Samool

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  1. Regarding the auction house, jaytoo, developer handling that feature, has created a feedback thread to discuss the motivation behind it and to iron out the implementation details with you all. You can find it here: That feature may sound a lot like the old enclosure rules, but it will be enforced by game mechanics rather than GMs. The area it can cover will be very limited, as it's not meant to be used for much other than new players using it for animal pens and small farms, so this definitely isn't a return to those huge fenced areas. It should end up on the test server within a few weeks, so there'll be plenty of time to test it out before release - hopefully we can catch and patch out any potential for abuse that way. The original post only meant adding new craftable items that are available to everyone, as we don't want to put all of the cool new stuff in the shop either. Yes, our work does include a Java runtime upgrade, which should actually come before we release that larger client update. Please stay open-minded in regards to the quest system. Having a set of tasks communicated to newbies in a manner that they recognize from other games should be a huge help for getting them started, and it's not at all about turning the game into anything resembling theme park MMOs - it initially won't even affect other players, as we're only focused right now on adding some introductory quests, rather than adding them to the gameplay of estabilished players. We do want to look into it eventually, but only to expand on the currently available content, to have more things for players to do, rather than to change the nature of the game in any major way. Wurm is, and will remain, a world run by player initiative, rather than by a set narrative or quests. You will not need to purchase premium separately to have premium status on other clusters.
  2. Inevitably, the auction house will compete with other ways of trade, but as we have to add certain limitations to it (no bulk items, max offers per player, fees to avoid offer spam), we don't think it'll make any other trading features irrelevant. Wagoners and "manual" cross-server bulk delivery will stay as the main ways of transporting materials. It'll still make more sense to go and visit a market in-game to purchase many different items at once as well, so it's unlikely to kill merchants either. The motivation with this feature is to increase trade where there currently is very little happening already - a lot of our players don't have forum accounts or prefer to not participate in chats, leaving them pretty much unable to participate in the market. We are close to being able to use a newer OpenGL version on Mac, and finally adding the in-game browser (currently only used for Wurmpedia) to the Mac client, as some recent changes in LWJGL seem to have made that possible. I can't promise the Wurmpedia feature being there in time, as the implementation of that may be more involved, but we should be able to up the OpenGL version on Macs with this larger client update, which should also be available on test within a couple months. We don't have an Apple Silicon device to test with, but it is something we want to look into still. I thought Rosetta is able to handle Wurm currently though, is that not the case?
  3. Hi everyone, We’d like to update you today on how and what we’ve been doing in the last few months, as well as showcase our current plan for the near future of Wurm Online. First, we would like to brief you on how Wurm Online and Code Club AB have been doing. As indicated in Game Chest Group’s report (Link), our parent company has improved the quarterly revenue by +11,8% compared to Q4 2022. This means the company has finally turned a profit with new corporate leadership and the increased focus on Wurm Online. During the year the game has performed better, with more players and increased revenue due in large part to maintaining a stable premium player count and the newly introduced silver shop. We’re still learning how to use the shop to best provide you with extra cosmetic items, even if we, most definitely, missed the mark with pricing at times. Going forward we aim to get out more attractive offers as well as a release more craftable items, not limiting it to skins. We have more active players than a year ago (close to 1000 more monthly unique logins), and that seems to be climbing steadily. That number is higher than you might think while playing the game, while we don’t have exact data on it, it seems in large part to be new players, who at this point often don’t stay in Wurm for long, which is something we’re actively trying to improve on. We currently have around 4550 premium accounts, which we consider a healthy number. Still, for us to grow the development team, we need to attract more players, something we think our plans laid out below can accomplish. Action rework We are in the process of finishing multiple major projects. The largest, action rework, is nearing completion and will be released onto our test servers very soon. This feature is partly an internal refactor of the code that handles many of the player actions. It adds plenty of quality of life features that will make Wurm better to play, including