Developer diaries

[Gurgarath]

Developer diaries

The developer diaries is an ongoing diary that will eventually show and put the spotlight on one or multiple features that are worked on, before actually showing them on the final update thread. They are also to relate with what is published on the Discord server.

What's new today?

Today we will shed light on two skills that will come in the internel 3.24 update, Charisma and Insight as well as the Party range.

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Charisma

This skill helps you when you are leading a group. It reflects back a portion of the bonuses to you for the different roles you assigned to your group members. If you assign a group member as a blocker, for example, not only the HP of the blocker increases, but so does your own to a smaller extent.
The bonuses you win increase with your charisma level and the size of your group – the higher your level in charisma and the larger the group, the more you will receive of the respective leader bonuses.


Inspiration

This skill is useful if you are assigned a role by the leader. It increases the bonuses you earn through the role. The better developed your **inspiration** is, the stronger the bonuses you receive this way.
This means that an attacker who has already gained a number of levels in this skill will benefit more from this role than someone who hasn’t levelled up this skill.

Party Range

The party range is a passive skill that allows a good leader to have the range on which the exp multiplier and bonuses are applied to be extended. The maximum amount is two times the original range.

 

[Gurgarath]

What's new today?

Today we will shed light on the overall enhancements brought by the 3.23 version of the game. This version is not the most recent but hasn't been published nor fully polished until now. This one is a bit long but serves to display the key feature of the 3.23.

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Enhanced assets & loading time

The assets of the game are usually numerous, sometimes heavy, dupplicate, unused and/or out of date, some models were created a long time ago using a 3D engine from 2004. What changed in this version is an in-depth cleaning and enhancement of all the assets, removing unused ones and upgrading, enhancing and fixing all of them through a more recent version of the engine. Also, many changes have been made to enhance drastically (sometimes by hundred percent) the ability to distribute the assets. What you could expect from it is a performance gain as well as around 50% disk space reduction for the client.

Fixed assets

Many assets have been reworked, from the shining of both weapons and armors to entire textures (such as the first warrior armor). Some 3D files were also entirely fixed, from fixing an animation, to fixing various clipping, empty textures or even adding facial animations during some specific animations (we are looking at you, wolfman). The fixing also includes effects. Many existing effects were upscaled to HD versions and many bugged assets were added back into the game (we are looking at you, Razador). LODs are also dynamically fixed to avoid NPC turning white on the distance.

More wind and animations

The game already supported a better wind and animations such as the watermill seen in the very first trailer. The game now handles more animated objects to give a better atmosphere. Namely, banners, flags, chains are now affected by the wind.

Better damage display

Damage display have been refactored and enhanced to show a k and to display like DiabloIII does. Consequently, the damage output will be more readable, less eye-straining and will be displayed differently for every damage existing. A critical hit you give will be shown as orange while a critical hit you receive will be darker orange. Same goes for piercing hit, poison, normal damage and so on. This change is coupled with a better server-side entity management which fix pretty much all the bugs where a monster will die but still run away or will stand in place before dying. The damage queue is also fixed, meaning that if an astonishing hight amount of monsters damage you, the output will disappear upon their death, instead of getting spammed for 2 minutes after killing all of them.
Note: This is an old fix, but I want to note that you can also hit archers while they move, instead of just having your hit not being registered.

Better window management

Opening or closing a window will now play a specific sound as well as an animation of opening and closing. What's more, many windows have been fixed in the way the are handled by the game, giving more overall stability when having multiple windows open and when dealing with them after multiple warps. Additionally, many scripts were fixed and the scripting engine have been updated and enhanced, fixing many vulnerabilities as well.

Better memory management

The memory consumed by the server is up to 50% less due to many adjustments and fixes. The server and the client also handle bonus switches way better, which completely removes any lag from both side when you change your bonuses.

More languages and a better font

The font have been even more fixed to support all existing charsets as well as allowing to display way more entities with their name, up to 50% more than after the last fix that allowed way more without lags. Many languages have been added to the game, such as : Czech, Danish, Deustch, Dutch, Spanish, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Turkish.

Many fixes and enhancements

Many overall fixes have been made, such as allowing your sash and your aura outfit to absorb your rarity bonuses, fixing client crashes, fixing uncomplete or unstable functions and enhancing already existing ones. Filtered item pick-up has also been fixed and enhanced.

You can find the complete and concise changelog here.

 

[Gurgarath]

What's new today?

Today we will shed light on the overall enhancements brought by the latest tweaks of the game.

