Project Hybrasyl: Temuair Reborn

This is the Phase V alpha release and includes new status effects, traps, new stats, and a lot of other features and fixes. Release notes are on GitHub.

This is the Phase IV alpha release and includes a major overhaul of AI and monster behavior along with a ton of bug fixes. Release notes are on GitHub.

This is the next phase alpha release, and contains several hundred bug fixes and new features. The very lengthy release notes can be viewed on GitHub.

The third phase of the Hybrasyl alpha has begun! We began admitting testers in phases in August, and are continuing to do so throughout September. Please join our Discord for more information on how to sign up!

Hybrasyl 0.7.1 builds on the Daithi release, implementing guilds, guild banks, player banks (items and gold), guild charters, a whole lot of bug fixing, and a new concept of spell mastery. We've also implemented a new account manager, finished up our launcher, and a whole lot more.

For a full list of everything included in this release, check out the release notes on GitHub.

Hybrasyl 0.7.0 ("Daithi") builds on the 0.6.0 release, implementing reactors, a fully complete and complex loot implementation, full spawning support with mob items/xp/gold, expanded dialog support, and complex Lua scripting support for dialogs and castables (spells and skills). We've greatly expanded the scripting support and API as we continue to implement the beginning of the game (from the player perspective). We're so close to an alpha we can taste it!

For a full list of everything included in this release (which is a lot) check out Daithi's release information on GitHub.

Following the soft release of 0.6.0 (Bruce) in January, the first bugfix series 0.6.1 is here! It squashes a number of bugs related to statuses and casting.

0.6.0 added a huge amount of new features and bugfixes itself, including:

Just a quick post to say - we are in fact, still alive!

Work had slowed down significantly since the beginning of the year, with numerous other commitments making it hard to make sustained progress. Marriage, moving across the country, yadda blah. These things occupy time.

But we are indeed, still here and still working.

The release of 0.5.6should happen within the next few weeks, based on testing. We believe we have fixed a serious bug that was making it nearly impossible for the staging server to remain online for long periods of time, and we are very close to having functional, albeit barebones, AI and monster support.

We have also added training (learn/forget skill / spell) support for NPCs. Our hope is to get the server to the point where it will support basic gameplay in the next few months.

The release of 0.5.6 will also be coordinated with a server wipe in staging. Sorry, but them's the breaks. We can't guarantee characters will continue to exist with any regularity until we decide to launch to production. But: staging should be far more stable and regularly accessible than ever before!

Future updates will bring a number of new features:

• migration to Microsoft's ClearScript engine for scripting, meaning future Hybrasyl scripting will be in JavaScript. We believe this will be a solid foundation moving forward as ClearScript is much easier to work with on the development side than IronPython. Unfortunately, this will delay the implementation of the starting town, but we believe this work to be very necessary to hugely simplify the task of writing scripts for the game.
• Basic monster AI and monster spawning support. Spawning support is completed and working - we now need to make mantises, vipers, and mice actually, you know. Do stuff. Move around. Bite things. Say "Sssssss"'.
• Starting village! Get ready to put your Boots on, equip your finest Dirk, and do some crypt walkin', at long last!

Hybrasyl 0.5.5, nicknamed Devlin, has been released! Spell targeting, cast lines, creature and player death, status support (poison, sleep, etc), monster spawning, spell and skill usage, and more are included in this release. A lot of progress has been made towards making Hybrasyl a viable, playable game!

Hybrasyl 0.5.0 released!

After a significant hiatus - Hybrasyl 0.5.0 has been released! Hybrasyl 0.5.0 brings a number of changes to New Temuair - changes you won't necessarily see, but build a strong foundation for a solid, scalable future.

0.5.0 completely re-implements how Hybrasyl stores its data - instead of MySQL, XML is now used to store world data, and Redis is used to store user data and more. A number of bugs in item display and exchange have been fixed, and support for grouping, forum boards, mailboxes, assail, and citizenship were implemented. Hybrasyl's networking was also completely re-implemented from the ground up, and we have implemented damage, creature support, spawning and more. Hybrasyl also works with all current client versions in the United States (7.41).

For a full list of changes, please check the changelog.

We also have a new launcher which you can download and use to connect to Hybrasyl!

