Changelogs - Summer 2019

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+Colibri
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Changelogs - Summer 2019

Post by +Colibri »

Autumn 2019 → http://www.uoex.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=12859

July 2nd, 2019
ADD The Excelsior Quest System - completely recoded quest system, along with all classic UO quests re-made with this new system. We have created it from scratch - we currently have 2 quest systems (the classic RunUO quests and the Xml quest books), each have their own benefits and drawbacks, the new system combines all of the benefits with a few additional improvements. All classic quests are already upgraded, and +Arden is working on upgrading the remaining book-based quests. The new system will make it much easier to create or edit a quest, so that making a simple "go there and fetch that" doesn't include rocket science.

July 4th, 2019
ADD Topsite Voting System overhaul. The old system was built 5 years ago, and tried to make the best out of unreliable data that we got back, and was then patched a few times to compensate for various issues. 0The new system is recoded completely from scratch and relying on different data, with different configuration. More info on this link: http://www.uoex.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=12710
FIX Quest system various fixes

July 12th, 2019
FIX Fixes to the mentor society toolbox
FIX Fixes to the topsite system, and administrative tools for tracking the functioning of the whole thing.

July 24th, 2019
ADD House positioning system, which shows an outline of the house and displays which tiles are blocking the placement. Allows the moving and resizing of existing houses, and makes it possible to merge houses, without any help from the staff. More info on this page: http://www.uoex.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=73562#p73562


July 27th, 2019
FIX House positioning system fixes: resizing the house now also resizes the editor design state. Fixed issue where in a certain condition it was hard to enter the house after resizing. Withdrawing or refunding House Merger Credits showed a false-positive error.
FIX Town house sign menu no longer shows option for move & resize.
UPGRADE House menu - ability to move the sign back to its original location. Also changed how disabled buttons are displayed.
UPGRADE Topsite voting gump touchups.
FIX Singular dyetubs could be used even if not in player's backpack.
FIX Account menu - after creation of an account for a member of the household, there was no confirmation displayed, and no information about if any error occured.
FIX VendorStone logging.


July 31st, 2019
UPGRADE Bonus house storage: account-wide storage that can be used in any house. House gump that shows storage information is also recoded for more clarity.
FIX Empty secured containers now also counted in the house's storage limit.
UPGRADE House collapse now removes certain protected items (items that can be bought on vendorstones and all currencies), and creates a protection of the land for 30-45 minutes to prevent the possiblity of someone dropping a house over all of it.


August 5th, 2019
UPGRADE House positioning: allow houses to be placed over a small hill, as long as all load-bearing tiles are on the ground at same Z-level. Placing in an invalid facet now shows all tiles in red, not just a center red dot. Fixed issue where it was possible to finalize a placement even though someone has just placed a house there. You must now be near the house location in order to finalize placement, it can't be too far away. If you are reducing the size of the house, the finalization screen shows a warning with the option to read more what happens with items that are in parts of the house that are going to be cut off.
FIX Issues with number of used storage displayed in the house menu.

August 7th, 2019
FIX Bug with secures in house (the code that checked available storage when you try to secure a container used wrong value, while placing in an already secure container worked fine).
FIX House storage menu showed incorrect values (instead of increasing available storage by the account bonus, it was decreased by the bonus).
UPGRADE House storage menu now shows progress bars for each usage (storage, lockdowns, vendor count).

August 10th, 2019
UPGRADE While in the house positioning mode, it's now possible to run through your own houses (you are no longer blocked by the foundation or walls that you currently cannot see while the house outline is displayed). When exiting the positioning mode, you are bumped off the ground to the ground floor (or if unsuccessful, to the house's ban location).
FIX With karate belt NPCs internal code that tracks the NPCs.
ADD Mentor signup stone.
FIX House resizing now properly re-locates the ban location as well.
FIX Transfering of a grandfathered castle (that takes 1 slot) now properly checks whether the new owner has 2 available slots and changes the slot usage of the castle to 2 after it's transfered.
FIX When a parrot perch with a parrot on it is placed into the moving crate, the parrot first redeeded and the deed is placed into the crate.
UNDO The fix with proper counting of house secures. Some houses are now over the limit and this will have to be done some other time with warnings before it goes into effect.