Combat Zone

The Combat Zone is a PvP map where all players can compete. There is no distinction between empires, guilds or team membership. Everyone can fight against each other and earn points that can be spent to earn valuable goods! The best players will have their rank displayed above their head for everyone to see - and to fear!

Enhanced Shops

Many conditions and enhancements have been implemented for the shops. You can now have daily limits to buy items, buy items using specific currencies (such as Medal of Bravery or Combat Points) and have restrictions to buy an item if your guild is not strong enough.

Enhanced Special Inventory

Having too much storage space can cause confusion, while having not enough can create frustration. For this matter, the special inventory have been enhanced to have one page for each category, and two unlockable additional pages. To unlock these, you need to use 4 keys to get a row. You can get these keys on bosses, metin stones, boxes as well as in the Item Shop.

To further enhance this, when your special inventory is full, let's say you want to pick-up a spirit stone but your spirit-stone inventory is full, the item will directly be routed to your normal inventory.

Chest Content Preview

You want to buy or open a chest but you are unsure of what's inside and you don't want to check the web-wiki or our integrated wiki? Just press CTRL+X to get an insight of every items that you could get in the chest!

Better Bridges

The engine was limited and couldn't allow people being on different Z axis. The game have been updated to allow for more verticality, which will surely come in handy in the future!

 

[Gurgarath]

What's new today?

It has been quite a long time since I publish the last update publicly. However the server is going really well and I am actively working on it everyday and many interesting features or updates has been going. For the record, the latest published internal build is the 3.23 and the current internal build is 3.26, with more than 25 sub-versions for the 3.25 only. Let's take a closer look of everything that has been achieved on the course of all these changes.

Overall objectives

The overall objectives of all the changes I will further discuss is the opening of the closed alpha that will take place in the weeks to come. Not all the changes will be shown, many more changes have been made, but the main ones will be discussed below. The reason I postponed it from my current schedule is one last big change that will smoothen the experience for all the players in every aspects of the game. The objectives otherwise follow a simple path. Fixing all the known bugs and making the game ready to ensure an alpha without any big chunks missing, even though the developpement will be ACTIVE during the alpha.

Better dungeons

The way dungeons works and their logic has been enhanced, from memory usage to notices as well as more quest functions allowing for better experiences in the dungeons in the near future. All dungeons have been checked or added and a new exclusive dungeon have been added, the Monkey dungeon, that will now work as your classic run, expect than it is for lower levels. This is however only one out of other new dungeons to come.
Warning, Monkeys are EXTRA agressive and can curse you, bear that in mind!

Better stability

The way the game cache data, the environment (OS and architecture) have been updated to better handle the available memory size, network and memory usage. The way requests have been made to the database have also been enhanced and securized, allowing for faster queries and less memory-straining calls that will give a smoother long-term experience and stability. This is from an internal point of view but it will result in less lag-spikes and less obvious latency. Please note that it's only a few of many other changes both in stability, environment and upgrade that was also focused on fixing tons of existing bugs, even (and mainly) bugs that are years old. that will lead to an increased stability and less unexpected behaviours. The way monsters find and target the players, as well as the way items that are "environment-aware" works have also been enhanced. It contains un-noticeable features like the way dungeons clean themselves to the way bravery capes works when there are no monsters around or the way monsters find a player in an un-reachable place.

Better font

Once again, the fonts have been enhanced, it ranges from the performances it takes when rendering multiple instances, resulting of the loss of many frame per seconds, which has been enhanced even more, to the way it renders, allowing the game to support and switch between multiple fonts. Also, the name of monsters now contain an indicator to their element and their aggresivity.

New Items

Many new items have been added to the game. It ranges from new boxes, to new horse-related items to dungeon items and future items that will be related to brand-new high-tier low level armors ().

Revamped skills

All skills are now using latest 2022 formulas, effects, damage and specificities. It ranges from buffs, to nerfs, to just balanced gameplay you would get out of a 2022 game. Note that thanks to one of the updates that have been made in the past, it is really easy to edit damages in PvP, PvE and assess the DPS of every classes, which will allow in the future for an unique fine-tuning if changes have to be made.

Evolving Items - Unlockable bonuses

Items will now be evolving and contain mini-missions within themselves that will allow you to get more bonuses the more you play with the said item. So far, it is only given to the free Appaloosa, but it will later on be added to multiple new items with many more challenges to come.

Other previews?

Of course, this is far from all that have been made, visible and disclosable at this stage. Namely, Damage Ranking, Better Exchange Window, Brand New Lore-Friendly UI, New Inventory, Revamped Hunting Quests, Multiple Pendants have been made to this stage and once again, many more have been made and will be displayed as well that many huge changelogs.