What's new?
This week brings two new quests into the game for your enjoyment along with a few small fixes. Outside of that things are a bit light as we are starting to work on bigger tasks that take more than a week to complete (see the WIP section for more details).
Bug fixes / improvements:
New Quests
Both Dryfoot and Redshore have a new quest available. Help out the Dryfoot folks from Newhaven as they struggle to survive in the desolate desert and all its pestering inhabitants. Then head over to Redshore and find out what happened at the camps throughout the forest; what are the Exiles up to?
More quests (both adventuring and trade professions) are coming soon (TM)!
Works in progress:
To see a full list of what is currently in progress head on over to this thread. I will do my best to update this list on a weekly basis and highlight the differences from the previous week with bold font. Below I will highlight some of the upcoming changes in more detail.
Skills UI & XP Bar Improvements (1-2 weeks)
We are making some small improvements to the skills UI that should hit live in the next week or two. First up is sorting your adventuring role to the top of others when it comes to the tabs on the right side. Next is improving the XP bars (both skills UI and on the action bar) to show a more detailed progress through each level. These improvements should provide more clarity that you are indeed making progress!
New QA Server (end of the month?)
One of the unfortunate side effects of going live is that we can no longer iterate as quickly as we did before. In the olden days we could pump out content as we didn't have to worry about things breaking since we were in alpha/beta/etc. However, now that we are live we have to be much more cautious about what is released and make sure that things are thoroughly tested. Our current QA team is just us right now. Part of the reason for that is that our QA server (the old server box) handles a number of internal services along with the live logging which leaves it a bit starved for resources. In other words: it can no longer handle the load of running multiple zones with many clients connected without impeding on other critical live services.
In the coming weeks we hope to be spinning up a cloud solution so that we may get back into the groove of quicker iteration times on the QA server for both us internally and YOU the community. Our ideal setup is that we push a new QA build out on a weekly basis (or even more frequent), copy characters over from live, give you all a bunch of cheats (potions, gear, etc), and allow you to test everything we have cooking so that you can provide feedback before it hits live at the end of the month. It will take us a bit to get this process smoothed out but we appreciate your patience while we work through it!
Hair Improvements (2-3 weeks, or never)
Our art team has been experimenting with improvements to our hair models. Currently we use a transparent shader which is a pain in the neck; it interacts with some lighting in weird ways, renders through particles at times (ember rings), and overall is not providing the intended look. These new models should (in theory) allow us to disable transparency and improve the overall look of the different hair styles. We say "should" because this is something we are still experimenting with so it is not guaranteed to fully work out. Either way we will keep you updated!
Active Defense Revamp (1-2 weeks)
The tech for the active defense revamp has been implemented. It is currently iterating through the design process which includes itemization and balancing. Threat adjustments will likely come after the first adjustment. As a reminder the functionality of the three active defenses are changing as follows:
Patch Size (ongoing)
Work is still ongoing here. Still no ETA as this has to be done for each individual zone and is a lower priority than some other back end updates.
We are working on migrating our scenes to a new loading system that will reduce the overall size of patches. At the moment all scenes are lumped together into a large ~3gb file. Any time data within this file changes it must be redownloaded - even if those changes are small. By breaking our data up into smaller chunks those downloads will ideally be minimized to smaller individual files moving forward. The end result will be saving us bandwidth (money), and saving you download time on patch day. The tech required to do this loading has been implemented. The work remaining is breaking the scenes up into individual files along with creating the shared bundles that contain assets used by multiple scenes.
This work is taking much longer than initially anticipated due to the large dependency trees within scenes (we are packing resources into shared "bundles" which requires us to identify what goes in each to prevent duplicates). The scene loading tech was rewritten over the break to accommodate this future change and will be active in this patch.
Known Issues:
This week brings two new quests into the game for your enjoyment along with a few small fixes. Outside of that things are a bit light as we are starting to work on bigger tasks that take more than a week to complete (see the WIP section for more details).
Bug fixes / improvements:
- Environment / Art
- Fixed a number of stuck spots, environment issues, and navigation issues in Redshore Ridge: Exile Freehold. More fixes next week.
- UI:
- Fixed an issue with DIM (diminishing returns) not properly showing in the combat log.
- Design:
- Specializations now gain experience at a faster rate when they are lower than your base role's level. This should allow specs to more easily catch up to base roles at higher levels (it still takes a bit of time!).
New Quests
Both Dryfoot and Redshore have a new quest available. Help out the Dryfoot folks from Newhaven as they struggle to survive in the desolate desert and all its pestering inhabitants. Then head over to Redshore and find out what happened at the camps throughout the forest; what are the Exiles up to?
