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Afar ~ 1,000 Players

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Battle system remodel.

Before:

battlesystem1.png


After:

flashybuttons.png
 
Significant Battle Updates

1. New skill icons
2. New spell animations
3. Weapon stats and tweaks
4. Elements

1. New Skill Icons

Skill icons have been replaced. They now look like this:

1.png
2.png
3.png


2. New Spell Animations

4 spells now have animations: Fireball, Rockfall, Sonic Boom, Kamekaze.

3. Weapon Stats and Tweaks

This is an important update as it reshapes battles significantly.

Weapons can now either be PIERCING or BASHING. Different enemies have different weaknesses to both of these. Thick skinned enemies are strong against piercing weapons, for example.

Weapons can now be either NEAR or FAR (or WHEREVER YOU ARE... not really.) Near weapons are strong against land animals; far weapons strong against flying enemies.

Weapon stats have been changed, rather than ranging from 1 to 6 they now range from 7 to 62 and are divided by 10.0 in battles. This meant I could change damage slightly making certain weapons more powerful than others.

The current trend is:

KNIFE: Piercing near, slightly weaker
RAPIER: Piercing near, average
SWORD: Bashing near, average
BATTLEAXE: Bashing near, slightly stronger

Weapons such as the cheese sword are quite weak. Barbarian swords, gilded swords, etc, a bit stronger.

4. Elements

Elements have been added but not yet used (everything is 100% effective against everything else). Watch this space.
 
I finally finished the "bear" quest. The sewer is one of the places that's confusing to navigate. You talk to the NPC to go farther in, you go from a screen with only up and down options to a new screen that has left and right arrows but they aren't labeled so you have a 50% of going back to the npc .
It would be nice to hover over the arrows so it tells you where it leads like in town areas or "???" if it's an area you haven't been to.

Some screens have a scroll bar on the side. It seems to always be there when I play from the HBgames arcade. It's only on the inventory screen when I play from the website.

The sword graphic was missing or broken in battles. Are there different weapon graphics now? I swapped between a fishing pole and ice sword, both of them had no graphic.
I also notice you have to unequip an item to see it's stat modifiers. Kinda annoy if you want to compare a new item with something you're already wearing.
 
Been in a but of a rut mainly due to HBGames being down, but I've updated the game today.

--------
Bounty (beta)

If you visit Tiben Town you'll find a new notice board which displays notes from bounty hunters across the land. They need your help. Click the board and you'll be given a new task, a new head to hunt. Head out around the world and seek the kill, return to the board, and you'll be given a reward.

This is actually two major updates:

1. The bounty task system
2. Multiple currencies

When you complete a task and return to the board you will get a bounty point. These points will be spendable in a bounty hunter's store, which hasn't been made yet (as in the items haven't been added) but is fully coded. We now have the ability to use multiple currencies - gold, bounty points, community points - in stores! When you sell the items at the secondhand store you'll get their nominal gold value in return, mind.

So, over the next few days:

- The bounty task system will be fine tuned and smarterned up based on feedback
- A store for bounty points will be added
- A community points store will finally be created

When you defeat your bounty task you will get 3x gold and 3x exp for the battle.
 
BIG AFAR
Attempt 2.

Afar died over the downtime mainly because all our hits are coming from here. In a last effort to try and get Afar active and self sufficient I have launched some stuff that will hopefully become something bigger.

Community Points

You get community points for posting on the forums, creating clans, creating fan sites, etc. You can spend them on new items in the Community Point Store.

You can access the beta store here: http://afar.ws/v/action.php?quickshop=11


Bounty Points

Bounty points are gained by completing tasks, like Slayer in RuneScape or Bounty in Final Fantasy XII.

New item: Bounty Hunter's Helmet

This item can only be bought with Bounty Points - 25 of them. A good excuse to try the bounty tasks system! Click the sign post in Tiben central to start a bounty task - you get one point per task. There will be more bounty point items in future. You can currently access the beta store here: http://afar.ws/v/action.php?quickshop=12


BE IN THE GAME

Ever wanted your character to be bigger than it is? Your name in the game, with their own history, weapon or armour set, quest or quest series? Or fancy getting your hands on a collector's edition of the game?...

http://afar.ws/v/homepage.php?page=donate

Afar needs YOU.

Running an MMORPG, especially one as large and complex as Afar, isn't cheap. Over the course of the game (since it's beginnings as Vengeance) I have spent over £1,000 - much of this being that since the past year and a half we have been on a Virtual Private Server, a necessity as our previous shared hosting couldn't cope.

I am happy with where we are - the game hasn't been down for over 500 days at this point - but times are hard and I can't afford the bills like I used to.

I want Afar to be something good. I want it to be BIG. But for that to happen I need your help.

A few months ago I launched an IndieGogo campaign to try and fund turning Afar into something greater. The campaign flopped drawing in precisely $0.

Instead I will rerun the ideas of the campaign and the donation rewards here - in the hopes somebody is interested.
http://afar.ws/v/homepage.php?page=donate


Other Things

  • Straupuft has been expanded but not uploaded yet. It's being given more maps to create a proper town rather than a couple of tents around a house.
  • We have reached 263 items.
  • Ten new battle item animations created.
  • We hit 1,000 members!
 
yo, in dialogs, you could change the fadeOut time on the top message to 0, this would cause the two remaining messages to jump up immediately, and then your eye would be drawn to the newly appearing message. This would feel a lot more solid than adding one, and having a jump while you're reading it already.
 

Jason

Awesome Bro

... So if I donate $7 (Eww dollars, dafuq man you're British!), I can have "Jesus Brist" on a wall and have him as a character in the game (In multiple locations!) that, when you talk to him, he rants about dirty socks and offers you unwanted advice?
 
Basically yeah.