We have set up a Discord server for users and developers of Hybrasyl, to learn more about the project and stay in touch with other members of the community. You can join us at https://discord.gg/0ziUhzij2THyYHXK

Stop by and say hello - and make your ideas heard!

We're still here, and work is still progressing on the 0.5.0 release. Stop by and get a status update!

After long consideration and discussion, we have decided to release Hybrasyl's source code to the world. It was always our intent to release Hybrasyl as free software, and we have decided that the time is right to do so.

We have created a new Github organization for the Hybrasyl Project, and we have released several repositories which contain all of the extant code related to Hybrasyl. In addition, we have been extremely careful about securing copyright from contributors; all of the server copyrights are held by the Project, and kojasou has graciously agreed to license both the launcher and the (still in its infancy) Hybrasyl world editor as free software. We believe this will allow the project to thrive and provides a solid foundation for future development - as well as allowing the Project to vigorously defend Hybrasyl's licensing.

Speaking of the license: All of the code produced by the Hybrasyl Project is covered by the same license - the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 (AGPLv3). We believe this is a perfect license for Hybrasyl, but, a few words about the AGPLv3: it is widely considered to be the strictest free software license in existence. By running any of the code in the Hybrasyl Project, you fall under its licensing terms - meaning, if you download and use Hybrasyl to provide a server to other users, you must make its source available. This also means that any derivative works (changes you make) are also covered by this license, and must also be free. We believe this is fair: it means anyone who writes code for Hybrasyl is helping to build the commons, and advance the goal of Project Hybrasyl: to develop and release a complete and well-documented Dark Ages server emulator. For too long, the projects in this space have foundered, collapsed, and been rewritten over and over - we are seeking to end this cycle once and for all.

It is our intent to release this software to the world in the hopes that it will foster a more rapid development of Hybrasyl and encourage other Aislings all over the world to bring their time, energy, and thoughts to the project.

With that being said, today, we are releasing four GitHub projects to the world:

• Hybrasyl Server - Written by Kojasou and Kedian, this is the server itself, written in C#. Due to the fact that Hybrasyl still uses MySQL, you will need a version of Visual Studio that supports MySQL for Entity Framework - as of this writing, that means Professional. We apologize about that in advance, and as we are moving away from MySQL as a data store, we hope that this requirement will eventually disappear.


• Hybrasyl Editor - Written by Kojasou, this is a proposed editor for Hybrasyl. We intend to develop this as a tool for world editing that will talk to an active Hybrasyl server. None of that functionality exists yet. Contributions are welcome!


• Hybrasyl Launcher - Written by Kojasou with small contributions from Kedian, this is the launcher tool that allows you to connect to Hybrasyl.


• Ealagad - Written by Kedian, this is the Rails administrative interface to Hybrasyl. It provides an ActiveAdmin interface for many of Hybrasyl's data models (maps, items, etc). It is in the process of being deprecated in favor of YAML files for most static data.

We have also created two new Google Groups to facilitate discussion:

• Hybrasyl Users - a group for those who want to run Hybrasyl, or who are interested in discussing it.
• Hybrasyl Developers - a more technically oriented forum for people who are actually interested in helping to develop Hybrasyl.

We can't wait to hear from you! Fork us on Github and start contributing today!

Hybrasyl 0.4.0 has been released to production!

This release implemented reactor scripting, dialog support, natural regeneration, exchange (player trades), fixed (e.g. correct) accessories handling, and contained a number of bugfixes.

For a full list of issues resolved, please visit the releases page.

Hybrasyl 0.3.5 has been released to production!

This release focused primarily on a number of bugfixes and new functionality relating to Hybrasyl's ability to scale and implement new features. There have also been a lot of new armor and weapons added. For a full list of issues resolved, please visit our new releases page where we will be keeping track of upcoming and past releases. In the future we intend to be far more open with our development cycles and processes!

We've gotten a lot of questions about whether this project is still ongoing as no major news has been announced. To address your concerns, we've decided to open Hybrasyl up to the general public.
 
In this build you'll notice there is still a lot (read: everything) missing. NPC's spawn, but won't talk to you. Monsters don't spawn. There is no method of getting skills or spells yet. In short, the game is still largely unplayable - but you will be able to log in as you please and see our progress, as well as report any bugs you might stumble across so we can get them taken care of sooner, rather than later.


