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Important Behind the Scenes: Restoration Spell & Chat

DeletedUser51

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Behind the scenes: Royal Restoration and Fellowship Chat


Dear Humans and Elves,

It's been a while since we last gave an update on the new chat servers and its features, as well as the Royal Restoration spell, so we would like to do that for you today. We know that information on both of these topics is overdue, and we do apologize for having been silent on these topics for what may have felt like a bit too long. And, while we had our reasons for that, it turned out to take longer than we had hoped, so now it's time to come back to our promise, and give you an update of what's going on behind the scenes regarding these two topics.

The Royal Restoration spell


Some of you may already know what this is, but for those who don't yet, we'd like to take this opportunity to tell you about a new spell we're working on. It is called Royal Restoration, and it will allow you to upgrade your event buildings, as well as the Magic Residences and Magic Workshops. This spell will replace the current Blueprints that you can get from the Tournaments. Of course, you will be able to get the spell from the Tournaments as well. Any Blueprints you have will be changed into the new spell, which has the same capabilities, and more.

blueprint_to_restoration.png

So, now the question that many of you want to have answered is of course: when is this spell finally coming to Elvenar? And this is where things get more complicated, unfortunately.

Since the initial announcement of this new spell, we have been working on getting everything ready for its implementation. We initially thought that this would be doable in a relatively short time-frame, but it turned out that it was much more complicated than we foresaw. This is common in a game like Elvenar, where many systems have to work together to make the game work, and even more so with the introduction of a second platform that is our mobile app. We had planned to make the spell available for the browser version already some time ago, but we then found out that, if we were to release it now, we would break the mobile app when anyone used one of these spells on one of their buildings, and that is obviously a major blocker.

That is why we have had to change our plans about the release of this new addition to the game. The next step will be to attempt to resolve the problem of the mobile app breaking when we release this spell on browser, so that we don't depend on the mobile team's full implementation of the spell anymore. If that cannot be done (e.g. because of technical dependencies or other time-critical tasks on the mobile side taking longer than expected), we may have to wait for the full implementation of the new spell in our mobile app before we can all enjoy it. That full implementation is currently scheduled to be finished latest in late 2018, which would then be the date on which we would see the Royal Restoration spell in Elvenar.

Fellowship Chat


Another topic that's widely discussed in our community is our new chat for Fellowships. We have made the decision to proceed with rolling out the new chat servers already, because we were having major problems with the old servers that kept disconnecting and failing. Right now, we have the new servers in place, but their implementation comes with a downside: we lost the /w and /who commands, meaning it's now impossible to use the chat to privately talk to another Fellow ("whisper"), or to look up who's currently online.

Privately chatting with others using /w is currently not supported at all by the new chat servers' infrastructure. We have evaluated the possibility of this feature returning over the last weeks, but found that implementing this on the new chat server would pose quite some technical difficulty and thus take far too much time to justify its implementation. It would mean that we would have to spend a lot of development time on a feature that was never officially supported, nor intended in the old chats system. This time we should much rather use on implementing other features in the game. So, while we would have liked to give you back this functionality, it unfortunately will not happen - at least not in the foreseeable future.

That said, we have seen that the /who functionality that allows you to see who's online, is the most-missed one of the two, and we are happy to announce that we will be implementing that in the new chat. Please do realize that it won't be happening immediately, as we find having the chat bug-free is more important than re-introducing this feature. We do still have a couple of open bugs related to the new chat, such as messages showing multiple times, or in some cases not at all. But, if all goes to plan, we are looking at restoring the /who command in the coming weeks to few months.

We want to emphasize that we can see that the chat is much more stable than it has been in recent months, so we still believe that proceeding with rolling out the new servers, despite these two lacking features, was the best approach. Since we rolled out the new servers, we've not had problems with the chat being offline anymore.


We want to thank all of you for bearing with us while we're working on bringing these new features to Elvenar. We hope that with this post we've been able to provide you with some of the information you've been looking for!

Kind regards,
Your Elvenar Team
 
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