Hiho all,
Apologies for not posting news updates as the PTR has updated for the last.. well, almost 30 days… you see, i kind of snapped my arm off at the elbow in a bouldering accident so have been err, sub optimally existing. Anyway nobody cares about that so let’s take a look at what has changed!
What is new?
- Spell systems
- AOEs re-implemented
- AOE Warnings implemented.
- If an AOE is channelled or has a cast time, it displays a colour coded “warning” template for the duration of the cast.
- The warning template only displays on squares the AOE is going to hit, so you can very easily see disruptions due to line of sight or safe zones.
- The colour indicates if an AOE is offensive or healing, as well as if it is going to affect the player.
- Colours are configurable in the preferences for those hard of sight, as per community request.
- AOE Warnings implemented.
- Healing spells re-implemented.
- Can now overheal.
- Can be cast on friendly NPCs / allies / yourself even if they are at full health.
- AOE heals by players & npcs perform faction reputation checks to determine which creatures are affected.
- Self castable spell mechanics implemented.
- If a spell can be targeted or self cast, the spell bar icon will correctly represent if a spell can be cast or not depending on your current target status i.e. if an ally is targeted but they are out of reach / blocked by line of sight / etc it will correctly display that is can not be cast, but if you were to clear your target it will understand you are now contextually in a self-cast situation.
- AOEs re-implemented
- Movement systems
- If a move is rejected while a cast is active, the client will correctly reset you to be facing the direction you were prior to the move. This is important as it can become erroneous to the caster which direction their beam or wave spell is going to go off.
- Creatures can no longer change direction while casting.
- Combat visibility
- Rewrite of “black square that indicates a thing just hit me” system. From here on out, it will be referred to as the hit marker.
- Targeting / untargeting a creature that has just hit you will now correctly adjust the hit marker to fit with / without the target marker so you always have visibility of it.
- The hit marker will now display on creatures that heal you.
- The hit marker now displays for the duration of a spell cast if that creature is targeting you with it, so you will now have visibility of if a targeted spell (friendly or offensive) is aimed at you while it is casting.
- Rendering
- Removal of the texture filtering shader, it wasn’t working as neatly as I had hoped.
- Significant re-work of pixel-perfect graphical scaling on the Desktop client.
- Overhaul of how entities are drawn into the game world, the following now render pixel-perfect and weird scaling artifacts, as well as jittering when moving are gone:
- Blood splats
- Bodies
- Loot bags
- Portals
- Health bars
- Names
- On-screen chat text
- Spell incantations
- Food sounds
- Emotes
- Party icons
- PVP skulls
- Rework of how emotes, skulls, and PVP status icons are displayed.
- Position of emotes tweaked.
- Position of Skulls and Party shields tweaked, they now render in the same place and will alternate between each other every 1.5 seconds if someone is both skulled and in a party.
- Player HP bar pays attention to “injured creatures” preference
- Fix for assets not being loaded correctly and drawing as presents if the device is set to Turkish
- Spells
- Mage
- Armageddon Ivisa Ult Mag Ignis
- 100 Mana
- 4 second cast
- 5 second cooldown
- Deals 600% spell power damage in a large area around you.
- Elemental Magic
- Requires a Staff
- Energy Beam Ivisa Lin Vis
- 30 Mana
- 1 second cast
- 3 second cooldown
- Deals 300% spell power damage 5sqm in the direction you are facing.
- Elemental Magic
- Requires a Staff
- Evocation Usuro Zen
- 5 second cast
- 60 second cooldown
- Restores 100% mana over the duration of the cast.
- Chaos Magic
- Frost Bolt Ivisa Glaci
- 20 Mana
- 1 second cast
- 3 second cooldown
- Deals 200% spell power damage to a small area around your target.
- Elemental Magic
- Requires a Staff
- Armageddon Ivisa Ult Mag Ignis
- Knight
- Whirlwind Usisa
- 20 – 60 Rage
- 1.5 second cast
- 5 second cooldown
- Deals 100% attack power damage 1sqm around you up to 3 times over the duration of the cast.
- Requires a Sword (will be an axe spell in future when axes.. y’know, exist)
- Note: Range of whirlwind’s AOE will be increased soon
- Whirlwind Usisa
- Shaman
- Healing Hands Ivuro San
- 20 Mana
- Instant
- 3 second cooldown
- Restores 200% spell power health to yourself or your friendly target.
- Holy Magic
- Requires a Rod
- Soul Mist Ivuro Mag San
- 40 Mana
- 1 second cast
- 6 second cooldown
- Restores 400% spell power health in a large area around you.
- Holy Magic
- Requires a Rod
- Nature Wave Ivisa Wav Fel
- 20 Mana
- 1 second cast
- 3 second cooldown
- Deals a 200% spell power damage wave 4sqm in the direction you are facing.
- Nature Magic
- Requires a Rod
- Healing Hands Ivuro San
- Mage
- Fixes
- So many. So many damn fixes. Thank you so much to everyone who has jumped on the PTR to help me find bugs and replicate them over the last 3 weeks!
- Known Issues
- There is an edge case where dying in the Arena can result in the client not correctly loading in the player’s character entity on respawn. I have not been able to replicate this, so if anyone is able to figure out a way of replicating it with any kind of consistency please get in touch with me on discord as I very much want to get this fixed.
What is next?
Well, I know it isn’t clear from the patch notes above but I spent an absurd amount of time fixing bugs this month. One issue that was causing many mysterious issues took me 3 full days to track down! Despite these efforts there are still two issues I am extremely eager to get fixed, so I am putting bug bounties on both of these problems.
Any player that can show me how to reproduce either of these 2 issues will receive £200 of scrolls of their choosing for free!
PTR: Dying in the Arena can sometimes result in the client not correctly loading the player entity on respawn. It is unclear how this happens or what triggers it, however we do know it only affects the PTR so it could be something to do with the new spell / movement system.- LIVE: Sometimes on live players will see “ghost” monster entities that are unresponsive, untargetable, and not really there. In addition, sometimes seemingly random entities like portals or traps won’t load in. It is unclear what causes either of these issues, but they do appear to be related.
Given I can’t replicate either of the above issues, it seems crazy for me to sit and aimlessly hunt them for weeks on end… so I am going to put those bounties out to the community and divert my attention onto the next big thing. Which is…
Status Effects
Hurray we finally got here. The last piece of the combat mechanics puzzle! Status effects are things like buffs, debuffs and dots! Some might stack, some might be consumed by spells, some might heal you over time, speed you up, freeze you in place, stun you, poison you, empower your next auto attack… you get the idea. This system is the final mechanical jigsaw piece that will allow us to do some amazing things with the new spell system and really bring it all together.
So.. I uh, should probably get on with it then 🙂
Once this system is in place, I will be creating a wealth of test spells for each vocation and holding a big PTR war livestream where we will all pile onto the PTR and test all of this new stuff out in an epic war. There will be a tournament and scroll prizes for the winners, as well as prizes to anyone who manages to replicate a bug during the stream!
Then it’ll be about time to give the NPCs access to the spells, before moving on to re-implementing items. Lots to do.
Cheers,
Fhox