Have you found any dice from the new collection?! Are you still on the hunt for the legendary?! If your deepest dice desires aren’t sated yet, I have some great news. The Winter Dice Event is live RIGHT NOW!
Hit the queues and hook up these frosty cubes!
Start: NOW!
End: 11:59am Sunday, 6th of January PT
How: These dice have a small chance of dropping after completing any game that yields a regular drop. If you obtain a chest from playing a game, you've got a chance that chest will come with an extra event dice.
Please Note: You can obtain multiple sets within the event, but you are not guaranteed a drop. These dice are rare. If you get multiple sets, look out for your pals and share 'em around!
You may notice a little bit of a diminished presence from us over this time, as we’ll be spending some well earned time relaxing with family and friends. Regardless, as always let me know if you have any questions!
<3 Darcy & The LoG Squad
Armello’s new dice collection, Mountain’s Hoard is now live!
Good day kind people!
The day is upon us! A whole new chest, full of all new dice have landed in Armello. Complete multiplayer games to find Boreal Chests and remember to visit Skeeve’s Shop up to once a day to get freebies. Get in there and complete your collection!
With this collection comes a few bug fixes. Please find the patch notes for this little update below.
Happy gaming and may the RNG be in your favour. If you have any questions, let ‘em fly!
Cheers,
<3 Darcy & the LoG crew
Features
"Mountain's Hoard" Dice Collection is now live! Featuring new rare, epic and legendary dice.
'Find Parties' Multiplayer option set to on by default.
Bug Fixes
Fury Friday timer can no longer be extended indefinitely by refusing palace entry.
Resolved an issue where using Hero Powers at the very end of a turn would result in an NMA (no more action softlock).
Playing Teleport into a tile occupied by a stealthed character no longer incorrectly initiates combat and now correctly reveals the stealthed character.
Entering GDPR offline mode will now correctly remove you from Multiplayer Matchmaking.
Controller support is now available for the 'Find Parties' toggle option.
Ghor's hero power will no longer be deactivated by losing/expiring health due to a buff expiry.
Fixed an issue where you could no longer return to Prologue Act 1 after completing Prologue Act 4.
Fixed an isue where some players could not claim their Daily Chest while using a controller.
Fixed an issue where players would recieve no penalty for abandoning Multiplayer games.
Known Issues
The King's Declaration phase in Fury Mode may sometimes has a very short timer.
Dice/Chests in the Inventory screen may incorrectly show the 'Not Marketable'/ 'Not Tradeable' tags when they are able traded and put on the Marketplace.
If you fail to accept a mulitplayer game ready up, theres a chance your UI will lock up and require client restart
Mountain’s Hoard, Armello’s new dice collection lands Monday, the 17th of December.
Hello one and all!
The exciting news is out, and that is that the brand new dice collection, Mountain’s Hoard will be available on Steam from Monday the 17th of December. That’s a shiny new set, from commons to the fabled legendary.
This means you only have a few days to wrap up your Star Seer’s Heirloom collection, so get in there and rumble with the King. If you desperately need to finish your collection and you just don’t have the time, remember that you can hit up the Steam Marketplace to wheel and deal these chests and dice. Remember that Skeeve has a daily free chest in his shop, definitely swing by and collect these when you can.
If you have any questions please feel free to hit me up and otherwise, let things get frosty, a new set of dice are on the way.
Cheers,
<3 Darcy & the LoG crew
v2.0 is Coming Q1 of 2019
Howdy Friends,
Hope you’re all well. As you may have heard we’ve been hard at work, charging towards the big v2.0 update for Armello. Thank you for all of your suggestions in the glorious suggestion thread here, this really assisted us in understanding your expectations and your deepest darkest DESIRES!
As you know we wanted to get v2.0 in your hands by the end of the year, but that date has now been revised to Q1 of 2019 for Steam. The v2.0 update is one we're taking really seriously here at LoG and we’re excited about meeting and exceeding your expectations. We’ve made some decisions this year (like bringing Client Servers in early) that steer v2.0 into the new year, but rest assured this will be our chunkiest, glorious...est, free update ever.
Sincere apologies to anyone disappointed by the delay and thank you for your patience as we charge ahead on making all of the things. As always, we’ll come to you with more information when we can.
As the schedule has been shaken up a little, I am happy to confirm today that a new build, including a shiny new Dice Collection (and a bunch of quality of life bug fixes) will be landing on Steam before 2019.
If you have any questions please let’em fly! I'm happy to answer what I can.
