Patching Vedeena, Improving the Process.
You may have noticed that we have reset Vedeena. This was necessary to bundle all of the previous changes together and enable new patching mechanics for our Public Test Server.
We enabled “soft patching” in the past which allowed us modify light weight parts of the game. Like weapon and item statistics, NPC health, damage values and anything else in Neocron’s definition database. Unfortunately, this process introduced complications meaning we couldn’t use it as often as we’d like. It was also unreliable for some members of the team, meaning the process was not as effective as it could have been.
Previously we were only able to create traditional numbered patches via a single route – Zoltan. The manual process of building a patch with previous tools was flawed and meant we could screw up the server quite easily. Care had to be taken to avoid this, this lead to an isolated process and one we could only use when Zoltan was available.
That problem has now been solved, for Vedeena at least.
Avalon and Zoltan have put their heads together and built new tools and build functionality, which are now in place to automatically construct traditional numbered patches for Vedeena.
This means we can do everything we could with the simplicity of the “soft patch” mechanic AND patch other elements such as graphic assets, the game engine, mission scripts and zones across the gameworld. On top of that, with this new implementation significantly more members of the team are now able to trigger patch construction for Vedeena - with the click of a button.
In short more people can create more patches for more things with far less risk and far less faffing about.
So with any luck you should see patches to Vedeena a bit more often when different bits and pieces from different teams are ready for testing. Including from the Assets, Balance and Content Teams as they’re now able to do this themselves without a reliance on Zoltan.
