The Future: What is Alligator 2 & Team Blog

Hey gang,

First, let’s rewind the clock—back over a decade, approaching close to twelve years. Picture a world where every private server ends in "Realms," the original sources are still under active development, and nobody has ever heard of Discord. Back then, the realm of private servers communicated through Skype, with all the chaos you can assume that brought. The community of developers argued and occasionally progressed on MPGH, just as Kabam took the reins of Production RotMG. In this era, Nilly's Realm emerged, soon becoming the bastion for players, reigning as the most trusted and premier private server for the next five years. Meanwhile, Phoenix Realms was breaking new ground, introducing fresh sources and the pioneering ItemData, which would eventually give rise to the original Project B and a slew of other servers based on Seraph's Dominion.

Valor wasn't always known by that name. It originally began as Realms Resolution, a creation by Omniraptyr that struggled to support over thirty players without succumbing to crashes but has some of the most fun mechanics I  (Arcanuo) ever found in a private server, such as cooking and it's lootboxes. As time surged forward, RR evolved into Vengeance of the Risen (VotR) by the mid-2010s, under the stewardship of Mike & Omniraptyr. Arcanuo would join around this time after originally being banned from VotR. VotR would become VotR 2, and later Valor after a source change. Developers would come and go such as flut, Astro, Lynx, etc. Entering the era of Valor as the official name, the Admin Team consisted of Omni, Mike & Arcanuo. Valor would end in early 2018, with the source at the time going public. It would later do an iteration under Faux, then Lynx, where Valor as you know it today, would be reformed by Flut & Arcanuo, and meander it's way into what you recognize today.

This iteration of Valor would be best recognized for it's stability, but has produced some exciting systems. We came out of an era of private servers where most servers except a few only existed for a few weeks, and we were able to turn that into almost four years without a single wipe, while fending off malicious actors, and dealing with our own mistakes as we grew.

We have achieved almost five years, and have learned a lot, as developers and as people along the way, but it's impossible to do anything without making some mistakes, even among many accomplishments. We're excited for many more years of both, and experiencing them alongside you. We will continue to take your feedback and grow as a team.

Our Promise & Goals

One of our core tenants and strong points of our four plus years has been our community service, engagement and way we present ourselves. We've always been proud of our support system, the work gone into the bot, and our level of support.

We also exist at a level where we're stuck between being a Private Server & being Valor - and this has been something that has been eating at us. We've long straddled a saddle where we do a large amount of development that puts us at an Indie Level in terms of effort, while developing a private server. We've had to develop deployment, protection & monitoring solutions, embracing tools of the industry and building a few of our own. We took a codebase that was a mess, and heavily improved it, thanks to the effort of countless developers.

We'd like to say a thank you to everybody who is still currently playing, and also appreciate all those that are waiting for big changes and new content patiently - we hope to deliver and see you again soon. We have been working on some current updates to the game - which you should see soon, but taking our time there as well, as we don't want to continue to create potential issues that go against our vision. As those in the trades say, "Measure twice, cut once".

What is Alligator 2

Alligator 2 is the internal codename for the reworked client, as well as a significant update and change to the way we do business, for lack of another explanation.

The name became a joke in our internal chat because we wanted a way to refer to it in very very early development, and Seb posted a crocodile emote, while working on our 2nd client, henceforth Alligator 2. Not sure how a croc emote became an Alligator, but that's life.

A significant portion of Alligator 2 will be the client rewrite, but if we only did this then we would eventually have the same problem that we have now, that a large portion of the content is outdated and slapdash, and our existing world/game lacks an identity. We will be timing the release of the new client, alongside large content reworks as well as introducing new content.  

There will be difficulties of course, we're commited to do justice to the community we've built, and fully believe that we can take what we have and make it something truly special. Difficulties will include a dangerous excess of un-unique items, and how those are obtained, as well as the fact that a lot of content is truly outdated, as well as attempting to move towards a more bullet hell style, instead of super high damage. We also realize that one of Valor's pioneering concepts was raids and hope to do the current and future ones justice once more.

