Greetings Vikings-community!
Finally, as a response to the War of the Vikings community we have been able to finish a complete overhaul of the network code to address its biggest flaws. This will have a fundamental impact on the game, so prepare for that the game will play quite a bit differently and that it will require some adjusting on your part. The new network design should improve competitive play and create more balance between offensive and defensive tactics. This is the top feature of the patch and it will surely create some commotion. I will try my best to explain what this is all about, and the reasons for doing it.

The most problematic issues of WOTV is related to latency, a kind of electronic delay that exists in every network. High ping players have high latency. Every multiplayer game has to deal with the fact that the game world is represented differently on each player's computer, most of the time quite similar but never exactly the same.

In my years working with programming multiplayer games I don't think I've ever encountered a tougher challenge regarding real-time network design than in the scenario of War of the Vikings. It's fast paced and every millisecond counts. Swords, shields and players move around at high speeds. The swords and shields are connected via arms to an upper body that moves almost freely with the player mouse movements. These are very unforgiving conditions for network approximations. In the shooter style genre you can get away with a lot more since you are not as dependent on the players' relative positions to each other and their weapons don't connect physically. However, in my opinion it's the agile fast paced melee close combat that also makes for the charm of the game.

The old network design
To better understand the concept of the new network design I'll begin with explaining the old one. It's a pretty straightforward client-side network approach as far as melee fighting is concerned. The outcome of every swing is determined directly on the attacking player's computer, and then communicated to the server which subsequently broadcasts it to the other players in the game session. This has one great advantage - the attacker experiences no latency since the outcome is evaluated directly on his local computer!

Well that sounds just fine and dandy, what about drawbacks? Quite a few I'm afraid, mostly for the player being targeted. The target player will experience an uncomfortable delay which is the sum of both players’ network delay to the server that they are connected to. Here are some typical experiences for players being attacked in this client-side network design. The attacking player will from now on be referred to as A, and the defending player as B:

- "B raises his shield to meet A's oncoming attack but experiences that the weapon cuts through his shield."

What's really happened here is that B has already been hit on A's client computer, but the news has not yet reached B. In cases of extreme latency you may even be dead before you see the attack coming at all.

- "B sees blood splatter about two meters away which strangely registers as a hit on B's player."

The explanation? The position of the blood splatter in B's view is where B was hit on the attacker's computer at the time of impact.

As you can see there's a distinct disadvantage to this setup, foremost that B gets to pay for the network delay of both players. This opens up for a kind of latency exploit: The higher ping A has, the harder it will be for B to avoid being hit. Than means that player A could easily add simulated latency via software to increase the advantage when attacking B. This is not good.

The new network design
Now that we have an understanding of the old network design we can talk about the new one. It's a server-side network design where all hit detection and damage evaluations are computed on neutral ground - the server. This is not without drawbacks either, but it will even out the imbalance of attacking vs defending. The latency will be cut in half, and in many situations it will be perceived as even lower. Hopefully this will help to create a more interesting variety of gameplay that incorporates both defensive and offensive tactics. I'm stoked to see where the Clans can take this.

The benefits of the new network design:
* The most important improvement is that it will balance offensive and defensive play, where the latter will improve significantly.
* Every player is accountable for their own latency to the server. This means that other players will not be at a disadvantage because one player is playing at high ping. The playing field should be fairly even up to a ping of about 100 ms, although it should be quite playable at higher pings too.
* Players will be closer to their actual positions with the new prediction algorithms making it less of a guessing game for the players. The algorithms are capped to compensate for up to about 100 ms to limit artifacts like rubber-banding etc. For example, if you have a rather high ping of 150 ms the system will try to compensate for 100 ms, and then there's 50 ms left uncompensated in the form of delay/latency.

In all fairness we have to talk about the drawbacks too. Implementing this network solution has one inevitable drawback: Since all attacks are executed server-side there's a possibility for discrepancy between the attacking client and the server. The attacking player will not always be in perfect sync with the server since there's latency to take into account. This can manifest itself in experiences like this:

- "Player A lands a blow on B but it doesn't do any damage."

