True Galaxies

As the current focus seems to be on creature LUA and quest lines, developer Elvaron has shed some light into the current development focus and why they have spent time away from focusing on the core professionals required for EOL (End of Liberator Milestone).

* Getting the Lua library we had so far only used for static template data tested for dynamic behaviour and stability before EOL.
* Testing it's viability for scripting quests / game content.
* Searching best practices, proper design patterns and yet unseen flaws in the Lua API (and there were severe ones we were happy to fix ahead of time).
* Setting examples for future content scripts.
* Having content to which we can get testers gathered properly and repeatedly without too much work for EC, so we can test the netcode / compression / congruence.
* Getting people to test PvE combat in a compressed manner to find errors in player combat commands, creature behavior, creature stats and overall combat mechanics.
* Testing AI for cell traversing, aggro and threatmap behaviour.
* Having proper obstacle scenarios for LOS testing.
* Testing the loot system in an enclosed scenario as opposed to random world spawns.
* Fun.

A lot has been learned since we started on them. Now that those two are almost finished we are returning to focus on professions and other things needed for EOL.

- SWGEmu

Saturday Stress Test - Round Two 01/28/12
by
Vlada
Published on 01-26-2012 08:29 PM

Saturday Stress Test - Round Two

January 28th, 2012
The SWGEmu Development Division

Greetings testers and community members,

Starting at 4 PM EST (check your local time here) on Saturday (January 28), the developers and QA are looking to perform another stress-test on Nova Test Center that will last roughly 3 hours (thus concluding at ~7 PM EST if results are sufficient). We need as many people as possible to log in, so please join us and Nova's rapid progression by contributing to our latest stress-test!

In addition to general stress testing, aka logging as many instances as your computer can handle, developers would like us to test some specific things:

Since TC: Nova will be wiped before the test, everyone will be required to create a new character and complete the tutorial.
Test MOB and NPC spawns and Loot in DWB on Endor and Geonosian Lab on Yavin IV

WHERE?
Nova Test Center (TC: Nova)

WHEN?
4:00 PM - 7 PM EST (GMT-5)

HOW?
Make a character on TC: Nova, complete the Tutorial, go to DWB and Geo Lab and kill & loot everything.


WHAT ABOUT LIBERATOR?
For the duration for this stress-test Liberator will be OFFLINE.


Once again and log in as many characters as your computer can handle. Remember this is not just stress test, there are specific tasks we need to complete. Those who never submitted a bug report should check this guide first: How to report bugs on Bug Tracker (Mantis). A well written bug report will make QA's job much easier.

And please remember to keep up-to-date on our testing information, the latest of which is detailed in our latest announcement and in End of Liberator Milestone.

~ SWGEmu Development Team

Hey all,

Just a heads up. We will be performing some forum updates, installing some additional modifications, and integrating additional website components. This round of updates has the potential to knock us offline for 10-12 hours or cause problems not reproducible in our development environment. This maintenance will start around 8:00PM on Monday, January 9. The site will be up and down during this time.

First off, hello to all our new visitors! True Galaxies is first and foremost committed to keeping true to Star Wars. So, if you are looking for a casual community to discuss everything regarding SWG emulation and SWTOR, you've found a nice, cosy place. With the recent closure of the official SWG servers, there has been a slight revitalization to the dwindling emulator community that TG has rested in for the past six years. Whether the emulator will ever be completed remains to be seen, but TG still holds its commitment to hosting a SWG server if that time comes. For now though, we can all enjoy SWTOR and the new life it inevitably will bring to True Galaxies.

Star Wars: The Old Republic
TG has guilds on Mind Trick. Both the True Empire and the True Republic have been formed and are open to anyone who would wishes to join. Each guild currently has around 20 characters, the highest characters being level 45. The guilds are going to begin organizing scheduled raids soon. If you have any friends who might be interested in raiding with the guilds, feel free to invite them.

Blue and Netrex reposted a variety of crafting, datacron, and companion guides in the SWTOR Guides forum.

Site Development
The development on the site stalled out this month. I've had a lot on my plate lately, so I have not done as much as I would like. Ofn and I intended on putting up a number of updates on December 14, but only about 20% of the changes were in complete condition to put up. There is a lot in the pipes in various stages of completion. As always, Ofn and I are always looking for new developers. In particular, those with intermediate knowledge and/or experience with Ruby, PHP, MySQL, CSS3, XML, and HTML5.

