Apr 6 2024 Devblog

Where We Are Now?

heRO has come a long way. We are one of the oldest remaining English servers and have an unbelievable amount of custom content. Sometimes it's worth looking back at our accomplishments to see how far we've gone while keeping the core feeling of the pre-renewal mechanics:

• Continued the tradition of the 18th year with no wipes, restarts or major data losses
• Out of ~2700 monsters or monster entries in the game, over 90% are modified in some way compared to a vanilla server
• 3/5 of all naturally spawned monsters have completely customized stats, abilities and item drops, or they are unique monsters to heRO
• Over 1000 custom items and cards are available in heRO
• Over 500 obtainable costumes (degree of cuteness varies)
• Our custom regions and areas result in over 40 custom maps available
• Introduced many custom artwork from GMs and player contributions alike, creating new NPCs unique to our server
• With our class reworks, more than half the skills in the game have been modified with number touchups, or they are heavily rebalanced
• Explored many unique ways for PvM combat that's never seen in other servers
• In terms of patches alone, heRO has reached over 600 releases and updates in our history

Recent years introduced a much heavier emphasis on quality of life improvement, such as the hero's journey, solo brewing room, BBS for async trading, continued reduction of time-gated gears, quick interface NPCs, and increased account-wide accessibility features. We expand on overlooked builds to breathe life into classes/skills that are forgotten by the original game.

However, our unique position and history also bring many problems unique to heRO that are never felt by many newer, more exciting-looking servers. We have reached a critical point where it is too difficult to go further.

• We have hit our hard limit on the number of monsters available in the game. To create any new monster entries, heRO GMs have no choice but to overwrite some unused/rarely used official mobs to make space. For reference, we are up to mob ID 3992. The last ID allowed is 3999.
• We have already run out on the number of NPC sprites available- we had to overwrite official NPCs already to fit Faeheim
• We have so many custom monsters and items that we've broken the default custom databases provided by the Hercules emulator engine a few years ago: we had to abandon the "db2" systems and overtake the databases reserved for official- because we've crossed the 50% boundary where we have more customs than officials
• Our map server is exhausted: GM Ciar and our T&D mapmaker have to purposely downgrade maps and monster sprites to make them compatible with our 18-year-old server (Lutia Mines, Abyss 4, Mora fields, Bifrost are all examples of downgraded maps)
• We've pretty much done as many unique twists and item combinations possible allowed within what we have- even though we have the creativity to make more interesting things that will challenge the theorycrafters, our tools don't allow these ideas to come to fruition
• heRO has so many custom resources that heRO requires the "GRF" file to be split into two to be functional- but this means every release or patches potentially have twice the amount of work involved
• We have hit the limitations placed on playable characters of the Hercules simulator engine, even though we have expanded them many times already (such as our beloved Kafra inventory size, the number of autobonus triggers available, or the number of kill-quest registered for a player)
• Every change we make in 2024 has to be compatible with a character created under the codes and rules permitted in 2006 (e.g. This is why Sign Quest seemingly breaks for every returning old player)

Therefore, it is time for the heRO GM and T&D team to take a break from making changes or creating new content that is visible to players and handle these extremely pressing issues behind the curtains. We need to focus our efforts to address technical limitations to give ourselves some breathing space for the future.

It's time for a client and patcher upgrade.

What Does That Mean?

We will make one final critical bugfix release with the current client and patcher in April to address the following critical issues: Super Novice Link requires the wrong skill pre-requisite and some item description errors that must be fixed. This will be released at the end of the Easter/St Patrick's Day quest. After this release, we'll enter a "code freeze" where we stop changing the server to prepare for the client and patcher upgrade. Any reported issues during this time will not be addressed under the current client. The fixes to reported issues will be carried out for the new client release version instead.

On the GM team, we have GM-Flutrane joining our team as a much-needed expert to assist us. GM-Abathur has also returned to the team to lend their aid. Admittedly, GM-Ciar and I (GM-Ayu) are unfortunately heavily occupied with real life due to a series of misfortunes since the latter half of 2023. We'll need help from these other GMs to maintain the pace of releases and to be less of a bottleneck for heRO. We also have our wonderful T&D player volunteers such as Ange, Rankin, Namreg, Kadar, Wys, JoeJoe, PonPon, Cattre and Peeka to help us in a broad range of areas- network administration help, artistic contributions (sprite art, card art, patcher art, loading screens, map-making), balance/stat calculations, project management and spot testing. This is a herculean effort that was already started back in February in the background. Only now are we close enough to the end where it's suitable for GMs to announce this project.

