Update 33: New Zones and More
Hi all!
Last month’s massive update included concepts and initial work related to two new zones, Tel Ekir (the Ashira dungeon) and Sungreet Strand (an outdoor zone to the north of Night Harbor).
Those zones, their inhabitants, and the systems that support new gameplay related to them, will continue to be a focus for us in the coming weeks.
While that’s being worked on, we’re also spending some time to bring new tooling online, knocking out bugs, refining existing systems, and pushing forward on more player character work.
Oh, and we snuck in a quick open stress test on July 4th in honor of our not having a king (or any other sort of boss) to tell us not to and because we wanted to see what would happen.
It ended up being a pretty good time.
Stay tuned for more.
Character Art and Concepts
Modeled and implemented first iteration of Halfling male & female
Integrated new Ogre rig and started blocking out female Ogre
Deep Dwarf proof of concept
Started adding variety in backpack appearances
Cleaned up old Bat model and set him up to LERP
Worked on organizing player feature options and added a couple new ones!
Made a Skull Staff!
Ghoul retexture
Various other mob concepts
Oh… and Lizardman concept iteration (because Zukan really loves lizards, we love Zukan, and Goblin loves doing cool concepts).
Environment Art
Tel Ekir
Completed first pass of Tel Ekir A grey box; the zone is ready to implement NPC population
Began applying placeholder textures to the gray box geometry
Began fixing gray box UVs
Scarlet Savanna Concept
Sungreet Strand
Began blocking out the Quarry in Sungreet Strand
Finished blocking out the Pyrmos Ogre Fort
Finished blocking out the Darrak Nor Hideout
Finished blocking out the Ravine Pass to Tel'Ekir
Finished a second pass on terrain at Sungreet Strand
Incorporated the Night Harbor facade at the Sungreet Strand zone line
Began blocking out the Glacial Steps
Animation
Tweaks to some existing player combat anims
Rigging for the Ogre and Halflings
Started animations for Ogres and Bards (though, maybe not Ogre Bards… or… ?)
Design
Class & Ability iteration
Some zone designs for the next biome (hint: it’ll be green and to the north)
Design work related to two new integrated game modes: Hardcore & Self-found
Design iteration related to Tel Ekir and Sungreet Strand
Began implementation work on those zones
Tech
General
No longer drop when using /fly
Added tabs to user options interface
Added settings to disable drop/destroy confirmation
Message when /corpse and no corpse in zone and fixed typo in /corpse help text
Added faction and HID data to /stats command printout for npcs
Added punctuation to a number of messages
Fixed unable to scribe innate abilities
When purchasing from a merchant or skill trainer, they will now take player coin starting with the lowest denomination up, with change if needed
Statics Tooling (interactive objects)
Improvements to static placement development tools
Static world objects can now have attached zonelines, defined in our database
Static world objects can now be configured to face the direction they are moving
State transitions for static world objects can now be scheduled by time of day
Zone Line Improvements
More zonelines coverted to use our new zoneline system
Fixed some irrecoverable zoning failures, now sending the player to zone safe location instead of back to previous zone in those cases
Improved how characters are placed on geometry when zoning in along a zoneline
Internal Tooling - Dressing Room
Ability to load/save items to the DB
Swap textures and Lerps to customize characters and equipment
Change Entity features like facial features/skin tone, sex, race
Search/Find NPC by race, sex, zone, level range, search by name
Play some animations
Free Fly Cam
Lighting Brightness
Left/Right Arrows for Navigation
NPC editing and Player Character Equipment Editing
Save/Load NPC Data to DB
Internal Tooling - NPC Editor
Change NPC appearance directly in the game world
Save/Load NPC Data via DB
Search/Filter functionality
There was more on the tech side of things, but Ali plans on writing up a bigger post on that. We’ll include it in the next update.
In Closing
The recent surprise stress test was a lot of fun.
The VOD for that will be posted soon, so check out our YouTube channel or just watch it now on Twitch (while it’s still up).
And be sure that you’re in our Discord with notifications on, since you never know when we’ll do another test.
Join our Mailing List if you haven’t already. We appreciate seeing that number getting bigger.
Thanks a ton for the support!
We look forward to seeing you around. Bring some friends!
