.
- Adjusted bonuses on Special Riggers Interface to 10RCL/10WPW and added a +6 bonus to transport.
- Adjusted bonuses on Drone Combateye to +3/+5/+10 RCL and +5/+10/+15 WPW.
- Drone Distance Interfaces now add +1/+2/+3 DEX in addition to the old bonuses.
- Mindcontrol CPUs now give an additional +3/+5/+8 WPW, +2/+4/+6 transport and -10/-15/-20 to WPL.

Misc
- Added faction medals and items. Visit your faction office or ask your faction counsellor for further details.
- Antidote now removes 3 stacks after 8 seconds, Advanced Antidote 2 stacks after 4 seconds and Concentrated Antidote 1 stack after 2 seconds.
- Changed the attribute requirements for the tank, spy and monk Powerarmor to 90/100/115/135, for the private eye to 75/80/90/105 and adjusted the tech levels of the armors accordingly.
- Antigamma bones can now be bought from boneimp vendors.
- Replaced/added icons for bone enforcements and psi modules. Thanks to Maarten "Eagle" Tops for making the icons.
- Switched the Powerarmor item graphics to a more fitting icon.
- Slightly boosted combat strength of swampcave mobs, slightly decreased strength of wormtunnel mobs.
- All faction guards now have better weapons, more health and a higher rank.
- The Soullight display in the runner statistics shows the correct values now.
- Help window popups in apartments and Area MC5 show only up once now.

In my eyes, this one single NC1 patch has added more to the game than all the patches put together during NC2. I miss the day when KK actually did stuff about overpowered/underepowered classes and items, and made changes that affected gameplay hugely.

Please KK make these kind of patches again :(

[CMaster]

Actually, I'd hope to never see patch notes like that.
I'd like to see more frequent, but smaller patches. KK seem to have a habit of perpetually delyaing a patch "just by another few days" to put this extra bit or that extra bit.

NC2's biggest patch ever was Patch 131 (http://ln.neocron.com/5/patchnotes?id=98&) And its brother Patch 130. Patch 132 and 133 I think cleared up some issues as well. There was even more done that isnt mentioned in the notes either.

[Zheo]

I miss the day when KK actually did stuff about overpowered/underepowered classes and items, and made changes that affected gameplay hugely.

Please KK make these kind of patches again :(

Ever think that maybe they just gave into nagging and didnt actually test to see if the said item was actually over or underpowered? Why do you think so much work is going into 2.2? You think they are just slapping stuff together and saying "This will shut them up?", They are probablying saying "I f***ing hate those bloody noobs!" <-- thats what I say at work about nagging customers. Come close to actually saying it to their face, though that could lose me my job.

Basically what im saying is: If balancing is worth doing it's worth doing RIGHT!

Sit back and wait for 2.2!

[NAPPER]

Escador Oasis GenRep
is that still there or have they removed it ????

Added faction medals and items
is that just the epic?

[Nidhogg]

Wasn't bad that one, only 8 pages of bug reports (plus 14 pages of discussion) and a hot fix. ;)

N

/edit - also, a lot of that patch was just tweaks to dat files. There was more actual coding in the most recent patch than that one, and the recent code changes had to be applied to two code branches (retail and balanced).

[giga191]

Wasn't bad that one, only 8 pages of bug reports (plus 14 pages of discussion) and a hot fix. ;)

N

/edit - also, a lot of that patch was just tweaks to dat files. There was more actual coding in the most recent patch than that one, and the recent code changes had to be applied to two code branches (retail and balanced). maybe that's why i'm still here, because balancing isn't necessarily hard to code so i look forward to KK giving it a try again for the first time in 2 years.

[Nidhogg]

maybe that's why i'm still here, because balancing isn't necessarily hard to code so i look forward to KK giving it a try again for the first time in 2 years.
That shows you don't understand what we're doing. The problem is that the balancing we used to do by just tweaking the stats was hit and miss because the underlying systems were bugged. This is why all kinds of unexpected things used to happen all the time. The balancing effort we're working on now isn't just tweaking those stats, it's actually fixing the underlying issues which is why it's not a simple job.

N

[Skusty]

If i remember right, anything can get bugged by just chaning a small code.

[unreal]

Being even more specific, changing a single character in the source could cause a BIG problem in some situations. :p

[rob444]

lol yeah, I've had really bizarre stuff happening with some applications I've made in my time. For example, I sat infront of a sourcecode trying to figure out where it is totally fucked up. So I'm sitting there, using breakpoints and all that crap until I have 5 lines of code where something is wrong. And then you sit there for another 5 hours trying to figure out why this wouldn't work and you do a lot of google - and you finally give up and go to bed. The next day, you start looking at it again and under 30 minutes you suddenly fixed it because you just realized that you had forgot to allocate memory for your pointer...