new toolbelt mechanics, where every item there is activated at the same time, and adds a new quickbar that replaces the old toolbelt UI. The new quickbar also includes the functionality of the current select bar. We’ve also added a visible action queue and new default action mechanics, where you can bind a lot of different actions to a single key easily. For pictures and examples of the changes you’ll encounter after the action rework goes live, see here: Public testing of this feature will follow shortly after we finish the UI part of the changes and we run it through some more intensive internal testing. Expect an announcement on this in the upcoming weeks. Client work Graphics rework and client optimization have both grown in scope and we’re looking at releasing that work on test servers sometime after the action rework goes live. Other than the previously announced lighting improvements, it now also includes a complete terrain overhaul. Terrain will not only look better, with all of the terrain textures being remastered in a higher resolution, but the performance should be drastically improved as well. These changes will reduce stuttering when walking around and will take up less memory, which, in turn, should allow you to run the game at higher quality settings without sacrificing performance - or you can just run a few more clients with alt accounts at once, if that’s your jam. New Haven Finally, I want to reveal one of our biggest recent development projects, a total revamp of the new player experience. Codenamed New Haven, this will be a starting island on which you land right after you complete the tutorial. The game rules of that area will be adjusted so it’s less dangerous and faster for new players to start on, giving them a better environment to learn on, before they dive into the real lands of Wurm. This may remind you of what Golden Valley once was, except a lot more friendly and guided than starting on GV was, back in the day. Players will be guided through their first hours in the game by an entirely new quest system, at first unique to that new server, providing small rewards for players performing certain tasks that showcase various mechanics that they need to learn in order to survive Wurm. We hope this will help newbies avoid getting overwhelmed with everything they can do, and instead being able to better understand the game a small piece at a time. While “quests” as you may know them from other games may feel out of place for the sandbox of Wurm, we believe this is the way to go for us to reduce the amount of new players leaving the game early on. This server will use new land protection mechanics in place of deeds, instead linked to fenced areas around houses, to both make it simpler for new players to understand and to mitigate the possibility of claiming large areas of land. The goal is for players to be able to play close to other players, while still having enough wild areas to explore. We will most likely extend this mechanic to work on all servers, to make off-deed living just a bit more viable. A large challenge of this project that we are yet to finalize, are other limitations so that players will be motivated to eventually move onto the regular Wurm servers. We also need to make it so they don’t feel like they’re leaving their hard work behind. We do have a few ideas for solving that, like being able to pack your house to move it to another location, but we’ll share the details with you once they are more fleshed out. The aim for this project is to lessen the drop out rate of new players. We hope new players will also be able to join the community early, as we are going to allow everyone to visit that server. Portals Together with New Haven, we’ll be introducing a new portal mechanic, allowing you to teleport from any server to any other server, as well as between starter deeds on the same server. We would like to not ever have to ask players to make new accounts if they want to change their playing server, as that often is what happens now, as well as allow everyone to play with their friends at any time, wherever their account is. Mind you, this does not mean a complete NFI-SFI merge, although we do intend on having almost everything, other than your items, transfer. That means your character, coins, skills, will now all cross between those two server clusters. Due to economic concerns, items are currently excluded from the transfers, but we have looked into skill statistics and found that at this point, the skill gap is not significant enough for us to have a reason to keep it separate. We hope this will make the new server transfers a more popular feature, since your skills will no longer be locked to the Freedom cluster you've been playing on, so it'll be easier for you to explore or move to any of the other islands. Upcoming months Shortly after we release all the previously mentioned work, we would like to focus on more content for all players to enjoy. A good bit of this will be things we already announced in the past, but priority changes came in the way. PvE content We plan on releasing this as an update soon after New Haven. It’ll include goblin camps, a new feature focusing on exploration and combat, as well as a building expansion, currently planned to include ceilings, docks, and