Arbitrary Milestone

[Ueda]

Dear Ninja,

I think it's around that time of year again where it's time to commemorate Nin Online's 9th Anniversary. Nin Online started in June 2013 officially (we were working on it for 2 months prior to announcing it) and so every June is a bit special in that we can celebrate Nin Online still going strong.

Version 4

On top of it being 9 years of Nin Online, we've also today hit another arbitrary milestone, namely we've hit version 4.0.0, which means you're officially playing Nin Online 4 at this point. To put it into perspective, we launched the Inochi Client aka. New Client aka. C# Client in 2021 as version 3.5.0. The way we iterate the version numbers is...

Minor increments, when there is no need to invalidate a past version
3.5.0 -> 3.5.0b/c/d/e/f/g/h/i/j

Major increments, when we don't want people of the last version to login to the game
3.5.0x -> 3.5.1

In this way, we've released 194 client updates since April 2021. Which puts us at an average of around 1 update every 2 days. Before this, we weren't tracking updates, but it has always been about that. This is also not considering updates that are only server sided!

When we launched the C# Client, the number of changes that were in it on top of just optimizations could be counted with your fingers. We had to maintain the same feature set for the most part to retain compatibility with the old server and old client because it had yet to be deprecated. When it launched, the coolest thing was that it had a more modern camera and it had an options menu (that worked). Since then, it's had entire new systems that were impossible before added: such as the Lighting System, Map Baking, Seeing behind walls, oAuth and Quick Logins, Mailing. 

Thanks to the client being made in Visual Studio, we've had such an easy time debugging for Nin Online in the past year. Just in the past month, we've fixed over 100 reported bugs. We've also had the benefit of working with Github Copilot in the past few weeks, it's almost crazy for me to say this, but we're literally using ML and cutting edge technology to work on Nin Online. A bewildering departure from the days of working with a 1990s IDE (Visual Basic 6) for those who don't know, that's how Nin Online was built in 2013.

This has always been the vision and this is why despite many asking for us the retain the old client, we couldn't. We're excited to add so much more that would've been impossible in the past.

9 Years

I don't want to say too much and take away from next year's Denary. Because it's still not the 10th year of Nin Online, but it will officially be next year, it's just really close to it.

I don't think many people can say they've given a decade of their lives to a project like this. I'm very proud of how far the game has come, and when I say this, I get flashbacks to times where people were telling me Nin Online was going to die soon etc. I even came across a post of myself in 2014 recently talking about how I saw Nin Online maybe lasting 4-5 years. A lot of what I believed was possible then came from similar experiences working on games in the past on Online Games, BYOND, Private Servers. I thought that a game like this would have a short, finite lifespan for sure because that's how it always was.

It took me years to realize that it was possible to build a game that is sustainable.

Most people who play Nin Online will never learn the deep history of the game. Nin Online is not a game that has ever been about money or even a game that pleases the mass market. To truly understand that, this year, I've written a long elaborate history of the game since its inception and first attempts in 2004.

I really hope you give it a read with your time! I think it'll give a new perspective on the game, and also help your understand why I do this and make the choices I make. I'd also be honored if as many people as possible live their lives knowing the history of this little game development scene that happened in the 2000s until today. I don't want the history to live and die with me!

The future

Well first I have to get some 9th anniversary events going then we can talk about the long term future. But I think the future of Nin Online has never been surer, we'll continue to put out great updates as we always have.

We hope you keep supporting Nin Online!

Regards,
Ueda