Clean-up !

[Xavier Antoviaque]

I mentionned it quickly in my article last week (see "News from the
devs" => http://ryzom.com/forum/showthread.php?t=11893) : the devs are
currently giving the Ryzom code base an early spring clean. It required
more than a few words to introduce it, and my article was already quite
long, so I wanted to have this dedicated space to explain its overall
philosophy to the best. But, don't worry - it will be shorter than last
week. :-)


1) Goals

Although in the past we've not communicated a lot on how we work, here
at Nevrax we do keep a vigilant eye on the feedback on the forums, the
suggestions that are sent to the community managers and the general
opinions that circulate in game. Over the time we've built up a large
collection of points that have been raised by different people at
different times and that deserve deeper consideration by the dev teams.
Some of these points are large, but many of them are small and less
troublesome to implement. With the spring clean, we are jumping on the
opportunity to dig out the points that were either previously blocked by
technical issues or that we just didn't have the spare resources to work
on, and seeing what can be done to get them into the game.

To be able to fulfill these, there was some re-work to be done on some
of the "behind the scene" game systems. Some of them were coded at a
very early stage of development, and had to be adapted to two years of
iterative refinement of the game mechanisms; as described in my previous
article, the fast paced development cycle of post-release did not allow
much ground refactoring.

While we're at it, we are also taking time out to polish the systems
which are actually preventing game content from reaching its full
potential. For example, the rates at which rites and bosses can be
introduced are directly linked to the improvements the developpers will
make to the code base. Also, having better systems means that new
features can be incorporated more easily, with less risk of side effets
and resulting bugs.

In a nutshell : when the flexibility of the underlying systems is
improved, our capacity to get more content and features into the game is
improved as well.



2) Current work

Here are some of the first elements that are being addressed at the
moment :

- Inventories :
The first (big) piece of work is the refactoring of inventories. The
game rules having evolved somewhat since the inventory system was first
implemented, possiblities have arisen to simplify the internal
management of items and inventories in general. These simplifications
make it possible to change legacy system limitations and allow us to
make some visible improvements. For example, the guild inventories that
were previously limited to roughly 250 slots will soon see this limit
vanish in favor of the larger 'bulk' limit. There will be significant
improvements to the way that similar items are grouped into stacks in
the inventory, and so on.

Here, the re-work will allow you to have more storage space on your
inventory, and the developpers to keep some of their hairs while dealing
with it.


- Bugs :
As most of you are probably aware, any issues that are signalled as
bugs, via the in game customer support tools, are passed on to the dev
teams where they are prioritised and looked into on a regular basis.
With the spring clean, the guys have been delving into the reported
issues database, digging out the issues that they had previously put to
one side. As a result, you'll be seeing some significant fixes coming
through in the next few patches.



3) More to come...

Of course, I will keep you informed of the following steps of the spring
clean as we progress on it.

--
Xavier.