Week 84 was unproductive for the game, practically took a week off
- Rename Character is finally ready, renaming is free once for new characters or non-leveled characters
- There's a new achievement/title called "stomped"/Stomped - You need to get randomly hit 1200 times by Stompy consecutively, getting hit by any other monster resets it
- Heartwood's Tangle is ready
- "gooped"/Gooped title/achievement for receiving 60M damage from Goo's
- Monsters have a random attack delay now, +- 50ms
- First 2 Paladin skills are ready (Thanks to jameswatson's reminders on Discord) - Mana Shield probably will be very fun until it's balanced
- Attack animations (the movement push towards the target) are more pronounced now
^ The game/servers aren't updated yet, it'll likely be in the next 1-2 days
Early Access: Week 83 in Review
Biggest update this week is the improvements to the messaging system, now all messages are retained, regular chat is server-wide - and pm's work both offline and within servers! The next step will be to update the https://adventure.land/comm/ so it will become more practical and also be a messaging hub (The typing bubble animation is also live now)
Worked on Steam payment integration, it's theoretically ready now, but practically need to do some more work
Observers now automatically update position, both when you are just observing a server, or when you are observing someone
There's a new experimental escapist monster: Tiny Fairy
After the next update, only merchants will be able to join giveaways, but at the same time, I'll probably make Cyberland hostile for merchants, as more and more things are added, don't want to move merchants dominantly to Cyberland - Also congrats to Kolo on Discord for figuring out what "give" does :)
Early Access: Week 82 in Review
First version of new movement system complete + the server logic is now multi-threaded with node workers - this is a major improvement, as the performance bottleneck was instance/monster computing, which is now mostly async and offloaded to other threads. Additionally, there's a new internal cached precomputation system, previously it was done at each server launch. As the new calculations take more than a 100 seconds, it was a must to add this new system. Thanks to it, servers now spin up instantly
New chat typing bubble animation / experiment (Unlaunched)
New name tags! Instead of the original name tags that appeared optionally on the bottom of players and npcs, the new tags are on by default, they appear on top, and extend when a character is focused or hovered on (Thanks to egehanhk's suggestion on Discord)
Monsters also received a new HP bar that includes their level, and there's also a very basic Difficulty calculation (Suggested by ellian very early on)
I've started visiting pinned ideas on #new_ideas, going to implement or eliminate them one by one - first one was Sanguine Amulet and item auras
Thanks for Matin's suggestion on Discord, Phoenix will drop a very very rare new hair
Early Access: Week 81 in Review
Re-visited Pets after adding Cosmetics last month, then dedicated the week to adding pathfinding to monsters, it's ready to release - To summarise the addition, most monsters, maybe all, will be able to pursuit better, take corners - However, due to computational limitations, they won't immediately take the shortest path to you wherever you are. The results are pretty interesting, if you farm Vampire Rats on the hill for example, rarely one can climb up to you. On the Spooky Town, it's almost impossible to outrun Mummies
In the future, probably going to adopt a multithreaded approach and dedicated the additional threads just for the logic of smart monsters and pets
Upcoming changes: - The Phoenix now has 160,000 HP - an increase from the original 60,000, the "fcape" droprate doubled - Merchant's Luck buff now has a `.strong` flag if it comes from your own merchant, it can't be overwritten by others with this flag - 4 Fingers no longer work on non-friendly targets outside PVP - Some UI Fixes - Definite cosmetics jar bugfix
Early Access: Week 80 in Review
New code functions: upload_code, get_active_code_slot, get_edited_code_slot, disconnect
New Game/Character events (in Code DOCS)
Hardcore Mode: You have to be within 10 levels to attack Agile party invites/requests: You can send/accept invites/requests freely independent of your party status, or the recipient's party status, when you enter a party, or if someone else enters your party with your invite, your requests expire, invites only expire when they are accepted (Thanks to number_e's urging)
ːsteamhappyː Cosmetics: Premium Armor/Hat items unlocked, Cosmetics Jar's now show what's inside them, new cosmetic drops from monsters, Updated: https://adventure.land/docs/guide/all/cosmetics (Thanks to Muhncheez's reminders)
> Item compounds now decay the positive components after a success, however, for ages items, it might still be enough to reach the max%
> Burn interval is now 210ms instead of 180ms, intensity cap is [previous/3+attack] instead of [previous/2+attack] - and there's a new/experimental duration formula, each attack now increases the duration at least 400ms, the duration can go up to 12000ms - the increments in between are dependent on the current attack and the current burn intensity - and if there's an existing burn, a super burn can last up to 8 seconds rather than 5 now
Endgame Bug: Beg on Discord discovered that auth checks was faultily disabled for the log_in calls only, this change was made recently to fix an issue which occured if accounts logged out while characters were in-game. He reported an unintentionally leaked game credential on Github to help, his report lead to this discovery later on. In order for this to work, you still had to know the character's numeric ID. I'm very thankful for his report and having such a positive community.
