Update 27: Ending the Year Strong

Written By Shawn Lord

Hi all!

Despite the holidays, the team carried on as usual and produced plenty of new stuff for us to show off in this month’s update.

They also prepped things for the launch of our Friends & Family (F&F) playtest, which is currently underway.

A big part of having F&F is for us to get a feel for whether or not we’re ready to attempt larger, open playtests with our community. So far, things are looking really good.

The goal with of our initial public playtests will be to get a feel for how our game operates under the stress of higher concurrent user counts. It’ll be an interesting test of our foundational tech, and help set the focus for our next steps this year.

Plus, it’ll just be fun.

Keep in mind that we’re doing all of this extremely early in our process. We’d rather catch problems early in development, get feedback, and integrate that knowledge as we go.

This approach of being open with our development, integrating feedback early, and iterating constantly has served us well so far.

And on that note, here’s what we’ve been up to:


Character Art & Concepts

  • Created Willowisp model and materials

  • Created Ghost / Specter shader

  • Implemented first pass of the Ghoul model

  • Shadowmen added

  • Handful of armor attachment slots added

  • Skeleton attachments added

  • Continued iteration on Human skin and armor texture style/fidelity

  • Tons of spell effects work

Environment Art

  • Started New Block out the Sagesyde District.

    • Wizards Tower

    • Spellbinders Spire

    • Library

      • Start Enchanter Class Area in Library

    • Housing area

    • Moved Gate into Highpoint Terrace

  • Set up Teleportation Navigation in Sagesyde

  • Started cleaning up Night Harbor's northern walls and fortifications

  • Did a quick light pass to class starting areas in Night Harbor

  • Created a shader for glowing runes / symbols in the environment

  • Night Harbor Western Newbie Yard

    • Broke up the wall around newbie yard

    • Added materials to various gray box geo

  • Various geo, material, and nav mesh fixes across multiple zones

  • Night Harbor Docks district work continued

 

Animation

  • First pass on Ashira animations

  • First pass on Elemental rig and some animations

  • Second pass on Human male combat animations

  • Overhaul of several animation systems

  • Bunch of small fixes with animation controllers

 

Game Design/QA

  • Prep for Friends & Family playtests

  • The first of our weekly Test Server updates, which includes:

Items

  • Several item costs have been adjusted

  • Various Tomb of the Last Wyrmsbane Named Item Drops have received some balance adjustments

  • Tomb of the Last Wyrmsbane Named Drops are now either common, uncommon, and/or rare drops

  • Added multiple new unique drops for various named in Tomb of the Last Wyrmsbane

  • Added Stone resource from Mining

  • Added Sharpening Stone Blacksmithing recipe

  • Added Bronze Chain and Bronze Plate Blacksmithing recipes

  • Added ability to Scrap Rusty Bronze Chain and Rusty Bronze Plate using Blacksmithing

  • Added Hammer and Chisel item

  • Throwing Dagger stats and class requirements adjusted

  • Bag costs increased

  • Lantern cost increased

  • Rusty Bronze Plate and Rusty Bronze Plate armor now drop

  • Rusty Bronze Weapons now drop

  • Rusty Bronze Plate and Rusty Bronze Chain armor can now be upgraded to Tarnished Bronze Plate and Tarnished Bronze Chain with Blacksmithing

  • Rusty Weapons and Rusty Bronze Weapons can now be upgraded to Tarnished Weapons and Tarnished Bronze Weapons with Blacksmithing

  • Removed Rusty Chain, Tarnished Chain, Rusty Plate, and Tarnished Plate armor sets from the game

  • Spellbook is equippable only to Belt Bag Slots currently

  • Added several pattern items

Merchants

  • You can now buy additional spellbooks from Spell Vendors

  • Bag Vendors will not buy as many things

  • Tailoring and Leatherworking patterns added

  • Added Tailoring Kit and Seam Ripper to a few additional NPCs

  • Several recipes now require a Pattern item component

  • Removed several sets of armor from being sold

  • Additional merchants added to the Black Feather Bazaar area

Mobs and Encounters

  • Various Tomb of the Last Wyrmsbane encounters have received some balance and AI adjustments

  • Added missing Ability Sets to certain mobs in Tomb of the Last Wyrmsbane

  • Adjusted the level ranges of mobs in certain areas in Tomb of the Last Wyrmsbane

  • Minor Shaded Dunes mob volume adjustments

  • Night Harbor population work continued, include minor fixes and additions

Quests

  • Added to and updated various Quest content

  • Added placeholder guild note turn ins to Spell Merchants for Elementalist, Enchanter, and Wizard. Go get your robe!

