jcsnider

In the process of releasing now -- the full plans are here, and Stage 1 is going really well so far

Just like previous versions we will release docs on how to upgrade to the latest version upon its release. There is generally zero or very minimal work lost that needs to be redone. (Ie, translations)

In B5 there are fields where you can adjust regen values for players and npcs on a class by class basis and npc by npc basis. And resources too

It's all about the target audience, and even for small/poor games we feel like password recovery is a necessity. We will implement these changes as quickly/easily as possible and it will be super easy to rip out if you're not interested

We collect email addressed but we need a way to send codes to those addresses. You'd give the server information to send emails through a gmail or account or something that's trusted and won't get picked up as spam.

Well.. there's always B6

Or the picture things in events might help in B5: https://www.ascensiongamedev.com/topic/3343-pictures/?do=findComment&comment=34213

Thanks everyone for the reports. Will hopefully have a full system update out sometime tomorrow

I don't know. At some point I'll reach out @Jjvm_ and setup a time where I can possibly remote into your pc and look into it. Seems to be working for everyone else though which is even weirder.

Start in 4.9.1, we will have a migration tool that takes care of everything for you, no need to wait.

You all have done a great job so far finding bugs. The server has crashed a few times but we have great crash logs and probably 8-10 bugs so far to fix on my list.

Lol the launcher should have never worked at all, but it’s cool that it did. And I sorta expected the client to crash on Mac and Linux for the moment. The only thing on the roadmap for me to do is test and resolve cross platform issues. No worries, that won’t take long

NoIp thrives in an environment where your IP address isn’t static. If you’re gonna be changing servers a lot it can also be beneficial so that you don’t have to send out updates when the underlying ip changes. It’s also fine to want your config file to look “cleaner” but I don’t know if that justifies using the service alone. Cut NoIP out of the equation entirely and make sure connecting via IP works at the very least, then you can rule out firewalls and other server configuration mistakes. You’re obviously going to get a UPNP error because there is no router, and that’s fine, just ignore the UPnP message. There’s a chance your game might be online and you don’t even know it.

Yup: Options: My Config: Presents with:

@Jjvm_: Can you try running Game1? (http://www.ascensiongamedev.com/resources/filehost/356966ca6693d640e6725d8840354abc.zip)

I’d go to the link. It will tell you everything and give you all your options. Does B4 work on that pc @Jjvm_?

Thanks for the report! You likely just found a bug with the migration tool. Will fix the quest and look into that more closely tomorrow

The game is very hard.. I highly recommend that you grab a friend when venturing into the forest, cave, or graveyard in the demo game! Also.. fair warning, the tombstone is dangerous!

Beta 5 Release Plans November 12th, 2018 We are finally wrapping up Beta 5! Sorry it has taken so long to get this out... there's been a lot going on.. and we want to make sure we do this right. The good news is that B5 is going to be awesome, there's a ton of cool new features, dozens of quality of life improvements, an entire new database engine, and major general improvements to our code base. With any update this large you should all expect to find a LOT of bugs that will need to be worked out. We did rewrite the entire database engine this update, and we haven't had an opportunity to stress it out yet, so we're hoping you all can help us from this point on Our ultimate goal with this release plan is to avoid a situation where you all go several weeks developing your games, and then we realize there is a big problem which would cause some or all of you all to lose your work. With all that said, our current plan is to release Beta 5 in three stages: Stage 1 (Game Testing) - Out Now! Awhile back @Kibbelz designed a small game that I could use for testing and to demo our game engine. I've finally worked out all the bugs and upgraded this demo game to Beta 5. So during our first stage of release we're asking all of you to download the Intersect Demo Game and play it for a bit. Game Preview: Things to test for: - Anything that would crash your client or our server. - All interactions with other players (trading, partying up, chatting, pvp, etc) - Logging in and out a lot, and making sure the server succeeds in saving your location, items, etc - New hotkeys, logout functions, targeting moving targets, and everything else lol Where to report bugs/issues: Bug Tracker Download Link: Click Here! Stage 2 (Closed, Full Engine Testing) - Concluded! I want 3-4 people to give the full Beta 5 a try in a closed test over the next 2-3 days. Let's find the major bugs and patch them up, and then the community can come together to help us work out the rest. Looking for people who can dedicate several hours a day 3-4 each day over the next 2-3 days. Are you interested? Let me know by filling out the form below, so I can pick the best group of testers for this task. Intersect Beta 5, Stage 1.5 Candidacy Form Stage 3 (Full Release) - Out Now! See here for the official release thread! Thanks for bearing with us all this time! Intersect is going to be much better off moving forward due to all these changes

Not in B5, but it should have been. Adding to the B6 todo list.

See op TLDR; Check windows audio settings and make sure you have an active audio device, try plugging in headphones, make sure graphics and audio drivers are up to date.

So this error has been popping up fairly often recently. Figured I would address it in a FAQ post, and Intersect versions B5+ will link to this thread when the error occurs. Basically this errors means that the client was unable to select or find an audio device to play the games sounds from. The most common solution to this is checking the windows settings and making sure there is an enabled and active audio device. The second most common solution is plugging in headphones We recommend making sure your audio and graphic drivers are up to date, but as long as you have sound on your pc you should be good to go.

There's a C# library for Steamworks, so a lot of the work is already done. As far as integrating Intersect with that library I think it'd be somewhat trivial for an experienced developer.. probably just take awhile.

