Our next stress tests are scheduled for:
What's new?
This week brings a slew of tech updates and content in the form of an entirely new zone to explore! To allow everyone the chance to explore this zone we are providing "vitality" potions at the North Newhaven city gate at no charge (see below for details). I am still working on performance tweaks and improvements to the 2021 build - so if you have any major concerns with builds on Unity 2021 speak now or forever hold your peace! Once we upgrade the team we cannot go back.
I've heard a few reports of issues with the character creation camera on M1 macs but have been unable to reproduce this locally. If this applies to you, could you startup the game, enter character creation where the camera is screwy, then exit and send me your logs? Thanks!
REMINDER: the servers will be open for 4hrs Wednesday evening. The servers will open again on Friday @ 12pm central and close on Tuesday at 12pm central. See events in Discord for timezone translations.
Bug fixes / improvements:
Line of Sight updates
Up until this patch we never considered line-of-sight (LOS) when checking if you could execute an ability. This was something that was put off for a number of reasons; mostly because it is a bit more involved than it seems at first glance. You can't perform a single LOS check and call it a day. To more accurately determine LOS one has to perform multiple checks to your target at different angles.
Our game determines if you have LOS by casting rays out from your midsection to the bottom, middle, and sometimes top of your target. The midsection of your character was chosen to not provide any advantage/disadvantage for shorter or taller characters (the point at which we cast our rays is the same for ALL characters regardless of size). If any one of these rays successfully reaches your target without intersecting a scene collider then you are deemed to have a valid LOS. Tab targeting requires LOS and operates in a very similar way except that the rays are cast from the camera's position rather than your avatar's midsection.
LOS is now checked at the start and end of an execution; if you lose LOS during execution you can still get that shot off if you re-acquire LOS before execution completes. I do not anticipate this causing any major problems - but we do have to be more mindful of the colliders used for props throughout the scenes. Please let me know if you run into any oddities or find yourself in a situation where you expect to have LOS but for whatever reason do not.
Call for help updates
The NPC call for help system (or social aggro) has gotten some love this patch. Previously a "call for help" would alert nearby NPCs to your position causing them to begin an "investigation" in which the NPC would search the area for any potential targets. The number of NPCs that could be alerted was infinite which required us to keep the call for help distance relatively low. With this week's patch the call for help system can now limit the number of alerted NPCs allowing us to expand the range much further without having to alert the entire camp. In addition, we can now set a chance that one of the alerted NPCs becomes immediately hostile towards you - which has been done. This should make pulling a bit more chaotic and challenging.
Redshore Forest
A new zone for levels 26+ is now available to explore! It can be reached from a northern road in Meadowlands, or the north western outpost in Dryfoot. Be warned: Redshore is much farther north of the wall than any of the others and hence offers far less protection.
This initial pass includes mobs, resources, and chests. This zone, like others, will be undergoing multiple iterations. It currently lacks rare spawns and redshore specific mob variants, but represents a base upon which those additions will be introduced. Currently there is no map. Expect Ember Ring/Hallow placements to be adjusted as well. There is however, new music!
Level up potions
Vitality potions have been added to North Newhaven just outside of the city gate at no charge. They currently come in three varieties: level 6, level 12, and level 26. Drinking one of these bad boys will up your adventuring + specialization level to the target level. These are for testing purposes only! But they should also allow you to drop & select a different specialization to try at your will.
Works in progress:
We are still discussing things internally on how to best move forward with crafting. The current list of things we are discussing and/or tossing around are:
The last thing we need to do for this is consolidate resists. This task is slightly more involved because it involves touching all of the current abilities and ripping out the old system. I hope to get to this soon but other tasks (<cough> crafting discussions <cough>) are taking up too much of my time.
Reagent Upgrade System(timeline: ...)
Ember essence collection and spending is on the list of things to do SOON, but is taking a back seat until we can iron out crafting, Unity 2021, the above mentioned stat consolidation, and reorganizing and prepping of the new dungeons.
Known Issues:
Wed. May 25th @ 8pm central
(Thurs. May 26th @ 1am UTC)
The developers will meet in Discord and test for approximately one hour. However, the servers will remain open for roughly 4 hours. The most up-to-date client can be retrieved via the patcher found on your account page.(Thurs. May 26th @ 1am UTC)
What's new?
