Worlds/Classic

This article describes one of Graal's many playerworlds. If you have some information about this world's quests, staff, events or content, feel free to contribute to it by clicking the Edit link on the left side. Try to keep your edits as fair and unbiased as possible, though - the GraalBible is primarily for information, not for argument.

History

The Early Years

Classic was the first Playerworld to emerge on Graal, and as a result, has gathered a strong reputation amongst Oldbies.

For a long time, the server was managed by Tyhm, and slowly evolved with interesting new ideas such as 'races', whereby players gained attributes of thier chosen race, for example, the Zorbi race could trap other players inside bubbles in order to escape a battle, though these races were later removed after players complained of 'unfairness' between them.

As time continued, a storyline and cutscenes were integrated, and the overworld was moulded to fit more cleanly together, eventually shaping the Classic world into a series of islands. These changes were prompted by the influx of new players, and the introduction of mapped levels, which allowed players to see nearby levels as if they were part of one large area. To appease some of the older players, unhappy with these changes, a quest was formed which took an early version of Classic, and placed it into a 'museum'.

The Middle Ages

By mid 2003, Classic was bulging with content, with some 7000 levels on the server. Whilst this was great for the players, especially those with a tendency to explore, Tyhm and his development team himself were finding it increasingly difficult to convert everything over for the emerging NPC-Server technology.

In March 2004, due to other commitments, Tyhm left the management of Classic, and after a brief period of anarchy, Stefan stepped in, appointing a new manager, Master Storm on the 7th of April. Storm made it his primary focus to get the NPC Server released, as it was by now some many years overdue. Due to various situations, namely the difficulty with converting everything, Storm decided instead to rebuild Classic from scratch, focusing on getting compatibility with the NPC server at a base level, and expanding with content after. The wipe of content also meant that new ideas could be implemented, and Classic could create content closer to it's roots.

'New Classic'

On January 6th 2005, the NPC-Server launched for Classic. This came somewhat early in the development of 'New Classic', but was pretty much forced as support for old style Classic GServers was being removed. It is fair to say that the server was rushed to meet this deadline, and this has had large knock on effects. Not long after, GScript 2 was introduced, and this futher delayed progress, as time had to be dedicated to compatability rather than the creation of content. The appointment of a new LAT Admin in August '05 has greatly improved the situation, and Classic is finally rebuilding itself.

Since the introdustion of the NPC-Server, Classic has been using custom movement and hit detection. Whilst these have been designed to closely emulate the built in system of Graal, by using custom movement, the opportunity for interesting new ideas is greatly increased. The custom movement also allows more subtle tweaks, such as allowing for a greater range of player movement speeds, and encompasses various bug fixes.

More controversial is the rewritten hit detection. This places the hit detection entirely serverside, as opposed to the clientside detection with which many are accustomed. This greatly improves security, and provides a more consistent, lower lag, but has been controversial with the players, most notably the sparring and pk'ing fraternity, as they have had to adjust to the different lag behaviour.