Pleasantly Surprised

I'm currently in Germany for work this week, and I live in California where the Broadside test server is located.  This gave me an opportunity to personally test the game with some higher ping times without trying to artificially create such normal latency.  I have to say I'm quite pleased with the game's network performance even from the other side of the world.

Now it is not perfect, as there is some work with ship turning I need to smooth out, but overall I could barely notice much difference at all compared to sitting right next to the server.  This is some pretty good news for the game's performance.

Now I do have several people who are involved with testing the game in other parts of the world, and they have reported good performance as well, but nothing quite beats seeing it for myself.

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Now that enough of the Broadopedia is implemented in order to be able to properly plan things like your skill training, I'll be pivoting back towards more fundamental gameplay development.  There's 3 areas that need immediate development in order for the game to really be fully playable as a real MMO. 

* Zone transfers - When reaching the edge of the map it needs to transfer the player to the adjacent zone.  What is really missing still is the functionality of the Master Server to spin up and down the Zone Servers as needed, but most of the ground work was already done for this back in 2017.  I just need to actually hook everything up. 

* AI aiming - Currently the AI has absolutely horrible aim with their cannons.  I have an idea of where the bug in the current implementation is (when the ship is leaning from the wind I think it is compensating with aim the wrong direction, putting cannonballs straight into the water next to the ship, or aiming too high and over shooting.  Instead of fixing this bug though I'm actually going to redesign the entire way the system works to much more intelligently hit their targets. 

* Buy/Sell orders - Right now you can both buy and sell items on the market, so long as an NPC order exists for the item.  The in game economy though can't function properly until the players can add persistent orders to the market for other players to use.  Mostly what is missing is just the UI windows for creating the orders and managing existing orders, as all the backend functionality was implemented already with the rest of the market system. 

After all the above I'm going to start implementing more zones, starting with the British Isles, followed by Europe as a whole, and then expanding from there.