This week brings a slew of tech updates and content in the form of an entirely new zone to explore! To allow everyone the chance to explore this zone we are providing "vitality" potions at the North Newhaven city gate at no charge (see below for details). I am still working on performance tweaks and improvements to the 2021 build - so if you have any major concerns with builds on Unity 2021 speak now or forever hold your peace! Once we upgrade the team we cannot go back.
I've heard a few reports of issues with the character creation camera on M1 macs but have been unable to reproduce this locally. If this applies to you, could you startup the game, enter character creation where the camera is screwy, then exit and send me your logs? Thanks!
REMINDER: the servers will be open for 4hrs Wednesday evening. The servers will open again on Friday @ 12pm central and close on Tuesday at 12pm central. See events in Discord for timezone translations.
Bug fixes / improvements:
- Hot fixes from last weekend:
- added level 20-30 Warden abilities
- warden now gets natural resists rather than movement
- adjusted armor calculations to provide better damage absorption at lower levels and widen the gap between defenders and non-defenders in their ability to absorb damage.
- Tech
- More robustly adjusting sky dome game time if your offset from the server gets too large.
- Fixing Anthills & Rat Nests not giving XP. For real this time! (note that the creatures that these spawn do NOT give xp; this is intended)
- Added behavior disable delay to the server's npc behavior manager code. This should help the issue where NPCs stick around the zone line.
- Removed some rogue reflection probes in Dryfoot that may have been causing performance issues.
- Updating some light props that had bad data.
- UI:
- Adjusting yellow difficulty color.
- Adding a background to buff/debuff icons.
- Design:
- Added remaining level 20-30 abilities.
- Dryfoot Stronghold arena nav mesh fixes
- Slightly increasing humanoid in-combat move speed.
- Meadowlands' wolves have bred. They can be found in multiple locations throughout the zone.
- Follow Through and Serration have been given a 100% proc chance.
- Windup has been reduced to be consumed by a single attack (this lasting the full duration was not intended)
- Fixed an issue preventing certain crafted outer armor slots from getting bonuses.
- Crafting quality is fixed at 100%. This will eventually impact some aspect of the item at a later date (likely durability)
- Flux material level will display the outputted item level only.
- Mid-tier crafting resources (material levels 5, 15, 25, 35, 45) now have increased property values over their lower level equivalents
- Crafting xp now depends on how many materials are used and from what harvesting professions they are sourced.
- Dryfoot clan will no longer assist Exiles when asked nicely.
- The "Wilds" of zones (spaces between group content) have had a significant reduction or even elimination of common group content mobs (2+ chevron).
- North/South Newhaven General Merchant near the city gate has been stocked with ALL levels of general equipment.
Line of Sight updates
Up until this patch we never considered line-of-sight (LOS) when checking if you could execute an ability. This was something that was put off for a number of reasons; mostly because it is a bit more involved than it seems at first glance. You can't perform a single LOS check and call it a day. To more accurately determine LOS one has to perform multiple checks to your target at different angles.
Our game determines if you have LOS by casting rays out from your midsection to the bottom, middle, and sometimes top of your target. The midsection of your character was chosen to not provide any advantage/disadvantage for shorter or taller characters (the point at which we cast our rays is the same for ALL characters regardless of size). If any one of these rays successfully reaches your target without intersecting a scene collider then you are deemed to have a valid LOS. Tab targeting requires LOS and operates in a very similar way except that the rays are cast from the camera's position rather than your avatar's midsection.
LOS is now checked at the start and end of an execution; if you lose LOS during execution you can still get that shot off if you re-acquire LOS before execution completes. I do not anticipate this causing any major problems - but we do have to be more mindful of the colliders used for props throughout the scenes. Please let me know if you run into any oddities or find yourself in a situation where you expect to have LOS but for whatever reason do not.
Call for help updates
The NPC call for help system (or social aggro) has gotten some love this patch. Previously a "call for help" would alert nearby NPCs to your position causing them to begin an "investigation" in which the NPC would search the area for any potential targets. The number of NPCs that could be alerted was infinite which required us to keep the call for help distance relatively low. With this week's patch the call for help system can now limit the number of alerted NPCs allowing us to expand the range much further without having to alert the entire camp. In addition, we can now set a chance that one of the alerted NPCs becomes immediately hostile towards you - which has been done. This should make pulling a bit more chaotic and challenging.
