Agenda[list]

• Current projects
  • Pen-and-paper role-playing game in Ryzom universe
  • OP refactoring
• Recrutement: Event team, Support Team, Translation team

For some time we have been working on a role-playing game in the Ryzom universe. The goal is to be able to play outside the New Lands, either on the Old Lands, now or before the Swarmings, or in other more remote places. Places that will never be in the MMO, for example places where resurrection does not exist.
There is a playable first draft, and I need testers, initially one or two teams of four people. People to play and point out what works well and give suggestions for improvement. For the moment, the working version is in French, and my level in other languages means that I can only have people playing in French. But if a game master wants to get involved, we can also set up tests in other languages.

The outpost refactoring project is Dev's current #1 priority.
Now that GvE tests are finished, we are preparing the next tests on Atys, which will involve GvG. Like GvE tests, these ones will be performed on special outposts.
Ulukyn (Dev) will come to present this GvG part in detail during the next Ryzom Forge meeting on Monday, December 6th.

Support Team

The Support team continues its recruitment campaign for volunteers.
We need you, your availability, your technical and gameplay knowledges of the game but also your diplomacy, to expand our ranks and best meet the expectations of players.
To learn more, please consult this post: https://app.ryzom.com/app_forum/index.php?page=topic/view/22047/2 #2 .
To apply, contact Tamarea exclusively at tamarea@ryzom.com, and do not tell anyone about your application!

Event Team
We're looking for volunteers who want to help write event scripts, or who want to become actors by playing a character in the events we play.
Training is provided, and the entry into acting is done very gradually to give the recruit time to get used to it.
Join us to benefit from this unique experience!
To apply, contact Tamarea exclusively at tamarea@ryzom.com and do not tell anyone about your application!

Translation Team
We are looking for volunteers to translate in-game texts and official announcements into English, German, Spanish, Russian, French, as well as to proofread texts in these five languages.
To apply, contact Tamarea exclusively at tamarea@ryzom.com.

That was the last topic for today!
If you'd like to contact Drumel about tabletop roleplaying, you can do so on chat.ryzom, or reply to the meeting minutes on the forum when they're posted.
The next meeting will be held on Monday, December 6th!
The two main topics will be Bugs and testing, and Outpost redesign.

I have a hard time understanding the principle of taking people out of the MMO

That's the dumbest argument against community projects ever, and this sort of closed minded thinking is why Ryzom will never recover. Adding more target markets does not take away from your existing niche target market. Growing the community does not shrink it.

It would tho, any ryzom player playing another game is taken away from playing ryzom.

Magez

It would tho, any ryzom player playing another game is taken away from playing ryzom.

Look at the resurgence of CP2020 when Cyberpunk 2077 came out and you'll see how wrong that is. It's a little different there since CP2077 is not an MMO so many peopel will stop playing after beating it a few times, but my point that it's not a zero-sum equation remains.

but what i mean is time cannot be spend on both at the same time, spending those 1-2 hours on the board game are 1-2 hours that you are not present/active/engaged into ryzom

dev-time and resources spend there could have been spend on the main attraction

Regarding the board game itself, i understand the 'fun' but not the benefit of it, the splitting of players activity/time aside, dev-time and resources spend there could have been spend on the main attraction, i also fail to see how it will attract new players besides circles of friends that likely would have already mentioned ryzom if there was interest among them (i hope), in the case of marketing i have doubts and raise the question why marketing ryzom isn't done more in stead and in the case marketing ryzom is already exhausted i fail to see why the board game would then raise new players in its place.

The person behind this tabletop rpg project is already active in the Lore Team. He is not a developer of the game. So his time wouldn't have been spent on development. Working on a tabletop rpg is a good continuation of the lorist work: it will use the existing lore and extend it.
It is NOT a marketing project too, it's a tabletop rpg that a passionate is making and wants to share it with the community.

Agenda

• Update on recent crashes
• Feedback on the Client's beta tests
• Feedback on Boss refactoring
• Progress on OP refactoring (GvG)

