Our next stress tests are scheduled for:
What's new?
It's been an intense week for all of us as we prepare to get this game out in the wild. This is one of our largest changesets yet including a new city, a slew of new npcs, more quests, crafting tweaks, augments, additional performance knobs, and a new patch server. This isn't the end however! We will continue working diligently through launch to bring you new content on a regular basis. Remember that this is the last weekend of beta and the servers will be closing on Sunday at 11:59pm. Please join us on Sunday at 8pm central for a last send off!
We are seeking focused feedback on these items this week:
Bug fixes / improvements:
Newhaven
Newhaven is finally open for business! Inside of the city you will find a number of NPCs, banks, lost & found (see below), merchants, and quests. There is currently a ton of LOD popping and other misc. art issues we are working through so please excuse the dust. Merchants & banks have been removed from the Newhaven Valley & Northreach tunnels.
At this time all anvils within Newhaven are decoration only and need to be replaced with the interactable ones; this will be done before launch. For those of you who logged in during one of our world breaker events you may now acquire an Ember Sword from the merchant in the hidden area above the Ranger's guild (this area and merchant are only accessible to those who have this reward).
Lost & Found
There have been occasions where items returned to your bag get "lost" to the ether. Previously, this resulted in items getting placed in a slot that there was no UI representation, so as a player you could no longer access it. This week we are introducing a "Lost & Found" to allow you to recover these items. When this occurs you will get a message notifying you that an item has been sent to your Lost & Found - which can be accessed in one of the banking areas of Newhaven City. This special container allow for item removal only so it cannot be used to store additional items.
I ran a check on all existing characters and found 6 that were impacted by this - any excess items have been sent to your lost and found.
Adjust Humanoid Texture Resolution
An additional dropdown has been added to the graphics options to help you further tweak the performance of the game. The new option is called "Humanoid Texture Resolution" and has settings of Low/Med/High/Ultra where High is the default value. When each of our humanoids is built, clothing is changed, or adjustments are made a rebuild is triggered. This process includes merging meshes and textures in order to keep performance at optimal levels.
This new option adjusts the resolution of the texture "atlas" that is used. In other words: when all of the textures for a single character get merged the value of this option determines what size image it uses for the atlas. Lower resolution atlases result in an overall lower resolution for the resulting texture but less of an impact on memory and vram. And opposite of that we have higher values resulting in higher resolution textures, but a much larger impact on memory and vram.
When changing this value you will not see results instantly. Instead, your client slowly cycles through all humanoids and updates their resolutions as to not have a huge hit on performance all at once. Up until this point all characters have used the "High" value by default so unless you are having memory/performance issues I recommend keeping it there for better visual fidelity.
Weapon & Armor Augments
Augments have been added! The recipes been distributed as follows:
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
You may have noticed our launcher was updated on Tuesday. This update allows the launcher to now pull data for patches through a CDN rather than a standard cloud server. This should provide a much more reliable download source for all and we should no longer run into throttling issues. The entire deployment process had to be revamped so please let us know if you encounter any issues.
Instancing Tech
I also worked on some CRUDE instancing tech for zones in prep for launch. For tonight's test let's all crowd into the city and give it a good try. There is currently no way to manually switch or manage which instance you are in.
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.
Repair Cost (timeline: 2-3 weeks)
We are looking into improving how repair costs are calculated to mitigate repair costs at higher levels. Still some work left to do but just wanted you to know we are working on it!
Leather Visuals (timeline: 1-2 weeks)
Leather bracers, greaves, and pants currently do not have visuals. This is being worked on!
Known Issues:
Wed. October 5th @ 8pm central
(Thurs. October 6th @ 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 launcher found on your account page.(Thurs. October 6th @ 1am UTC)
What's new?
It's been an intense week for all of us as we prepare to get this game out in the wild. This is one of our largest changesets yet including a new city, a slew of new npcs, more quests, crafting tweaks, augments, additional performance knobs, and a new patch server. This isn't the end however! We will continue working diligently through launch to bring you new content on a regular basis. Remember that this is the last weekend of beta and the servers will be closing on Sunday at 11:59pm. Please join us on Sunday at 8pm central for a last send off!
We are seeking focused feedback on these items this week:
- How is performance inside of the city during the day/night?
- How much of an impact did adjusting humanoid texture resolutions impact performance on your rig?
- Are weapon & armor augments worth using?
- Was your patching process faster than it typically is?
Bug fixes / improvements:
- Tech
- Fixed: issues with transform replicators that was causing some NPCs/Players to be out of position on your local machine by up to 10m. This bug has been present for quite some time but it became much more noticeable with the hard leashing.
- Reverted hair shaders to their previous state.
- Adjusted eye smoothness.
- Fixed: issue where you could double stack items if your connection encounters lag.
- Reduced complexity and memory overhead of Redshore terrain shader.
- Slightly extended shadow cascade distances.
- Disabled volumetric lighting on street lamps to save on performance.
- Fixed: error when hailing merchants.
- Environment / Art
- Crossbow quivers are now mounted on the right shoulder.
- Fixed bad animation on Doe Bite ability
- Fixed Stun VFX from Flash Powder
- UI:
- "Escape toggles menu" toggle moved to Input Options tab
- Added: toggle to the input options that allows crouch to act as a toggle.
- Added: group-only nameplate toggle
- Fixed: character creation UI should now be fully visible on ultra wide monitors.
- Added: role & level information of guild members is now displayed in the guild UI
- Added: role & level information displayed in /who results
- Fixed: dialogue choice list not supporting high number of choices
- Fixed: dialogue choices overlapping if the text overflows
- Fixed: scribble audio continuing to loop if you walk away from dialogue.
