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[blurb]Water focused, new vehicles, events, bug fixes, stability improvements, and more![/blurb] Planned release should be tonight. The original goal of this release was to address a lot of water related issues, things that just looked ugly or needed polish; although still highly water focused, this update has added some new jobs, vehicles, disaster events, pets, and some terrain rework. It also makes the usual attempts to increase server performance and address crashes. New Stuff A new shipping lane system that lets the AI know what safe paths around the main land masses are. The ocean is now populated with cruise ships and cargo ships, these happy fellows just put around the ocean on their way to deliver their people or cargo. The San Casina Police Department shelled out a ton of money and purchased an old destroyer, expect to see this show up if people with a wanted level of 5 are in the area. The ugly old fishing buoys have been replaced with actual fish, birds, and other sea life. A new daycare has moved into San Casina, feel free to visit or call the Quality Learing Center for any childcare related needs! Fishing Boats now show the 5 nearest fishing spots - Also added two new perks for the Fishing Boat, one will make it so you see the 10 nearest spots, the other will make the markers on the radar show up colored (Blue = Normal, Better = Orange, Best = Light Green, Trash = Black). Added 3 new events, one is completely water based, one is mostly water based and one only starts and ends in the water. Enabled an old event from 2020 that was disabled due to how unstable the Pathfind was (it would often crash the server within 5 minutes of starting). Also touched up the effects of this mystery event. Added 3 new sea-based houses (they’re ex-military bases floating on ice bergs). Each house can have a favorite ship and helicopter. These houses also serve as docks for fishing and show up as closest locations when boating about. A new store has moved into San Casina that sells Ogels! Minifigs & Bricks has opened its doors and will pay good money for Ogel sets! Sure there might have been some rumors of them not paying, but everyone the owner knows has got payouts. Added 5 new player controlled boats! Speed Boat 1 (yeah, I don’t have a creative name here) Speed Boat 2 (same as above) Yacht Mark V Special Operations Craft Hamina Class Missile Boat A new city beautification project has been put underway; this project aims to revitalize some parts of town and make it look lusher and greener (and totally wasn’t done to simplify terrain/pathfind to increase stability). Added two new pets - Giant Spider and the Rabbit. Added some more Easter Eggs to the map. Added 23 new high scores for the player to master. Added a new system for the perks system that will notify players if a perk requires more than one use. Perks like Sniper now require at least 2 uses to have any effect, same for Master of Disguise. A system has been added to make holiday events happen automatically. New Years, Valentines, April First, Easter, Fourth Of July, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas should now automatically trigger without having me to remember to update the server files. Tweaks/Improvements Shrank the size of the circle marker on the radar, it was far too big. Increased the size of the ocean by 1000 meters to the South (And then even more after that, I’m guessing I added 1000 more to the East, forgot to put it in my notes of how much). Fixed some alignment issues with the ocean water. There used to be some visible gaps. Increased the polycount of the ocean so when the fog rolls in the player is no longer trapped in a sea of gray. This also has the benefit of casting slightly better shadows. Nullwave Repeater now carries less ammo and is now more expensive. Several building LODs have had their distance increased to make the pop-in less painfully obvious: Gas Station, Westwood Warehouse, Limmers. Bushes, Ferns, and other plants now have a slightly farther LOD distance, so they don’t pop in all of 5 meters away from the player. Increased the suspension of the Fiat Tipo so it gets hung up on curbs a bit less. A bunch of news updates now come from “SCPR” Made the Message In A Bottle’s LOD less awful to look at. It’s a little harder to spot now but it also doesn’t look like complete ass when you drive 5 meters away from it. Shooting AI Jets down now increases your wanted level even if the cops don’t see you do it, FBI or something. Weapons that have been favorited now will update their price the next time you purchase them if they’ve had increases or decreases over the years. Hovercraft that get EMP’d now fall into the water. This is an old system that I’m 90% sure was working at some point and just got broken. Made a simpler system for cleaning up data at the end of a game. This should help make game over and next map loading be more stable. Empty street sweepers now repair signs, making them less exploitable. The Mutant Takeover perk now unlocks by winning the Mutant Assault instead of losing (harder to unlock this way but doesn’t encourage the team to work against itself). Vehicles from a player’s garage are now only worth 1/10th their price, this is to reduce an exploit where players would sell them for full price instantly on spawn. Improved how exiting water with swimming works. There used to be some code that would block you from flying out of the water if you bounced on the surface, this is now handled by setting you Z velocity to 0. Added some new net code that will allow me to make certain objects only update if they are misaligned by a set amount client side. Bug Fixes A certain door in Renhalo has been fixed to work with the red keycard once more. Removed a delay from the Nullwave Repeater that made it silent for a split second when being fired. The simple fountain mesh now correctly lights with lightgen - no more glowing poles at night. Fixed some misaligned ID’s that caused doors not to open on certain buildings client side. Fixed 4 spots in the ocean where if you were swimming, you’d suddenly just fall. Fixed 4 high scores that have not been recording. The Killed messages would occasionally say killed instead of destroyed, this has been corrected. Fixed a bug with the Jackpot system that would cause the Jackpot to slowly decrease as the player gambled more. (already live on the server). Ambulance Job no longer pays money to the driver if the driver was the one hurting the person being healed. Fixed a bug that was causing trains to sometimes have odd collisions on