We aim to have the first stage of the new client available by May or June at the latest. Unfortunately, this means that there will be a bit of a slow time ahead of heRO. According to our current schedule, we expect that the Summer celebration in July will be the first true "new content" where there are new activities to do. After the small summer celebration, then we aim to have new PvM content available using technologies made newly available to us via the update. When the new client arrives, all players will have to re-download heRO from scratch due to the massive changes involved with the client. Admittedly, this is quite a nuisance to download 5 GB+ of files again, but it will be very worth it.

What's in the Update?

Note: all pictures are still screenshots of work in progress or in development. They may change for the final release.

Address currently "unfixable" bugs and issues

• Knights and Crusaders can learn skills on a Peco Peco
• Bizarre palette failure whenever another player gets on a mount within your point of view
• Remove all ID-related limitations for monsters, NPC sprites, and item sprites
• Fix an issue with a new download of heRO complains about an invalid path

• Improved in-game quest list- so that it's usable. The quest translation may not be available on release, but the technology to fix and rewrite it for English is here now.

• Fix map-related issues where previously it's unfixable, and our only option was to downgrade maps or remove the appearance of certain effects or objects to bypass the errors
• Return of different weapon/shield sprites for different equipment (example: Violet Fear)

New Quality of Life

• Break the limit with 5000 storage slots available in personal storage and guild storage
• Dedicated costume tab so costumes do not clog up the "armor" tab

• Equipment loadout: prepare 2 sets of equipment, and with one single button, all equipment will swap from "loadout A" to "loadout B"

• Expanded character slots: 15 characters per account instead of 12
• The gender of your character does not have to be fixed for an account: you can have a mix of male and female characters in the same account

• Skill bar loadout: prepare 2 sets of 4 rows of skills, and with one single button, what you have put on skill bars will swap from "skill bars 1" to "skill bars 2", allowing battlemode players to utilize more than 4 bars at once easily
• Allow etc. items to be placed in the skill bar so you can see the quantity of a particular item without opening your inventory (see the "Shoot" etc item in video as a way to count your Pet Food for your Cute Pet)

• Favorite items have their tab in your inventory, not only in Kafra
• Ingame recommended quest list: have less reliance on the heRO wiki to suggest notable things to do in heRO

• Gunslinger mounts will no longer be a brand peco peco. Gunslinger will get a motorcycle mount!

• Opens new possibility of more status icons available in the client to notify you of any issues
• Expanded hairstyle and palette options for character customization at Styla
• Patching heRO should no longer require a long time to "unpack" files
• Not a quality of life for players, but for GMs: much-needed ease in development and modernizing development tools

Brand New Features

These are potential new features for heRO- not everything will be made available immediately with a new client/patcher, but we will have the option for the following:

• Class Costumes: A much-requested feature—dress up as the 3rd and 4th classes in appearance while remaining true to the pre-renewal system, which allows you to only go up to trans 2-1 and 2-2 classes. (Note: you will not be able to disguise as 1-1 classes due to mechanical impact/balance reasons)

• Pet Costumes: disguise your current pet to look like something else while retaining its actual abilities (such as looting)

• Skin tone for your character for more personal customization. 3 new skin tones will be available.

• Achievement system: obtain rewards based on meeting certain requirements or doing specific actions at any time. This is unlikely to be released initially, but it is likely to be implemented in the later half of the year.

• Titles earned from achievement for display to show off your progress
• Rearrange party display via drag and drop- no longer do you have to invite members to a party in a curated order so that your Prof and HP do not go insane
• More garment costume and "weather" costume options available
• "Trans" version of extended classes: While it's debatable whether we should do it or not, we currently don't even have the option due to sprite ID limitations. A new client at least opens that option for us, so it's even plausible to think about it.
• Rodex mail system: this is another hotly debated feature on whether it should be enabled. On one hand, people like the feature for easy offline trading, but players are also wary of the mail system due to security concerns. The new client opened up the option for us to consider whether we should implement this or stick with banker/BBS to fulfill the role of offline trading.
• Opens up the crafting list so that we have room for more arrow crafting and get the option for an item creation revamp for Blacksmiths and Alchemists