Cheers,
<3 Darcy @ LoG
The History of Multiplayer in Armello
Howdy folks!
We have something really special here today. We've mentioned previously that we'd like to share more information about how our multiplayer systems work, and here we have it.
Here's a history and retrospective of the Multiplayer systems in Armello, written by our lead developer, Karl Burdack.
The History of Multiplayer in Armello
How did it take 3 years for Armello to transition from ‘Peer to Peer’, to ‘Cloud Hosted Dedicated Servers’?
The short answer is we were always busy, fixing issues, adding features for monthly updates, or porting to new platforms. We were also a very small team, of four permanent coders.
The rest of this article is the long answer!
It’s been a winding path for Armello Multiplayer. As a studio, we have learnt much in three years about how to deliver updates to a live game. However we recognise there are still many improvements to be made.
NMA’s
The biggest issue for Armello Multiplayer has been deadlocks in the gameplay event queue. The event queue is a list of actions, or rules, the game takes to move the game forward. They are executed one by one.
If an event does not complete, the next event cannot begin. These are seen as freezes in gameplay, that we refer to as ‘NMA’ which is short for ‘No More Actions’. These freezes mostly affect multiplayer, since they occur when one peer’s version of events go out of sync with another, or a bug in our code fails to complete an event.
An analogy, would be if you played a physical board game. Where one of the four players, on their turn, could draw cards then take 3 actions. If that player sat at the table and refused to finish drawing their cards (NMA), all the other players would wait forever for their turn, and get very annoyed!
September 2015: Version 1.0: Photon Matchmaking
As a beginning, let’s start with the first full public release of Armello, Version 1.0.
The first Armello multiplayer architecture operated by relying on Photon Relay servers. The Relay Server receives messages from players in a match, and then sends those messages in a consistent order to all players. We also had an optimization for when the local player was having a turn, that they would immediately execute their actions, eliminating latency.
Remaining Issues:
Players would timeout and be disconnected after only approx 10 seconds of lost connection. This was a limitation where Photon could not be configured to behave differently.
It did not support future improvements to Matchmaking we had planned, such as ranked matchmaking, in a way compatible with how we wanted to implement it.
This system had no way to block cheaters, issue bans, or prevent pirate copies of the game from playing.
January 2016: Version 1.2: Steam Matchmaking and Peer to Peer
We evaluated the Steam Matchmaking and Peer to Peer (P2P) Networking, and decided it was more flexible and suited our future needs.
After implementation we immediately saw improvements in latency and connection timeout tolerance. Steam matchmaking also automatically blocked banned, or pirated copies joining multiplayer.
Changing to Steam P2P networking, transitioned Armello to a pure Peer to Peer network architecture.
In order to support reliably ordered messages across all the peers, we had to continue to use a Relay for messages. So instead of using Photon Relay Servers, we now hosted the relay on one of the peers. This peer would be picked at the start of the match, and would remain the Relay host for the remainder of the match
Remaining Issues The biggest issue with this change, was that dealing with disconnects became much harder. If the current Relay host (Amber) were to disconnect, a new peer needs to be consistently chosen, and all messages that were outgoing from the previous host at the time of disconnection, need to be reconciled in case any were lost to some players. It’s likely that Amber disconnecting while Thane takes an action, might let Thane execute his own action (red arrow) but for the message to never arrive at Sana or Mercurio (black arrows).
This lead to difficult issues for us down the road.
June 2016: Version 1.4: Optimized networking
For 6 months, part of the Armello team were focused on porting to the Xbox One. Unfortunately, at that time Photon was not available for Xbox One. So in order to support that platform, we had to port the multiplayer to support a third solution: Unity Networking.
Unity Networking on Xbox One at the time, had much stricter message size limits. So we had to get serious about optimizing Armello’s sloppy network message sizes. It’s something we had on our list of things to do, and now it had become a priority.
In many cases, these optimizations reduced the amount of data sent and received by a factor of 100.
What? How could a simple Move action in a turn based game, consume 2500 bytes. Easily:
These optimizations were easy to bring over to the Steam release of 1.4. It would also be an important optimization down the road for Mobile platforms. These optimizations have benefited players on connections with poor bandwidth, as well as reducing CPU overhead on below minimum spec machines.
Unknown to us at the time, would be that the initial Unity Networking port to the Xbox One, would also be useful when starting out implementing dedicated servers!
Jan 2017: Version 1.6: Multiplayer Stability Update
Poor disconnect handling had now been plaguing our multiplayer community for 6 months, and we began work on an improved model for the Peer to Peer Relay Host
An example of how disconnect could cause stability issues:
In this situation, the system must be designed to recover the message Thane had sent, and re-send it to Sana. If the message is not recovered correctly, it can lead to an NMA situation.
