Announcements

Get Ready to Evolve! Prepare for Saturday.

On Saturday 12th November Neocron evolves again with the release of the Neocron Evolution 2.3 update. If you've not read the news already, you can read the details here.

Bringing this update to you will require some server downtime; to apply the patch, carry out some maintenance and perform some testing. We expect the downtime to last several hours and start in the late morning (CET).

Part of the maintenance will involve the reset of all non-apartment sectors of the game world. This involves taking them offline and essentially resetting them to their default state. This process ensures changes we've made to NPCs, sectors and missions all work as intended.

So, does what that mean for you?

Three things.

• You must ensure you collect Quick Belts you may have left in the game world. When sectors are reset, the contents of any belts left lying around will be lost.

• You must ensure you finish any running missions. If you have text in your Mission Log window (F8 of the RPOS), you will need to complete the mission before the downtime begins. If you don't, you will need to start the mission again from the beginning.

• You will have some time on your hands while the servers are offline. For this we will provide you with the patch notes, so you can read and digest the many changes that will greet you when the servers come back online.

That's it! We can't wait to launch the update on Saturday and hope to see many of you online once Neocron Evolution 2.3 is released.

Join the conversation in our Forum (EN/DE).

It is with great pleasure that on behalf of the Neocron Support Team I announce our target release date for Neocron’s next evolution. We appreciate the road to this point has been long and winding but as a team we are proud to finally bring you something very special indeed.

Neocron Evolution 2.3 releases Saturday 12th November 2016.

Reaching this point has involved the writing and rewriting of thousands of lines of code. Huge chunks of Neocron’s underlying systems have been gutted and entirely reengineered from the ground up.

Where there was once an unruly and at times haphazard weapon system, now lies a modern and efficient system. Acting as a foundation to be built upon the future the new system is designed with flexibility, growth and agile iteration in mind.

Shield mechanics have been completely re-implemented, fixing countless bugs and decoupling their behaviours from other systems which had previously limited their application. This also adds flexibility for future extension to the shield system.

Damage Boost, Parashock, “Leg Shots” and Foreign Cast mechanisms have all been completely rewritten making them flexible, configurable and most importantly – reliable.

A key part of the rebuild has been to return much loved weapon behaviours and setups to the fore. As a Runner in Neocron Evolution 2.3 you should have more setup choice than ever.

Finally, the Pegasus Engine, the Neocron Support Team’s evolution of Neocron’s game engine, has received several enhancements enabling positive change now and into the future. A number of graphical and logical features have been implemented, again with a focus on modularity and configurability.

This is just a taste of the changes awaiting you in Neocron Evolution 2.3 and the work involved to build the biggest Neocron update in over a decade. This also marks our return to more frequent updates going forward. Full patch notes will follow with the launch of Neocron Evolution 2.3.

In the meantime, point your friends and enemies alike to https://neocron-game.com/client-download and get ready to evolve.

Join the conversation in our Forum (EN/DE).

Hi Runners!

Just to let you know about all of our official social media channels that we use, so that if there is any downtime, news, announcements about the game, you can follow them on your favourite social media!

We will still be using the forums of course, but along with them, we will be posting snippets and sneak previews of the game ahead of events, such as patches. Don't forget to like or subscribe to these channels to get the most up to date information coming from us as it happens!

Facebook	Twitter	Instagram	YouTube	Discord

All Neocron services are back online, running in our newly upgraded infrastructure. Thank you for your patience during the downtime and we will see you in game soon!

We're extending our server infrastructure in preparation for the release of our next patch to Titan. The patch brings a significant number of improvements to the game and to be ready for these we need to make some changes. Our provider has been able to turn around their part of the works a lot faster than originally anticipated, so we're able to bring forward our plans too.

The Neocron Service (game servers, web servers, website etc) will be offline for an extended period tonight, from 22:59 BST / 23:59 CEST 18th October 2016. The downtime is expected to last several hours and we currently do not have an estimated time the service will be restored during 19th October 2016. We will keep you posted via social media during the downtime and will announce via Facebook and Twitter once things are back online.

We appreciate your patience during these essential works and apologise for the late notice.

Click here to join the discussion on our forum.

Join Kronos and Bifrost on our new YouTube channel tonight at 20:00 BST for our next live stream!

During the stream on Vedeena, our Public Test Server, we'll be covering some of the new 3D assets and content we're adding to the game in the next and future Titan patches. Using YouTube's built in chat feature we'll be looking out for your feedback and answering questions where we can.

Be sure to subscribe to the channel so you're always up to date with our live streams and other video content planned for the future.

Your eyes do not deceive you. The launcher front page has indeed changed!

Patch R#198 has been applied to Titan, to lay the foundation for many more changes to come in a future patch. You can find the details of this patch here and come along to discuss it on the official forums here.

On Tuesday 22nd September the Neocron Service (game servers, website, IRC, etc) will be taken offline temporarily for an important hardware replacement at our host's data centre.

As a result the Neocron Service will be unavailable between 22:00 BST/23:00 CEST on Tuesday 22nd and 04:00 BST/05:00 CEST on Wednesday 23rd.

