Release 64

Other (90)

• Story: The first lands associated with Episode 2 will begin to appear!
• Performance: Performance work will mainly focus on improving frame rate and reducing hitching during gameplay. Work will also continue to be done on load time reduction on the few outstanding scenes that are not meeting our 15-second load time target.
• Bug Fixing: Time will be allocated to a general sweep through all systems, features, and content to reduce overall bug counts.
• Crafting & Economy: Upon achieving Grandmaster in a crafting school you will now unlock a set of new exclusive effects for Masterworking and Enchanting.
• Player-Made Dungeons: More features and content will be added to the Player-Made Dungeon System including the ability to place creatures to fight in your dungeon!
• Player Towns & Player Housing: Updates to Dynamic Player-Owned Towns (POTs) that have locked submission forms will appear in the game.
• Livestream and Seasonal Content: We will add recent livestream stretch goal items and 2019 Easter items.
• Combat:
• Pirate Items: Yar! There be more pirates in Release 64, me mateys! Continuing from Release 63, we are adding more pirate-themed items to the in-game crown shop, perfect for excursions to scenes like Tenebris Harbor, Penmawr Island, and Blood Bay.
• Character & Social:
• Quality of Life Improvements & User Interface Polish:
• Arch Lapin Returns: Rumors abound of the return of this nasty foul creature who perhaps can only be slain by the fabled Sacred Orb of Obliteration? The return of our very first seasonal boss is made even more exciting with the addition of two new loot items: Confection Eggs and Confection Bunnies!
• Norgard Barbarian “Viking” Dance: Somewhere deep in the South Boundless Forest is a barbarian seer who is too intent on the undead recently awakened on the nearby hilltop to kill you. Do you dare offer to help in her task? Those that do might learn something about her culture, including the “Viking” dance they sometimes perform.
• South Broken Road: We improved the “Essence and Ice” dialogue in this location by adding additional keywords to the Orator’s conversation.
• Episode 2 Lands Delayed: Please note that Release 63 was our first release since moving to a distributed working model (no office). This meant a larger than normal number of post release patches and a larger than expected impact on Release 64 deliverables. Additionally two of our engineers and one designer had vacations during Release 64 which greatly reduced our capacity.
• Unity Upgrade: We are once again trying to make the move to the newest version of Unity, 2018.3. This brings a number of performance improvements and increased threading in systems.
• IL2CPP Switch: For windows users only, we are once again experimenting with IL2CPP builds. This is an experimental system that generates native code from C# code that should be more performant.
• Texture Streaming: Due to stability issues, we ended up disabling this for the previous release. We are experimenting with it again for R64 to see if the stability issues were fixed in the newer Unity version.
• Shader Optimizations: The memory footprint of our shaders was cut in half by reducing variants. This results in a memory savings of roughly 700MB and also improved load times.
• Bug Fixing: We dedicated a portion of the release to working solely on fixing bugs and reducing our overall bug count.
• Universal Trade Channel: We have added an additional channel to Universal Chat dedicated solely to trade. This should hopefully reduce trade spam in the main Universe channel and better facilitate trade. This can be accessed through ‘/t’ for “Traders”
• Food Decorations: In Release 54 we enabled the ability to have foods placed as decorations but currently that only works for fruits and vegetables. In Release 64 we have begun to expand that with items like the Slice of Cake, Spring Equinox Items, and the new Arch Lapin loot.
• Dyeable Egg: This new recipe lets you make a dyeable egg decoration!
• Deco Stack Limit: The deco stacking limit has been increased from 5 to 8 by player request!
• Dyeable Slice of Cake: The Slice of Cake recipe now produces a dyeable decorative item that is also consumable!
• Crown Merchants: Now that we have a comprehensive Crown Shop that holds all items we have removed the now obsolete localized Obsidian Crown Merchants from Ardoris, Aerie, Central Brittany, Owl’s Head, and Resolute who had limited inventories.
• Grandmaster Effects Delayed: Please note that Release 63 was our first release since moving to a distributed working model (no office). This meant a larger than normal number of post release patches and a larger than expected impact on Release 64 deliverables. Additionally two of our engineers and one designer had vacations during Release 64 which greatly reduced our capacity.
• Player-Made Dungeon Encounters: Player-Made Dungeon encounters were originally scheduled for this release and we did an early iteration in Release 63. Release 64 includes a larger variety of encounters and totems. This release brings 2 new creature types: Trolls and Kobolds. Additionally 3 new encounter rooms that previously existed will be convertible to spawned versions. One completely new encounter room will also begin dropping.
• Natural Cavern Dungeon Ramps: We added 4 ramps to the Hallways pack at the request of players.
• Trolls and Kobold Essences: Trolls and Kobolds (Tier 5 and above) will now sometimes drop essences that can be used to craft totems that enable dungeon encounter rooms to spawn higher difficulty creatures.
• Encounter vs Non-Encounter Rooms: There were a large number of encounter rooms already in use and decorated and therefore we did not want to eliminate the deco versions of these rooms. Instead, there will be two versions of each room. One will be the deco version and the other will be the encounter version. Recipes will be available to convert from one version to the other.
• Player-Owned Town Message of the Day: POT owners can now set a MOTD that is shown to people upon entering their town. The town message of the day is shown in the chat window when entering a town that has a message. There are 3 chat “slash” commands associated with this feature:
• Confection Stand: Available in the Crown Shop.
