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Aelthai -> =Dev= The joys of legacy code (7/14/2010 20:30:03)
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Some of you may have noticed Zephyros's tweet earlier today:
quote:
Fixit's rough this wk. 65! weapons w old code broke w last engine update. All ~the first weaps new players see. Still lots to do tonight...
He's quite right - there is a LOT to do. All of those weapons plus a Fixit release (which is a full, if small, release in and of itself) plus the War blade (which will be going up for a Limited Time Discount) - and after that, we still have the WarpForce release on Friday.
I happen to be a bit ahead of Zephyros at the moment, so I thought I'd take a few minutes and let everyone know what's going on in detail (Warning: I can be wordy - when I say "in detail", I MEAN it).
I think I'm getting ahead of myself, though. I really should start with the background and work my way up to the present.
As many of you know, we recently had an issue with the update to Flash Player - suddenly your character's name started displaying as CHARACTER_NAME when you upgraded. We got that fixed in a few days ... but it seems that there was another bug that was both less obvious ... and more important.
I'm the AQ Bugs Head Moderator - but I'm not the only person who works in AQ Bugs. This time, it was Chii who put the various reports together and came up with what was happening: many of the very, very old weapons (which are often ones that new players will run into early) were breaking because they were written using some of the very first code ever used for AQ - what we call "legacy code" - code that isn't what we are using now (usually for good reason: we've found better ways to do it), but that is still in the game because it works (...unless something breaks it....), so it hasn't been worth fixing.
Specifically, in this case, all weapon Specials on these ancient weapons were missing. Not just a few of them, or missing a lot of the time - ALL of them. This isn't a good thing to begin with, and some of the weapons were 100% Special ...
Chii figured this out, and put together a list of the ones that were doing it - I might as well pass along the list; we're going to fix as many of these as we can manage for this week, hopefully all of them:
Abyss Blade
Aged Holy Water
Alpha Orbiter
Angelic Scepter
Arcane Scythe
Axe of Radiance
Blinding Blade
Book of Death
Book of Death: Volume 2
Coin's Coin
Dark Angel Spear (exists as temp in angel of darkness)
Dark Blade
Dark Energy Scepter
Dark Magic Scythe
Darkbow
Defender Orb (exists as temp in walkaround quest)
Drakel Tube (exists as temp in drakel raider)
Dueling Dragons Staff
Earthquake Hammer
Enforcer Blade
Evil Battleaxe
Eye of the Sphinx
Gemblade
Ghost Blade
Giant Frozen Mace
Golden Summoner
GumBlade
Heaven and Earth
Holy Water
Hook Fist
Hotshot Sword
Lightmace
Lightning Grip Axe
Liquid Fire
Lucky Lamp
Lucky Sword
Magical Turkey Dip
Magical Twig of Carnage (temp in waq)
Mooncrest Staff
Omega Orbiter
Qiang of Exploding
Royal Elven Blade
SeaSlayer
Shadowoksen (also exists as temp in waq)
Shovel of Doom
Siren Spear
Slaxe Axe
SolSaber
Spear of Lumina
Starbow
Storm Sword
Super Crossbow
Tempest Scimitar
Trident of Etain
Tusk Spear (exists as temp in chrask)
Ultimate Crossbow
Un-Blade
Vampire Blade
Volcano Mace
Vorpal Edge
Wave Striker
YoZor
Zulian Blowgun
It's a long list. It's possible there may be a few more with this issue ... but we *think* this is it. If you see this bug on one of these weapons, there's no need to report it: we already know about it and it's actively being worked. Once these are fixed, you will be able to get the updates by either logging out and back in or by visiting a shop and buying, selling, or moving something in your inventory.
Once Chii put this together, we made the call to push off the planned Fixes for this month to next month and do these instead. We've been trying to do Fixes in order of priority, and this set of bugs preempted all of the other ones quite easily. So I got busy putting together stats for them, and Zephyros got busy coding them (neither of us has been getting much sleep this week, and with as much as is left to do I don't see that changing tonight).
While I would very much prefer to update weapons top-down - it eliminates potential issues - there isn't any reason to plan to touch them more times than we have to, and they are essentially having the background code rewritten ... so we are going ahead and sweeping these at the same time we are doing bugfixes. A few of them are also getting some new abilities where it's appropriate. We'll try to get stats for them out there after the weapons are done so that you can see what they now do!
And now that you know what's going on, I really should go work on the rest of the releases for this week ...
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