To address these inconsistencies with disconnections, we implemented improvements to how disconnections were handled. We implemented a better message tagging and reliable message recovery protocol. A simplified example of how lost messages are recovered is shown below:
Remaining Issues:
While this was promoted as a Multiplayer Stability Update. Many players complained that it made their experience worse. We reflected on two areas of weakness where we must improve:
Measurement: We must be able to better measure build stability during development (testing), and in live builds (analytics)
Automated testing: We must automate the testing process of multiplayer, so that an enormous volume of games can be played, testing all possible combinations of actions.
‘Double disconnect’: There were many cases where if two peers disconnected rapidly, our implementation would not handle it well. We would need to add automated tests for this case.
Undetected by us at the time, was that the optimization of immediately executing the local players action (indicated with red arrow in previous images), was also the cause of much of the disconnect instability, due to ordering issues when switching hosts.
May 2017: Version 1.7: Automated Testing
After the disappointing results of 1.6, we worked for around 6 months to implement an automated testing system for Armello. We added support for multiplayer Bots which would play fully through games many times a day.
Immediately we found an enormous volume of NMA bugs. We were now able to more easily address these, with full logging from all our test agents. During this period, we released several patches, usually once a week, as we found and fixed the issues.
Automated test PC's. These nifty HP micro PC's have a low power usage, but enough CPU power to run several tests of Armello in parallel, usually without graphics.
Remaining Issues:
After this round of patching, disconnections remained the major cause of instability, and we determined to look at this next.
Analytics were still lacking enough detail for us to track live build stability.
August 2017: Version 1.9: Improved Disconnect Stability
We hooked up our automated tests to live analytics, so that we could analyze thousands of test games per day. We increased our test coverage to include disconnection. We also began to receive our first live Analytics for live build stability, and were able to track live issues, and our progress at reducing instability.
What we discovered was that the most common stability issues arose when players disconnected during the end of their turn. In many cases, the issue was related to the ordering of remote messages, compared to the locally executed message (indicated in red in previous images)
The fix was for players to take turns being the relay Host. The player who was having their turn would have the active Relay host, which would dispatch messages to all other hosts. When players end their turn, the active host moves to the next player.
This way, the active player, would continue to always immediately execute actions on their turn, such as movement.
Problems:
Multiple players disconnecting at the same time were still causing stability issues, which were difficult to address easily with our existing peer to peer architecture and certain game events.
November 2017: Internal Prototype of Dedicated Servers.
We were faced with a choice, continue to improve the peer to peer model, while fixing issues in very complex Armello game code. Or look at all the issues as a whole, and decide on the best outcome going forward.
We decided to prototype Armello running with a Client/Server networking architecture. We would begin to look into the costs of hosting dedicated servers.
Fortunately, Armello was already well suited to Client/Server architecture, because it already broke up actions into discrete events which execute one after the other in a deterministic way on all clients. Deterministic means: The results of the action executing is exactly the same on all clients.
Initial prototyping was promising, but some additional problems would need to be overcome:
A hosting service for the servers would need to be found
Server hosting costs would need to be evaluated. As every hour of a dedicated server costs money. We didn’t want to dramatically burden our indie game with an unsustainable cost for running multiplayer.
The server version of the game would need to be heavily optimized for CPU usage, Memory Usage, and build size. So that it could be more cheaply hosted.
Latency for the active player would be unacceptable for some players. Additional work would need to be done to hide the latency by allowing the player to move, and revert that action if the server decided differently.
February 2018: Version 1.10, iOS Port
When porting to iOS, we needed a new, non-steam inventory and online account management service. We decided to integrate a service named ‘PlayFab’.
This work turned out to have a fortuitous benefit; because PlayFab would later become our cloud hosting service for Dedicated Servers on the PC platform. We now had the final piece of technology required to make this happen.
Planning for Version 2.0
For our planning for 2.0, we surveyed our community, what changes they would suggest for Armello 2.0. When we looked at the top 5 multiplayer related requests:
The number one requested feature, was Multiplayer Reconnect. This is a feature that would allow players to rejoin a game that had already begun, after they were disconnected for some reason. Also note resolving NMA’s as 4th on the list.
We also keep an eye on our monthly negative reviews, here is an example from April 2018:
This month is fairly typical for reviews. 25% of negative reviews are attributable to NMAs. Also, 8% of players gave us a negative review for lack of a Reconnect feature.
