16 May 2006 - Game engine upgraded!
Today finally sees the launch of our latest game engine upgrade.
This is the biggest upgrade to the underlying engine which runs the game since we launched the new 3D engine two years ago, and I've been working on it for literally months. However this time the changes are more under the hood, which means (if everything goes to plan) you shouldn't actually notice a huge amount of difference!
The game engine upgrades this time are focused on allowing us to make the game bigger and on providing support for all sorts of features we want to do in future updates. These are the sort of changes that you won't see immediately, but do allow us to do all sorts of things in the future which we've been dying to do, but couldn't previously.
However there will still be quite a few improvements that you will see immediately, such as:
The first time you load the new engine it will take slightly longer than normal to load as it imports all the data from the old engine.
However it only ever has to do that once, and from then on you can look forward to much faster loading times and much faster update times.
Greatly reduced memory use.
Vastly improved sound compatibility, including sound support in Firefox.
Better sound engine which can play more sounds at once.
Improved chat filter. Again this is a whole new technology and we might need to tweak it a bit so please be patient with it, but it should in the long run give less false positives whilst still protecting the chat.
Far better anti-macro technology.
Better compatibility with dual CPU computers.
Better compatibility with firewalls.
Better language support, with support for accented characters in chat, etc.
But of course it mainly consists of underlying changes to let us do more exciting stuff in upcoming updates...
Boring...... :(