The new client has been pioneered by Sebafra and Orbit, and is still very early in development. We have plans for larger changes to existing game systems, but are currently getting the client feature set up to date with the current engine, before massive customizations are previewed.

Our new client is a ground up rewrite in MonoGame, which will be able to take advantage of newer hardware, while still performing exceptionally well on older machines. We're hoping to embrace our own look and feel, which we've been working with Zemagaia on.

We don't have a release date/timeline quite yet, but we're making significant progress. We'd like to avoid the mistakes made with the wipe.

Features Of New Client

• MacOS, Unix & Windows Compatible.
• New UI Components & Fresh Look.
• Rapid iteration, easier development experience, opens up to more potentially developers as as3 is old and niche.
• No more restarting the client every thirty minutes.
• Better Multi Server Support. (EU?!?!)
• The framework allows us to have more and better UI changes, allows for easier implementation of better qol since we did it from scratch. (Battle Pass claim all, etc)
• Lighting system can implement different global lighting schemes, dungeon lighting, dynamically illuminated projectiles, static flickering lights for torches and lava and other atmospheres
• Bringing systems such as Vaults & Market into a modern era.
• Mobile release is.. Possible? To be discussed more seriously in the future.
• Support for more proper game systems such as better effects. (No more emotes on the ground. :P)

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Not every system shown is near it's final copy, and a lot is still being worked on and discussed. This is still very much a beta build, and we're working out remaining visual and performance kinks.

We've almost reached feature parity with the current client, all while improving existing systems. Systems like sounds, effects, and discord RPC are fully implemented. A bit of work for completing Options is left. We have reached a state where it's easily shareable on windows, while still figuring out exact pipelines for MacOS/Unix. It can be compiled and ran on development easily in those, but we've yet to fully master packaging.

Our current server has had some changes, and we've started a separate alligator-2 branch which tracks our development branch, with a few rendering and Player update changes to support the new client.

Rates Viewer & The Website

The Rates Viewer which was promised for this summer is almost ready to go. It is fully functional, and is being rolled out early next weekend, if not sooner. It just requires some styling. It still looks very ugly unfortunately.

In the future, with Alligator 2 releasing, we will most likely end up adding the rates into the Oracle.

We will also be releasing an updated vision of the website following the large Alligator 2 push. We've enjoyed offering leaderboard systems, but they have become defunct and unmaintained, which for a lot of people the website is their first look before they download - which presents a poor first look. We are hoping to bring back life to leaderboard and tracking systems such as the guild boards, etc. This will also coincide with Branding Changes as we enter a new Era. We'd also like to redo the blog theme, and match it up with the website.

A lot of focus will be on content and the client, but we feel a consistent feeling across everything is vital.

Staff & Community

This section is difficult, because we realize that while we've been making changes behind the scenes, events such as the Summer Events have suffered, and broken a little bit of trust, which we can only say we hope to repair going forward.

We're continuing to work with and find developers that share our vision. We've gone ahead and released PlatosPoet - who we wish the best IRL & on it's own projects, we'll be introducing Hermitico, who is an experienced Game Developer who has played both Private Servers & Production Realm.  We'll also be expanding our spriting muscle. Don't worry, BQ isn't going anywhere!

For now, we've gone ahead and frozen staff ranks for the Majority of our Helpers & Moderators. This is an effort to restyle our Moderation to be less top heavy, while doing our best to deliver a consistent moderation style, something that has been an issue off and on for years. Team & rank changes will come in one announcement.

VCC will be seeing a revamp, with details on that to follow. We feel the system is a good V1, but has became bloated, and folks with truly incredible ideas have been skipped over, and diverting management energy to VCC has made other systems suffer. We're still working out exactly how this works, and will be starting with a review of existing ideas and suggestions inside VCC we may of missed.

We're super proud of the team over the years, and hope to continue to see it grow.

Thanks,
The Valor Team