Early Access: Week 79 in Review
The week started with a bug and bug fixing frenzy, a forgotten 1/10 cosmetics jar drop rate from Goo's and Party% calculations far exceeding 100% - it was a good exercise in post disaster processing/recovery
Implemented the Damage Received to Bonus Damage mechanic, it will likely appear on a Warrior weapon, but I think it could be a welcome addition to Rogue's as well
With the recent additions that diversified options, I started considering a very basic character build too, likely Level 60/70/80/90/100 selections, 2 options at each, so a 2x5 simple build that adds a skill/passive/attribute to your class
I was going to update the game before this Week's update, yet decided to delay the update 1-2 days, as quite a bit changed
Experimented with node/puppeteer after getting inspired by syrup's interface on Discord, headless Chrome uses more resources, yet the jsdom approach has been problematic so far, at one point might re-write the CLI to just use Chrome - maybe a secondary version
New item grades: Legendary and Exalted
All upgradeable items now become Legendary at +10, and Exalted at +12 - Exalted items can no longer be upgraded - T3+ items become Exalted at +10 - to compensate, T3/T4 armor get extra stats at +10
Legendary scrolls are now buyable, "scroll3" is 480,000,000 for the time being, in the future, the price might lower, but there might be a challenge to acquire it
There are 2 new offerings, Primordial X and Primling, Primordial X is for grade 3, i.e. Legendary, Primordial Essence is now less effective for Legendary items, Primling will drop from monsters, it's for High grade items (grade 1) - Essences are now more effective if used on lower grade items, but %-caps don't change
"grades" data on items become an array of length 4, example: [0,0,6,10] - A rare item becoming Legendary at +6 and Exalted at +10
Plantoids and One Eye's are balanced
New Achievement: Unlucky - failing an upgrade/compound with the exact% - you get an Essence of Greed too, that's needed to craft the Primordial X
G.skills .wtype property can now be an array, for example "3shot"/"5shot" has ["bow","crossbow"] as wtype - Only skills with a wtype now trigger attack passives
Mansion's Crypt map updated
There's also a new mainframe command: swap - It's up to you to discover the functionality
Early Access: Week 78 in Review
A week with small, scattered changes and additions, the equal party share among one's own characters is now live
New Monster Prototype: Black Scorpion New Item Prototypes: Sanguine Amulet, Heartwood, Enchanted Earring, Ring of Gold
The changes from earlier weeks are now live too, including the rebalanced Fire Roamer
Most interesting recap from this week is Archalias's ideas and suggestions on Discord, I want to thank him for his contributions, most of them are surely going to make it into the game, 2 of them are already in - Can't wait to add the weapon that increases attack based on recent incoming damage
Early Access: Week 77 in Review
This week's focus was an Achievement system + Item Titles as rewards
First challenging achievement is the "Fire Hazard" where you have to kill 20,000 monsters consecutively with burn last hits - It awards the "Hazard" title which grants +4% Crit Damage
Second achievement, an easy and random one, when you roll the % perfectly on upgrades / compounds, the item gets the "Lucky" title, +2% Luck
Item properties are now stacked, it will be possible to get them re-titled this way (Only one of them is active at any point)
There's an upcoming minor re-balance, affects the Fire Roamers and the new prototype bosses in the Mansion
Early Access: Week 76 in Review
Overall a very productive week
- Added Item Mailing - New System: Traps - Achievement Integrations - Hardcore events on Sundays
The first rewarded Hardcore event was pretty fun too, good turnout, wish I didn't forget and take some screenshots, got into it too deep myself, forgot everything else
First example of a trap is the `G.monsters.fieldgen0` - It applies a dampening field (`G.conditions.dampened`) which prevents magiporting in, blinking out and teleporting - ultimately, going to introduce more of them for PVE, bosses could spawn them, beneficial / long lasting ones could be used by players etc.
It was fun trying to complete a semi autonomous server for the Hardcore event, ended up being very productive, hope to repeat it this week by bringing back the daily event system prototype for Saturday!
Hardcore event will be a weekly thing too, each week in a different zone, this week it'll be Europas, next week Eastlands
Early Access: Week 75 in Review
Added a new zone inside the mansion, it's open for preview but the drops/event/complete-dynamics aren't there yet
There's a new tracktrix scoring system, the guide page explains the new dynamics: https://adventure.land/docs/guide/advanced/tracktrix
Other changes:
- Armorbox drop table buffed - Essence of Frost crafting recipes eased
