It's been a long time fans. I'm sure for some of you, who relished in the glory of FOnline Australia back in its heyday in 2014-2016 you may have had a passing thought about the destiny of the game.
Well, in whatever rare free time I have had in these recent years, I continue to make some developments. Sadly, some features were lost in a corrupted hard-drive in 2016 however, using the downloadable singleplayer build I have managed to pick up the torch and continue tinkering in the game world.
In 2023, for your information, I have made the following mechanical improvements to the game:
- Slave / Follower mechanics - There was bugs with the use of rope for slaves in addition to a serious issue where when a slave awoken, he would attack members of your party who had assisted in subduing him. This is now fixed - hooray. New Feature: Slaves will run away with you, if you're trying to escape an encounter you dont like, and they will come to the world map with you.
- First Aid / Drug mechanics - There were issues with using drugs/medicine on other people, all drugs would work as fruit and would give 5hp thereabouts. This is now fixed, and drugs work as intended.
- Awareness - The awareness perk which displays HP and stats and faction name above a player when the cursor sits on them was causing huge framerate drops, this has now been fixed.
- Zombie Hordes - Zombie hordes have been reworked to now target a random location (instead of a cumulative timer working on every critter in the game charging up to be attacked) in bulk. After a certain amount of time, if the Zombies have not already been killed, a pack of NAR troopers will arrive at the town to help clean the zombies up. You now also get notified in general chat about where a horde has launched an attack
- Party shared XP - When killing in an encounter, you equally share XP amongst members in your party.
World Map & New Locations:
- Blowing the dust of my memory of C# development, spent a day developing a new tool built to support the mass amendment of the world map encounter tables. This has allowed me to ensure there is coastline, urban areas, desert and certain classes and difficulties of encounters in various areas throughout the map, instead of what was, a mutant (and unrefined) carbon copy of California's encounter map from Fallout 1/2.
Hey, if you knew what the colours actually meant, you might have a good idea of where to settle in the new world map. In essense, the east coast has far more difficult and mountaneous terrain, the deserts (dark green) are very sparsely populated, not too many interesting encounters. There are other colours I will let the fans figure out when the game eventually comes out to release again. (2024 edition??)
(Coastline where coastline would be anticipated, basically along the boundary of the entire continent)
- Adelaide has been redrafted in this current edition, take a look:
Hope you had a great Christmas,
See you all around.