Nous allons parler un peu des récents soucis du serveur, il y en a eu plusieurs.
Le premier souci, le plus critique, était assez particulier et pouvais faire planter n'importe quel services de Ryzom. En effet, un serveur Ryzom se compose de nombreux services qui gèrent aspect un aspect du jeu : l'EGS qui gère les entités (PNJ, créatures, actions, etc…), l'IOS gère lui les textes et les chats et d'autres services plus petits mais dont le rôle est également important. Or le bogue pouvait se produire dans un de ces services et jusqu'à 2-3 fois par jour, ce qui en fonction du service qui plantait pouvais provoquer des réactions en chaîne (et donc un serveur qui plante totalement). La raison du crash est un peu technique (je pourrais donner plus de détails si besoin) mais un correctif a été appliqué et depuis lors aucun des services n'a planté à cause de ce bogue.
Un autre bogue a pu enfin être corrigé. C'est l'un des plus vieux connus dans le jeu. Nous nous doutions qu'il venait des missions et nous avions l'intuition qu'il ne survenait qu'avec des personnages revenant en jeu après une longue absence. Nous avons pu examiner ce bogue car nous l'avons sans le vouloir provoqué en déplaçant les métiers dans la Kitinière. Cette manœuvre, en effet, a provoqué eneffet, à notre insu, la modification des alias (numéros d'identification sauvegardés dans le fichier du personnage conservé par le serveur) des missions concernées. Or, si une mission change d'alias et qu'un joueur a conservé l'ancien alias dans la sauvegarde d'un personnage sur sa propre machine, le serveur plantera dès le chargement du personnage en question. Car les alias n'ont pas à l'origine été conçus comme susceptibles de changer... nul n'avait prévu que certaines missions seraient déplacées d'un continent à l'autre. Pour finir, ce diagnostic a permis de plus facilement trouver et corriger le bogue et au malheureux joueur qui faisait planter le serveur à chacune de ses tentatives de connexion d'enfin se connecter sans anicroche.
Un troisième bogue a été identifié dans l'IOS, il se produit assez rarement. Nous avons fait l'hypothèse qu'il survenait lorsque'un message était envoyé par le serveur sur un canal de discussion dynamique, au moment même ou un des joueurs se déconnecte et avons ajouté plusieurs vérifications permettant d'aviter cette conjonction. Pour le moment pas de nouveau plantage constaté. À surveiller cependant.
Enfin, les derniers bogues (qui provoquent des ralentissements et retardent énormément l'envoi des messages) se produisent quand le SU plante (SU = Shard Unifier , service surtout utile quand plusieurs serveurs tournent – tels Aniro, Arispotle et Leanon – ou quand des sessions Ring sont actives). Nous en avons déjà corrigé un, un autre est en cours de correction. Nous allons renforcer la partie du code du SU gérant l'écriture en base de données.
Voilà pour les informations sur les récents plantages. Y a-t-il des questions ?

Voir forum.
Nous avons besoin d'un maximum de retours, car le délai d'application du prochain patch en dépend : plus rapidement nous validerons le client bêta, plus rapidement nous patcherons les nouveautés.
Donc, y a-t-il des gens qui ont pu jouer régulièrement avec le client bêta ?

See forum.
Quels sont vos retours, en particulier sur le nouvel algorithme d'apparition des Rois ?
Nous souhaitons en effet savoir si son activation dans toutes les régions d'Atys est désormais possible ou s'il nécessite encore des réglages.

Le projet est plutôt bien avancé.
Nous menons les derniers tests alpha et ceux sur les serveurs de tests (Yubo & Gingo) devraient démarrer bientôt. Pour le moment ils portent sur de nouveaux avant-postes en mode GvG dans les zones 50 et nous permettront de déterminer si le réglage des PNJ est bon (il est à son minimum, mais combattre simultanément une guilde et des PNJ peut être un défi un peu trop difficile).
Pendant ce test du GvG, nous avancerons sur le reste du projet. Certaines modifications déjà prêtes comme la réduction à 1h de la durée des batailles et la baisse du coût des attaques, pourraient être mises en place rapidement. La rotation des matières premières et la prise des avant-postes par des tribus hostiles de PNJ viendraient alors dans une phase ultérieure de développement du projet.
Nous sommes convenus de donner un coup d'accélérateur au projet durant les deux mois à venir.

***DEL***

Against the CoC, see: https://en.wiki.ryzom.com/wiki/Ryzom_Code_of_Conduct


I.2. Slander or rumour about a Ryzom Team member or Winch Gate

(Major/Minor offence: depending on the degree, the Support Team will decide on each case)Spreading rumours, false accusations or lies against a member of the Ryzom Team or against Winch Gate, in order to harm them or their reputation or honour, is strictly prohibited.The Support team reserves the right to make appropriate decisions based on the seriousness of the facts.

Agenda

• Update on dev tools
• January patches presentation
• Silan refactoring
• Boss refactoring
• OP refactoring

I'm going to come back to the year 2021, which has been the year of consolidation if you will.

We have indeed updated quite a few things, on the one hand the servers, the webIG and the client code (with the merging of the code of Ryzom Core 4), but also the compilation process which is now based on Visual C++ 2019 for Windows. In addition a tool, Hunter, has been implemented by Nimetu (RT) to compile the whole more easily.