In order to make the world interactive, we have added simple slash commands to create things, teleport, cause things to happen, and change things about your character. These are obviously things that won't make it into the finished product, but for now, will allow you to have some degree of interaction with the world. See the list at the bottom of the page.

From the launcher, you'll notice there are three servers to connect to. Localhost should not be used, staging is where new changes will occur before going to production, and production is where your progress will save and the game will be played. Both servers are available to connect to for now, but most players should connect to Production by default.

Here is the launcher you will need to use to get in. Please remember to run as administrator.

Once you have created a character, log in, and use the following slash commands:

After a long hiatus, work is ongoing on the 0.3.0 branch of Hybrasyl. We thought we should share what we’re working on, to let people know we are still here and still working on it!

Scripting support

In Hybrasyl 0.3.0 IronPython is fully utilized for NPC & item scripting. A generic API has been exposed for script usage and currently supports a variety of API functions for creating dialogs and dialog sequences (groups of dialogs), dialog branching (starting different dialogs based on input or script logic), giving/taking items, gold and experience from a player, and more. Currently, NPCs have handlers for click events as well as when objects (such as players, items, or monsters) enter their area of interest. Still to come are reactors (special tiles that respond to events) and support for items responding to various events (such as being used, dropped, etc).

Live reloading

Progress is ongoing to support live reloading - integrating changes into a live server. At the moment, scripts can be dynamically reloaded with a slash command (/scripting). In addition, a feature has been implemented to get the status of a script (if it had any compilation or runtime errors), which is displayed to a client using an in-game popup window. Hybrasyl will eventually support reloading maps, world maps, and more.

Dialog support

Related to the first item, Hybrasyl 0.3.0 includes full dialog support for option, text input, and simple (just text) dialogs. Work on shops is ongoing.

Dialog scripting

Dialogs can now implement callbacks, generic scripting functions that will fire after the dialog is displayed. In addition, dialog sequences can implement prechecks - a callback that will run before the sequence is actually displayed.

Gold handling

Gold now exists in Hybrasyl, and can be acquired, dropped, and so forth.

Reusable dialogs

Also included in 0.3.0 is the ability to set up and register dialog sequences that can be shared between NPCs. This allows sequences to be easily reused between multiple NPCs.

Minor improvements

Display time since last login for players | use standard folder in My Documents for storing Hybrasyl data | update MySQL Connector .NET to 6.7.4 | better exception handling | better logging support | EF 5 support now uses config files for MySQL connection vs App.Config | lots of bug fixes

Acht and I have labored to bring a number of new features to production (f147844):

• Doors are implemented and working. In addition, Hybrasyl's doors use map information to work (similar to how the client knows something is a door: by consulting a huge list of sprites) so no additional data is needed. If a door sprite is anywhere on a map, the door will function correctly.
• Signposts function correctly.
• NPCs spawn and display correctly, and are able to be notified of players entering or leaving their area of interest.
• Basic citizenship is implemented, along with spawn points. If you belong to a nation, you'll login there (e.g. for Mileth, you spawn in the inn).
• Music / sound / spell effect support.
• Emotes are implemented.
• Who list is implemented along with support for colored names.
• Many bug fixes.

A number of bug fixes and other new features have been implemented in master:

• Collision errors are fixed! You can no longer walk into other people, or F5 into walls, or etc (HYBSRV-4)
• Profiles are implemented! Clicking on others and yourself displays the correct titles, equipment, and other goodies. (HYBSRV-10)
• A few nasty bugs related to item weight have been fixed (HYBSRV-25)
• Distance calculations for pickup/drop are now equivalent to what you would expect
• Metafile support (thanks to kojasou) - correct support for client side data for skills, towns (nations / citizenship), spells, etc

Looking forward to the immediate future, we will be starting to implement support for NPCs and dialogs, which will also dovetail with the work to implement full scripting support in Hybrasyl (for those interested, we will be implementing support for Lua using LuaInterface).
 

Alright, this post is gonna be absolutely huge. As always, any questions, comments, discussions, threats, rants, or free pizza can be directed to our subreddit or our facebook.

