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Release 1 Postmortem and Breakdown

Discussion in 'Announcements' started by Chris, Dec 20, 2013.

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  1. Akrondar

    Akrondar Avatar

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    Congratulations xD and great job!
     
  2. Lord Melvek

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    Thank you for sharing this post mortem. I had a blast testing the first pre-alpha release R1!! Bugs as it was suspected but still a nice quality release none the less!

    I'm sure it was very hard behind the scene to make this happens in time and you guys made it! You and your team did almost the impossible, cheers!
     
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  3. Isaiah

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    You guys did all that... and I thought you guys only had one server for the game. j/k

    Amazing work. It is good for the community to hear this because most of us don't have a clue about all the actual work that goes into this process. Most people base success on their user experience (which was still a success), but that only appears to be 5% or less of what release one set out to test. Great job all around.
     
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  4. Cryptomancer

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    Please excuse me if I am being pedantic here. Though John Carmack is certainly brilliant, he was quoting Donald Knuth regarding, "premature optimization."
    Good advice nonetheless, I remind myself periodically!
     
  5. rild

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    Great release, had a blast and wish I'd had more time to delve deeper! It all went very smoothly from my POV. Between this release and the story advancements I'm starting to get a better picture of New Britannia and how I might look there.

    Thanks to everyone on the team!
     
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  6. vjek

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    Great information, thanks for putting together this post, Chris.
     
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  7. Maka

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    This information is just amazing. Especially the 200k cost for the company to just push out patches. I feel like more companies should be this transparent so people know what their money is helping to support.

    I'm not sure if I should be disturbed or proud to be 1 of 1900 that played long sessions.
     
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  8. NirAntae

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    I have never been so excited by such "dry" data before! ;) Excellent post, thanks for the peek behind the curtain!



    Also...

    Three words: Target Rich Environment. ;) *snickers*
     
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  9. smack

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    I know I was on for like 2-3 hour stretches at a time. Making a 1-hour timelapse will do that :)

    I wonder who was online the longest and for how long?
     
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  10. Maka

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    Bring forward the biggest shroud nerd! We shall call them King or Queen of R1!
     
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  11. Chris

    Chris Tech Lord Moderator Ambassador SOTA Developer

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    Joviex, go check out the thread I just created in the Dev Plus Tech section. I go over some of our data and back end choices. Sorry to tease the non-DevPlus people but that is supposed to be a big part of the DevPlus level is getting more insight into the real guts of tech and game design. :)
     
  12. Knight Dozer Belador

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    Chris,

    I too had great fun in R1, running around, picking up stuff and decorating my future house and interacting with the NPCs and nice to see a little that went behind the scenes.

    Dozer
     
  13. Ao Soliwilos

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    I am impressed with the level of detail you guys are giving us, and great work! Thank you. :)

    Eagerly awaiting release 2!
     
  14. Cryptomancer

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    Gads I really need to bump myself up to Dev+ eventually. Hopefully I can budget it after the holidays.
     
  15. Leondegrance

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    Thanks Chris!

    I just have one small nit and I mean no disrespect.
    My nit is about your comment on premature optimization.
    That quote has nothing to do with "when" in the project you optimize (early or late).
    It has do to with optimizing without first measuring to understand "where" to optimize.
    You should constantly be optimizing your code with every release, just make sure you
    fully understand where the bottlenecks are before optimizing.

    Thank you and your team for a great first release!
     
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  16. Borg

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    Thanks Chris, R1 was so great, UO's flavour was all around, just as I expected.
    Thx LB and Dev team team for making the game we all have been waiting for years.
    Happy Xmas and Happy 2014 to all.
     
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  17. Edaeron

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    Very mind blowing hearing about every thing that had to go in to this. I mush say I'm more then impressed with how things are going so far and with all the work put in to this so far. Great job!
     
  18. Pendragon

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    I hadn't a doubt things would go well. Although I had not enough time to kick the tires as hard as I'd like to have, I never doubted it would be a success. Congrats guys and gals!
     
  19. Chuzpah Goodfellow

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    Awesome! Thanks Chris for posting this. I absolutely love this kind of information (geek at heart)!
     
  20. Chris

    Chris Tech Lord Moderator Ambassador SOTA Developer

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    Absolutely true. In this case it is more about optimizing content and not code. It went out with far too many textures at 4X or 16X the size they needed to be. The truly important thing is that we're in the ball park and we know what work needs to be done to get things in shape. One artist spent 1 afternoon this week doing clean up and shaved about 200MB off the memory footprint. Lots more to go but right now we're just making sure we're not making any decisions that can't be cleaned up later and moving forward! CHARGE! :)
     
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