Update: Patch 1.20 information

[Skeedorr]

Greetings everyone,

The team has wanted to come back to Rise of Nations for some time and give it an update that will both fix some of the outstanding bugs and roll forward the multiplayer code onto a more modern architecture. These changes will set the game up better to keep it running for the next 10 years and beyond. We started that process with patch 1.20.

We’ve been monitoring the issues impacting player connectivity and other regressions closely. We are going to get those bugs fixed as soon as possible.

In the meantime, we feel like the right thing to do for now is to move Patch 1.20 into a Beta branch while we fix the bugs and let you keep playing on v1.10. We are making that change now. For anyone that wants to stay on Patch 1.20 Beta and help give us feedback as we work on it – instructions follow.

Your mainline branch will be 1.10. The beta branch will be v1_20_beta. To switch between branches, right-click on the game name from your Steam library and select Properties. Select the Betas tab. Use the drop down box to either opt out of all betas, or choose the v1_20_beta branch.

Thank you for your support. We are committed to working through the bugs in 1.20 and when we get there, the resulting multiplayer code will be much more future-proofed than before.

The Rise of Nations team.

[vita]

Thank you for making the only right decision in such a situation. But for the future: A bit more communication with your community would be highly appreciated :)

[Meensai]

*Thumbs Up*

[Fedomar]

thanks. Full support for that decision.

[Phantom]

Sounds good guys, thanks for the update.
Below are a few ideas some of the veteran players from 2003 have asked me to pitch to you.

At first release, Rise of Nations was operated by Gamespy servers. Gamespy had a few cool options in multiplayer that were left out of Skybox patches. Gamespy had terrible connectivity issues though, so perhaps there can be a happy medium for the future. These ideas are as follows:

1. Live-playing games to be listed like a glossary in the Multiplayer Lobby, and listed as "Running", as well as listing the players than are in those games when a cursor hovers over the game icon. This would make matchmaking much more simple as the times of the game start and completion could allow some players to wait on friends or clanmates.

2. Allowing an option for passwords to be created and required for certain multiplayer lobby stages. (No more booting new players from professional-level lobbies)

3. Preventing the lobby chat to disappear and clear once you switch pages or enter and exit game stagings. This is very very frustrating when having a conversation in lobby chat!


I know that connectivity and longterm functionality of the patch is most important, perhaps these suggestions could be discussed and pitched to the Skybox team. I can assure you that these 3 changes alone would make thousands of people smile and reminisce of the old days when Rise of Nations had tens of thousands of regular players.

-El_Phantom

[Aurora Borealis]

Does the Rise of Nations team intend to maintain LAN when a stable 1.2 is released?

[vita]

That's the question of the day. Skeedorr is evoiding any comments to that topic by any means since yesterday and that question were asked more than enough times already

[Aurora Borealis]

Yea, that's definitely not a good sign. They should at least have the respect to paying customers to give us a straight answer one way or the other.

[Phantom]

Originally posted by Hammerhead Shark:

Yea, that's definitely not a good sign. They should at least have the respect to paying customers to give us a straight answer one way or the other.

He knows about the issue and will attend other requests once they find out what's wrong the the connectivity for multiplayer. But in the mean time, relax, we know you feel passionate for LAN and will support the reinstatement for it in v1.20.
Skybox engineers are busy fixing bugs right now. They have tried to keep us updated but cannot hold individual conversations with everyone! Hence the forums. Be patient and respectful and the guys will make it happen.

[BR DreadlocK]

I hope they fix that lobby things u've mentionated plus these two bugs:

- If u build an outpost behind the city the enemy cant take it, even if he has bigger army.
- The possibilty of have 2 merchants on 1 same rare resource.

These bugs affect the high level game.

[jpsmburden]

I personally would like LAN back and direct IP and if you can't give us that then at least give us an online that works

[Captain Pentium]

Can you fix the crash when loading Conquer the World scenario? I've found that more than several people have this issue.

[Weazel]

I don't want to have to turn off all of my mods/scenarios before going into a multiplayer game and having the game crash if there's a mod turned on.