new wall types. Character customization rework We’re in the initial planning phase of a character customization overhaul. This will address most of the complaints with the current player character visuals, while looking better and adding a lot more possible variations, including more detailed faces and new hairstyles. In-game auction house Another project being developed is an in-game auction house, which will handle both auction and WTS offers. It’s meant to facilitate trade between players - you’ll be able to sell and purchase items through a new UI window, currently planned to be accessible through any mailbox in the game. Longer term projects Most of our plans for the future will depend strongly on the outcome of the releases of changes described above, so we would like to avoid creating a definite roadmap for the entire year here. There’s just not much point in that right now, as we historically haven’t been great at following our own roadmaps, so our aim is to only promise what we’re sure we can deliver, and to bring you the things you’ve long waited for. Among previously mentioned changes you might be wondering what happened with, is the new account system and PvP work. The account system is something that is not currently the priority, but we likely will focus on finishing it in the later part of the year. Our developers are actively looking into PvP tweaks and balancing, but we have no progress ready to share yet in either of those projects. I hope you can forgive me for this post being so text-heavy, as these aren’t things we can easily show off right now, but you can expect more posts from us to pop up over time with details about each of these works. Thank you everyone for your continued support, and we can’t wait to have you try out what we’ve been working on! Happy Wurming! PS: This year's map dumps have just been released. Check them out here:
  4. This should be resolved now, please let me know if there are any more issues with the registration process.
  5. Hi everyone, The login issues stemmed from us having to change our CDN, which provides the pack updates to the client. The initial issues were due to a long TTL (time to live) for updates on that new CDN setup, which we are tweaking to make sure it doesn't happen again. The error you're seeing right now is that it fails to connect to that CDN for an unknown reason. I suspect that tweaking your firewall settings might be able to fix that (seems a VPN can work around that as well) but we also have a potential fix prepared, which makes the client download the packs via our own domain using HTTPS - that's likely to make the connection more consistent. We'll be able to release it as a client update in a couple hours.
  6. We just released a client patch for the bug where outlines were invisible for some configurations, depending on the game settings. The outline rendering method had to be revamped both for future use and to allow for reasonable outlines of semi transparent objects such as vegetation, and the new default white color is what fits best the softer lines it produces now. Visibility on winter tiles does seem pretty bad here so we'll have to tweak that still. We may be able to reduce the glow that @Xalloshowed here further as well. How the outlines look depend strongly on the distance and resolution - they were made to be significantly less impactful on performance than the old outlines were, so it's using a lower resolution buffer "behind the scenes", but we may have to sacrifice that optimization to improve it further.
  7. The restart today has fixed the maple leaf necklace issue, where accounts with 0 coins in their bank were unable to claim it despite having premium. All premium accounts should now be able to get that item from the shop. To ensure people don't miss out on it, we've extended the availability of that item until December 7th, as indicated in the main post.
  8. We don't recommend using the old shop as we don't actively maintain it, but it is safe to use. Still, we wouldn't want you to miss out on the sale. With the VPN, I meant using a VPN that is located in Belgium so it just gives Xsolla a different situation where it might actually realize that it should show the correct payment options for Belgium. If these options don't work, please contact me privately here or at contact@wurmonline.com, and we'll see about arranging something so you don't have to pay extra during the sale.
  9. Hi Lycanthropic, We've looked into this and I can verify that Paysafecard should be available in Belgium as well. The geolocation code that determines what payment options you can use is not something we are able to change, as it's on Xsolla's side. Maybe Twitch and GOG have another way of determining your location, but we rely on Xsolla's tools for that. I know it's more of a workaround, but since it's decided to think you're in Germany, could you try using a VPN service located in Belgium? That, or using a different internet connection (a mobile network perhaps), could cause it to change the payment options to the ones available in Belgium, including the local paysafecard variant. If you get a chance to try that out, do it in a private browser page, to prevent it from potentially using the previous cookies, in case Xsolla stores the location that way.