More quests (both adventuring and trade professions) are coming soon (TM)!
Works in progress:
To see a full list of what is currently in progress head on over to this thread. I will do my best to update this list on a weekly basis and highlight the differences from the previous week with bold font. Below I will highlight some of the upcoming changes in more detail.
Skills UI & XP Bar Improvements (1-2 weeks)
We are making some small improvements to the skills UI that should hit live in the next week or two. First up is sorting your adventuring role to the top of others when it comes to the tabs on the right side. Next is improving the XP bars (both skills UI and on the action bar) to show a more detailed progress through each level. These improvements should provide more clarity that you are indeed making progress!
New QA Server (end of the month?)
One of the unfortunate side effects of going live is that we can no longer iterate as quickly as we did before. In the olden days we could pump out content as we didn't have to worry about things breaking since we were in alpha/beta/etc. However, now that we are live we have to be much more cautious about what is released and make sure that things are thoroughly tested. Our current QA team is just us right now. Part of the reason for that is that our QA server (the old server box) handles a number of internal services along with the live logging which leaves it a bit starved for resources. In other words: it can no longer handle the load of running multiple zones with many clients connected without impeding on other critical live services.
In the coming weeks we hope to be spinning up a cloud solution so that we may get back into the groove of quicker iteration times on the QA server for both us internally and YOU the community. Our ideal setup is that we push a new QA build out on a weekly basis (or even more frequent), copy characters over from live, give you all a bunch of cheats (potions, gear, etc), and allow you to test everything we have cooking so that you can provide feedback before it hits live at the end of the month. It will take us a bit to get this process smoothed out but we appreciate your patience while we work through it!
Hair Improvements (2-3 weeks, or never)
Our art team has been experimenting with improvements to our hair models. Currently we use a transparent shader which is a pain in the neck; it interacts with some lighting in weird ways, renders through particles at times (ember rings), and overall is not providing the intended look. These new models should (in theory) allow us to disable transparency and improve the overall look of the different hair styles. We say "should" because this is something we are still experimenting with so it is not guaranteed to fully work out. Either way we will keep you updated!
Active Defense Revamp (1-2 weeks)
The tech for the active defense revamp has been implemented. It is currently iterating through the design process which includes itemization and balancing. Threat adjustments will likely come after the first adjustment. As a reminder the functionality of the three active defenses are changing as follows:
- Avoid provides a 100% damage mitigation. Later we will add threat reduction.
- Block provides damage mitigation based on your shield or 2H weapon. A new "Block Value" is being added to these items in the form of a range which determines how much additional damage is mitigated. Later we will add threat generation to this.
- Parry provides a flat damage mitigation value, imposes disadvantage to the incoming attack, and allows for the chance to Riposte. Later Riposte will be buffed.
Patch Size (ongoing)
Work is still ongoing here. Still no ETA as this has to be done for each individual zone and is a lower priority than some other back end updates.
We are working on migrating our scenes to a new loading system that will reduce the overall size of patches. At the moment all scenes are lumped together into a large ~3gb file. Any time data within this file changes it must be redownloaded - even if those changes are small. By breaking our data up into smaller chunks those downloads will ideally be minimized to smaller individual files moving forward. The end result will be saving us bandwidth (money), and saving you download time on patch day. The tech required to do this loading has been implemented. The work remaining is breaking the scenes up into individual files along with creating the shared bundles that contain assets used by multiple scenes.
This work is taking much longer than initially anticipated due to the large dependency trees within scenes (we are packing resources into shared "bundles" which requires us to identify what goes in each to prevent duplicates). The scene loading tech was rewritten over the break to accommodate this future change and will be active in this patch.
Known Issues:
- Resource nodes may occasionally tell you "invalid target". This means that your client thinks a resource node is there but the server does not. We are still investigating the cause of this.
- Occasionally a loot roll may be skipped entirely and a carcass will be given. When this happens please provide any relevant details as we are still trying to track this one down.
- Deconstructing crafted items returns junk 100% of the time.
- Not all clothing/armor has visuals
- Dragging a group-nameplate in the group window will set the wrong pivot point for the group window and the whole thing will drag a bit weird.
- Typing chat text may occasionally become invisible. Unfocus your chat window and trying again a few times typically resolves this.
- Sometimes when you respawn you don't end up at the proper Hallow --> if this happens please report the position where you died via the "/report" command or "/debugposition" (if using debugposition you'll need to paste the value here)
- MacOS:
- Zooming the camera while holding the right mouse button can cause your chat window to scroll. This is not intended behavior.
- At some camera angles the sun may go dark. This should not happen frequently but is readily reproducible at some locations. Investigating a fix.
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