Many of the complaints are down to taste, such as Randomness (RNG). However NMAs and Reconnection are something we can improve, without fundamentally changing the game of Armello.
Reconnect: This is by far simpler with a Client/Server architecture. Where the Server has a complete copy of the game, which can be replicated to clients attempting to reconnect. If we are ever to support this feature, we would first need working dedicated servers.
Resolve NMAs: We knew that the ongoing difficulty with testing and preventing NMA’s would be much simpler in a client/server architecture. In particular, having a dedicated server does away with the problem of a ‘host’ disconnecting completely.
With solid information backing our instincts, we knew changing to Dedicated Servers might be the most important change to Armello we could make.
July 2018: Version 1.12: Dedicated Server Beta.
For the first 6 months of 2018, we worked on fully implementing Client/Server in Armello. This included:
Setting up the backend technology to let us easily upload new builds of the server into the cloud. (PlayFab)
Developing optimizing builds of Armello to be hosted in the cloud as a server.
Improving disconnect to take advantage of the stable dedicated server.
Repurposing our automated testing, to be testing hundreds of cloud hosted games a day, and to pressure test the cloud hosting service.
Improving client side movement actions to hide latency
Fixing a whole bunch more NMA’s along the way.
August 2018: Version 1.12.1, Patch 4: Dedicated Servers switched on permanently
After about 4 weeks of beta testing the dedicated servers. We switched them on for all multiplayer games on 20th August.
The following chart tracks server load time over 30 days, which is a good measure of performance. In this chart, the lower the line, the faster servers are launching into games. In the first few weeks, we had to work hard to eliminate issues where servers would crash, or freeze. We also had to tune the load balancing of how many game servers were allocated per cloud machine.
By the first week of september, in Patch 7, we had resolved all known crash issues, and had load tested the server into a stable configuration. From Patch 7 onward, server load times, and availability have been rock solid.
One of our reasons to switch to dedicated servers, was increased match stability, by reducing NMA rates. Now that dedicated servers are fully operating, we can compare public multiplayer games completed against those that failed to complete because of an NMA. The following chart shows 30 days of games, with the transition from Peer to Peer to Dedicated Servers marked in red. Note the significant decrease in NMA’s as a percentage of games (in light blue):
We are very happy with these results. And we hope our players are too! More games are being completed than ever before, with stability issues such as NMA’s and disconnects at all time lows.
The future
While we aren’t promising anything (when do we ever do that?), having dedicated servers does open up some interesting future possibilities for Armello beyond adding reconnect capability. We will be announcing some of these in future. In the meantime, keep the suggestions coming!
- Karl & the LoG Team
The Gallows' Eve Dice Event Begins...
Are you a coward, or will you creep forth and collect these haunted dice?
During this holiday, you will have a small chance of receiving a Gallow's Eve Bone Dice after completing Public Multiplayer games. These are rare dice, so you’re not guaranteed a drop.
Remember, you can collect multiple of these so share them with your worthy allies.
PLATFORMS: Steam, iOS, Android & Switch (we wish we could cater to all of our platforms, but unfortunately for this one we cannot)
Start: NOW!
End: The Evening of Thursday, the 1st of November PT
Game mode: Public and Private Multiplayer
Gallows' Eve is Coming!
Embrace the horror!
On these cold days, when the wind chills your bones, we're bringing the spookiest event to your houses - Gallow's Eve!
Starting next Thursday night - October 25 (PST) and for a whole week you will have a small chance to expand your collection and get this special dice!
Spread the terror! Be the trickiest! Win that throne!
<3 Much horror,
Lena and the LoG people
Party Queue Update is Live!
The beta is now over and the party queue update is live!
Features:
- Party queuing is back! Players may now queue as a group again by converting their Private lobby to a Public one, and we have added a Find Parties: On/Off option on the multiplayer screen.
Fixes:
- Fixed an NMA caused by combat, perils or cards played (Blizzard or similar cards that caused a forced movement) which would result in some tiles sometimes being incorrectly blocked. This would seem to occur in a variety of ways but was ultimately based on any mechanic that forced movement.
- Fixed an issue where players would not be able to join a lobby via the 'Join Game' option on Steam once the lobby's leader had left.
Hop into multiplayer and let us know what you think, as usual.
Once again, thank you all for being patient and an additional thank you to all the folks that actually did play our beta and sent bug reports! ːsteamhappyː
<3 Lena and all the people of LoG
Party Queue Update Beta is LIVE!
Hello there fine folks!