• Confection Platter: Available at in-game Decorations Merchants for gold.
• Dyeable Cake: For those wanting to save space due to decoration limits (versus using the craftable cake slice), you can purchase this in the Crown Shop.
• New and Updated Dynamic POTs:
• /getpotmotd: will print the current (or expired) message of the day to the chat window, and copies the text to the clipboard.
• /setpotmotd <message>: sets the message of the day for the current scene. current scene must be a town, and the local player must be the owner of the town, or be a steward.
• /unsetpotmotd: causes the current message of the day to expire. The message will no longer be shown to players when entering the scene, but can still be retrieved via the /getpotmotd command.
• NOTE: Messages expire after 7 days unless renewed.
• Crafters Town: Upgraded to Town.
• Hammaburg: Added interconnection with Immortal City.
• Immortal City: Added interconnection with Hammaburg.
• Silent Ascent: Added new snowy mountains Village (nested in Soltown).
• Sionann: Upgraded to Town.
• White Hart on Abundis: Upgraded to Town.
• Release 60 Stretch Goal Items: We have completed more of the Cornucopia-themed Release 60 Stretch Goal items and hope to address the 2 remaining items in Release 65.
• Release 61 Stretch Goal Items: We have completed almost all of Dark Winter themed Release 61 Stretch Goal items and hope to address the 3 remaining items in Release 65.
• Spring Equinox Items:
• Dragon Polearm
• Dragon Sword
• Black Ice Shield
• Black Ice Wand
• Black Ice Staff
• Black Ice Sword
• Black Ice Bow
• Black Ice Elemental Statue
• Black Ice Wings
• Black Ice Building Blocks
• Dark Leather & Fur Yule Outfit
• Krampus Mask
• Haunted Snow Family
• Haunted Snowman Mask
• Icy Dungeon Hallway Set
• Haunted Yule Tree Set
• Dyeable Egg: This new recipe lets you make a dyeable egg decoration!
• 2019 Easter Basket: The Easter Basket replenishes confetti eggs annually that can be thrown at other players. This is a rare Spring item in the Crown Shop that expires on May 3.
• Spring Equinox Replenishing Confections Platter: This indulgent platter of confections regularly and randomly produces one of the following: Elderberry Cream Cheese Sugar Drops, Dyeable Cupcake, Thumbprint Cookies, or Petit Fours. This is a rare recurring Spring item in the Crown Shop that expires on May 3.
• Dyeable Multi-Color Easter Eggs (Dozen): There are six different patterns of eggs that can be dyed multiple colors! This is a rare recurring Spring item in the Crown Shop that expires on May 3.
• Pet Balance: A quick pass was made at balancing pets.
• Earth Elemental has gained the ability to use Earthquake, an powerful AE effect that has a chance to knock down victims
• Water Elemental: Remains the most effective pet in the game but it has had the cool down time of its heal spell increased by 5 seconds to prevent it from spam healing itself and players.
• Daemon: The Lesser Daemon summon will now have greater health and do significantly more damage with its Chaos bolt.
• Pirate Outfit: This pirate outfit is a must have for your daring high seas adventures and features a Head Scarf, Pirate Vest, Pirate Pants, Pirate Bracers, and Pirate Boots. You can find this outfit on the Crown Shop.
• Jolly Roger Flag and Jolly Roger Banners: Fly your pirate colors with this flag and two different banner styles (free-standing or hanging), all of which sport the jolly roger (aka skull and crossbones). You can find these items on the Crown Shop.
• Treasure Maps: Episode 2 will bring the Treasure Map system to the game. In the meantime you can purchase these decorations from the Crown Shop.
• Guild Message of the Day: Guild Officers can now set a MOTD that is shown to guild members in the chat window when entering their first scene after login. There are 3 chat “slash” commands associated with this feature:
• /guildactivitylog: Writes a log file to the player’s data directory. Contains various guild activity from the past 30 days including new member invites, kicked guild members and more. Must be the guild leader or guild officer to use this command.
• /pet Emote: Purchasing this emote from the Crown Shop gives your avatar the petting animations. NOTE: At this time the animation happens at a fixed height and location regardless of the size of your pet. Players will have to manually align themselves with their pets to make this “look right.”
• Community Cloak: This “Truly Courageous Hands of Compassion” version of the Clasped Gauntlets was created to support Paladin Michael’s campaign in support of Ahmed via gofundme.
• Judge’s Wig: After numerous requests from players we have made this Blood Bay quest item dyeable.
• /getguildmotd: Will print the current (or expired) message of the day to the chat window, and copies the text to the clipboard.
• /setguildmotd <message>: Sets the message of the day for the guild. The local player must be the leader or an officer of the guild.
• /unsetguildmotd: Causes the current message of the day to expire. The message will no longer be shown to players, but can still be retrieved via /getguildmotd
• NOTE: Messages expire after 7 days unless renewed.
• Quest/Task Bug Reporting In-Game: In order to improve the flow of our quest and task bug fixing we have improved in-game reporting of task and quest bugs. Simply right-click on a task on your HUD and select “Report a Problem” then fill out the report. We will be then automatically notified of the issue.
• In-Game Crown Shop Polish: We made various improvements to the in-game Crown Shop:
• Countdown timer for sale items so you can see how much longer the item will be on sale.
• Scheduled availability of items so that we will be able to schedule the start and end times for the availability of items.
• Countdown timer for expiring items so you can see how much longer the item will be available before it expires.