As an ongoing part of our work, we are attempting to fix things that are broken in our predecessor and not bring them into our game. This covers a lot more than we had anticipated however, and we continue to conclude that a myriad of gameplay elements are broken. That said, this news post is a culmination of discussion to date about things that are broken and are definitely being fixed, as well as some things that have already been fixed, and some things that are up for debate and/or controversial.

Item changes were listed in a previous news post

General

• Yes, hybrasyl is and will always be free.
• There will no longer be a profanity filter. However, different jurisdictions will be permitted to enforce their own laws against their own definitions of profanity.
• Stat resets will be possible, but costly, once level 99 has been reached.
• Learning skills and spells belonging to a previous class will be possible. The idea is to eliminate the need for things like adorations to sub useful characters.
• Banks will function on a per-account basis instead of per-character.
• Gold will also function per-account.
• Accounts will be expanded to allow many more characters. The exact number is not defined yet, but the idea is to eliminate the need for more than one account.
• Age-based rewards (for example, legendary aisling) will be enacted on a per-account basis, not per character.
• Names that are created but never added to an account will be deleted after a few weeks.
• Going above max base stats will no longer be possible. Items will still be able to give you higher than max stats, but adorations and anything else that gives stats will no longer add stats to one that has reached max.

Dungeons, hunting, and leveling in general

• Dungeons will no longer feature auxilary floors; that is to say things like floor 2-1, 2-2, 2-3, etc. All dungeons will be remade to match the format of CR, i.e. floor one, floor two, floor three, etc often with multiple entrances between floors.
• To compensate for the above change, spawns may be increased as needed. However, with a projected lower population than these floors were created to deal with, that will probably not be necessary.
• The experience penalty from multiple group members will be removed, to encourage social play instead of discourage it
• An experience bonus will be added to groups that feature at least one of each class
• Social interactions such as politics, religion, and the arts will be given realistic experience bonuses so as to encourage bringing these types of play into the fold, as well as allowing players who prefer to engage in the social to still further their characters.
• Every item dropped from monsters will have a purpose of some kind. At the very least, they will be able to be sold to a vendor and thus worth picking up.
• To compensate for the repetitive long walks through major hunting grounds, new "elevator" quests will be added to each zone with such a walk. These quests will require proof that you've ventured into these depths yourself several times, and after completion, will enable fast travel to these locations.
• Ascension will be reworked to be considerably faster; including the ability to dump all or a portion of your experience directly into either HP or MP as opposed to clicking endlessly. The cost will remain the same, however, and large chunks of experience will be factored into the cost identically.
• Similarly, stat buying will be possible in a much more expedited manner, buying several stats or all possible stats at once.
• Ascension and buying stats will be completely disassociated; buying stats will cost experience directly, and ascending will not be a part of the process at all.

Politics

• There will be no rangers in Hybrasyl.
• To account for the game being completely free and account creation having little to no restriction, clout will be limited per character per day. That is to say you will only be able to be voted for an as-yet undetermined amount of times per day, in an attempt to do away with clout farming. Ten votes per day is the current limit.
• To compensate for the above limit and the projected lower population, overall clout requirements will be lowered.
• Social interactions such as politics, religion, and the arts will be given realistic experience bonuses so as to encourage bringing these types of play into the fold, as well as allowing players who prefer to engage in the social to still further their characters.
• New players will no longer start the game as Mileth citizens - pending further discussion, they may not even start in Mileth at all. This is to try to make politics something you 'opt in' to as opposed to simply being the default state. This should alleviate a lot of problems overall, particularly in Mileth.
• Jurisdictions will be limited by mundane mandate.
• Many features exclusive to mileth are going to be moved entirely, or copied elsewhere; functions of the temple of choosing, mileth college, and ascension will no longer be completely off limits to you if you are removed from mileth's jurisdiction via banishment or exile.
• Voting for ones self will be restricted to one vote per day to encourage people who want to get into politics to actually go out and get votes. Voting ones self into office will still be possible.
• More regions with active citizenship will be added.

