Pumping Irony

I just logged into DDO and the following alert popped up: (Note: only active subscribers can read the links)

Dungeon Closures: Depth of Despair, Sanctuary, The Vile Apothecary.

We have discovered a serious issue in the following dungeons, with Large Violet Slime, dividing infinitely.

Think of it as a cell dividing repeatedly and infinitely, until the dungeon is filled with thousands of slimes.
The dungeons affected are:

Depths of Despair, in House Deneith (CR 4)
Sanctuary, in the Catacombs in the Market (CR 2)
The Vile Apothecary, in the Market (CR 4)
The Slime Infested Warehouse – Search for the scrolls (For Goodblade)

For more information, click here.

I’d imagine that would suck to have your adventure brought to such an end, and it wouldn’t surprise me if that crashed the client too, but what a hoot it would be to intentionally pop into one of those dungeons just to see the slimes dividing and filling the dungeon! Quarion even posted a screenshot attachment of it happening. Reminds me of some of the “whoops!” moments in WoW such as the “Corrupted Blood” plague when Zul’Gurub was released.

In other DDO news, Module 5: The Accursed Ascension went live yesterday. Module 5 Final Release Notes. My patcher got me updated as soon as it went live but I was occupied with Vanguard. I don’t have a high level character in DDO yet so I can’t see the new content yet but I immediately noticed improved performance and a few nice looking UI elements. I’m curious if this update implies UI skinning, etc. just like LOTRO does? Also they finally fixed the textures on the lighthouse island in the Harbor as well as replacing the ocean textures and effects with all new ones that are LOTRO-quality. LOTRO has some of the most beautiful water surface effects I’ve seen, and certainly the best I’ve seen in the MMO genre. Waterfalls, however, they botched but this isn’t a LOTRO article. I was already impressed with DDO’s graphics but with the new engine improvements, texturing and water effects, it’s just downright gorgeous. I also noticed in the options we have the texture cache and crowd quality options that LOTRO has, which is a very good thing. I’ve been hoping that Turbine would take measures to keep both their games on the same engine build and it looks like my hopes will be answered after all.

The release notes are quite a huge list, as usual, but I did spot this way down near the bottom, which confirms my initial observations:

Engine Upgrade

• We have significantly upgraded the game engine for Module 5. A short list of improvements is as follows:
  • Client Performance: Users should see an improvement in performance at all graphics details. Hitching, rubber banding, and momentary freezing is reduced while overall rendering performance is much better.
  • Graphics Improvements: Several graphics options are new or optimized. Antialiasing will produce better image quality, windowed mode has better controls, and graphics effects have been rebalanced to produce better results at different graphics qualities. Because of these changes we recommend that users go into Options -> Graphics and select “Detect Optimal Settings”.
  • Bug Fixes: Many engine related bugs (both minor and major) have been fixed.
  • Network Performance: The network code has been optimized to use less bandwidth.
  • Water Shaders: Most water has been significantly upgraded, and now produces scene reflections depending on detail level. The medium graphic quality experience has also been greatly improved around water.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 28th, 2007 at 10:38 am and is filed under DDO, MMO Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.