[Nidhogg]

Back in my old days when I was developing a real-time database in C under HP-UX and IBM-AIX (ah, those were the days), I had a bug that caused an API call to stack dump. I put in a debugging statement like this:

printf("Stack index :%d\n", ndx);

All it does is prints out a number. That's it. So what happened? The code no longer crashed! Take the debugging statement out, crashes again.

The problem was that I was writing to some memory that was outside of the range that I'd malloc'd. When I added the printf it caused the stack to grow and even though my pointer arithmetic was still wrong it was no longer pointing into empty memory space, so there was no stack dump. The program was still buggy but the debugging statement actually had the opposite effect and "hid" the problem.

I still think C is my fave language though, possibly with the exception of C#.

N

/edit - spot the mistake? Mallocs come off the heap, not the stack, so it must have been an array bounds issue in a local variable or something. It was a long time ago :p

[rob444]

Hehe, I use Delphi (built on the old pascal language). I like c++ too but I prefer Delphi language more for some unexplained reason :P.

[Kozmos]

Hehe, I use Delphi (built on the old pascal language). I like c++ too but I prefer Delphi language more for some unexplained reason :P.

haha 5th week in codin class me and mike made a 3d rotating coloured cube with pascal, just vectors, lagged like a fucker tho took ages to render it, but we did it, this is while the rest of the class were still figuring out how to generate a random number and stuff lol, our teach didnt even know it was possible, with coding you have to think how a computer reads shit, a program will only do as you tell it to, so be careful what you tell it to do ;) its silly schoolboy errors that create the bugs, and go un noticed because normally their that obvious ...

[rob444]

Hehe nice, I lost my current opengl engine I was working on in a harddrive format :(.

[jini]

The balancing effort we're working on now isn't just tweaking those stats, it's actually fixing the underlying issues which is why it's not a simple job.

N
All this is good, but what Giga says and I agree, is that we also need something new to try and have some fun and keep population levels happy. All of you in kk suddenly found the holy Grail for neocron under the moto "no Bandaids anymore", but the trick to keep your customers alive and kicking is a lot more easy than that huge underlying changes that take 6-12 months time. Put a new gun here, place a new mission there, do something original in a place that can be close easily. We all noticed, how many people came back with this last patch and shook Terra didn't we?

[giga191]

That shows you don't understand what we're doing. The problem is that the balancing we used to do by just tweaking the stats was hit and miss because the underlying systems were bugged. This is why all kinds of unexpected things used to happen all the time. The balancing effort we're working on now isn't just tweaking those stats, it's actually fixing the underlying issues which is why it's not a simple job.

N So after this anti bandaid stuff, will patches be made faster because less problems will occur during the testing phase?

Sounds like a huge problem if you can't even change weapon dmgs without causing bugs :lol:

[RogerRamjet]

Ahh, the day the devourer got patched.

Brings a tear to my eye.

Especially after the entire OP team i was with died to 2 PPUs and a HC tank with a dev, fucking ASEN...

[Lodar]

Hehe, I use Delphi (built on the old pascal language). I like c++ too but I prefer Delphi language more for some unexplained reason :P.

Delphi is a great language to use IMO, it has lots of support for custom built components and libraries and a large community base to provide said support. I also find it much easier to use than C based languages.

/me wishes I had the desire to program for a hobby these days.

[rob444]

Delphi is a great language to use IMO, it has lots of support for custom built components and libraries and a large community base to provide said support. I also find it much easier to use than C based languages.

/me wishes I had the desire to program for a hobby these days.

Yeah Delphi got loads of nice components. I rarely use components though because I want to do everything myself ;P.

[jini]

And you say, Delphi is based on Pascal?

[aKe`cj]

And you say, Delphi is based on Pascal?

According to Borland ... it is ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_programming_language

[Kojin]

Back in my old days when I was developing a real-time database in C under HP-UX and IBM-AIX (ah, those were the days), I had a bug that caused an API call to stack dump. I put in a debugging statement like this:

printf("Stack index :%d\n", ndx);

All it does is prints out a number. That's it. So what happened? The code no longer crashed! Take the debugging statement out, crashes again.

The problem was that I was writing to some memory that was outside of the range that I'd malloc'd. When I added the printf it caused the stack to grow and even though my pointer arithmetic was still wrong it was no longer pointing into empty memory space, so there was no stack dump. The program was still buggy but the debugging statement actually had the opposite effect and "hid" the problem.

I still think C is my fave language though, possibly with the exception of C#.

N

/edit - spot the mistake? Mallocs come off the heap, not the stack, so it must have been an array bounds issue in a local variable or something. It was a long time ago :p

I've lost count of how many times debugging statements/code has altered the aberrant behavior of code I was writting/debugging.

C is by far my favorite language. Powerful enough and flexible enough to let you get yourself in as much trouble as you want without too much effort.