Greetings Rubi-Ka Citizens!

@Portaler here with an update for January 29498 AD (2024). It's been an action packed month since our last update. First and foremost, I'd like to express our collective appreciation to the Project Rubi-Ka tester community. You have been absolutely great over the years and in the past 3 months since we've expanded our tester pool we've seen a huge surge of not only activity, but quality bug reports!

The bureaucrat droid without textures will haunt my dreams...

We have some rough figures to share. The community has seen a huge increase in activity, with our Discord opening up and growing to over 110 members, 89 of which have joined in the past 2 months. We've had over a dozen different community members reporting over 72 bugs and defects. We've resolved over 60 of them, with a handful still needing final verification of resolution.

A special thanks to: @PlayboyFixer, @EnfoDoug, @Varzog, @S4ff0, @deathlef, @westtell4, @Random823, @Xannon21, @AOFlux, @praxis1988, @gigabite1123, @GlitchyGirl, and all others who have contributed this past month.

No leets were (permanently) harmed in the making of this news post.

The community testers have been hard at work, and it shows! As is tradition in developer circles, when we fix bugs we often make bugs. We do our best improve our unit testing systems to help prevent regressions. I will say that this is a challenge in a project that has grown organically as our reverse engineering discoveries often require us to rethink and rewrite entire systems. We've done this many times over the years. So as such, we have to work extra hard to make sure we move our agg/dev slider to the left and practice as much 'defensive programming' as possible.

For a full list of bugs closed check out Latest Changes page. For a list of any open issues feel free to check out Issue Tracker

A Deeper Dive - Collisions and Meshes

So, is there anything that can be shared about our deeper dives into the Anarchy Online? Absolutely, @Unknown and @3F1 have been hard at work on a number of engineering dives. One of the key discoveries of recent months has been the analysis and reverse engineering of the client's geospacial structures. They are stored in custom formats of which contain collision meshes in KDTree format. These structures determine the vertices and points that make up the polygons that form the structures of Rubi-Ka, shown below.

A peek at what the collision meshes look like under the covers.

So what value is there in parsing and understanding these structures? Well first and foremost we use these structures to build higher fidelity navigational meshes for NPC pathfinding. Additionally we have it in our backlog to use these structures to build in physics like ray tracing to determine things like Line of Sight on when firing a gun, casting a nano, being affected by an AoE vs standing behind a wall or obstacle.

By processing these structures we can bring higher fidelity physics to our server-side logic.

Do you recognize this playfield? Hop over to our Discord and tell us what you think it might be?

Join our community

As we jump headlong into 2024, we want to thank the community and encourage all to keep up the hard work on this project!

If you'd like to get involved with the project as a tester, drop in to our Discord and say hi!

— Portaler