This year will not end till another major patch was released. I actually planned to have something more to see for this year but I underestimated the time takes for overhauling some database-related content.

I decided to post most of the internal auditor updates now again into the ticker so you don't need to check unofficial channels for some updates. The revision numbers are gone which were artifactually generated anyway so now the date and timestamp are used, but also this is artifactually because a patch contains more commits then just from one date.

I continued some behind the scene work on the EQCLauncher which eat away a few weeks during summer and is more of a pet project of mine but I hope that players will be able to take advantage of some newer features that are in development like last years enhanced screenshot functionality.

Content-wise, all quests and events have been reviewed for the available zones - due not so optimal planning on my side and a large scale private "project" that will go well into the second half of 2021 I was also busier as usual and found it a bit more difficult to split my free time even more.

I don't think I need to repeat myself but because there is always doubt so here again: I will continue to work on the project on my own schedule, the Auditor Test Server has just been renewed for a whole new 12 month period so there is that.

Apart from that, some more exciting things are happening on the Project Lantern front and I encourage everyone to check out the Discord Channel viewtopic.php?f=47&t=4185 for some juicy updates.

Stay in good health, over and out

I want to give some short overview for the recent year, to keep people outside the Auditor Test or IRC/Discord in the loop regarding the project. Most of the time was spent updating the build and dependency system for EQC. Previously, there was the original Windows Only Visual Studio build and later on a coexisting CMake build just for creating Linux Packages. The crux was that no recent C++ language features could be used because some dependencies just for Windows were hardcoded, even though the Auditor Server already runs for years on Debian - Development however used mostly Windows.

Using more convenient and lightweight API's which were available for Linux couldn't be used without breaking the Windows build, which was still using the compiler and language features from Visual Studio 2010. This has been massively improved by unifying the CMake build and solution configuration also for Windows and using the direct support from Visual Studio 2019 for managing CMake based projects. It is now much simpler to update 3rd party libs like Lua or Boost.

Next up, a few months were invested in improving the EQCLauncher. EQCLauncher for those unaware is the projects own Launch System for the game client, which provides many enhancements like custom resolutions and proper hor+ widescreen support (something that even EQLive isn't able to do last I checked) or enhanced audio playback, login data saving and much more. While the major feature isn't yet fully completed, it will be very exciting when it's done. While I don't want to spoil anything about that, I can at least detail the specific quality of life improvements that have been finished. First up is in-game screenshots can now be created in PNG format and in a dedicated folder with good file naming and timestamp. The reason for this improvement was, that vanilla EQ and even the trilogy client - which created BMP screenshots - were just naming the resulting screenshots by an index, e.g. EQ000000.bmp, EQ000001.bmp and so on. How did EQ know what to name the next Screenshot filename? By looking through all screenshot files in the EQ dir. You might guess where I'm getting at. When you have 100 screenshots, it would on every PrintScreen go through each of these 100 screenshots, and check what is the highest number in the filename. This resulted in the game freezing for a couple of seconds or longer depending on how many screenshots were already there. Instead of just fixing this by using a unique name using a timestamp, I went ahead and used smaller, easily shareable screenshots in PNG format instead of BMP.

Next up on the list is initial WINE support for the EQCLauncher, there were WINE specific bugs (like, they create Win32 controls differently than genuine Windows does) that would lead to crashes upon starting the Launcher. This has been fixed and since WINE 4.21 Widescreen should work fine too (see comments below this post for 4k Screenshots from WINE)! I have high hopes that with the Linux Subsystem in Windows 10, WINE will be tightly integrated too. There are WinD3D libs for Windows which allow running the client however there is no performance improvement! On native Linux, WINE provides the full (locked) 60FPS while Win10 requires a DX7toDX9 proxy to achieve 60FPS. This is not an issue on previous Windows Versions.

Finally for the EQCLauncher, for those on Win10 with higher resolution and font scaling enabled - automatic DPI Scaling is now set in the Launcher so that the Screen is displayed correctly without manually trying to overwrite Windows specific settings.

Apart from a few bug fixes, not much time has been spent on the actual codebase. However, the Auditor playground has been continuously increased with content. For reference, the following zones and starting races are currently available on the Auditor Server:

[b]Antonica Reachable by Boat, Travel Agent, Only "Good" Races and Zones[/b]
[img]http://www.eqclassic.org/images/antonica.png[/img]

[b]Faydwer Reachable by Boat, Travel Agent, All New Characters[/b]
[img]http://www.eqclassic.org/images/faydwer.png[/img]

[b]Odus Reachable by Boat only, Only "Good" Erudin New Characters![/b]
[img]http://www.eqclassic.org/images/odus.png[/img]

I want to finish this report by wishing everyone Happy Holidays and giving a small sneak peek at the recent progress of our former EQC Developer Wizzel. The Lantern project is busy figuring out anything related to how the old client read zone data or graphical assets, how the shaders, clouds or fog were generated and how to exactly mimic this behaviour in more recent frameworks.

Recently a breakthrough was achieved by cracking the animation data from the EQ Clients assets and made it possible to show animated NPCs in Lantern Game Client:

https://imgur.com/a/JRuboNy

https://imgur.com/D8LJBr1

If you want to be more in the loop about things that are happening that are not officially posted or like to communicate with testers, feel free to join our official IRC Server (http://eqclassic.de/cgi-bin/cgiirc/irc.cgi) or the unofficial discord server moderated by a forum member (viewtopic.php?f=47&t=4185).