Note regarding the house secure counting: there is a bug in the original code, secured containers are not counted towards the secures limit, and neither to the house lockdown limit. So in a way, you can have 100 of secured containers with nothing in them, and the house will still show that there's 0 consumed secure storage. But since this is not a known issue, there are 79 houses out there that were very near the secure storage limit, but with this fix it pushed it over and it's now over the limit, not allowing to place anything into secure containers anymore. We already got a few tickets, and I assume that if this change would remain, we'd keep getting bug reports until all of the 79 owners are aware of this. So to keep things simple, I've reverted this bugfix, and it will be applied sometime in the future, with a transitional period first where you are still able to lock stuff down (based on old, incorrect limits) and where you just get a warning about it, and then eventually apply the fix again.

August 16th, 2019
ADD New housing map 'Maral', can be accessed through the world teleporter in the Malas section.
ADD House positioning now supports temporarily protected sections of land. If the house outline is currently placed on temporarily reserved land, it will auto-refresh at the time when the land becomes available.
FIX House positioning menu can now be open only in a single instance. In case the gump gets forcibly closed (not right-click, but closed by some other script), the positioning mode is removed when you log off.

August 17th, 2019
FIX The legacy house placement tool didn't check restrictions for temporarily unavailable land (for the Maral facet opening)
CHANGE House positioning rules: house can now be placed directly next to a road (there no longer needs to be 1 tile in between). Houses can be placed adjacent to standalone impassable obstacles (e.g. rocks & trees, but only if it's a single item).
FIX House resizing, when downsizing in the Y direction, it was not possible to enter the house by walking through the south stairs. Also, when resizing, the "Current type" and "Selected type" shown the same label.

August 18th, 2019
(some technical fixes)
FIX Issue with an internal system not assigning IDs properly
FIX Database caching error

August 19th, 2019
FIX Crow on fence is no longer scared away by a hidden staff member nearby.
FIX Housegate & house-to-house gate destroying: Improved wording on the confirmation gump, so that it is more clear what kind of gate you are destroying and what the consequences are (either redeeded, or destroyed without refund).
FIX Certain pack animals didn't retain blessed items in their backpack on death, when the pet was bonded. (horde minion, bone beetle, pack horse, skittering hopper familiar, beetle, pack llama, ridable pack llama)
FIX If a non-bonded pet dies with blessed items inside, those items are now left on the corpse (until now, they went with the ghost as blessed items regularly do, but the ghost is lost and so were the items).
UPGRADE Guildstones now move together with houses.
UPGRADE Grandfathered castles (1-slot) show a warning before they are destroyed, or traded, about the fact that this is a grandfathered castle and with the demolishion or trade the grandfathering will be lost.
FIX Issues with house ban locations, the ban location becomes broken usually after unmerging of merged houses, in certain situations, this bug has existed since before the house positioning upgrades.

August 20th, 2019
FIX Error when setting Map property on house (occured when resizing the house).
FIX Newly built houses didn't have a properly set ban location.

September 5th, 2019
UPGRADE House positioning: when moving a house, there is now an option to reserve the land that the house occupied (at the location of the house before it was moved). The reservation can also be cancelled
UPGRADE House movement: previous locations of the house are remembered for 24 hours, so when moving the house back to previous position (or near it) the movement fee is calculation is based on that location.
FIX When positioning a house, you must now be standing within the house's outline in order to finalize it (otherwise it was possible to place houses in invalid lands).
FIX When moving a house, the house sign is restored to its original position.
FIX Fixed issue with Bonus House Storage Deed reverting its quantity to 0.
-- later in the day, another restart: --
UPGRADE Co-owners of a house can now manage secured items (up to co-owner level).
FIX Removed the source of a 3-stone phantom weight that was present on some players.
FIX Optimized a number of timers for better overall server performance, less useless calculations.

