darkhearted_raven

Maybe not everything was finished till recently. I certainly don't know that kind of information like you do.

My understanding (I am not on the project so my information is sketchy at best) is that this most definitely wasn't ready for Halloween. So it really shouldn't be thought of as "taking from" a possible halloween update, the decision not to do halloween was not in any way linked to this release (to my knowledge).

Whilst I have a lot of love for the thought behind this post I do feel a need to step in and stand up for the Live Events guys here. They're trying something new, which is what people asked for, and they've put a lot of work and love into this.

Sure the cosmetics are raven themed, but they're not ravensworn themed and have no impact on that "achievement" and crucially they don't stop me adding more ravensworn stuff in if I can find an artist that's bored/drunk enough to sneak it in.

I got to see much of the concept art and (surprising no one given my ego) supported the cool imagery.

There are as many raven interpretations as there are creative minds in the cosmos, so let this simply be one variation. If I get a chance to sneak more ravensworn cosmetics in, they'll be quite different to this anyway.

I for one welcome more of the raven aesthetic and I do not feel the live events guys have been anything but flattering with their choice of image...

Sorry, it's not a ravensworn issue because ravensworn doesn't work like that. I do think I've worked out the problem though and am testing it currently.

This is a known bug. It's a bit fiddly to track down but I'm currently working on it and hope to have it live with the farming 120 and herblore 120 update later this month. ;)

Hahaha very tempting. :D

I'm not planning on going anywhere anyime soon. I mean sure, if I win the lottery I'm going to buy a castle and write terrible books for the rest of my life, but otherwise I'm not likely to leave anytime soon.

But, real talk, we are actual people with actual lives that extend beyond this game. Sometimes really good opportunities come our way that align with the lives we have now. If someone offered the right job, I'd consider leaving for it. I love RuneScape and the players, but sometimes we need to make the move that's right for us.

I know there's a lot of conspiracy talk and "rats on a sinking ship" analogies, but that doesn't actually line up with reality. We're actually doing pretty good and there's a lot of positive feeling about our future.

As for internally, there's some really good stuff happening. Mod Warden is a great new addition and has been pushing for some great changes that should be awesome for everyone. Changes in development and the content...

It was a really rather dumb one as it turns out. Checkboxes were not working properly for the new seeds we'd added. Something so simple on paper, literally the little ticks were not appearing on the screen.

Took 3 devs, several hours of debugging and pouring over the code, before we realised that there were duplicate entries that had snuck into a data file... that's it. Duplicate entries that our code addled brains had filtered out when we looked over it.

I may have screamed a little.

Well the issue wasn't a live one, it was with the content we're currently working on. So that would be why you weren't aware, I was just using it as a reference.

Honestly we don't have the time to write up that sort of detail for patch notes. What we write in jira would need to be edited, sanitised, have the code specifics removed and then rejigged to make it player facing. The time taken to do that for each bug would rack up really quickly and we'd be losing the ability to actually fix bugs or create new content to do it. So I don't think it's something we're ever going to do.

<3

So, realistically, this is turning into a discussion I cannot add to any more. We have done midweek coldfixes in the past, but they're a big deal and require some careful consideration, as I am not part of the discussion in this scenario you're not going to get the in-depth answers you want from me I'm afraid.

Coldfixes require a decision to be made and the costs weighed up. It's expensive (in both time and resources) to shut down and restart the game and shutting down the game disables the game for everyone not just the people suffering the issue. So a call needs to be made and this time I'm not part of that so can't give you any more answers there, sorry.

In some part, yeah sure, but this is also just the power of code full stop. Sure there are more modern processes that help to limit these issues, but bugs happen in code, it's the nature of the beast and many of these modern processes simply cannot be combined with the runescape set up.

Client crashes are much trickier to track down and resolve than other bugs and uploading those fixes may require additional processes that I myself don't understand (not the part I work with).

Oh cthulhu yes, I HATE those!

I'm honestly not that clued up on that part of the process, but I know rollbacks are certainly very costly.

Real answer, because not everything can be hotfixed. Some things require what's called a coldfix, which is where we need to take the whole system offline and reboot all the worlds in order to manage. That's a BIG ask and it's one we have to weigh up really carefully. If the issue is annoying, but not utterly destroying the game, then generally we feel waiting until the next update is best bet. If the issue is gamebreaking, then we'll coldfix and sometimes implement a rollback if we feel we need to.

Where we can, we hotfix. Even if it's where we temporarily add in a little bit of less than perfect code to fix the problem for now whilst we roll out the better fix when we update the game. But this isn't always possible, especially when it comes to things that deal with the client.

And sometimes the fix isn't immediately straightforward and takes time to solve. Ramen and I are currently pulling our hair out over a small bug (in test, not live) with Seedicide. An issue...

No, it wasn't but I can see how reskins would work for that as well.

A palette swap would require an artists involvement, I am not able to do that. My art skills are baaaaaaad.

To be fair this is not that level of gathering data yet, this is me getting a rough idea of whether an idea has value so we can discuss it more in future. A poll at this stage would just be wasting everyone's time, nothing may come of this, this is for my own interest.

Is it a big change in dev/art time between reskinning a pet vs adding a new one?

Eh not really. It's about the same amount of work ish. A bit less graphically I think, but it's either the same or (at least as a one off) more work dev wise.

just design an alternative skin for an existing model and that's literally it

Such a dangerous word "just". It's never quite as easy as it may sound. But I get where you're coming from.