A look behind the scenes

Since the last news have been primarily about patch-level decisions, we decided to take a different approach today: How about an insight into what is happening behind the scenes on Uthgard? In our attempts to go more towards classic, we have come to the conclusion that the current v1.113 game client was way too modern for our patch-level - so we decided to go a little pre-alpha, and developed our own game client:

The client will feature the full 16 dos color set, including black and white! We will also try to make use the the entire extended ASCII scheme. That is close to 256 different symbols right there for you!
Okay, this is not really happening. But a lot of other things have actually been happening since Uthgard was shut down. Lets take a look at one of them:
Experimental Pathing for Monsters!

Remember those good old days when NPCs were walking through the dungeon walls, ran head-first through trees and jumped down any cliff just to get to you as fast as possible because they loved you that much? We’ve been playing around with the thought of pathing monsters for a long time but never finished implementing it during the lifetime of Uthgard v1. Well - now it is close to completion. As the first DAoC freeshard we will offer realistic mob pathing. Watch the video below to see for yourself. Please note that the NPCs were given quite a high load of caffeine - on purpose - to produce a higher server load; we’ll keep it a bit more realistic once it is really done. Enjoy!
This works outdoors and indoors in pretty much any zone. Of course it is still experimental and there are glitches that remain to be fixed, but we hope that you can get an idea of what we have been working on in the past few days, and where this is going.
Cheers,
Your Uthgard Staff

The client will feature the full 16 dos color set, including black and white! We will also try to make use the the entire extended ASCII scheme. That is close to 256 different symbols right there for you!
Okay, this is not really happening. But a lot of other things have actually been happening since Uthgard was shut down. Lets take a look at one of them:
Experimental Pathing for Monsters!

Remember those good old days when NPCs were walking through the dungeon walls, ran head-first through trees and jumped down any cliff just to get to you as fast as possible because they loved you that much? We’ve been playing around with the thought of pathing monsters for a long time but never finished implementing it during the lifetime of Uthgard v1. Well - now it is close to completion. As the first DAoC freeshard we will offer realistic mob pathing. Watch the video below to see for yourself. Please note that the NPCs were given quite a high load of caffeine - on purpose - to produce a higher server load; we’ll keep it a bit more realistic once it is really done. Enjoy!
This works outdoors and indoors in pretty much any zone. Of course it is still experimental and there are glitches that remain to be fixed, but we hope that you can get an idea of what we have been working on in the past few days, and where this is going.
Cheers,
Your Uthgard Staff