Highlights in the development queue:

• Raid and Group Organizer / Scheduler tool [50% done]
• Calendar automation [25% done]
• Guild pages [25% done]
• SWTOR Character / Forum Account linkage [75% done -- workaround for now is to use the user profile field]

Garbage Collection:

• Avg. unique visitors per day hitting the website: 641.2 (up 584% from November 2011, up 466% from December 2010).
• Avg. search engine impressions are up 815% from November 2011.
• December posts per day: 8.2
• Estimated number of cookies (the digital kind) eaten by our directors and developers since TG's foundation: 1,349,340

Hope everyone had some happy holidays!

It looks like the swtor server queues are indeed part of trying to spread population between servers, and they should be going away soon. I knew this was likely the case from the start, but I'm glad there is finally some clarification on the matter. The raging and complainers on the swtor forums and ingame were starting to get a tad annoying - just the sheer volume of them. I've had to sit in a 1,300 queue this week waiting to get on Mind Trick, so I feel others pains. Looks like they will be raising those caps after launch.

Heres a link to the SWTOR blog about the status of queues: http://www.swtor.com/blog/regarding-server-queues

For everyone's benefit, we have reposted some companion, skill, and datacron guides for Star Wars: The Old Republic.

They can be found here:
http://www.truegalaxies.com/swtor-companions/


Thanks to Netrex and Blue for compiling and posting these guides. The original companion guides are from www.swtorface.com.

If you're planning on joining a TG guild with your swtor characters, please bind your guild characters to your TG account by specifying their names in the "SWTOR Characters" profile field on your user control panel. It is under the Profile -> Edit Profile.

While initially we will not be restricting guild membership, we do at some point want to enforce a binding with a forum account. This is simply to improve out of game communication, and manage guild groups on the website.

Our guilds are tentatively scheduled to be deployed to the Mind Trick server. If anyone has any objections to playing on the Mind Trick server, and would like to petition to switch to another server, please reply as soon as possible. If I hear no complaints, then we will start joining Mind Trick... tomorrow.

Look forward to seeing everyone in game!

When?
The site will be taken offline sporadically with limited availability between 6:30pm and 11:30pm ET on Wednesday, Dec 14.

What is the purpose of this maintenance?
Integrating new guild tools into the site and forums, putting up tor.truegalaxies.com, integrating forum permissions into guild tools, re-configuring phpbb groups, sending out email spamz and enjoying delicious cookies.

It's December already?


Star Wars: The Old Republic
Three weeks until launch. Two weeks until some of us are playing. Hopefully everyone who tested this last weekend enjoyed themselves! The groups on Whitebeam Run were awesome all weekend. It was a lot of questing, grinding, crafting, learning, and getting the feel for things.

So where are we with guilds?
We will find out within the next several weeks which server True Galaxies Republic is being placed on. We may decide to disband the guild and reform it on another server, depending on the server we get placed on. Our current plan is to have two True Galaxies guilds, a Republic and an Empire guild. Both guilds will be on the same server.

As soon as we learn our server fate, we will be opening up the Events and Trade forums. We want to organize some pre-launch day and launch-week shenanigans. Specifically, some meet ups in various locations and questing groups.

Netrex has volunteered to lead raids when we get to that point. So, if you're interested in getting into the raid groups early, check out the thread.

Minecraft
Minecraft 1.0 is now live, following its release at Minecon earlier this month. Our minecraft server is still running 1.8.1, because bukkit and associated server mods have not yet updated. Blame Notch code. If you'd like to play on the minecraft server, grab a 1.8.1 jar and jump on in game. There are some interesting new builds that have been built recently. We will update the server to Minecraft 1.0 when prudent.

The Website
There are some updates and new features coming to the website soon. Specificly, we are currently implementing guild-sites to handle out-of-game communications effectively. We're also working on a way to tie your character names to your TG account.

Garbage Collection:

• Avg. number of logins per day on the minecraft server: 11.4 (down 42% from October 2011)
• Avg. unique visitors per day hitting the website: 109.8 (up 6% from October 2011, down 51% from November 2010)
• Posts per day: 13.2
• Estimated number of cookies (the digital kind) eaten by our directors and developers since TG's foundation: 1,314,700