create that would vanish after the player started moving. One of the basic hunting AI scripts wasn’t wandering around the map if it couldn’t find anything to hunt. Changed how my custom date time code works, broke more than it fixed at first. Pets no longer try to teleport to their owner repeatedly while the owner is swimming. Performance Reduced the number of draw calls on the graveyard Added a preset specifically for collision testing to reduce processing on the server. Added BillBoard textures to 3 of the common trees in San Casina to reduce impact on the client at range, managed to get the pop-in to not be completely horrible. Future Cop vehicles (APC and Enforcers) now have a final LOD that brings their poly count down to around 600. I’m noticing a pretty bad performance impact when the city is full of cops on the highest wanted level. Unfortunately, while this improved it, it didn’t completely fix it. Trains and Parachutes now use different objects to detect collisions; this reduces the number of script zone hits on the server. Simplified what types of objects are used for swimming to reduce the number of script zone thinks are needed. Fishing Schools now only scan the smart game objects list instead of the simple object list, which was resulting in 300 fishing spots checking roughly 5000 objects each 10 times a second, it got bad enough that I could start to “feel” the stutter when hosting locally. The change has made local hosting feel buttery smooth. This same update has been applied to things like EMP, Kezlarbo, chinook, and the vehicle transport. Increased the initial load speed of the game. Crash Fixes Ghost Strike Craft is no longer an instant crash (something caused its scripts to get blanked out). Player Controlled V22 Osprey will no longer crash the server when it’s destroyed. Fixed 10+ pathfind crashes, some in the industrial area, some by the gas station, a couple in parking garages, a few by the little park in the residential area. Original Release Specific Made the executable support up to 4GB of ram, which fixes 99% of the random crashing it was getting previously. Modern Client Specific Fixed some issues that could cause it to crash almost instantly on join. Fixed a bug with the object that created bubbles for people swimming, this was causing network issues with the modern client that would cause crashes, lockups, and disconnects. Massive UFO’s motion is now synchronized on 4.x if the player quits and rejoins. Boring Stuff Much of the code base now runs in VS 2026 (dropped VS 2008 support, a more modern debugger and night mode are godsends) I made the server crash logger a bit more robust, not sure if it'll actually help much with tracking the pathfind crashes but one step at a time.

A little backstory; I told told a friend of mine, I tested games for fun as a hobby. He told me he knew a guy involved in accounting for a game developer. It sounded cool, and I inquired to get a small meet up. I had a few questions, and spoiler I left feeling depressed. I started off with how I gave feedback into how the experience could be enjoyable, and often checked for bugs or glitches things like that. He told me that the big money maker in games were open world games because they generated live services. I asked what are live services he said you know RCS? I shrugged, he said you know PRI? I asked what PRI was. PRI stand for Player Recurring Investment. I said micro-transactions? He laughed. He told me games are measured in Sell-through, Engagement Time, and Yes in-game store transactions. I asked why open world was so lucrative? He painted a picture... A game is a virtual world, a box, and a while ago was asked the question, "what if the box was a disguised store?" Like what if world of warcraft allowed purchases at any time? You'd never have to go to the store, you'd be in it all the time. Like Disneyland where every 200m is a shop. The more customers in the door aka game sales and the longer browsing time aka Engagement through quests, maximizes the potential for in-game purchases. I was stunned. So the quests are there for Engagement time? He said yes. The quests keep you playing and logged-in, that why we measure potential play-time in hours. We are measuring a metric of potential store transactions. You know cosmetics, DLCs, currency packs, exclusive perks, etc. Exclusive perks? He said, well the enemy of play-time is when the player feel discouraged, so we offer perks to maker their shopping or playing experience better. Is that what people call play to win I asked. He told me no it makes accomplishing time fillers are tasks easier. (I call it grinding but whatever.) He told me difficult and repetitive tasks often drive the sales for these perks. It's a feature, like icons on a map. I asked what he meant by map icons. He told me game metrics requires a certain amount of icon density to give players time consuming tasks to keep him busy. Like Disneyland's rides. So success is measured by square km, icon density, and potential hours of engagement. He told me optimizing these three lead to potential additional transactions. Then he got real excited. AI is making it so we can generate thousands of km, icons/quests, and thousands of hours of potential live service sales. He told me players want more to do, more see, and more hours of game-play. He couldn't share any of his company's formulas (for obvious reasons). I said, that's a lot of AI work how do you quality test it? He said, the elements individually tested, then simply randomized. Like testing the cookie shapes, not the cookies. He told me not all assets need interaction, some are just ascetic. It's expensive to detail buildings and interiors, while it's easier to generate square exteriors, but change color or positioning. He let me know they are saving money by limiting total designers and focusing on modulating unit for projects. The idea is reusable assets with minimal bugs or errors. I asked about how that might effect aesthetic. And he told me that's what the graphic design departement solves. You know lighting, shading, and etc. So game design is making stores with the interior as theme parks with facade castles and quest distractions all for the purpose of the gift shop? He said, games are expensive and don't pop out of thin air. There are shareholders to please and quarterly earnings to account for. He told me if the model wasn't profitable it's wouldn't be used. After about an hour or two I thanked him for his time, and did my best not to feel depressed. So I did what any angry millennial does and write an angry blog. Thank you for your time.