- Quests:
- Added: Cleaning House quest
- Added: Specialization promotion quests
- Added: Ember Stone and Ember Essence quests
- Updated and re-enabled Marreska's crafting quest
- Fixed: position of one of the weapon cache quest objectives
- Design:
- Items crafted with purchased materials will have reduced durability vs. their harvested material counterparts
- Seed oil failure rate removed
- Reworked some Rupture spawn locations
- Reduced spawn rate in Newhaven Valley bear cave
- Reworked Misha and Ancient Bear in Newhaven Valley. The Ancient Bear can now be found more regularly.
- Consolidated some crafting professions. Tailor + Leatherworker = Outfitter. Light Weaponsmith + Heavy Weaponsmith = Weaponsmith.
- Banner recipes have moved from Tailoring to Woodworker.
- Fixed issue with imbued weapons that were preventing additional dice modifiers.
- Fixed issue with imbued bows causing them to update the wrong damage value.
- Added a description to flux to better describe the functinoality.
- Avoidance potion is now known as Reflex Potion
- Updated description on Windup ability
- Fixed issue preventing Leather from being used as strapping for imbued metal armor and shields.
- Some of you may have noticed that the rate at which you gain adventuring experience was changed this past weekend. This was a stealth nerf that I added at the last minute to see if anyone would notice - and some of you did! The XP curve currently in place is what we intend for live and is more "evenly" distributed to mid levels. In other words: this makes higher levels less of a burden while increasing the burden on mid levels.
- Hot fixes from last weekend:
- Fixed: patched up some cosmetic holes in dungeon walls
- Reducing overall tree density in Newhaven Valley and Northreach for performance. Rebaking nav mesh to account for this.
- Fixed: some rendering issues causing things to follow your camera (happened mostly in Dryfoot)
- Reduced the cost of basic recipes
- Added suffix to cooked meats to help differentiate them.
- Fixed an issue where some abilities that should disable auto attack were not doing it quickly enough.
- Minor performance fix with the skybox that was causing some per-frame allocations.
Newhaven
Newhaven is finally open for business! Inside of the city you will find a number of NPCs, banks, lost & found (see below), merchants, and quests. There is currently a ton of LOD popping and other misc. art issues we are working through so please excuse the dust. Merchants & banks have been removed from the Newhaven Valley & Northreach tunnels.
At this time all anvils within Newhaven are decoration only and need to be replaced with the interactable ones; this will be done before launch. For those of you who logged in during one of our world breaker events you may now acquire an Ember Sword from the merchant in the hidden area above the Ranger's guild (this area and merchant are only accessible to those who have this reward).
Lost & Found
There have been occasions where items returned to your bag get "lost" to the ether. Previously, this resulted in items getting placed in a slot that there was no UI representation, so as a player you could no longer access it. This week we are introducing a "Lost & Found" to allow you to recover these items. When this occurs you will get a message notifying you that an item has been sent to your Lost & Found - which can be accessed in one of the banking areas of Newhaven City. This special container allow for item removal only so it cannot be used to store additional items.
I ran a check on all existing characters and found 6 that were impacted by this - any excess items have been sent to your lost and found.
Adjust Humanoid Texture Resolution
An additional dropdown has been added to the graphics options to help you further tweak the performance of the game. The new option is called "Humanoid Texture Resolution" and has settings of Low/Med/High/Ultra where High is the default value. When each of our humanoids is built, clothing is changed, or adjustments are made a rebuild is triggered. This process includes merging meshes and textures in order to keep performance at optimal levels.
This new option adjusts the resolution of the texture "atlas" that is used. In other words: when all of the textures for a single character get merged the value of this option determines what size image it uses for the atlas. Lower resolution atlases result in an overall lower resolution for the resulting texture but less of an impact on memory and vram. And opposite of that we have higher values resulting in higher resolution textures, but a much larger impact on memory and vram.
When changing this value you will not see results instantly. Instead, your client slowly cycles through all humanoids and updates their resolutions as to not have a huge hit on performance all at once. Up until this point all characters have used the "High" value by default so unless you are having memory/performance issues I recommend keeping it there for better visual fidelity.
Weapon & Armor Augments
Augments have been added! The recipes been distributed as follows:
- Weaponsmith: 1H weapons, gloves
- Woodworker: 2H weapons
- Tinkerer: Ranged weapons, belts
- Armorsmith: heads/chest, faulds, vambrace/pauldrons, greaves
- Outfitter: shirt/pants, boots
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
You may have noticed our launcher was updated on Tuesday. This update allows the launcher to now pull data for patches through a CDN rather than a standard cloud server. This should provide a much more reliable download source for all and we should no longer run into throttling issues. The entire deployment process had to be revamped so please let us know if you encounter any issues.
Instancing Tech
I also worked on some CRUDE instancing tech for zones in prep for launch. For tonight's test let's all crowd into the city and give it a good try. There is currently no way to manually switch or manage which instance you are in.
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.
Repair Cost (timeline: 2-3 weeks)
We are looking into improving how repair costs are calculated to mitigate repair costs at higher levels. Still some work left to do but just wanted you to know we are working on it!
Leather Visuals (timeline: 1-2 weeks)
Leather bracers, greaves, and pants currently do not have visuals. This is being worked on!
Known Issues:
- Loot roll occasionally does not trigger leaving the loot open to anyone. We are currently investigating.
- Terrain textures have a bit too much tiling. This will be resolved shortly.
- Characters can get stuck in any looping animation if they do not properly complete. This is most noticeable for strikers using a bow.
- 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.
- 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)
- 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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