  10. Since this update's launch we have released a hotfix, another one to fix a second server crash type that we've detected, and now a client update to fix broken keybinds. Here's a summary of the fixes: Bugfix: Rift beams should no longer appear on random colossus Bugfix: Putting a barding on a mount won't increase its speed anymore Bugfix: Fixed server crashes related to the "Bury all" action Bugfix: Arrow bundle related keybinds should no longer crash the client. These are: ADD_BUNDLE, BIND_ARROWS, UNBIND_ARROWS We are working on further fixes and tweaks for reported issues and should have them out soon, with next week's maintenance restart at the latest.
  11. Hi everyone, I’m glad to finally be able to share with you all the work we have been doing to improve Wurm. This post contains both features that are going to be included in the game very soon, as well as some more longer term changes that we will release in the upcoming months. Rift Update As the rift changes have concluded testing, they will be included in an update planned for early September. If you missed the public testing period organized by Jaytoo, here’s a summary of the changes: Rift Colossus Four unfinished colossus, one for each god, will be placed around the rift before it starts. For each part added to the colossus, the builder will have a chance to get a rift point (to be spent for rift rewards) or a rift material. A finished colossus will grant different buffs, depending on which god it belongs to: Fo - one random wound healed every minute, Willowspine is applied to rift participants Magranon - Mass Stamina is applied to participants every minute, Frantic charge buff is also active for players in the rift area Vynora - Excel is applied to all rift participants Libila - Only fight skill will be lost on death, double rift creature spawns Rift Points Rift points will now be awarded proportionally according to damage dealt to the rift creatures Rift Rewards Functionality of the bracelet of inspiration has been changed - this item guarantees success on a Moment of Inspiration when improving items, while being worn. Upon creating a rare item the bracelet gets destroyed. Socketed rings now give different crafting and gathering bonuses depending on the gem used Artisan rings increase skill gain for a skill you select up front.. These can also be recharged with rift points when it’s close to being depleted. Shoulder pad functionalities have been changed, and their effects now are more varied, with some providing new buffs such as the Tank and Berserker affinities, respectively reducing and increasing the incoming and outcoming damage at once Soul stealer necklace functionality has been balanced, now triggering only on stronger enemies Included in this update are also functionality enhancements to rift items - all shoulder pads should now be able to be worn on either side, and many of the items will finally be improvable and repairable. Rifts will also no longer alter the terrain significantly, instead being limited to removing trees and grass around the site. More details of the implementation can be found in the public testing thread here and will also be available in the patch notes upon release. We think this update will make attending rifts more rewarding and worthwhile, as we hope to see the activity around these events increase. We’ll be monitoring the changes with the release, in case we still need to iron out the balance of it. Arrow bundles Arrow bundles will be added to the game with this upcoming update, with the intention of making archery more viable. These will allow you to combine multiple arrows into one item, so that you can improve and cast spells onto the bundle to affect all of the bundled arrows. You will be able to combine between 2 and 41 arrows into a bundle, depending on your Fletching skill. We’re still planning on more changes to archery in the future, as it’s not very fun to use bows right now, but this should make it much less of an annoyance to get decent arrows. Resource Nodes Coming soon to the public test servers, we will be introducing a complete replacement for the existing foraging, botanizing, and snow collecting systems. Currently, whether or not a tile can be foraged or botanized, or have snowballs collected from it, is completely invisible until you try to perform the action. On top of that, the results of foraging and botanizing are very random, selecting from mostly the same pool of items no matter what, making it difficult to search for anything specific, even if you know what the possible results are. Replacing all this will be a system where specific resource nodes, with visible graphics, can spawn on tiles randomly over time. You can then gather items from them similarly to how foraging currently works, destroying the resource node in the process. This will be an improvement over the current system in several ways: Foraging and botanizing resources being visible on tiles will make it easier to find what you're looking for, in addition to adding some much-needed visusal variety to the world. Each type of resource node will have its own list of items, so finding specific items should be easier. For instance, if you're looking for rock shards, you can keep an eye out for "rubble" nodes, or