Hello again, citizens of Rubi-Ka! Drake here again to share a project update with you all! It's been quite a while (six months, wow!) since we made one of these news posts, but we've been very busy, as I'm sure those of you on our Discord will have seen, so we're long overdue!

We've made a lot of progress since our last post - for the full details, you can check our changelog, which was last updated on the 19th of July. The changes below are the things which we've been working on since then!

New members on the team

We're very happy to congratulate TinkeringIdiot on joining the dev team - for those of you unaware, TinkeringIdiot has an awesome suite of web-based tools for AO and has been helping us out with bug testing for a while, and has started to look into some potential improvements to our Player Portal.

Verganas has also joined the Bug Hunter team - he has been working on coming up with a way for us to do automated client-side testing for Project Rubi-Ka. One of the most persistent and annoying issues in software development is regressions - things which you already fixed break again because of some changes - and automated testing helps you to catch those earlier, so having those tools would be a great help to the team.

Monster/NPC behavior improvements

Portaler has been working on a total overhaul of the system used to control NPC behavior - an area of our codebase which has been creaky and difficult for a while - and replaced it with a much better, easier to work with behaviour tree model. This has also resulted in many improvements to NPC/mob behaviour generally, such as pathfinding and the abilities to intelligently react to their situation. This includes doing things like casting Total Mirror Shield if their health gets low, for example. This will enable us to have much snappier, more engaging and challenging PvE combat.

The PRIDE of Project Rubi-Ka

Unknown has been working rather quietly on a tool for viewing/editing playfields and other game data, which we have named PRIDE (Project Rubika IDE) in honor of Funcom's original editor, TIDE. At present, this tool is most helpful to us in diagnosing problems and checking that our interpretation of the RDB data formats is accurate, but long-term it will also be possible for us to change existing playfields or create entirely new ones, which I'm sure you'll agree is a very exciting prospect!

Quests & NPC Conversations

This is what I've been mainly working on - the static mission and NPC conversation system used for delivering most of the game's story and quests. This is another example of a system which was a bit neglected and hard to work with, so we've overhauled it in a way that makes the data a lot easier to use, making it much more pleasant to develop. Most conversations are now working properly, with a few issues still lurking around - hopefully those will be fixed soon - and a lot of quests are now playable, including the ICC Shuttleport starting quests, Nascense Garden Key Quest, and many others I am sure!

Various other things

Of course, we've been working on countless other little things - lots of new features, bug fixes and improvements every day, here's just a sample of a few:

• Tradeskilling performs much better and checks requirements properly now
• Fixed bugs that allowed nanos to be spam-cast
• Lots of little quality-of-life improvements to the Player Portal
• Some helper tools to make it easier for devs to generate AO Markup Language text
• Some invisible NPCs (such as Mortiigs) have been revealed
• Many, many more!

As always, thank you to you all, the wonderful AO community, for your unending patience, enthusiasm and optimism!

If you'd like to learn more about the project or just look around, drop in to our Discord and say hi!

— Drake