Hi everyone, it's been a while! We've been on a nice long break, but has returned with a small patch to add some QoL and improve the balance a little bit. Take a read below to check out what we've been up to! Update 0.9.0.13 The changelog for update 0.9.0.13 is below: That's all folks! Head over to the discord for all of out latest updates. Please leave your feedback on Discord and we'll look at a larger balance patch for next time! Stay tuned for that! - @ OWA, @ moonsense715 and the AR Dev Team

Last updated 2020-09-24 (tested on wine 5.16 and W3Dhl: 0.11.2.1) Summary: The W3D engine itself (in current game releases) has no compatibility issues on Wine, the games are click and play. Some games that use older versions of scripts (ECW) require a simple workaround to get working. The W3D Hub launcher itself requires some non-obvious workarounds to get working (as detailed further down in this post). New renderer (scripts 5.x games) do not perform as well as of the time of writing. (lower framerates). EDIT: this is now in a lot of flux, both in the engine and the Linux graphics driver world. Things are a lot better. Introduction For years I have run Renegade and other Windows games using Wine on Linux. Wine's compatibility is reasonably impressive, but recent dotnet versions and DRM in popular games are known headaches or showstoppers. The W3Dhub launcher uses a recent version of dotnet and WPF, making it problematic. Wine lets you run Windows programs on Linux. It's not an emulator, it doesn't have to be (we're all on x86), instead it provides a userspace compatible with Windows (dlls, services, etc) so Windows programs can be run natively. Once wine is installed you can double-click on EXEs and they'll run. Wine can be installed on any major Linux distro through your relevant package manager. W3D Hub Launcher Download and run the W3Dhub installer as you normally would. I've ordered these problems based on the order I think you will encounter them. Prerequisite: Wine 4.0 or later Make sure you are running an up to date copy of wine: $ wine --version wine-4.0 Many distributions (eg Ubuntu, Mint, Debian) ship out of date copies of Wine. These will not allow dotnet and the W3Dhub launcher to operate correctly. Manually install a copy of Wine Stable if you have to. Problem 1: The W3Dhub installer hangs when it tries to install dotnet. Workaround: Kill the dotnet installer process. The W3DHub launcher won't notice the failure and will continue normally. Install winetricks. Your distro should have winetricks in its package manager. Use winetricks to install dotnet461: $ winetricks dotnet461 Installing 461 will take quite some time: various versions of dotnet have to be installed in a certain order to get there. In my case one of the steps hung because I had other Wine applications open ("Waiting for all wine applications to close"), so I had to manually close some other Windows applications I was using. Problem 2: (updated!) Graphical glitches in the launcher and drop-down menus misbehaving Workaround: open a terminal and run this command: wine reg add "HKCU\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Avalon.Graphics" /v DisableHWAcceleration /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f This forces WPF to use software rendering, as detailed in Wine bug 49055. This will not affect your game, only the launcher (and other WPF apps). Problem 3: Extremely poor framerate/performance, even in game menus This is a common symptom seen by people using 64 bit Linux distros that don't come with the necessary libraries for 32 bit graphics acceleration. As a result your system uses slow software rendering for 32-bit games. On Debian based distros (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, etc) you need to install several packages: $ sudo apt-get install libglx-mesa0:i386 (other packages?) TODO: find the full list of packages that need installing, or a source to link to. Nag me if you need help here, even if it's years in the future Problem 4: DXSETUP fails to run when installing a game Workaround: ignore. Appears to be harmless. Problem 5: Expansive Civilian Warfare (ECW) crashes on start with a "please report this error" dialog ECW came from an era of scripts/shaders where some directx8->directx9 conversions were being performed using a 'thunk' dll. Wine (by default) ignores any game-provided or microsoft-provided d3d8.dll and instead uses it's own version. Workaround: Open up winecfg and add a native override for d3d8.dll: Additionally: this workaround may affect or break some other games. Change it to '"Builtin (Wine)" to disable the fix. Thankyou to the members of the WineHQ community for providing the fix . Problem 6: Screen is left looking bright (or dark) after a game is closed. The W3D engine changes your screen/card gamma settings when the game is launched, but it does not always to restore them back when you close the game. Some Windows users also (used to?) experience this. Workaround: reset your gamma. A simple way on the command