1.8.0 update

**Robin** · November 10, 2015

Greetings ninjas,

For instructions on how to updater your launcher, please see this thread: http://www.ninonline.org/forum/index.php?/forums/topic/3057-new-180-launcher/#comment-45493

It's been a rough week, but we're happy to announce that we've signed off on the changes for Nin Online version 1.8.0. With this announcement we're also going from Nin Offline to Nin Online and will be restoring access to the game server for all users ASAP. (Yay!)

Quite a few of you have noted a lack of communication and visibility whilst we've been working through the issues facing the game, so I'd first of all like to apologise to anyone who was confused about what exactly was happening during release. It was a rocky start, and unfortunately all our effort had to be spent on fixing the issues leaving us very little time to interact with the community (not to mention all our real life responsibilities as well).

Fortunately a lot of progress has been made in making sure Nin is as stable as possible. There's still a lot to do, but we're confident the changes made so far will at least allow us to get the game running again so people can continue to play.

Engine changes

Robin (me) has been working on fixing various issues which were causing stability problems on the server. For those of you who don't know, I'm the guy who made the game engine that Nin Online was built on. I've been around for a while now, so some of you might recognise me from a couple of years back, however I haven't actively worked on the engine itself for a long time.

I've been concentrating on bringing myself up to speed on the state of the source code, fixing various small issues that went unnoticed, and stress testing as many isolated parts of the engine as possible to see which areas of the code were causing problems under load. For now all I can say is that I've fixed two of the main areas which were causing the server to crash and more work will be done over the next few weeks to improve the stability even more.

Abhi has shown an amazing amount of patience in completely re-writing our entire character saving system. I'm sure plenty of you will remember the issues we had on release day where the website was constantly going down and character data would rollback practically every time you logged off.

Abhi recognised these issues and took it upon himself to completely re-think how our various server-side systems interacted. By isolating the game infrastructure from the database we were able to fix the main cause of the character data losses and also stop the website from going down. This is no small feat, and the fact that Abhi took the time to do this whilst also studying for important exams is very commendable. Thanks Abhi!

Seth has been working hard on fixing the bugs our community reported during the last few weeks. (Believe me, our team communication was flooded with him completing so many tasks on our tracking board.) He's also been working hard on improving the general code-base with possible stability fixes and memory leak plugs.

Seth has also been picking up .NET and has been actively working on developing the new updater, fixing the authentication server, and generally cleaning up our workspace so that it's much easier for other people to get involved. Thanks Seth!

Content updates

Whilst our programming team has been hard at work getting the engine fit for (re)release, our dedicated team of artists and content developers have been hard at work designing and building an entirely new geographical area within the Nin Online universe!

Elk has returned to the team as a pixel artist. He's shown some amazing designs and has quickly integrated himself in to our production pipeline, so I hope all of you will warmly welcome him back to where he belongs. Welcome back, Elk!

Rory, Fernando, and Elk have all been working closely together to come up with their artistic vision of what the Sand village will look like in Nin Online. This work is ongoing, and won't be released with 1.8.0, however Rory was kind enough to share some screenshots of some of the surrounding desert areas where you'll soon be finding yourself fighting those pesky Leaf village ninja. I'll leave the rest of the details for our next big content update. Thanks guys!

(Warning mobile users - large images)