Not sure. It shouldn't get worse though. As a counterpoint I have a decent laptop that suffers playing league but handles Intersect games like a champ. Hardware configurations, drivers, and how games are rendered matter a lot.. under the hood we are updating MonoGame to the official 3.7 release which might help, but none of our rendering code for the engine itself has changed.

Beta 5 Wrap-Up Dev Blog Nov. 8th 2018 News and Updates We're all but finished with the creation of B5 which will arguably be the largest update this engine has ever seen! I'm gonna quickly touch on some of the changes you all can expect to see and what you all should test as soon as you have your hands on this incredible update! Weather Effects Use a mixture of animations and map properties to create crazy awesome weather effects: The weather is configurable per-map in the map properties box: Equipment Vital Buffs and Animations Worn equipment can now buff your vitals along with your stats! You will be able to give equipment animations as well, so you can create cool effects like glowing boots, or torches, or whatever you want! Spell Updates Lots of bug fixes here but Kibz also added 2 new spell effects which include cleansing (removing all other effects, to escape from stuns and blinds and such), and invulnerability. NPC Combat Conditions We've removed the basic npc types (Attack on Sight, Attack when Attacked, Guard, Friendly) and added far more customization for NPC combat behaviors. You can make NPCs defend your players and attack your players based on conditions such as level, quests statuses, variables, switches, and more! The uses here are limitless but these conditions would be great for having guards of specific towns attacking or defending the players based on factions, or player actions in that town. It wouldn't be hard to make a bounty system like in Skyrim where the player could get in trouble and then pay off their bounty so they wouldn't be attacked on sight moving forward. New NPC Behavior Options: Using event switches to alter NPC Behavior/Aggression on the fly: NPCs that use switches/variables and decide to defend players: NPC Fleeing & Swarm Mechanics This was asked for a lot.. you can now make npcs run away when their health falls below certain thresholds. This is configurable on a npc by npc basis which is really cool. Furthermore swarming is where npcs come to the aid of their friends when they're in trouble. Super easy to setup now and really effective! NPC & Resource Common Events You can now make common events run when a npc or resource is killed both for the killer and for everyone in the killers' party NPC & Resource Dynamic Drops You are no longer limited to only having 10 item drop chances for NPCs and Resources.. you can create however many drops that you want! Resources from Tilesets Don't want to rip trees and stuff out of your tilesets for resources? You don't have to anymore! Resource graphics can be selected directly from tilesets now! General Combat Upgrades Targeting is easier now when trying to click on moving entities. Kibbelz even added in a hotkey for "auto targeting" which will target the nearest enemy when you hit the hotkey (tab by default). Lifesteal and Cooldown reduction on equipment items now work! Items/weapons can now have static attack speeds when wielded, or increase the players default attack speed by a certain percentage. Hotbar Rework The hotbar used to forget items/spells when you no longer had them in your inventory/spellbook. This isn't the case anymore, and the same items don't have to be drug to the hotbar over and over again each time your players go to the store! Class Balancing Updates This is a big one and requested often. Starting in B5 when you make changes to a class your players' stats will auto-update to reflect those changes! This even works with adding/removing the points your players allocate into their stats individually. Event Upgrades You can now use event conditions to compare player switches with other player switches, and compare player switches to global switches - same thing for variables too! Furthermore you can set the value of switches and variables to the values of other switches/variables in the game! Finally, you can set variables to the value of the current real world time expressed in milliseconds. With these values you can keep track of when players accomplish tasks, create real-time farming systems, daily events, and more! Setting a variable to the value of another variable, or the system time: Comparing variable values with other variables: New Escape Menu Tap escape to reach the options window, you also have buttons that will allow your players to logout, go back to character select, or quit directly to the desktop! Better Disconnect Handling Has your server ever crashed on you while you were play testing your game? What happened? In Beta 4 the client crashed too! In Beta 5 the client returns to the main menu and informs the player that the server connection has been lost! This is minor, but also a nice polish update for our engine. Beware: Updates below are targeted towards our developer crowd and technical speak lies ahead! Jsonification We've already been over this once, so I'll link back to that dev blog and just leave it at this; all of the Client, Editor, and Server language, ui, formula, and configuation files use the json format. This simplifies our code, and is arguably easier to work with. Database Overhaul The entire database system for B5 has been redesigned from the ground-up. We are using Entity Framework now to handle a lot of the database communications for us. This new system properly stores your game data in either a Sqlite or Mysql database using proper database columns and values instead of our previous design which used impossible to read binary data dumps. If you don't know what any of this means, don't worry, it's a good thing! Once you're game is running on B5 you won't have to use the migration tool anymore, the server will handle database upgrades for you automatically. The player database is now separated from the game database... so they can be stored in different locations, or you can store player data in a networked Mysql server and game data locally in a Sqlite database or vice versa. We highly recommend that you continue to use Sqlite for the game data.. but it is really up to you. The server has a 'migrate' command built in now so you can switch to the different database formats whenever you want! API Use web services and other applications to communicate, query, and control your server! In Beta 5 this is just proof of concept. We will release documentation soon on how to authenticate with the API and how to start grabbing player data. In Beta 6 we will have more options so you can alter player inventories, change switch/variable values, and more! This will be the de-facto method to integrate your game with your websites/forums, handle microtransactions, and much more! Stay Tuned! The next big post will be outlining our Beta 5 release plans. Our goal to is to get Beta 5 out to everyone as quickly as possible. We really appreciate your patience, and hopefully you are as excited as we are!