if you're looking for branches and sprouts, you might want to look for "undergrowth" nodes. Since there will be many types of nodes, the number of potential items has been greatly expanded. All items from the current foraging and botanizing systems will be available, in addition to many more. Types of resource nodes that can appear on a tile, and how likely they are, depends on many factors, including tile type, altitude, season, and more. This means that foraging and botanizing will be possible on nearly any type of tile, and that both geography and in-game time of year will have a much greater impact on gameplay. For example, you might find dune grasses on sand near the water, lichen growing on pavement, or even fungus growing in caves. Some uncommon tiles, such as enchanted tiles and mycelium, even have their own resource nodes that cannot be found anywhere else. Which items you find from a specific type of resource node, and how likely they are, can depend on similar factors. For example, as in the current system, woad is more common on steppe, but this also extends to certain plants being more common in certain seasons, near water, or several other factors. "Snow" resource nodes will not only accumulate during the winter, but also at high altitude. The minimum altitude for snow to gather will vary depending on time of year, so the tallest mountain peaks will always have some even in Summer, and some lower-altitude areas may only have any during Autumn and Winter. These altitude limits are determined on a per-server basis, so that every server should have roughly the same percentage of tiles above the snow line. Skill will matter more than it does now. Quality will be determined in a fairly similar way to how it is now, but the difficulty of foraging or botanizing is determined by the type of resource node, the type of tile, and the specific item gathered from it. Some special items may also require a certain amount of skill to gather at all, or may become more likely at higher skill. The current foraging and botanizing system has another problem: There is currently no way to know what possible items you might find when foraging or botanizing without looking it up on Wurmpedia or some other resource. To solve this, a "Lore" option has been added to both tiles and resource nodes themselves. When used on a tile, Lore will tell you what types of resource nodes might spawn there under current conditions, in order of how likely they are. When used on a resource node, you will instead receive a list of what items you could possibly harvest from it, also ordered by likelihood. Skill will also matter here, as some higher-difficulty items or resource nodes might be hidden from the Lore command with insufficient skill, but you will always be told when this happens. This should allow players to determine for themselves what they might be able to find and under what conditions, without needing to use the wiki or any other source. This feature also replaces the current random terrain decorations such as stones on dirt or ferns, which are a common point of new player confusion. Action changes The work on this has been going on for a long time now, and while the bulk of it is about making it easier and less bug prone for us to alter anything action-related and add new features, there are some gameplay things this work will immediately affect: Default action key functionality should now be possible to re-bind based on context, rather than be limited to the static target/action set it uses now New quickbar will replace the current quickbar, select bar and the toolbelt slots, creating a more streamlined way of interacting with the game world - with dedicated slots to insert tools and actions into, the quickbar is split into a tabbed top part and a common bottom area, all of which you should be able to arrange the way that suits your playstyle best Toolbelt will now act as a container that keeps items inside of it active at all times, allowing you to do more things without fumbling around with activating different items all the time - various systems in place will try to pick the item suited best to the action you’re trying to perform, but manually activated items will still be prioritized A visible action queue will be added to the UI, with the ability to change order of the queued actions and cancel any of them, rather than just the latest one When actions can’t be performed, rather than being hidden from display, they will now explain what is needed to be able to select that option in the context menu, such as suggesting the required tools. These changes require a rewrite of most action code in the game. Converting actions to this new system also gives us a chance to go back over everything, fixing long standing issues and making things run smoother - for example making flatten and level do what they say they will do. An added bonus of this conversion will mean that all actions will be bindable without them having to be approved manually by the dev team. Here's the original concept for the quickbar to further explain how it will work: The action changes are not yet ready for public testing, but it will be on the test server for everyone to try out well prior to release. Graphics and client improvements