Turbine Nation
Well, coming in September is the new launcher and billing system for AC2. This has been a difficult and time consuming project, impacting development work for many months now. Now we'll see it all come to fruition, however... and I know for most of us the change will be worth the effort.
Sadly, this won't go magically into effect in one day. The changeover will take time...and it is likely that the GUN server technology won't be 100% vanquished until sometime in the first half of next year. Each month will see more of the core tech being replaced by Turbine's software and it is likely that we won't see any more signs of GUN's existence long before it is entirely gone on the back end.
The first people to see and take advantage of the new launcher will be new players. Starting (hopefully) in September, all new players will be able to log in directly to the new launcher and access the Turbine Billing system from there. The launcher itself is somewhat streamlined. Turbine isn't interested in making a player jump the hoops of a dozen launcher screens in order to enter game. Instead, there will be a simple login page with username, password and data center on one side and news on the other. Here is a sample of that page with some humorous notes by Ramen on the news side. They had everyone laughing after a stunned moment. More proof (as if we needed it) that the devs have a sense of humor.
We are working on getting a better shot.
The next page was indicated at being a selection of world, probably still with the same scrolling news panel to the left. It was not clear at how much of the loading would take place with this screen showing. What was stated by Citan is that there would be an option for a player to make a shortcut on their desktop embedding their username/password/datacenter/world, placing them very rapidly at the character selection screen.
I'm curious as to how they will make sure that someone who does this gets to see the important news posted in the launcher, but I'm sure they'll find a way.
Okay, back to the transition. It will take a measureable amount of time following the addition of the new launcher before they are ready for a clean migration of the existing accounts over to the new system. A lot needs to be coordinated with Microsoft, with work on both ends in ensuring that the migration is as smooth as possible. In addition, a plan needs to be put in place for those players who have inactive accounts to be migrated before the deadline for complete removal of MS technology from the entire loop.
I would expect that existing accounts will be migrated during the course of October-December, quite likely early in that period. (The sooner, the better...and that is both Turbine's opinion and that of the playerbase.) At the same time, the Envoy team should migrate to the new system to serve us all. And they will actually be able to see accurately whether or not someone logs off after making a call for assistance. That alone is worth a large Huzzah!
Following the actual account migration, work will begin on removing the remaining chunks of code tied in to the GUN system piece by piece until it is all gone by early/mid 2005. Anything that isn't working 100% is probably going to go first, so we should see the last of problems due to the GUN subsystem prior to that time.
The GUN system is embedded deeply into the core of AC2. And in replacing it, Turbine has to bring up an international billing system and an authentication system to replace the ubiquitous MS Passport system as well. That is a lot of work in less than a year. Now we're finally going to see the results, even if their true complexity is behind the scenes.