I'm here to let you know that the Party Queue is now live in the beta branch! This is the version of this feature that we've mentioned in the earlier post here https://steamcommunity.com/games/290340/announcements/detail/1694933761145738182
Please note that the final version that will be available in 2.0 is likely to be different. We're testing it right now to gather your feedback on what works and what might need improvement.
*Features:*
- Party queuing is back! Players may now queue as a group again by converting their Private lobby to a Public one, and we have added a Find Parties: On/Off option on the multiplayer screen.
- Double drops are ON! Get them sweet sweet dice.
*Fixes:*
- Fixed an NMA caused by combat, perils or cards played (Blizzard or similar cards that caused a forced movement) which would result in some tiles sometimes being incorrectly blocked. This would seem to occur in a variety of ways but was ultimately based on any mechanic that forced movement.
*Known Issues:*
- The new Find Parties option button has missing text in languages other than English
- If the leader of a private lobby leaves the lobby after creating, players will not be able to join the existing lobby by using the 'Join Game' option via Steam. Players being sent invites from players still in the lobby does resolve correctly.
How do I get in there?!
All you have to do is navigate to your Steam Library and locate Armello and do the following:
Right click Armello -> Properties -> Betas -> Select the open beta from the dropdown menu
This will download the beta version of Armello. Please be mindful that changing back will cause you to redownload the base game, if you're conscious of your downloads.
As usual, submit your bugs and let us know what you think!
Much love,
<3 Lena and the LoG squad
Stability, Reintroducing Party Queuing and the Updates Ahead!
Hi, hello!
I'm here to talk about a few hot topics, and I've got some great news for all of you. Primarily I'm going to chat about Multiplayer Stability and our plans to reintroduce Party Queuing.
Just quickly in case you weren't in the loop, v2.0 is scheduled for late this year. Let the hype grow within.
As always, if you have any questions please feel free to hit the comments below. Make yourself a cup of tea and let's get into it.
Multiplayer Stability
According to our analytics, Armello is officially more stable than it's ever been. Talkin’ specifics, the game completion rate is far better than it’s ever been, and NMAs (no more action soft-locks) have reduced by over 1500%. That’s *big*.
Why, you ask? Well kind friends, our new Dedicated Servers are to thank. Their introduction was a little rocky, we know, but we're really thankful we weathered the storm as we're currently living in a new, stable future.
For those keen on more details, including juicy numbers, LoG lead developer, Karl Burdack, is preparing an in-depth retrospective of our multiplayer services - why we made certain decisions, what bugs arose and the actions we've taken over the years to make improvements. This will be released in the form of an extensive Steam announcement over the next week or so, so keep an eye out for that.
Party Queuing
Party Queuing is coming back to Armello. With the implementation of the new Dedicated Server tech and new multiplayer menu flow, the functionality of queuing for public games as a party of 2-3 was removed. We were comfortable releasing a build like this, as a large complaint had been that friends were relentlessly and unfairly targeting solo players, in the hopes of benefiting their "team".
Much like any tabletop game where several players gang up on one player, this isn't fun.
Naturally we understand that the majority of friends jumping into the public queue together do play Armello in the spirit it was intended, and the feedback we received after the change addressing teaming was clear. Armello was always intended to be played with friends, and we need a solution that caters for folks who want to queue with their pals, whilst protecting folks from being matched with malicious teamers.
This issue is inherently dividing. Some like how it is now, and others like how it was. So the big question was, why can't we have both? Well, you can.
Matchmaking with Parties will be an option that can be toggled on and off at will.
PLEASE NOTE: This is a work in process screenshot. Final implementation may vary, including wording etc.
If you'd prefer to match with solo players only, turn Find Parties off. If you don't mind the possibility of being matched with a party of 2-3 players and are looking for the fastest queue times, then turn Find Parties on. Simple as that!
This solution provides choice, and puts the power in your hands to play as you like. Please also know that this whole system will be improved for v2.0, which makes it the perfect time to give us feedback! We're excited about it and I hope you are too.
Okay so when?!
An update will come out within the next few weeks, reintroducing the ability to matchmake as a party of 2-3 players. We'll shout loudly when it happens to let you know. From then, we'll be here with fixes and improvements where necessary, but we'll also be hard at work focusing on hot secret content for v2.0.
That's it! I hope this news is well received because the LoG squad is fighting to restore and protect Armello for every type of player. Whether it's stability or queuing, we're out here listening, looking for the best solutions. We hope you appreciate it.
As always, if I can help with anything please hit me up.