We have been working on an overhaul of the lighting model used in the client. This is going to introduce things such as environment reflections on metallic objects, moonlight and lamp shadows, and generally more believable visuals. In this case pictures tell a lot more than words, so here’s screenshots of things we’re ready to show off, including some before/after comparisons: The lighting changes are still a work in progress and should improve significantly before release - the reflections especially still require tweaking from the art side depending on the item. Client performance is something we consider a priority with all of this, so we’re making sure these new features don’t impact it significantly. If we include any heavier visual changes that do affect performance, these will be optional, to be toggled in the game settings. We have also identified some of the current performance issues and these should be addressed soon as well, improving frame rates and reducing stuttering across the board. We are also looking at upgrading our version of the Java runtime soon, which is likely to alleviate some of the issues players have been experiencing, mainly visual hitches and stuttering often caused by the Garbage Collector, which is significantly improved for real time low latency applications such as Wurm (or rather, games in general) in the newer Java versions. Development direction After these changes are out, we plan to continue on improving the new player experience and working on more quality of life improvements, as our main goal currently is to bring more players to the world of Wurm and keep them with us. With all that’s planned now, we aren’t actively working on large content expansions, but that’s not to say we have canned the previously planned work - features like the goblin camps have had work started on them and they are still coming soon after we’re done with our current plans. We’ll be including some smaller content additions in our various updates, such as new craftable decorative items that we nearly have ready for launch. That’s it from us for now. Despite the recent troubles around staff departures, the development team continues to work on the game, and we can’t wait to have these things out for you all to play with. As always, keep on Wurming!
  12. Hi Steveleeb and everyone, Enki isn't gone from us, he is still part of the GM team. We don't have any doubts that he's done wonderful things for the game, and I personally can't wait to see what he comes up with next. GCG is currently in discussions with Enki about getting him more involved on the game event front.
  13. Thanks!

    Hi everyone, I'll be stepping down from my post as a Product Manager of Wurm Online, due to a pileup of personal issues and health problems. It has been a great adventure and I've thoroughly enjoyed working on the game I've played and loved for over a decade, but it's time someone else takes the lead as I'm not fit at the moment to do it properly. There's no better person to carry this game further than Keenan so I'm certain it'll turn out great with him at the helm - you can expect a development update post from him shortly Thanks for the chance, and see you around Wurm! Samool
  14. Hi everyone, First off, apologies for the lack of communication coming from us recently. I have personally been in a life situation where I couldn’t do a good enough job to keep you all up to date, but that’s not an excuse for not being prepared for it, as we were still lacking a community manager contractor (please remember Demona was still a volunteer). Fortunately others have stepped in to help out - thanks a lot Keenan ❤️ Anyways, let’s get to the things we’re working on. Obviously we’re not too happy with the current state of animal husbandry, and we’ve got multiple tweaks pending for the next update we release, including large changes to how traits are passed down (more likely to be passed down rather than replaced with random ones), lowering the chance of passing down negative traits as we’ve decided it was a bit too harsh, as well as significantly reducing the chance of getting traits not relevant to the animal, such as resource yield traits on animals that don’t produce any resources. We’re planning to release a smaller update next month, before the exploration update, and that will include those animal husbandry tweaks as well as some content additions. To fix the communication issues we’ve been having here a bit, we’ll be looking at getting some extra Community Managers on board to help with things, and until that time I’ll try to keep you all updated a bit better than how we’ve done recently. Lastly, while this might be a bit of unexpected news, it’s something we’ve teased in the past, long long ago, in one of the news posts - we’ll be starting development on adding VR functionality to Wurm, and while we can’t release any further details on it yet, we don’t expect it to derail development on the content features we’ve announced. Other than this feature, the last roadmap we posted is still relevant, and so there’s more exciting stuff to look forward to. Thanks for the attention, and keep on Wurming!
  15. Can you upload your console.log or gamesettings file so I can try to repro with the same settings?