While it is a possibility you may be able to login to the service between the times above, we strongly advise you not to attempt to login to any part of the Neocron Service before 04:00 BST / 05:00 CEST on Wednesday 23rd September. If the hardware replacement is completed early we will confirm this via the usual official channels.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.

All the best,
Your Neocron Support Team

Hello Runners!

It's been a while since we made an official status update and recap, so we thought we give you a little something-something for the summer hole.

Lets start with the beginning of the year. In December 2014 we pushed hard to release you the first of the community created runs. For us this meant a lot of crunch since this required an upgrade of ye ol' mission system. To put it simple, there was only a limited amount of unique runs possible to be supported by the game. Those are the type of runs that can only be complete once per character, like Epic missions or the Tiki run. So, in order to implement the community written runs we began writing a new mission system and the "NCPD has an Eye on you!" run by Hell Deamon was our first test run for that new mission system.

Unfortunately, after that crunch we hit a wall with our development efforts in January, as some of you might have noticed with the account expiration issues. To clear up the situation about that: currently all the rights of the intellectual property and the brand of Neocron belong to Kirk Lenke, whom we have a gentlemens agreement with about Neocron.
This agreement allows us to operate the game and develop it further, yet, what happens with the brand beyond that is not our call.
So in case you where wondering why we don't go on Steam or anything: Kirk has the say in that matter, not us.

Part of our development process are also regular talks to coordinate our efforts between Kirk and Zoltan. We always only receive permission to operate Neocron for a set amount of time before the agreement gets a renewal. This also includes the game accounts. Approaching January there was a radio silence for some time before whenever we tried to contact Kirk. This silence was what has lead to the expiration issue at the beginning of the year, without any word from the IP holder we where simply bound to let the accounts expire as we had to assume that there was no renewal of the agreement.
As you can see, we decided to renew the game accounts on our own accord, indefinitely for now.

So, the year started with a big question mark and the development work ceased for a while as we where waiting for Kirk to come back at us with news. When that didn't happen we decided to continue on our own from that point on with the development. However that does NOT change the fact that Kirk still holds all the rights over Neocron and it's his decision to pull the plug if he wishes so.


But obviously more happened since march, aside from team members finding new jobs and other real life changes, aside of constant DDOS spam from zombie bot nets - there where also improvements to the game!

HA! You didn't think so, did ya?

A lot of that happened behind the scenes, in the code. Thats why you might not feel or see those changes but they are there. First of all a lot of work happened to the game mechanics concerning weapons and the balancing project. Unfortunately, due to a lot of redundant code and other troubles, the first attempt of balancing failed our expectations and calculations - mainly due to modifiers and variables implemented by the previous coding team, *cough* KK *cough*, at unforeseen places.
Speaking of the balancing, we finally got rid of the commas for the implants!

With Zoltan digging through the engine's entrails anyway to bring the games code up to speed since 2013 now, we could clear up those roadblocks on our path to the next round on the balancing carousel. Really, all those numbers can make your head spin...
Alongside came further improvements for our tool set, so we don't have to edit all definitions and variables with notepad anymore. Wohoo!
Aside of that there have also been improvements on other places, thanks again to Zoltan's reworking of convoluted code strings into something less messy.

Tucked away under all those band aid fixes from the days of yore where quite surprising features actually. For example, did you know Neocrons engine had the ability to load different textures depending on its language settings all the time? That means we can load different decals for things like adverts or directional signs, and provide you with translated versions. We only recently found that feature so this is only coming to Titan at some point in the future though.

Other byproducts of the ongoing work in the background are things the new health bar for Mobs introduced in R# 189 [T# 199]. Netcode has also been improved, allowing for a smoother movement. More changes include the tracking of kill stats for players, we are working on making those available for you. How does a ladder-board for NC sound?

With the recent patch on Vedeena, a bunch of new textures came along too, so keep your eyes peeled. Connected to the work happening around the weapon mechanics are also new visual effects for Fire and Poison by the way, just in case you wondered where they come from.


If you have been following the patch notes for Vedeena you know that a few more things happened, but the question is, when will this ship to Titan?

Currently, we are working a few more things to deploy for Vedeena. There is still a lot more to before we can wrap all things up in one package. The refactoring and rework of the weapon mechanics is still not completed. Drones and PSI modules have their very own calculation construct, so they are currently not properly affected by the balancing tools. Hence we first have to bring them on parity with the rest of the weapons, code wise, before we can go anywhere with the next balancing stages.
We hope we can get this done until after August, seeing as player numbers usually drop during summer we hope we will be ready with a set of new features when people come back in autumn.


So long,

Your Neocron Support Team

Hallo Runner!

Seid Ihr aus der Umgebung von Hamburg und möchtet eure Mitspieler gern einmal persönlich Treffen? Dann ist der 25.07.2015 vielleicht genau der richtige Tag dafür. Unser Community Mitglied Ressorator hat für dieses Datum ein RL-Community Treffen organisiert, bei dem neue Gesichter gerne willkommen sind. Details zu Ort und Zeit, sowie Anmeldungen findet Ihr in diesem Forum Thema.