Hellgate: London Multiplayer Revival Named London 2038, Update #2

The only reason Buck isn’t posting this update is that he’s currently very busy, but I’m sure he’s delighted by what is described by the second update of the Hellgate: London multiplayer revival project. The team has finally selected a name for the project, London 2038, and is making some important progress, with Stonehenge content playable, and a number of systems that weren’t available before. There’s still a lot of work to be done, but this is undoubtedly encouraging:

Work has continued on the main issues remaining; namely our data woes. We, mainly through the genius of MMan and MarCNeT, addressed many of the bugs in the first development diary entry and have a much more stable build to test with. However, issues still remain which can crash our server, cause unexpected behavior, or otherwise make the game unplayable. All in all though, we are moving at a slow but steady pace towards an Alpha-testable state of our server. Here is an updated list of what does work and what needs work:

What Now Works In Addition to Previous Update

• Stonehenge
• Stonehenge quest-related essences drop
• Trinket slot for Abyss-era rings
• All issues with traveling between zones seem to be resolved
• Guild formation and management
• The Transmogrifying Cube
• Friend System/ignore system
• Item linking in chat now works
• Power now regenerates
• Shields now regenerate Subscriber status and subscriber-only features are now unlocked and working
• Boss fights now have no known issues
• Skills seem correct, but further testing is needed

What Doesn’t Work/Is Being Worked On

• Remaining data alignment issues causing most known problems
• Power and shield regeneration rate calculation is incorrect
• Rare random server pauses caused by bad data related to merchants and items
• Party member health is not shared correctly
• Game client crash when exiting inspect window
• Rare and random error related to AI path scripting
• Auction house still has one bug

What’s Next

In addition to addressing bugs in our current build, we are also working on some developer tools related to the game data that should provide some boost in productivity around fixing data-related bugs. We will be continuing our work trudging through the data alignment issues we have faced, as well as addressing and documenting any other bugs that crop up during test sessions. We are also working on automation and standardization to make our lives easier and to ease the transition out of closed development to a pre-alpha stage.