Update 30: Stress Test Info & March’s Progress

Written By Shawn Lord

Hi all!

We said last month that we were hoping to have a Public Stress Test by the end of March.

After running through the feedback and issues from a recent Friends & Family Stress Test, we’ve decided to push the public test until the end of April (28-29th).

We’ve posted more information about this in our Discord, so we hope you take the time to swing by and read the rest of the details.

Again, check our Discord for more info on the upcoming stress test.

As I type this, over 800 people have expressed their interest in trying to smash our servers that weekend, so… well… it may end up being chaotic, but it’ll be a fun milestone either way.

And until then, here’s some data we’ve pulled from our Friends & Family Testing.

And so… while the upcoming Stress Test has been a big focus for design and tech, we’ve also got plenty of other work done, and a ton of new art to look at. Enjoy!

Character Art & Concepts

This month we completely rebuilt the character texture loading system. Ali revamped the tech and the art team prepared new human male model and textures, and also transitioned a bunch of old textures to the new system.

Also:

  • We can tint everything with color gradients now!

  • New faces, facial hair, and armor sets added

    • Hair and facial hair still a work in progress

  • Updated textures to match the new UV layout

  • Created a new shader for the fire elementals

  • Reworked Ghost shader to work with both the new lerped gradient texture system, and diffuse textures

  • Human Male nipples added (Happy Birthday, Shawn!)

  • Saber Model added

  • Dragon Shield added

  • Backpacks can now change colors

  • Pouches can now change colors

A note from Goblin regarding the Concepts Above:

“I wanted to include this to give context to our new armor system and how it affects concept art.

Each gear slot has a maximum of 3 different colors we can apply to the piece of gear. It's enjoyable for me to problem solve what 3 colors gets allocated to what gear slot, but it also pushes some nice repetition, and complexity to the designs.

Take for example the torso slot. It overlaps the shirt slot, so we essentially have 6 possible overlapping colors on that one area. This only gets more complex when mentioning shoulders and capes, which can share the shawl space.

Zukan and Patrick (vgfx) were incredibly prolific in their desire to simplify the system we had - and this revealed a manageable complexity to our armor system, while also offering more novelty in the designs.” 

 

Audio & Animation

  • Ocean sounds tweaked

  • Floating Dome sounds added

  • Shaded Dunes music and sound effect setup

  • Merchants now have music

  • Crocodile movement sound fixed

  • Rat and Ashira footsteps quietened

  • Added new human animations

  • Idle animations for Ghoul, Wererat and Ogre

 

Environment Art & Concepts

Night Harbor

  • Northern Newbie Yard revamp gray boxed complete

  • Sage Side continued updates

  • Night Harbor Nav Mesh Optimization

  • Various geo fixes / adjustments across the zone

  • Rough lights added through Night Harbor to help with night time navigation

  • Fishing Volumes Added

  • Exterior block-out of Mirthful Djinn (Inn)

  • First pass on the "Elemonkalist" Guildhall and adjacent cavern

  • Collaborated on first pass of Yuum & Gyffre statues with Goblin

  • Completed interiors for the majority of Twilight Harbor buildings

  • Modelled props based on concept art for the Elementalist Guildhall

Wyrmsbane

  • Fixed invalid vert issue causing black screens in the antechamber wing

  • Fixed light triggers in Elite tomb area

  • Fixed an issue causing max shadow count to be reached in certain rooms, causing shadow flickering

 

Game Design

Content

  • Northern Newbieyard has been updated

  • Rogue starter quests have been added

  • Completed initial quest writeups for the rest of the class guilds

  • Began implementation of the remaining first stage newbie quests

  • Various Night Harbor population adjustments

  • New Zone MUD interactions

  • Began deity lore expansion

Itemization

  • Tattered Cloth Robes can now be broken into scrap

  • Tattered Cloth Robes can now be upgraded to Patched

  • Patched Cloth Robes should work properly now

  • Fine Cloth items that wouldn’t sell should now sell to Cloth merchants

  • Cheikho in the hunter camp now returns home after combat

  • Paladin Merchant no longer sells dispel and abolish magic

  • Bronze Bar added

  • Copper Bar trivializes at 25 Smelting

  • Rusty Bronze renamed Corroded Bronze

Mob Abilities

  • Snake Kick is no longer also an Interrupt

General Abilities

  • Skeleton Pet damage reduced by 25%

  • Added Conflagrate, Flames of Eth, Fires of Eth

  • Added Life Duct, Life Flume, and Exsanguinate

  • Various Abilities now have higher mana costs and cast times

Archer

  • Auto Fire now shares a cooldown with Auto Attack

  • Targeted Shot is now Instant Cast

Beastmaster

  • Rat Pet melee damage reduced by 25%

Druid

  • Added Flames of Eth-ehm, Fires of Eth-ehm, Embers of Eth-ehm

Elementalist

  • Fire and Water Pets now have 40% less HP

  • Air Pets now have 10% less HP

Rogue

  • Swift Strikes can no longer miss and is now self targeted

Shaman

  • Fixed an issue with several Shaman Slow spells that were not properly applying their debuff

 

Tech

  • Completely new Character Controller

  • Completely new model loading process

  • Ranged weapons now have models and are visible when you use ranged attacks

  • New faces for Human Male integrated

  • Positional update and Sphere of Influence fixes to support more players in close proximity

  • Added command /chatfontsize which configures the chat font size

  • Fix for using /place <object> with an item in the cursor

  • Follow-up fix for cross-zone GM summons, actually fixed this time

  • Corpse model loading is now rate limited, to prioritize other loading entities first when there are many corpses around

  • Support for teleport volume sound

  • Improved group pet frame UI functionality. Added support for multiple pet frames, and auto-layout

  • Code architecture improvements

  • Fixed some issues with party invite / rejection logic and UI

  • Fixed some issues with party frames when members are in different zones

  • Added resizable chat window functionality

  • Added better support for user settings with dropdown UIs

  • Added right-click option to reset a single UI element

  • Fixed an issue with the chat window in large resolutions

Fixes

  • Bards can skillup their music skills again

  • Pet AI won’t error out if its master is missing

  • Fix targeting issue on charm dropping

  • Fix charm pet aggro on charm fade

  • NPC AI awareness of buff overwrites, will not attempt to cast a buff that will not stick

  • Zoning in while pet is already summoned no longer breaks UI

  • Can no longer bug mobs on corners

  • Party fixes

  • Fix party frames for players in other zones not showing player name

  • Corpses should no longer clog up the model loading pipeline

  • Teleport sound triggering adjustments

Changes

  • Skill gain rates adjusted

  • Tradeskill success chance rates adjusted

  • Trivial combines will let you know they are trivial

  • Add a cooldown between melee auto attacks and ranged auto attacks

  • More advanced pet bars, auto arranging group UI with pet bars, UI support for multiple pets

  • Add ability name to cast bar

  • Client saving optimizations

  • Music states for better audio immersion

 

In Closing

Last but not least:

We’ve had the pleasure of adding another member to the team again this month!

Brandon (“First” in Discord/game) will be supporting us on the design side of the house. First’s contributions during Friends & Family testing and subsequent discussions we had on topics like worldbuilding, lore, and design in general, made it a no brainer to ask if he’d be interested in working with us.

We’ll get a bio up for him on the Team page soon.

~~~

Obviously, we’re going to be very focused on preparing for the stress test at the end of the month.

You can follow that progress via our new Twitch category and the VODs we post on YouTube.

Join the Discord and Mailing List if you haven’t already.

~~~

A massive thanks for being a part of the community!

Shawn Lord
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Public Stress Test Announcement
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Update 29: Feedback & Preparations