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ConnectUO 2.0 Release Date Announcement

Jeff

Lord
ConnectUO 2.0 Release Date Announcement

It's a great day! I'm pleased to announce that we finally have an official day that we want to release ConnectUO 2.0! ConnectUO has been beta tested by roughly 100 users and aside from a couple hiccups on my end, seemed to do pretty well. I've fixed roughly 20 significant bugs, lots of small minor changes, and completely revamped the way the local storage engine and patching works. I've spent nearly 60 hours in the past 7 days working to get the release of ConnectUO 2.0 as flawless as possibly. Ravenal has spent roughly the same amount of time working on the server side of things. Although it is still in beta, and will be for some time, we believe ConnectUO 2.0 will be fairly stable and usable to be released. We do expect issues and bugs, but we will be working diligently to alleviate these issues as quickly as possible in the following days of the release.

So, you are probably now saying... enough, i don't care.... when will it be released!!!! Well we are looking at releasing it on Thursday of this week, and pending any unforeseen issues, you should find a release on this site sometime on Thursday 10/29/2009.

For now, I will share with you some screenshots, and some comments about what is new in ConnectUO 2.0

First off, let me show you the official screenshot of ConnectUO 2.0. To help understand and link things together, the image contains red letters to signify each section.


  • A. Connection
    • Update Serverlist - This will download the serverlist from the connectuo webservice. The webservice provides realtime data, so once you have added your server to connectuo.com, clicking this will make it show up on the ConnectUO 2.0 client.
  • B. Server Lists
    • Public Servers - This will change the server view to the public server list. If ConnectUO has never connected to the ConnectUO WebService, you will not see any servers listed. ConnectUO 2.0 also stores a local copy of this in it's internal database. This allows you to view the servers even when you aren't connected to the internet.
    • Favorite Servers - This will show all the servers you have saved as a favorite from the public server list.
    • Local Servers - This will show all the local servers you have created within the ConnectUO 2.0 client.
    • Manage My Shards - Clicking this will bring you to the shard management page at the connectuo.com forums. You may need to login to connectuo.com to view this page.
  • C. Options
    • Settings - Allows you to change things like the Installation path of the client, ability to load razor when playing a server, location of server patch storage, etc.
    • About - Tells you about ConnectUO, provides a way to donate, and links to the bug tracker and connectuo.com
  • D. Help and Support
    • Client Help - Directs your browser to the Client Help section of the connectuo.com forums
    • Directs your browser to the Server Help section of the connectuo.com forums
    • Directs your browser to the FAQ section of the connectuo.com forums
    • Directos your browser to the Add Bug page of the bug tracker.
  • E. Filtering
    • When entering text into the filter textbox, the currently viewed list will only show servers that have the entered text in either the name, or the description of the server.
  • F. Sorting
    • This will sort the currently viewed list by the selected value. Some of the sorting options are, Current Online, Max Online, Avg Online, Name, Description, etc.
  • G. Reverse Sorting
    • This will simply reverse the currently sorted view of the serverlist.
Next lets move on to the anatomy of a server list item. Here you see an image of a server list item. To help understand and link things together, the image contains red letters to signify each section.


As you can see, it looks pretty fancy. Also, before anyone gets any smart ass comments , I've modified the UOGamers: Hybrid server for this picture alone. I needed to show a server that had all the feature without promoting a server that wasn't RunUO endorsed ;). Now back to the details!

  • A. Icon - This is the icon you can upload when you list your server with connectuo.com. This icon should be 72x72 pixels and no more then 20kb.
  • B. Server Name - Pretty straight forward I think.
  • C. Server Description - The View of the item will expand when clicked, so even tho it looks like the description is truncated, you can click the server item and view the entire description.
  • D. Stats - Here you can find all the information we collect for each server. Some of this is input by the server administrator, but things like the online counts and uptime are from the server poller that polls each server roughly ever 10 minutes.
  • E. Buttons
    • Play - This will launch the patching process (if required) and the Ultima Online client completely setup to play the selected server.
    • Favorite (Found on the public server list only) - This adds the server to your favorites list.
    • Remove (Found on the Favorites server list only) - This removes the server from the favorites list
    • Website - Direct your browser to the servers website
    • Reset (Found on servers with patching) - This will reset the patches for the server. This basically tells ConnectUO to redownload the patches and re-apply them
  • F. Patch - this Icon is 2 bandaids (hence patch) and when seen this represents that the server requires patching to play. ConnectUO will do the patching for you, but this is to let you know that the server does require it.
  • G. Current Status Icon - This represents wether the server was reachable during the last polling attempt. An up arrow (as seen) means the server is currently up, a red icon with the line through it means it is down.

The next thing that has really change since any previous version of ConnectUO is the way it patches files. Previously ConnectUO would simply download all patches, extract them to a folder, then one at a time apply it to the mul files. This was painfully tedious and slow. Although the logic really hasn't changed, ConnectUO 2.0 now takes advantage of parallel processing. Now, instead of doing things in a complete linear fashion, ConnectUO will download a maximum of 2 files simultaneously, this may be upped in the future, but for now, it is set to a maximum of 2. Once a file is downloads it will immediately be extracted , ConnectUO limits 5 concurrent extractions at a time. Once all files are downloaded and extracted, the patching process will begin. The patching process is split into 1 task per mul/idx file. ConnectUO 2.0 can patch up to 5 mul/idx files simultaneously while all others become queued till an currently running patching task completes. This process has proven to be extremely fast and should alleviate a lot of waiting (depending on how fast you can download the patches of course).

Here is a quick screenshot of the ConnectUO 2.0 patcher at work.


This is basically it, or at least all I can really think of right now. I look forward to the release and hope you do to!
-Jeff
 

Alex21

Sorceror
Cool, will put some ease into generating a playerbase. A simple to use app with an automatic list of servers, sure to help the game.
 

milva

Sorceror
Woohoo!! Thank You Jeff and Ravenal for all your hard work, be great having Connectuo back once again :p
 

Deimos

Page
It's definatly a lot better than the old ConnectUO
Much more streamlined, responsive and overal it's much nicer. :D
It's a joy to use
 

Alex21

Sorceror
O i also believe it would be nice if connectuo offered an API to make the task of displaying dynamic shard data on the shard website easier.

And an API would make it possible to display dynamic data in shard descriptions etc.

:)
 

Jeff

Lord
Alex21;816428 said:
O i also believe it would be nice if connectuo offered an API to make the task of displaying dynamic shard data on the shard website easier.

And an API would make it possible to display dynamic data in shard descriptions etc.

:)

what does that even mean? all of connectuo's data is pretty static, aside from online counts. Also, if you have a feature request, it is 100% valid to goto the bug tracker http://www.runuo.com/bugs/ and create a new bug for connectuo, but check the feature request check box. This will make it a feature request, but please be sure to describe in detail what you are looking for. Fragmented non-coherent sentences like the above will just be deleted.
 

endwolf

Sorceror
Vacation Time!!!

Now thats a good sign for the beginning of a Vacation...Gotta get the release! Thanx for the heads up and date! Looks to be great work. Cant wait to give it the go!
 

secret man

Wanderer
Great Jeff it looks awesome i've waited awhile for 2.0 to come out you and your team did an excellent job on i look forward to using it two thumbs up oh also btw Thank you so very very very much for all your hard work that goes to your team as well.
 
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