September 17th, 2019
FIX Containers no longer auto-close when player changes facet.
FIX Doom gauntlet entrance: if the dragon is lured away from the bell, it will be deleted after 15 minutes.
FIX Corpse stone: recoverable corpses stayed indefinitely, now they decay 14 days after time of death.
FIX Addons: when placing an addon on the ground floor, if there is an item protruding through the floor of the house and you target the item, the addon was placed under the house. Now, in this scenario, it is placed on the ground floor.
FIX House gump: the "Reset sign location" is no longer available for town houses. Fixed issue with invalid input on the menu for transfering house ownership to a different character on the same account.
UPGRADE Database caching functionality improved and fixed a bug that sometimes caused achievement data to be lost (if doing a specific set of actions in a specific timeframe).
FIX House positioning system fixed error in how it calculates house mergers (how much to take from account merger credits, and how much from ED)
+Colibri, Administrator of UO Excelsior Shard

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Re: Changelogs - Summer 2019

Post by +Colibri »

Bump for today's restart and updates to the changelog (I haven't posted since July 27th).

Special note regarding house secures - we got a few tickets recently about the house being over the cap since a recent restart, even though the house owner hasn't secured any new items:
Note regarding the house secure counting: there is a bug in the original code, secured containers are not counted towards the secures limit, and neither to the house lockdown limit. So in a way, you can have 100 of secured containers with nothing in them, and the house will still show that there's 0 consumed secure storage. But since this is not a known issue, there are 79 houses out there that were very near the secure storage limit, but with this fix it pushed it over and it's now over the limit, not allowing to place anything into secure containers anymore. We already got a few tickets, and I assume that if this change would remain, we'd keep getting bug reports until all of the 79 owners are aware of this. So to keep things simple, I've reverted this bugfix, and it will be applied sometime in the future, with a transitional period first where you are still able to lock stuff down (based on old, incorrect limits) and where you just get a warning about it, and then eventually apply the fix again.
+Colibri, Administrator of UO Excelsior Shard

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Re: Changelogs - Summer 2019

Post by +Colibri »

Bump for today's restat. Although it was supposed to be an easy weekend, we fixed quite a lot of various bugs and had a restart every day to apply them asap.

I'll be taking a short break to tend to non-UO stuff (things to do around the house, vacation time...), so the development will continue in September.
+Colibri, Administrator of UO Excelsior Shard

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Re: Changelogs - Summer 2019

Post by +Colibri »

Bump for today's restart. The housing upgrades are coming to an end, there's just one more scheduled improvement related to this project, then it's on to other things, we'll keep you posted.
+Colibri, Administrator of UO Excelsior Shard

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Re: Changelogs - Summer 2019

Post by +Colibri »

Today's restart was for a batch of various bug fixes and technical improvements. The bugfix that I think we will all be most happy about, is that now when you change facet (recall to a different map, from Trammel to Tokuno for example), all the containers from your backpack that you currently have open, will no longer automatically close, but remain open.
Disclaimer: this changes how certain packets are sent from the server to your client. I've tested the changes quite well, but there's always the possibility that I missed something that will be found soon... If it turns out this causes more issues than it fixes, I'll have to undo this improvement.


Btw, although our upgraded helpsystem is great because tickets no longer get lost (or have to be re-sent when you log on again, or when server restarts), but the downside is that any ticket that's open remains open until we review it and do something about it. So we racked up 340 bug reports that are still open. Well, many of them are not actually bugs (just misfiled, or the sender expects different results from that thing in the game), or multiple tickets sent because of the same issue discovered by different people, but still there will be a couple more batches of bugfixes in the near future so that we can significantly decrease the number of open issues.
+Colibri, Administrator of UO Excelsior Shard

Don't know what the purpose of your life is? Well then make something up! ;)
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