Customs?

Someone said

Impressive stuff so far, you clearly know what it takes to make a successful RO server. I'd like to ask a quick question, though, about your opinion of custom hair styles and clothes colors. Would you implement them on your server, or are you going to keep everything straight up official? Thanks in advance for your reply. xD

Yes there will be lots of palettes to choose from. But custom hair styles are not possible because there is no such thing inside the RO client itself (just checked). So unless you use Xray, you can't really have them. and i'd hate to use something like that... :(

I'l use this post to express my thoughts on customs.

Yes, Custom items & monsters could be an addition onto eRO but only if they fully meet the following requirements :

For mobs

Balanced abilities depending on location
Sprites that meet the general RO Standards
Drops that go with the map & level of the region. (Prontera fields are not niflheim's.)

Example :
This one would go well for a lutie area mvp.

The same goes for items.

Website Design

Yo!

Alright, The Website layout for Elegy RO has come to a pré-release state where it will be tuned.
I will update this post with a preview as things change...






Update : 21.03
I didn't have much time but managed some to play some more with the layout, here is what it looks like now (with duplicated content)
I should seriously get into it this Saturday tho..








Update: 01.04
Well, as of now. You can view the progress on the site here
http://erotest.hopto.org/index.html

About Donations

Hello² again!

Someone asked about donations. And damn, i have a lot to say about that...

I Never understood how a sane person could afford to take money from underage gamers in exchange of a virtual item on an illegal server. Seriously, it's simple. If you can not afford to pay the required amount for the hardware then you aren't supposed to be starting a server.
And i have a lot to say about those who think of their servers as a secondary (main for some) source of income... But let's keep the blog clean.
There will be no donations on Elegy RO.


Answering JackSpace

However, what about special items that are normally unobtainable. Things like "sheep hat". So far I have only seen ParadiseRO give these out, with custom NPC/Quests

That will be the case, and not just Give & Take quests, but real quests with a consistent scenario.

Hardware information !

Hey !

The Hardware for Elegy RO was ordered and is now ready.

For the Off-Game interface, We ordered a dedicated Server with Unlimited bandwidth in order to offer a stable , non limited environment that will offer a lot more liberty than shared website hosting; The server will be empty and i will install the Webserver ( Apache,SQLite,PHP & IIS for the ASP Applications.)

Then; The Game Server,
A Dual Core intel Xeon with 3.0 Ghz each. 2GB Ram & A 10MBPS Dedicated line, just for us.
This server is able to provide 1000 Players with a lag-less ,stable game play with optimal uptime.
You have my word on that or else i will retire from my job :p
However be sure that once we get 500 + Players we will upgrade to a more capable machine.

Backup Server information.

Well, Usually, backups are just taken and put on the same machine, but what if something bad happens to that computer? This risk makes backups useless.
So i will set-up my home computer to download the backups taken on the other machines via FTP at the end of each day.
Also, The game will be saved each hour. So in the case of a big problem, you shouldn't loose more than 60 Minutes of game time.

Some Gamplay issues

Well, duh.
This is important.

For now, Rates will be 4x 4x exp; 4x drops;
Why ?
I wish it could be 1x, but the general public would not be appealed by such a low rate.
So instead, i choose 4x, it does not shorten the game because you will have a hard time getting to job 50 unless you are being leeched. Many game aspects, and what i consider failures will be changed.
For example :
Anubis. A mob that will reward you with 112K Base Exp and just a tiny bit less job exp on a 4x. At level 98, that makes for approximatively 0.12% Exp. That's far far from the 0.02% i leveled my knight with on Isis back in the good ol' days.
His Exp will not be lowered, instead we will make him more powerful so that he becomes , worth his points.

Feedback and advice over this issue will be highly appreciated. :)

Job Attribution

A Ragnarok Server development can be divided to 3 parts therefor we need 3 capable persons.

Server Software Developer : Leon Honore

Basically the person who will handle all of the server side processes.
Maintenance, Bug Fixing, Hardware & Software related issues and so on.

Scripting : Windsor

He will handle everything that is related to NPC's, Update the server with new quests & updates & new items & mobs.

Client Side Developer : Windsor/Leon (Temporary)

He will handle the client of the server, update the application, create patches with new sprites & files to then apply them for everyone to download and use.

This post will be regularly updated, because there are a lot of other positions that need to be filled.

last update : 17.03

Forum Software : PHPBB3 Versus IPB 2.4.x

Another issue, and a major one. At least that's what i believe.

The forum is probably the most important feature after the game itself, so it is supposed to be "good"....

I don't mind either, making the skin for IPB or PHPBB3 is no problem.
So it's more a battle of features. I'm just the admin so i don't have anything to say about it. I think that it's a choice that requires feedback from mod's & users.

So comment ² !!!!