line: xgamma -gamma 1.0 Alternative workaround: set all of the brightness/contrast/gamma sliders in the in-game settings to 1.0 or 0.0 (as appropriate). This will make the game use a gamma of 1.0, making things appear darker overall but also ensuring a strange gamma level is not left when you close the game. Technically this also "improves" the image quality by avoiding colour crushing, so it's my preferred fix. Problem 7: Mouse problems: limited aiming angles, mouse leaves game, sluggish or slow mouse movement Cause 1: "borderless windowed mode" is not well supported. Workaround: Choose "fullscreen" or "windowed" mode instead for the game settings. Cause 2: external applications running, eg screenshot utilities when you press PrintScreen. Workaround: press Esc to enter the pause menu, then esc again to return back to game. The game will grab the mouse back properly again. The problem of 'limited mouse movement', where you feel that your mouse has been constrained in a large box, is also known to occur when some specific directinput DLLs are installed. If you have previously installed these DLLs to fix other games you may need to remove them. (Retired problem): My login credentials are not being saved The W3Dhub launcher only saves your login credentials when it exits normally. If the launcher crashes then it won't save them. Workaround: Enter your credentials Wait until you are logged in Close the W3Dhub launcher before it crashes. (Retired problem): The W3Dhub launcher crashes exactly 15 seconds after logging in EDIT: As of Wine 4.3 (March 2019) this problem no-longer appears to occur. If you are still suffering this problem then please reply to this topic saying so. Workaround: Open the W3Dhub launcher Wait for it to log you in (your name and avatar will appear on it) Launch a second copy of the W3Dhub launcher The second copy will login, work normally and will not crash. The first copy will crash, but you can safely close it and ignore it. I've paced the steps above for a reason: please follow them. If you launch two copies of the launcher at the same time then there is a chance one copy won't login properly. You can also open more than two copies, but this is not generally that useful. (Retired problem): The W3Dhub launcher pegs a few CPU cores EDIT: As of Wine 4.3 (March 2019) this problem no-longer appears to occur. If you are still suffering this problem then please reply to this topic saying so. I have no idea what's going on here. Excessive redraw loops if not vsync limited? Mining for tibercoin? This may negatively affect your gameplay if you do not have spare processor cores. Do you have a GPU that supports Vulkan? Install DXVK and reap better performance! winetricks dxvk DXVK converts directX calls into Vulkan calls. This is (generally) less CPU intensive than converting directX calls to OpenGL calls (which Wine normally does), and many W3D/Renegade games are CPU-bound. Warning: whilst this works for W3Dhub games, it is known to break other ones! If all else goes wrong: starting from scratch Sometimes installers will refuse to cooperate because of the state of your Wine environment. Installing some older versions of dotnet can 'break' dotnet461, stopping the launcher from running Installing dotnet461 or other dlls can (in some circumstance) break other older games or programs. If you need to start with a 'fresh windows environment', then consider deleting the ".wine" folder in your home directory. Warning: this will delete all files in your virtual C:\ drive, including other windows programs and games! Note: Filenames and foldernames beginning with a dot are hidden. Alternatively you can create a single "Wineprefix" just for W3Dhub and W3D games. Every "Wineprefix" you have is like a separate Windows installation and environment, complete with its own version of the C:\ drive and Windows registry. Whilst Wineprefixes are a very effective way of segregating different Windows programs/games, they require some more advanced steps to setup and use, so I don't recommend them for beginners. https://askubuntu.com/questions/956244/what-is-a-wineprefix https://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#Wineprefixes I use wine prefixes extensively. I have had bad experiences with experimental windows programs breaking my registry and ruining modded game installs that have otherwise survived many years of my abuse. I have also had certain games require dlls that dramatically slow other games down. End notes This is a very Windows/MSVC-centric community so I don't ever expect Linux support to be priority, but it's nice to have it. Dotnet and all of its extensions are always going to be a PITA to get working on other platforms, that's arguably one of the motivations of dotnet. We now have projects like Mono and some interest from Microsoft in become cross platform, but things are far from perfect. Happy to answer questions and hear people's opinions; I don't mind if you have not used Linux before and there's no such thing a silly question.