Redshore Forest
A new zone for levels 26+ is now available to explore! It can be reached from a northern road in Meadowlands, or the north western outpost in Dryfoot. Be warned: Redshore is much farther north of the wall than any of the others and hence offers far less protection.
This initial pass includes mobs, resources, and chests. This zone, like others, will be undergoing multiple iterations. It currently lacks rare spawns and redshore specific mob variants, but represents a base upon which those additions will be introduced. Currently there is no map. Expect Ember Ring/Hallow placements to be adjusted as well. There is however, new music!
Level up potions
Vitality potions have been added to North Newhaven just outside of the city gate at no charge. They currently come in three varieties: level 6, level 12, and level 26. Drinking one of these bad boys will up your adventuring + specialization level to the target level. These are for testing purposes only! But they should also allow you to drop & select a different specialization to try at your will.
Works in progress:
- Zones: 3x additional overland zones have had an initial art pass completed
- Grizzled Peaks - accessed via Highlands, Redshore, and Gorge. Mountainous region with a number of tunnels. High level range (40-50). Has a one-way exit to Newhaven North. This is the snow capped mountains you can see from Redshore.
- Highlands - accessed via Meadowlands. Hilly region with sparse vegetation and water features. Mid level range (approx 30-40, likely to come after Redshore and Grizzled)
- Gorge - accessed via Dryfoot. Large canyon-like area. Mid level range (approx 30-40, likely to come after Redshore and Grizzled)
- Dungeons: All of central veins has been delivered from the art team and is now awaiting integration into the game. This includes the starter dungeon currently found in S. Newhaven, and a larger more difficult area for N. Newhaven. Spawning tech for dungeons is mostly complete so we just have to iron out the details in the spawning workflow. Will likely need to reorganize all of the dungeon prefabs for easier usage moving forward. Will likely start this soon.
- NPCs: fully custom Bear, Elk, and Spider models are complete and integrated into the game. Spider is currently the only one implemented; elk & bear will come soon. Ashen creature varieties have also been integrated into the game but are not yet populating the world.
- Quests: a number of quests are in the queue for implementation/testing. Quest data structure and likely needs a refactor.
- Tech: npc improvements, npc merchants.
- UI: quest dialog redesign, tooltip improvements
- New clothing & armor is still in the works.
We are still discussing things internally on how to best move forward with crafting. The current list of things we are discussing and/or tossing around are:
- improve progression by unlocking recipes as you level up rather than giving them all to you right away. this can have the added side effect of not giving you a bunch of gear to wear at low levels when you maybe cannot equip it all due to armor weight limitations.
- add an augment system for equipables (previously discussed)
- loosely tie crafting level to adventuring level
- make some equipment slots only obtainable via crafting, and some only obtainable via adventuring (at least during the early levels, this may change at higher levels)
- if the we implement the above point, then we can bring regular crafted gear (no flux) back up to par with common drops. the issue has always been crafting stepping on adventurer's toes and vice versa - so by segregating the slots (again, at least at early levels) then we can avoid this and allow non-flux crafted goods to be roughly equivalent to dropped gear.
- make the experience of a craft proportional to the number of materials required to craft it
- increase the number of materials required for some items (which would also increase the xp gain)
- re-evaluate the role of "quality" in the make of an item - this will likely be converted to only impact the durability.
The last thing we need to do for this is consolidate resists. This task is slightly more involved because it involves touching all of the current abilities and ripping out the old system. I hope to get to this soon but other tasks (<cough> crafting discussions <cough>) are taking up too much of my time.
Reagent Upgrade System(timeline: ...)
Ember essence collection and spending is on the list of things to do SOON, but is taking a back seat until we can iron out crafting, Unity 2021, the above mentioned stat consolidation, and reorganizing and prepping of the new dungeons.
Known Issues:
- Not all ember rings and/or POIs are proper map discoveries. This is especially true in Dryfoot, Dryfoot Stronghold, and Redshore. Discoveries and map uncovering is a WIP and will be revisited soon.
- Redshore has no map
- Deconstructing crafted items returns junk 100% of the time.
- cannot roll on loot while unconscious
- 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 Ember Ring --> 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)
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Wishing Warden had that movement speed bonus instead of useless nature resist ><
