Nevergrind Online
Brazilian Portguese language support added! Fixed party death bug!
• Added Portuguese language support. Thanks to Lucas F C for the epic work on the translation!
• Fixed an annoying timeout bug for dead party members that caused a bugged state.
• Piercing attack attribute was renamed to Penetrating to avoid confusion with the piercing weapon skill.
• Skills that are considered piercing (now penetrating) can no longer be dodged. This was the original intent, but there was some confusion along the way. Penetrating will only bypass parry and riposte.
• Enabled penetrating on all archery and Ranger bow skills. This gives Rangers a unique DPS advantage that others do not have. All of their archery skills can bypass parry and riposte.
• The message for when someone leaves the party is now properly localized.
• Fixed the ignore remove message.
Major Server Stability Milestone Achieved!
My vision is to keep all players connected in one giant world. But the dream met reality and I was forced to resort to shards as a quick fix to support the massive surge. Shards worked very well, but it broke up friends, guilds, and undermined the excitement of being in one massive socially connected world full of people that you built relationships with over time. Behind the scenes, I was hard at work re-designing a key technical bottleneck that would help us reach the goal of supporting over a thousand players at once. Sharding worked. It helped us reach an all-time peak of 1,184 concurrent players. But I knew it was not Nevergrind Online's final form. I had to persevere and make it better!
Throughout the last week, I continued to improve the servers. It was not simply a matter of throwing more money at the problem. When you reach this scale, it requires meticulous attention to detail to the server configuration, limitations, and strengths of various hardware and software. To be more specific—the servers that route our game data were changed from Apache HTTP Server to Nginx. Additionally, I must have read dozens of articles on server configuration for supporting maximum TCP connections. This challenge is like an onion where several layers of software can all constrain how your server handles TCP connections. When your server limits TCP connections, it results in your users dealing with login queues. At peak hours, the servers had enough processing power to route the game data, but, at peak hours, players could not login due to no available TCP connections on the server. This is not an unusual problem. In fact it's quite common! Not just in the gaming industry, but in telecommunications as well. I can't imagine the havoc EverQuest created in 1999 when its success broke the internet.
Nevergrind Online had a rocky week around peak hours and it cost us a few negative reviews due to causing disconnects and login queues. It is unfortunate, but we earned those negative reviews. Players should expect an online game to work most of the time and this was a rough week full of stumbling and bumbling toward the end zone. I even had to fix the idle disconnect logic on the client which was incorrectly causing disconnects mid-stream for NGC_the_Twitch. Thankfully, he was much more patient than most streamers would be. I was able to quickly resolve the issue within minutes, enabling him to finish the stream! You don't want your peak hour chart to look like this:
We survived, but you definitely don't want streamers to deal with technical problems on stream. In the subsequent days, I continued making improvements and it seemed that I had finally configured everything the way that it needed to be! As of last night, we finally went over 1,000 players in one world without a single technical issue the entire night! Look how smooth and lovely that curve looks! Not a single bump the entire night!
Of course, there are no guarantees that another challenge won't emerge in the weeks ahead, but this is a fantastic milestone that I will never forget! With server challenges taking up less of my time, you can expect even more features and updates in the weeks ahead! Stay tuned!
New LFG and AFK Features! Plus other goodies.
• Fixed bow damage in several areas. Auto attack with archery was not properly doing full damage to the back row. Ranger bow skills were incorrectly piercing all the time. Only Trueshot Strike should bypass dodge, parry, riposte.
• Added a new LFG feature. While solo, you can type /lfg to toggle LFG mode. Your name will appear brighter in town as a cue to other players seeking to group up. LFG disables automatically upon joining a party.
• Added a new AFK feature. You can type /afk to toggle AFK mode. Your name will appear darker in town as a cue to other players that you are AFK. You can also use it to prevent invite or trade invites. It will automatically clear upon joining a party.
• Added search support for AFK and LFG players via the /who command. For example you can type /who lfg to see a list of everyone that is LFG. It also supports filtering by level. For example /who lfg 1 10. This will return a result of everyone that is LFG from level 1-10 across the entire server.