Religion

• To make religion desirable for players again, participation in religion will now carry unique rewards - higher ranking clergy members will get unique and globally useful spells/items/abilities, such as increasing experience, gold drops, etc.
• High ranking clergy will now be given realistic term limits, as well as a period where you cannot take that rank again for a period of time.
• Each religion may allow a maximum amount of members to be a given rank at one time; worshipper, acolyte, and priest would remain unlimited.
• Only high priest will require an award, and the requirements for the other ranks will be further differentiated.
• Active participation in a religion will yield real rewards - this, combined with the other changes, strives to make each religion desirable to some degree as opposed to some being clearly superior.
• Religious enchantments on items have been reworked a bit so that some are not quite as useless. (im looking at you, sgrios and deoch)
• Religion may eventually play an active role in buying stats/ascending, pending further discussion.

The College

• The college has moved! No longer located in Mileth, the college will reside at the entrance in Undine. It's a lot more peaceful there anyway.
• The entire college system will be reworked, and the details have not been ironed out quite yet. Expect to no longer require 5 randomly given rare marks from attending class, for submissions to be fairly voted on, and for fairness to be enforced by the GMs.
• Nobles will now get department-specific rewards to encourage participation.

Class-specific changes

Warrior

• Warriors will be given a couple more interactive skills so that the leveling process is not simply repeating spacebar and windblade ad nauseam.
• Skills for this class will require slightly harder to acquire items, to put it more in line with the other classes.

Monk

• Hubae will be severely reworked, if not removed outright, to a far less annoying/demanding problem.
• Item requirements will be balanced for this class to be a bit easier to find, either by reducing the rarity of the drop from the monster or by reducing the items required.
• Gentle Touch will be made actually useful.

Rogue

• Rogues will be given more assails so that in addition to their utility, they can be worthwhile bashers.
• Traps will be made to take less time to cast.

Priest

• Suain, puinsein, and dall have been removed from this class and given to wizards.
• Ao's will now remove all versions of the spell they are removing - ao ard cradh will remove beag cradh, cradh, mor cradh, and ard cradh for example.
• Spell stat requirements will be adjusted to be a bit less idiotic.

Wizard

• Wizard spells as a whole will have their mana cost severely reduced as well as their damage inflated, ideally to allow wizards to contribute to damage done in a hunt.
• Wizard spells will now pull not just from int, but also from their representative stat (str for srad, for example) to formulate their damage done.
• Spell stat requirements will be adjusted to be a bit less idiotic.
• Suain, puinsein, and Dall have been removed from priests and given to wizards.
• Fas nadur ranks no longer offer varying degrees of amplification; higher levels of fas nadur offer increased duration of the spell.

HEAD on the item-variants branch has fully implemented items: stats now update correctly when equipping / unequipping items, and gauntlets and rings now function as they would normally. A number of bugs have been fixed, and this code, pending testing, will be merged back into master. Hybrasyl continues to grow by leaps and bounds, now containing 575 items with all variant types (tailored, dyed, religious) bringing that number up to thousands. Work continues on mapping out current Temuair with Undine, Rucesion and Abel coming soon.

In the spirit of improving upon our predecessor and not simply replicating it pixel-for-pixel, a lot of changes have been made directly to items - some specific, some general - most of which are worth noting in public format.

All items are now, by default, able to be sold to a vendor. The option to disable that functionality is present, and will only be applied to specific items for which it is appropriate (quest items, etc)

In support of the above change, all items have had a 'proper' value assigned, and a trend has been established for items of a given level/quality/rarity to follow. With these two changes, an actual economy is now possible, and the primary source of income in the early days of the game will no longer be Fiosachd Prayer.

Extensive balancing changes have occurred; too many to list here, and many are forthcoming. From stats on items to weapons to weight to durability, everything has been tweaked such that, ideally, nothing is too overweighted in any one specific area. (Example: Spiked club, a level 66 weapon, now accurately does more damage than wooden club, a level 50 weapon)

Many cosmetic changes to items have occurred, most of which are simple convenience or common sense changes. Examples include; Nadurra necklace no longer shares the same sprite as a wind necklace, songs to different towns are now color-coded (Rucesion scrolls are blue, mileth scrolls are green, etc). Potions now look different based on their effect (ard ioc deum is now a smaller red potion than beothaichs, etc) and generally anything that shares the same sprite as another item has been changed, when appropriate, to more easily differentiate.

Consistency has been established among common 'types' of equipment. Examples; Mythril gear now either adds MP, or consumes vastly less MP than equivalent pieces. Hy-brasyl gear is now heavier, but grants bonus HP. Talgonite gear tends to improve AC more than equivalent counterparts.