Explanation? The game world on A's computer differs from the server game world in this case. The server tries to predict the game world those couple of milliseconds ahead, and it's an approximation based on prediction math. Most of the time it will do a splendid job, but in some cases it will not come as close as one would desire. High latency in combination with sudden unpredictable movement is where the discrepancy will at times rear its ugly head. This is the inevitable price one will have to pay for using a server-side solution, but in my opinion the benefits outweigh the drawbacks by far.

The rest of the feature list
I'll briefly walk you through the rest of the feature list of the 1.5 patch, here's the brief excerpt from the change log:
- Server-side hit detection and damage evaluation!
- New network prediction algorithms
- Shields also protect passively
- Old parry delay system removed
- Mouse sensitivity is lowered during swings, blocks and parries
- Weapon momentum introduced
- Angle of impact matters for projectiles
- Damage below knee level is reduced
- Frame reset to 60 hz for optimal performance
- Some crash issues have been addressed

We have really worked hard to improve defensive play in Vikings, and one of the key elements is the shield. We've deliberately designed them to only protect from the front side to eliminate awkward edge hits. This worked out pretty well I think. Shields are now a force to be reckoned with.

The old parry delay system has been removed. It's redundant in the new network design.

Mouse sensitivity is lowered during swings, blocks and parries. The reason for this is partly to just stabilize the player view a bit during swings, but also to reduce the effects of the 360-exploit, where users bump up the mouse sensitivity to swing in full 360 circles.

Something we refer to as momentum has been incorporated in the damage calculations. Swings and stabs will have most impact mid-swing. There are two reasons for doing this besides the added realism; the first is to reward well timed attacks, and the second reason is to reduce weird hits where the weapon has no velocity. Special attacks are however exempted from this.

Damage evaluation for projectiles have been improved to take angle of impact into account. The reasons are similar to the momentum feature of melee attacks; to reward accuracy and to reduce damage when the projectiles barely touch the target.

Reduced damage of hits below knee level. Well it's hard to defend against attacks below knee level, and we want to discourage feet-spamming all in all.

Another change is that the patch will reset your frame rate to 60 fps. This is an effort to see if this can help stabilize the application for users having stability issues. I believe the default setting is unlimited which makes every computer and its graphics card race at 300+ fps when playing Vikings, which in turn could make the system more prone to crash if your system has those kind of issues. If you don't like it, you can just go into the graphics settings and set the frame rate back to full blast hyper-speed if you prefer that.

We have noticed a big improvement regarding crashes with the last 1.3 patch, and we still try to track down these kind of issues and this patch addresses some of them.

In my relatively short time working with War of the Vikings I've learned to appreciate the game a lot, and personally I think it has not gotten the attention that it deserves. I've never come across a game quite like it, and in my opinion it's got some really nice and unique game mechanics. I love its agile melee fighting system and how the game really rewards playing as a team. And the theme of bloodthirsty Vikings screaming on the battlefield is just such an awesome setting that I can't get enough of.

One thing that WOTV has had to struggle with is its low player retainability. One of the key reasons I think has to do with the fact that newcomers in WOTV have had to stand being slaughtered for the first 20 hours or so before being able to bite back. As a beginner you instinctively try to defend yourself, and it takes a while for you realize that defense in many cases is almost pointless in the old version. This patch should be able to change things up in that aspect. We have noticed during testing that the game becomes more forgiving towards beginners as they stand a better chance to survive while learning to fight. My hope is that this will help remedy the low player retainability that the game has suffered from.

I sincerely hope that you will enjoy and embrace this patch and that you will feel that it enhances your WOTV-experience. It will require some effort on your part in the form of adjusting to it since it's now a different beast. In the long run I do believe it will help improve and develop the gameplay of War of the Vikings. I would love nothing more than to see the community prosper again. In my opinion it's still a kick-♥♥♥ game with a lot of potential.