EverQuest II: Weekly Developer Diaries

EverQuest II: Rise of Kunark - Weekly Dev Diaries, Tradeskills

In the late afternoon Liz had put together a helpful overview of LUA, our scripting language, with some basics of structures and so on, and then some more specific examples. It looks pretty similar to other similar languages I've used, but of course there are little tricks of syntax and inheritance structure that are unique to it, or at least different from what I've used before. Since my last job involved application development using LotusScript, I didn't really need refreshers on things, but the syntax and examples will be very useful. For tradeskills, I haven't had much need to do much scripting yet; the folks designing lots of quests are doing a lot more of it. When I get time to look into quests more, I'll need to learn a lot more about it. But that's not going to happen for a while, at this rate!

After the LUA tutorial I finished up a few more things and then headed home to work some more. I don't have access to quite as many tools from home as I do at work, but I can stretch out on the couch, and keep the cat company! I've just checked in the carpenter recipes and recipe books, and have a few bug fixes to check in in the morning once I can test them at work, so it's time to head to bed for now. Another day of tradeskills completed, another day closer to beta!

Wednesday 26 September
My birthday today, so I came in a little later than usual, which is to say about 8:30 instead of 8. While doing the recipe books last night I was watching "Bridget Jones' Diary" (for at least the 20th time) and I now have a faint feeling as if I should preface this dev diary with statistics like she does:

cigarettes smoked: 0
recipes created: 297
weight gained... on second thought, let's not go there!

It was a pretty productive day today, which made me happy. With all the recipes for the 9 primary tradeskill classes complete, today's plan was to work on recipes for the secondary tradeskill classes, tinkering and transmuting.

Before starting this however I checked my bug queue - which is getting extremely long thanks to QA carefully testing all the stuff I've been submitting! A lot of it is minor things such as items with the wrong icon, or typos. Still, it all needs fixing at some point; though I hope the early beta testers will be tolerant of typos or wrong icons here and there, since I need to tackle more urgent things first...! I'd fixed the provisioner books yesterday, and today I fixed the weaponsmith and woodworker recipes. None of the other class books seemed to be affected, for which I'm extremely grateful!

While checking the bug list I also cleared up several other issues that were either urgent or could be fixed very quickly. Looking through my sent mail for today it looks as if I fixed about 15 bugs today, mostly beta stuff though there were a couple ones that will be flagged for an immediate push to live. These are pretty minor things like, for example, a crude quality level 50 tailor-made cloth cap is apparently flagged "lore". It's probably been flagged "lore" since it was made but nobody ever noticed and bugged it till now ... so not urgent, but a very quick fix, so that's one thing off my list! I still have three pages more bugs waiting for fixing even after the ones I did today though, so I can't get too smug.

When I started looking into the transmuting recipes, I got a really nice surprise -- I'd already done them! I had in fact created all the transmuting recipes and recipe books back when I did the adornments, probably two months ago. But I'd completely forgotten I'd done it. All I had to do today was double-check they were all correct and check them in. How nice a surprise is that -- I gave myself a little birthday present and didn't even know it. If it were possible to kiss myself-of-two-months-ago, I would! Some time during beta I'd like to take a closer look at the adornments, there's a long and very helpful thread on the forums discussing the topic and there are lots of good suggestions, but I simply haven't had the time yet. For now though, at least the standard recipes expected from previous levels is complete and in place.

With those done, I was able to take a little time to add all the new recipe books to the tradeskill beta buffer and tweak his dialog a bit, before starting in on the tinker recipes. Tinkerers don't get as many recipes per level as the primary crafting classes do, so this was a much shorter task. I should be able to check them in tonight or tomorrow morning first thing, depending how late I stay tonight. Normally I'd carry on at home till they are done, but since it's my birthday I'm going out for dinner with a friend, so it'll depend what time I get back -- and how much wine was consumed. As Gallenite occasionally reminds us, drinking and game designing are not a good mix! ...Though actually, a few glasses of wine might have helped me to invent some of the weird and wonderful ideas required for tinkered items, come to think of it. But, I think we have a couple of unusual and amusing ones that people will enjoy. And I'm sure drinking and recipe books do not mix, considering that I already managed to make crash-to-login-screen recipe books without the benefit of alcohol!