The second Auditor Test is still ongoing, since the initial start the playable testing area has been continuously increased. Initially, only areas around Qeynos and Halas were available. As of today, it is possible to travel from Odus through Antonica to Faydwer by boat and foot. Three dungeon type zones can be visited and characters in most "good" cities can be created. The increase of the land mass is not something that is really a focus of the continued testing but gives Testers the ability to have more things to do and see some kind of progress outside of bug fixing.

Speaking about that, the Revision Ticker hasn't been updated in a while but that did not mean no updates happened. Test Server update notes are only available to testers because it also includes things that are not related to the server code itself but also about our own Launcher and it's improvements and specific content that makes testing easier and NPC pathing nodes for dungeons and cities.

What is the current state, you are asking. On the surface, the server is in a playable state - there has been, not a single crash in the last 2 years. However, there are important things that still do not work as perfect as they should, like some side issues with the pathing code in dungeons or connectivity issues during zoning. These things are very hard to track down and take a long time to fix. Apart from real bugs, there are still greater areas like reviewing and balancing of melee combat and spell aggro which is generally a part of a beta test with more players.

Does EQC need more testers? The answer is a clear NO because there are still enough open issues that can be worked on before more issues are found/reported.

Do EQC Testers want more testers? The answer is a clear YES, because getting a group with people from different time zones is not easy with the current active tester base. I will consider adding more Testers which are long time forum members in the intermediate future. However, 99% of the time people that ask me are nowhere to be seen a few days after getting access. The Auditor Tests single focus is on improving the server core and not to enable people to re-experience old memories, there are plenty of alternative servers available for that with more players! We do have some very loyal testers, including one who isn't far from reaching level 50 through legitimate (no bonus experience, buffs etc) means.

If you want to be more in the loop about things that are happening that are not officially posted or like to communicate with testers, feel free to join our official IRC Server (http://eqclassic.de/cgi-bin/cgiirc/irc.cgi) or the unofficial discord server moderated by a forum member (viewtopic.php?f=47&t=4185).

The second Auditor Test has started, everyone who already participated in the first phase has been automatically added. We leave the Tutorial grounds for a more hands on experience in this phase.

Auditors will have access to the new Phase 2 forum, to get started please follow this [url=http://www.eqclassic.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=70&t=4063]introduction[/url].

If you have not been part of the first Auditor phase, do not worry - I will add more people over time. The server has less raw power than your mobile device (because we don't need much) so I'm carefully watching the load first. People who are seriously interested in testing can send me a PM with the subject Auditor and they might be added immediately. The only requirement for testers is being a somewhat experienced player. You do not need any technical or programming skills.

No matter if you have been chosen or not for now, eqclassic.org wishes everyone a Merry Christmas!

[img]http://www.eqclassic.org/images/eqc_xmas_small.png[/img]

There wasn't much information available about our first testing phase.
Well, this is about to change!

The first Auditor Phase was successfully held from April to end of June 2013.
About 100 users were invited to participate in the first testing stage. The group consisted mostly of forum members who had earned auditor status http://www.eqclassic.org/autism.php.

I'm not going into details about the test playground, but there is a sample video by one of our members here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UGdDEWDd00

The test server stability was excellent, even Yeahlight and me were surprised that we only had 2 crashes in the 3 month time-frame, which only happen right at the beginning btw. This in itself is evidence enough that after years of development without external testing, the coding quality produced for EQC is more than just good.

More developers doesn't necessarily mean more stable and complete code, if you don't understand the bigger picture and only part of a server mechanic, you are more likely to break things or implement it wrong. I know for people without development background this is not easy to understand, developing a server is not like building a house were you just add more workers and it will somehow be done quicker and not fall apart. A meal will also not cook faster if you just add more cooks.

Now for some statistics.

About 50 Users reported in total over 400 issues.
About 200 issues were valid and almost all have been fixed now.

6 Testers reported about 50% of the valid issues. These reported at least 10 issues each, and the No #1 reported 25 valid issues.

Here is a top 10 list of *valid* issues reported

[code]
| TreatsEQ | 25 |
| fatal_error | 18 |
| adeptation | 15 |
| Loki | 14 |
| Naeadil | 14 |
| Beledric | 10 |
| Deathrydar | 9 |
| Tiiden | 7 |
| Deattas | 5 |
| Deantodd | 5 |
[/code]

Thanks to every tester and reporter, and especially to the above people - we were able to massively improve the server quality.

[b]So, you are asking, what now ?[/b]

I have updated the Roadmap to reflect the current project status. As you can see a few things cannot be simply just implemented without knowing what needs exactly to be done.

This is a reoccurring theme also for fixing issues, most of the time is spent on actual research and not on development. When you see the issues that were resolved, significantly more time went into verifying that the reported issue is valid and should be implemented in that way.

BTW: Since a few people still haven't grasped it, as long as [b]I[/b] didn't make a statement regarding this project - any reports are probably false. Additionally, any posts with my name in the subject will most likely not be read by me.

Ownership of everything EQClassic related has been transferred to Harakiri. From this point forward, I cannot guarantee communication under my name as legitimate, but you may always verify messages, requests, etc. by sending me an e-mail at Yeahlight@gmail.com.

All private messages have been purged from the database. If you really need something from a past private message, feel free to contact me to recover it.