Variations of items have been tweaked to be a bit more balanced. good/great/fine/grand weapons no longer add miniscule static additions to a weapons damage, instead adding much larger % bonuses, making smithed weapons a viable subtitute for two handers. A 5th tier of smithing/tailoring has been added - Regal - which conveys exceedingly nice bonuses. Once implemented, tailoring and smithing will no longer have abysmal (read: impossible) chances to actually acquire grand/great/regal equipment.

Moving forward, this is a trend we hope to continue long into development; item balance is atrociously subpar in our predecessor, and is seen as an area where much improvement can be made.

Any thoughts, suggestions, questions or comments are very welcomed and may be directed to our subreddit

Pushing the envelope, Heiler and Kedian can be seen here trialing any number of new and weird items, while wielding the deadly and very rare "GM Slipper":



On a serious note, however, most items in old Temuair now exist in Hybrasyl, with support being implemented for item variants (automatic creation of things like Magic Boots, Cail This and That, etc.)

73e61b in the quadtree-implementation branch completes the implementation of items, including stacking. It's now possible to drop items, pick items up (i.e. loot), drag items between slots, combine stacks, drop part of a stack, etc. Now you can litter with the best of them! Too bad there's no support for gold just yet.

A new branch on GitHub, quadtree-implementation, begins the process of implementing quadtrees (thanks to the handy C3 implementation) in maps for entity (item/player) storage. As a result, most operations for calculating distance, finding nearby objects, or searching, are now far more efficient. This work is also a platform for a general refactoring of Hybrasyl's entity / object inheritance & structure. Items now (somewhat) work - you can properly equip and unequip items which are properly displayed to nearby players. A lot of work remains, however, including stacking, dragging and dropping items between slots, and dropping items on the ground (a classic Temuairan feature, in our opinion). Would you like to be a part of this project? Do you have what it takes to resurrect Temuair? Get in touch with us.

PR #1 on Github merged 019723c from the hybrasyl-refactoring-1 branch back into master. This means that the Rails application and Hybrasyl server are now in sync and operating on the same schema and database (meaning everything is now live). Hybrasyl server has been refactored to use Entity Framework 5.0 and now uses EF functionality to access / modify database objects, as part of a larger refactoring of Hybrasyl's object hierarchy. In terms of functionality, however, master now represents the same functionality that was achieved before the refactoring work began! Hooray. Onwards!

665305c on the hybrasyl-refactoring-1 branch adds support for tags, and some nifty autocompletion features. This allows you to quickly define a map as having a certain tag (i.e. "Mileth") and then also allows you to quickly search by that tag. Tag support is now, in general, able to be easily implemented with any object in Hybrasyl, meaning items and worldmaps can also have tags assigned to them.

As part of a significant refactoring effort on the hybrasyl-refactoring-1 branch, Hybrasyl now has a webpage that has been reimplemented in Ruby 1.9 and Rails 3.2, along with a modern administrative interface. Whoa. If you're interested in helping make the page look better, or more importantly, "thematically correct" with regards to Temuair, get in touch with us. This is all just some Twitter Bootstrap default stuff with a whole lotta Rails.

Commit be03f9ac on Github completes support for worldmaps. Here is Kedian, newly arrived in Rucesion, as a result:

Commit c5a817df on Github begins support for world maps. The packet format for this is now well understood, but I felt that there needed to be a really slick way to edit maps. So far, with a little jQuery magic, including the Annotation plugin by Chris Wood, this is what I've arrived at:
As you can see, you can basically point and click to put down points anywhere on the map. Once a point is put on the map, you can drag it around to its final destination, and also, more importantly, set up its destination. The points are saved / retrieved via AJAX.

Commit 4ef781a8 on Github adds support for whispering! You can now whisper people "huk, huk" as much as you like. In addition, this commit fixes the bug where a user could basically login as many times as they wanted, and adds two new slash commands, /mute and /unmute, which operate about as you would expect.

Welcome to Project Hybrasyl! This project aims at producing a production-quality server for Dark Ages. Over the next few weeks and months, you can expect to see this site regularly updated with information on our progress. We are aiming to produce a faithful reproduction of classic Temuair for all to enjoy. Thanks for stopping by!