Dear Players!
We would like to start by acknowledging the long silence from our side over the past months. We know many of you have been worried, and even unsure about the game's future and we appreciate your support. We were holding back from posting updates because we were carefully considering various options for the future development of the game and did not want to rush with incomplete or inaccurate information.
At the moment, we are working on preparing the game server for launch. We hope that everything will go according to plan and that the game will be back online within a few weeks.
To begin with, we would like to outline the main issues that led to the current situation. As you know, we have been working on recreating the original version of the game for years. While some features were recreated relatively quickly, other required more and more time, making the recreation process increasingly difficult. Moreover, the original game engine was developed for operating systems and hardware that are now outdated. This is why you may experience issues with newer graphics cards, compatibility problems, scaling issues on modern monitors, information panel displayed incorrectly, and many other aspects. As a result, most of our efforts shifted towards maintaining the game’s functionality under new conditions rather than developing new features.
Equally important is the fact that the original engine relies on outdated graphics rendering methods, which also forced graphics designers to use outdated technologies. This provided little opportunity for them to gain the experience needed for modern game development. For developers, it is important to learn new technologies and grow professionally, even when working on a hobby project.
With this in mind, we believe that the best decision here is to migrate Alicia to a modern game engine, and we've already taken some steps in this direction. We've developed an improved horse model, created some high-quality coat variations, and explored the possibility of using a modern editor to design new tracks and locations. While we initially planned to incorporate some of these features into the original client, we found that most of the planned improvements for the game can only be fully implemented after migrating to a new engine, therefore this decision was only a matter of time. We want to emphasize that during this transition, we will try to preserve the original style of the game while enhancing the graphics quality.
Of course, the question will come: what will happen to the original client version? Although the upcoming updated version of the game promises many improvements, we understand that some of you may still be interested in playing the original version. For that reason, we plan to release the source code of the current game server, which is compatible with the original client. This means that any interested players will be able to independently support and develop the original version of the game, as well as create their own servers for it. We will also provide the necessary tools for adding new content to the original version of the game.
In fact, we still have much more to share about the transition of the game on the new engine, but for now, here are the key points:
- Transitioning to the new engine will allow us to implement all game features using our own code, giving us the freedom to add new features such as dismounting, new types of magic, and game modes.
- Compatibility issues with modern systems will be automatically resolved thanks to the regular updates of the new engine.
- Alicia will remain free to play.
- Once the basic game features have been implemented on the new engine, all player accounts, including horses and game progress, will be transferred to the new version. You will be able to continue playing on your old account using the new client.
- During the transition to the new version, we will continue to support the original client.
The exact timeline for developing the new client is difficult to determine at this time. The initial implementation could take anywhere from several months to a few years, depending on the number of people willing to participate in the development. If you have creative ideas or want to participate to the development of the new client, we’d love to have you in our community! Join the official Alicia Online Discord server to connect, share, and collaborate.