  • First Shaman and Beastmaster quests added

  • Fixed various quest issues with the first Druid quest

  • Beastmaster quest #1 is now available for testing

  • MUD Action changes have fixed the first Inquisitor

Spell & Ability Updates

Too many to list here.

Note: the second weekly update is going out as I type this. Things are moving along quickly.

Sound/Music

  • Support for day/night sounds with RTCP

  • Palm trees now have separate day and night ambient sound sources (birds, crickets, etc.)

  • Level Up, Level Down, and Quest Complete sounds are now properly classified as "SFX" and work as Stingers, reducing music volume drastically when triggered

  • Optimization: All music and ambience tracks are now Streaming directly from disk

  • Adjusted Music Volume Slider default setting

  • Added sound to Torch_02 prefab (torches in the tunnel leading to Wyrmsbane)

  • Mining/Pickaxe sounds

  • Crocodile Jaw Clap, Growl, and Step sounds

  • Fixed an issue with double audio playing in Login Screen, caused by accidentally having two listeners in the scene

  • Shaded Dunes pyramids now have pulsating ambience sounds

  • Added Open & Close sounds to portcullis, doors, and gates

  • Spell sounds polished

  • Fixed an issue where audio would stop when game window is unfocused

  • Fixed an issue where audio would stop when zoning

  • Jackal step and barking sounds

  • Snake movement sounds

  • Rain and Thunder sounds

  • Ocean sound is now positional audio

  • Added ambience audio layers in Night Harbor and Shaded Dunes

  • Water stream sounds added

  • Death sound stinger added

Tech

Tech built a new launcher from scratch and then focused on support for F&F.

This included:

New Features

  • Hotbars and Macros Initial Implementation

  • Loading screen Lore!

  • Implemented “/target” command (alias “/tar”)

  • Launcher v4 Released

  • Implement “/reload” “/rewind” “/unstuck”

Main Menu - Character Selection / Creation

  • Overhaul of main menu code

  • Display character with equipment at Character Selection

  • Tab input focus/cycling

  • Validation prompt component

  • Rotate character model

  • Disable race selections if there are no available class selections

  • logging into a server, then backing out then logging into another server does not work

  • Fix issue trying to navigate back to login screen when using launcher

  • Fix issue camping and trying to load server list does not work

  • Fix skin tones not working

  • Remember the current feature selections when clicking Randomize button

  • Select the previously logged in character at character select screen

  • Pressing enter at delete character prompt will enter world instead of deleting

  • remember server/character selection

  • Various bug fixes when displaying character doll

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed models being invisible sometimes

  • Fixed pathfinding getting stuck

  • Spellbooks when dropped do not forget all their spells

  • Party bugs fixed (invalid party state, lost invites, and exp to party members getting lost)

  • Party UI now shows class

  • Will no longer say level 0 when targeting other players

  • Trade bugs causing dupes

  • Hair fix for humans

  • Trying to scribe a spell in an incorrect spellbook now correctly shows an error

  • All NPCs now have attack animations again

  • Spell effects now emit from both hands

  • Fixed skill training costs

  • Fix ground item decay causing errors

  • Prevent duplicate models from loading in Character Selection

  • Fixed a series of bugs causing infinite load screens

  • Texture seam cleanups on player races

  • Fixed some nametags not being culled when too far away

  • Sometimes interrupting spells does not work

  • There are some places where NPCs can get stuck and the unstuck code doesn’t detect it

  • MUD Actions with item requirements fixed to allow for held items

 

In Closing

Thanks again for being here! We hope you had a wonderful holiday season. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Io Saturnalia, Bestest Festivus, or whatever else you’re into — and Happy New Year!

2023 is looking to be a really exciting year for us, so stick around.

Join the mailing list if you haven’t already. We’ll try to make it worthwhile in the coming months.

Shawn Lord
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