Sorry for the lack of updates, I keep getting put off by the lack of people playing but know that's down to me not updating it regularly. It's a catch 22.

Been a bit heptic this week with things going on.
 
I logged out and can't remember my username or password. Is my username the same as my character name? I named him Fekron or something stupid I made up on the fly. I clicked the X on the menu thinking it would close the menu and take me back to the map. I should probably log-out more often since the game preloads the graphics at the long in screen but I've never logged out before. Maybe that's my problem, cause I've had a lot of issues with the graphics.
The grass background, it's a repeating tile pattern but I watched it load top-down as if it's one big image. It was probably slow because it was trying to load everything else. But if it was just a small square pattern set to tile I imagine it would load instantaneous.

Edit: Exceeded Max. Log-in attempts, it asks to type an additional code from a image. But there is no image.
 
Sorry I'll try and sort all of this later today. For now I have increased the number of allowed login attempts to 15.

Should I add a tooltip to the top menu?

Your username is coyotecraft.

The preloader really needs to go but I'm not sure what to do about it.
 
Some of you might know I've been working on an expansion to Afar called Ahandru's Armoury. I've decided that it would be better to implement it in small steps, to raise interest and whatnot, than to leave it as one huge lump with too much for people to do. I have added what I've made so far, will work on an announcement, and will continue working on it with regular updates. They'll still come under the Ahandru's Armoury expansion because dicks.

Ahandru.png


Currently implemented updates:

Weapons, enemies, etc

- Five new enemies added to the game and to random encounter tables
- Weapon sprites added for every weapon in the game (about 50)
- Head sprites added for every head, roughly an extra 50

Damascar

- The four Damascar maps have been redrawn
- Twenty new interior maps have been added to the Eastern Desert
- Several new temporary maps in the area
- Pyramid location added for an under production quest

Other Locations

- Straupuft significantly expanded to three maps
- Dark Knight's Outpost, Farmhouse, added
- New entrance the other end of the Earth Caves

Temporary Maps

To be filled with content soon:
- 15 added to create the Darker Forest
- 20 added to expand distances in the Marsh, Woods, and Farm
- 6 creating the Northern Steppe
- 5 creating a northern fields area
- 2 added to the dark forest
- 4 creating the "mountain"

Lumberjack Skill

The lumberjack skill has now been fully implemented, but levels have yet to be decided on:

- 8 varieties of tree now give different types of wood
- Trees now have level requirements to cut them (currently low - 1 to 8)
- Trees give different exp based on their level
- New mechanics for map objects that you can't touch yet (displays message) which works with a variety of conditions, such as quest switches or levels
- Small trees are now cuttable (and required to progress to cut larger trees)

New Quests...

Two are in progress, not yet finished. A large amount are planned out however and will be implemented as and when they are completed.



A wide range of other updates are in progress.
 
:)

Tiben Central

The central map of Tiben Town has been expanded, it now contains a Bounty Points store and Community Points store, and has been rearranged to look busier.

Before/after

tibencentral_old.png
tibencentral.png



New Weapons

And other items. Three new bows.

__________

Insani wood + knife = bow piece

Bow piece + string = insani bow (unenchanted), a more powerful bow

Insani bow + toxicity scroll = poison bow (chance of poisoning enemy)

Insani bow + fire scroll = burning bow (chance of burning the enemy)

Also had to add a fire scroll item (unusable) because fireball is given to the player by default.

271.png
272.png
273.png
274.png
275.png


There are now 275 items in the game.
 
I'm going to be using graphics by The Inquisitor for Afar, on top of what's there at the moment. Currently I've remade the World Map. Reckon this is an improvement?

Before:

xBzvKo7.jpg


After:

iQxtLEL.jpg


Also everything now lines up properly, so clicking Fort won't accidentally take you to the Fayre.

This map will finally be expanded soon, mostly towards the West.
 
I don't know if anyone actually saw it before, but I've remade the login screen. Way less info thrown in your face and hopefully looks less cluttered. I moved the loading bar to be part of the logo, and removed the skip loading button - to skip loading you can just login before it loads or press stop in your browser.

IklHW6K.png


New Quest

Barcrawl quest released alongside eight new shops including a redone Faygrin's Fayre with better goods. The quest is actually going to get a boss fight once I code some things but currently it's just a typical errand runner.

Inventory

New inventory scene:

gFYyZzO.png


New settings landing page:

5Q6SUS5.png


New item crafting scene:

P1ooGre.png


Graphics

Everything's been compressed properly so the files have gone down significantly. Loading should be quicker all around.

Interactivity

You can now use the spade item on maps, particularly the desert and coast maps where you can dig sand. It'll do other stuff soon, as will various other items now usable from the map screen.

Other Stuff

A range of new items added and new crafting combinations.
 
I know this *just* started to pick up again, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to take a bit of a haitus, while my new laptop is on order. At the moment I'm on a tiny backup netbook that doesn't have any of the software I was using. Any updates for the next week or two will be small things I can do simply over the net, sorry guys. I will try and pick it back up afterwards though when I have my new PC, and you have my sincerest apologies.
 
So, how is this going? Remembered when I was one of the first users (first 30), and it was in full Dev.
Logged in recently, and was quite surprised. Nice work Whyatt.


Fun fact, I'm one of the richest people in the game (loose gold) yet still Lvl. 1 and at base stats... :box:
Also, aren't there items in my inventory that aren't used anymore?

Anywhoo, I'm looking into getting back into the game. Just wont need a restart, cause I'm still base level xD
 
I'm working on other projects as nobody really plays afar. Those that did wanted things from it that I'd never be able to provide; I think I need to stop coming back to it as it's always disappointing the things I add.

The game will stay online though, hosting isn't *too* expensive and I use it for other things.
 
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