Beyond the tools, the past year has also seen the developer team update its way of working: we now use gitlab more for bugs, communication and patch management and we are very satisfied with it... Wondering why we didn't do it earlier! There is one last thing to do: joining our server and data client repositories with the ryzom-core repository, so that the development process will be even easier.

We have also worked on enriching our collection of generic or model-based systems.This is the case, for example, of the "shops" which are increasingly (and will be in the future massively) used to make items or services available in game (for example, purchases in Elyps, whether from Nations merchants, grooms or Allegory carvers NPCs). This is also the case for the Lessons, which are the basis of the information transmitted to players in-game, as well as for the Encyclopedia window (ctrl+E), which includes the Daily Missions, the Storyline, the future tutorial and, recently, the titles, all of which are (or will be) based on the same model.

As a result, we have (and will have) fewer systems to maintain, thus fewer bugs, and we will be able to concentrate our efforts on three main tasks. Namely:
• completion of the three refactoring projects (Silan, Bosses, Outposts) ;
• Storyline's ongoing and the addition of content that has yet to be completed (e.g. Supreme Tokens);
• bugs' fixing and improvement of the client (by the way, the year 2022 will start with a patch – currently in test – illustrating this point).

As Ulukyn mentioned, one of our goals for 2022 is to improve the player experience through fixing bugs or bettering the client. The first patch of January will do exactly this.

The first change we made was to the system for trading between player characters. More generally, we've tried to improve the process of item trading, because it's not the best at the moment. In addition to changing and simplifying the layout of the trade window, we added two more slots for items. It was mainly the exchanges of jewel sets that led us to this last change.

Another change we've made to the player trade window is the ability to drag and drop items into the window from all of your inventories. This way, if you want to trade items carried by your Zig, you won't have to transfer them to your bag first, thus interrupting the trade to complete it later. Note: In order not to clutter up the item selection window, this one won't show you items from other inventories and this function will only operate by drag and drop.

The final change to the trade window presented to each player is the addition of item bulk and weight indicators. In fact, a small indicator (similar to the one in the upper right corner of your inventories) will be displayed next to both offers, which will show the weight and bulk of the items given and received. All this in the hope of making the exchanges a little more fluid.

Then, stacking of items. Anyone who has fought in PvP knows what it feels like to have an inventory cluttered with crystallized spells. From now on, crystallized spells of the same stanza (or identical stanza) will automatically stack in the inventory where they are stored. As the same clutter currently occurs in the bag of working crafters, identical items produced will now automatically stack in the inventory.

Any questions so far?

Let's move on to fixes.
I have to say that this patch is quite big, so I'm leaving out some small details. You'll get the surprise when the patchnote will be released!

We have a lot of fixes in this patch, especially concerning the Zigs:
• fix of the bug that gave them the wrong status when they were hosted in bags;
• addition of their inventories as tabs in the commercial windows of merchant NPCs;
• addition of the ability to transfer items directly from their inventory to your apartment's and guild hall's inventory;
• fixed the malfunction of locking/unlocking items in their inventory.

By the way, the lock status of items will now be displayed in your apartment and guild hall inventory.

Any questions?

I redesigned the tutorial after several opinions from the first testers, and it is now more intuitive and interactive. The feedback about the first two lessons is quite positive. So I'm going to continue and I hope it will really help new players to get their bearings.

I take this opportunity to remind you that the test team is recruiting. So, if you want to test either the patch implementing the additions to the client, or the first lessons of the tutorial, you are welcome.

Boss refactoring will soon be applied all over Atys Atys. However, the work is bound to continue, though we haven't yet determined exactly what we'll be working on. But we'd love to make hunting for Bosses a most funny activity on Ryzom.

One of the ideas that has come up among us, so that players can escape routine and their tactical skills can flourish, is the one of providing each of the current Bosses their own defense mechanics. That's the idea which originated this refactoring project… and gave it its first name: "Boss in the Box".

If you have other ideas, please feel free to post them in the forum under the meeting report.

Any questions ?

We have been able to make progress on GvG, but its introduction seems interesting only if accompanied by the planned changes on all Outposts.

That's why we are planning to make several changes at the same time. Namely:
• reducing the duration of battles to one hour (already tested in Nexus);
• rotation of raw materials produced by each outpost every N days (to be determined), via server reboot;
• suppression of the production of Q50 and Q100 materials;
• addition of four outposts in level 50 regions for testing GvG battles.

After that, another patch will implement the last changes, as the project is well advanced thanks to the full-scale tests on the Atys server.

Any questions?