EverQuest Developer's Log August 2024

We're still trying something new but a little different this time.

Last month, we introduced a Developer’s Log which allowed some insight into our development process. While it did accomplish what it was set out to, we felt it could use some improvement by way of expanding on some of the points to explain the ‘why’ and not just the ‘what’ of the things we are working on. So, we are trying this again, without the bullet points and with some more in-depth knowledge for you. We appreciate and welcome all constructive feedback about this process.

You'll see a summary of work below, and while some tasks may only be listed as part of one sentence, some of the tasks may take multiple days, weeks, or months to complete. We will be breaking up this work by disciplines which are not necessarily chronologically ordered. These tasks will include work from Design, Environment Art, Character Art, Engineering, Production, and Audio teams. This will not include Community, Brand, Customer Service, Quality Assurance, Operations, and other essential teams throughout the company.

For this log, the time-period is from the Friday before the July update until last Thursday.
The items below may include investigation and long-term research and development tasks. This is not a promise or indicator that changes are coming soon or that they will even happen as sometimes research proves why we shouldn't do a thing as opposed to why we should do it.

Before we get into the specific disciplines, this past dev month, the team kicked off our Annual Planning. This yearly event is when we sit down and discuss all the major initiatives we'd like to tackle in the next calendar year. Before the kickoff, the leadership of the different disciplines dedicates some time to preparation. Part of that prep is getting our current processes and projects cleaned up. For this year, we updated our project tracking software with new fields and migrated the existing tickets and any lingering tickets to support it. We also updated all the automation, project tracking boards, and detailed views, our crash reporting systems, and our roadmaps to use the new fields. Annual Planning meetings are broken up into various focuses such as re-investments, progression servers, expansion features, tools, etc. These meetings involve the entire team figuring out just what to prioritize and work on in the next year (sorry to the team for all the email invites for meetings!). From there, the follow-up, estimations, block scheduling, review, and finalization portions will continue through the end of this calendar month. It's time-consuming, but the outcomes are critical to enabling us to continue development.


Design

The design team continued to plan for our 2025 expansion, concentrating on quests and raids. During this time, design management also prepared for some new content design hires, attended Gen Con, wrote one of the 2025 expansion NPC description documents, reviewed marketing articles, and helped the Engineering team in interviewing candidates for their team.

On the content team, we wrote documentation for six zones for the 2025 expansion. We also finalized a raid for The Outer Brood and started work on two more raids. Along the way, we updated Dranik's Hollow and added NPCs to two zones and collection items for another one for The Outer Brood. We also fixed some original game bugs. We created new content for the August and September Anniversary Tower. And perhaps best of all our two new content designers got started with training that included pathing, NPC creation and population, general task creation, kill quests, and story quests. This training is to give them a good start on the complexities of working on EQ before tossing them in the deep end.

Our systems team was also quite busy, primarily focused on work for The Outer Brood expansion. For spells, in addition to general bug fixes, we planned spell lines, adjusted spell levels, and started spell upgrades. For items, we made conversion previews, the luck chase item, ultra-rare items, and began tradeskills. We also created Nights of the Dead and Frostfell marketplace items, Extra Life rewards, and closed a few bugs. For Alternate Abilities, we finished planning class and focus AAs for supports and tanks, then went on to create data for general and mercenary AAs, and archetype AAs for attacker, healer, and support classes.


Environment Art

With the rest of July, the EverQuest Environment Team was busy putting the final polish on zones for The Outer Brood. We’re very excited for the players to see and play them. The environments are a bit of a departure from a typical expansion. They are unique, cohesive, and required the development of some new "tricks" to complete, as well as dusting off a few old ones.

As is typical of summer months, the team also completed other assets for the expansion through the first half of August. Two striking new suites of Hero’s Forge armor were created. As were hundreds of icons. We also kicked off the logo and key art for The Outer Brood. And continuing with our commitment to Extra Life, we produced some fun reward items for participating players who achieve the required goals.

We did a lot of planning for the upcoming year. As part of that planning process, the Environment team started on pre-production for a new round of zones. The team is currently building out from simple representations of these zones created for visualization purposes.

July and August were engaging months for the Environment team! What exciting things does the rest of August have in store for us?


Character Art

The character team is wrapping up final touch ups and looking for any bugs for 2024. There was a last minute add in boss asset for The Outer Brood expansion that turned out great. We did a couple assets for Extra Life for our players to enjoy.

Most of our focus will now turn to 2025 and getting a jump start on our next big adventure. So, lots of planning for 2025 character assets needed for special events and yearly releases. Getting started early is really helping the character team get more new assets into EQ.


Engineering

This past month, the Engineering team wrapped up the Thornblade to Mischief server merge, which was (once again) the fastest server merge EQ has had to date, unlocking after six hours. Although not many people get excited about server merges, EQ is super fortunate to have improved this process as much as it has been in the past few years, especially considering its complexity, the addition of new systems, and its database architecture (which is, like many things about EQ, not conducive to server merges). We also spent some time investigating a real estate bug on Mischief that occurred as a result of the merge, and an issue with unusual types of player data collision, which were resolved and we've taken note of them for when the next server merge comes around. We also completed an internal project to assist the design team with creating dialogue. The creation of NPC dialogue has been a pain point of the design team for a long time, and we have set up the beginnings of a better system for these to be created (and maintained).