• If you add a player to your ignore list, you will no longer receive trade or party invites from them.
• Improved certain auditing systems for the security of all citizens of Edenburg.
• Fixed a bug where only newly created characters were attempting to save data before the client was prepared to do so.
Change to treasure chest rooms to discourage dungeon spam runs for chests
• Treasure chests can no longer border the entry room, but you have a higher chance of finding chests deeper in a dungeon. This will discourage map spamming for chests and incentivize longer dungeon runs.
Dungeon chat toggle, stagger fixed, improved party invites, improved net code
• There is now a toggle setting to control whether you see town chat while in a dungeon.
• Improved the server-side counting of players to determine assignment to town channels. This is not really a visible feature for players, but you may notice improved automatic town channel assignments.
• New server-side settings may improve connection stability for players using a proxy/vm.
• Improved socket handling when closing the game.
• When someone is already in a party or rejects your party invite, your party leader will be able to issue more invites.
• Fixed a bug with stagger. It works correctly, now.
• Greatly improved the efficiency of the socket keep-alive logic.
• Improved the disconnect issue. It should be much less of an issue, now. Let me know if I'm wrong again.
• Fixed a bug that made scrolls appear twice at the apothecary. 🙄
• Average ping indicator is now more accurate. 🤣
Improvements to the server disconnect issues and minor fixes.
• Improved the disconnect issue. It should be much less of an issue, now. Let me know if I'm wrong again.
• Fixed a bug that made scrolls appear twice at the apothecary. 🙄
• Average ping indicator is now more accurate. 🤣
247: Early Access 0.12.84 - July 28, 2022 9:15 AM EST
• Made some adjustments to prevent disconnects.
• The disconnection screen is now localized.
All potion types now available + continued server improvements!
• Continued focus on server-side adjustments to iron out existing issues login queues (darkness screen of doom at peak hours).
• Mobs now reduce the effectiveness of your armor as they level. This will be more noticeable in future difficulties (nightmare and hell).
• Unidentified items no longer indicate their required level.
• All potion levels are now available at the apothecary if your level is high enough.
All Shards Re-Merged (AGAIN). 🤞 Plus Bug Fixes.
• Invested a ton of time and energy upgrading the server architecture to support one large online world. This is attempt #2 to get rid of sharding.
• Fixed a bug that was preventing add elemental damage and passive skills from properly rolling on rare items.
• You can no longer trade while in combat. This just seemed annoying and pointless to me. You can still trade in town, empty rooms, or in dungeon hallways.
• Removed Prowl's (ROG) movement debuff (hehe).
• Condemnation (CLR) now staggers its targets as intended.
• You can now identify equipped items in the rare case where your equipment somehow becomes unidentified. This is very rare and it's not the right solution, but it does enable the player to fix their bugged state.
• Improved session handling to prevent bugs that make it appear like you logged out.
• Updated Japanese localization!
• The average ping indicator now indicates your average ping over the last minute. Previously, it averaged across a longer period of time. A minute is probably a better range of time.
• A mechanism is now in place to prevent mass spamming of party invites. This will help prevent party bugs and persuade party leaders to be more selective with their invites. Note that their party lockout is quite brief, so it is not a big deal. The idea is to prevent a party of four from inviting ten people. Instead, just find one person that actually wants to join.
• Probably fixed the combat music not playing in a hallway battle bug.
Added a fifth shard and fixed the broken trade overlay blocking the UI.
• Added a fifth shard because the traffic looks legitimately insane today.
• Fixed closing of the trade window. The overlay was not removing itself. Woops! Sorry! 😭
Context guild invites, fixed trade screen lock bug, party size bug fix
• Added the ability to guild invite from the chat presence context menu.
• Resolved an issue where your screen would lock out after a trade in certain cases.
• Improved checks to ensure that parties never exceed five members.
• You can now see text selection on player names in the chat log. This makes it easier to double-click names and paste them if you need to do that for invites, ignores or whatever. Some names are hard to spell.
• Enabled & improved the text selection in the combat log and patch notes. This makes it easier to share output.
• Updated the Japanese localization.