We've also been hard at work on game performance, especially the biggest performance bottleneck of the game, real estate. Real estate does what we call a "blocking load" when players log in or zone - this means that nothing else happens until the server receives a player's real estate data. Once you have a lot of players online, and a lot of real estate, it starts to negatively impact things like zoning speed. Real estate also affects zone performance, in that when we do item focus lookups we do, in fact, check your real estate. Improvements have been made to this process that we hope will make raid zone performance smoother, and zoning faster. Some of these improvements are included in the August update, and others are still in progress. We've also made improvements to the system that controls the "end of raid" reward script and plan on taking telemetry measurements to see how effective the latest changes have been.

The Engineering team has also been working on resolving some latent UI and window related bugs, especially related to fullscreen mode. EQ's UI has a tenuous architecture, on top of many, many different settings (see: the nightmare that is eqclient.ini). This makes testing and verifying very difficult, especially when different operating system versions and video resolutions come into play. We completed several hotfixes related to these issues and will keep an eye out for any remaining, getting them in when we have time.

A side note about a couple of interesting things that came up - EQ has something called "graveyard zones." Way back when (maybe you remember), in Planes of Power the development team made each zone automatically summon corpses close to the zone entrance to assist with corpse recovery. This mechanic would come up again any time these zones were used - for example, in the TBL Plane of Fire missions. The graveyard mechanic can be somewhat unforgiving in that you can't take a corpse away from the graveyard once it decides to summon one (this is something we could fix in the future). There were some zones that probably needed the graveyard mechanic disabled (TBL missions), and other zones that were flagged as graveyard zones but never set up correctly (perhaps intentionally), such as Veeshan's Peak, Dulak, and Crypt of Nadox. The second odd thing is something we stumbled upon while investigating a player report about a bugged quest turn-in. The quest turn-in code (the old, OLD quest code) is super dusty, and it has some special cases that didn't quite work right. One is a special quest to disable the PVP flag, which was never fully implemented. It is pretty interesting to think of how certain things may have been intended in EQ, but never worked because of a bug.

We've also spent time fixing and improving a lot of miscellaneous things (as is the norm) - improvements to inventory and parcel UX, internal tool requests, investigating server crashes, equipment set bugs, DZ loot lockout errors, improvements that help customer service, and a mysterious parcel bug on Teek. Aside from that, we've been hard at work on interviews and hiring new engineers. It has been a pleasure to speak with some very enthusiastic candidates who want to help make the game better and have a lot of fresh ideas for the game.


Production

We have been keeping up with our recurring tasks such as weekly and monthly meetings, reviewing the top bugs on the forums, updating and promoting members of the guide program. We did a post-mortem on the Fippy Fest Event. We reviewed the EverQuest Soundtrack Volume 8 track listings. And, on adding new members to the team, supported them by getting their workstations and various software/database permissions set up.

We gathered information, questions, and new proposal breakdowns from Art & Engineering for an Environment Technical Art Proposal and sent them over to our external contracting team.

We requested various features from our Platform team in preparation for future feature releases: promotion related, expansion related, and for our Extra Life 2024 rewards. Also, for Extra Life, we are getting our reward keys ready for the big game day later this year.

With our Community team, we’ve been poking at the new forums for EverQuest, reviewed (a lot) of web articles and forum posts, answered questions and gave clarification on incentives for Extra Life articles, and we documented the server ruleset ideas collected from the Community Resource Council program into our internal wiki.

We regularly check in with our Brand and Marketing teams and provide information from the team or work with them on information checking any releases they have ready. We worked with them on getting cross promotion information for the Year of the Dragon content across Daybreak Games. We answered some EQ questions for a press outlet. We also accepted the title of Extra Life Partner of the Year, so we took the time to fly out and receive the honor and thank them.

San Diego Comic-Con was this month, and we worked with Brand on our SDCC presence- preparing, outlining, and practicing our SDCC panel and organized (and attended) the Community Event we held after.

Our swag store is still the best spot to get official EverQuest merchandise. The production team has been keeping things up to date. We sent our monthly reports for our sales to our finance team and reviewed our t-shirt pricing after some changes to our vendor's pricings.


Audio

The Audio team is plugging along, working on SFX and Music for the new expansion for EverQuest! We’re cooking up new music for the upcoming zones and some SFX for the [redacted] mount!

We’ve also worked on the EverQuest Soundtrack Volume 8 - getting the soundtrack all together, preparing it with our distributor, and getting it submitted and into your favorite streaming services. EverQuest Soundtrack Volume 9 is currently in the works and be on the lookout for a release in mid-September for that.

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We hope this has helped you gain some insight into our development cycle or at least a bit of curiosity has been satisfied. Please let us know if you'd like to see more of these or other constructive comments about this process or general concept.

The EverQuest Team