3 new items have been added to the loot table! The Chest Armor is Legendary, while the gloves and quiver are Epic in rarity. These items provide some more unique abilities including a defensive barrier to help protect yourself against some of the more recent enemy additions.
Death System Adjustments
Until fairly recently, player death was a rare occurrence. Due to this, the system was not given too much thought as to mechanics and consequences. This update will be the first step in addressing the issue. Many games have a standard "respawn timer" which is the primary punishment for player death. I feel that the inability to take actions is not a particularly fun or interesting consequence, so the respawn timer is being reduced from 8 seconds to 3 seconds, just enough time to see that you're dead and to get some audio-visual cues about respawning.
To replace the timer consequence, a gate damage system has been implemented. At time of respawn, the gate will take damage (effectively you draw from the gate's power to be restored). This solves two issues. The first, and more inconsequential one is that it still makes death meaningful with the reduced respawn timer. The second, and much more important one, is to train players about this system before they have encountered Event Tiles.
Without this system, to lose an event tile would either require a new mechanic to keep track of, or require the enemy/puzzle to damage the gate instead of players as their main source of combat. By implementing a global system that does damage to a gate when a player dies, it effectively creates a life counter for the events, and bosses can focus their energy on killing players as the primary method of attack, leading to more interesting encounters.
The damage numbers are not final, and will likely be tweaked over the next few weeks to end up with a fair value.
Other Changes and Fixes
Fixed issue where multiplayer map layout could be out of sync
Fixed score duplicates on leaderboards
Added new death visual and audio effects
Improved game UI performance
Added floating combat text for enemy immunity to certain abilities
Fixed corner gate rock pathing
Fixed issue causing rare environment changes
graphictest branch depricated for default branch, new performanceboost branch created for improved performance at risk of crash on launch.
Still working on the updated Armory inventory selection system, creating an infinite scrolling wheel turned out to be more difficult than I anticipated.
Patch 0.42.87
New Armory
Loot in Adventure/RPG games is extremely important. It lets you see your progress at a glance as you continue to play, it gives you additional ways to tackle challenges with new abilities, it lets you to show off in multiplayer, and it gives you a sense of accomplishment when you look upon your spoils after a hard fought victory.
Currently, QuiVr's inventory management and collection systems don't do justice to this important aspect of the game. The existing mannequin can only show a single item of each type at a time, is unscalable for many items (having to switch items one at a time doesn't work if you have 20+ masks), and give you no sense of your collection progression.
This update brings the first part of a 3-Phase change to the inventory management/collection system to QuiVr.
The equipment station has been changed from a lone mannequin sitting in the middle of the courtyard to a dedicated Armory building. This serves two purposes. The first is to create a dedicated space to see and interact with your equipment. And the second is for performance. By creating a dedicated and separate space for the Armory, we can turn everything off when you are outside, and turn the outside off when you are inside the building, giving us a huge performance budget to work with (which we are going to use!).
Each player's armory is their own. It will start out bare, only showing a few small props and the items you start out with. As you continue playing and earning gear, the Armory will begin to fill up to match your inventory.
Each piece of gear that you earn will be displayed within the room, as well as other props and decorations when you reach certain thresholds. In multiplayer, multiple people can be in the Armory at the same time, but you will always see your own items and progress displayed within.
The other two phases are updating the item selection system (away from hitting arrows on UI around a mannequin) and how items are actually earned and presented to the player (which will be changed with the Event Tiles).
Other Changes/Fixes
Fixed first time user gloves not working in tutorial
Fixed teleporter placement in a few tiles intersecting rocks
Fixed rock mesh colliders not matching visual
Fixed end-of-game teleporters not working
Fixed Game Progress orb disappearing on specific tiles
Fixed spectator view going underground
Please don't shoot the owl.
[0.42.82] - New Tutorial System!
New Tutorial System
Aryleth has returned to the Summit and brings with him new knowledge of the areas within! His arrival has also caused some spatial anomalies, and the summit's layout has been altered to make navigation and his teachings more accessible.
Most locations within the Summit now have a "Help Potion" that will summon Aryleth over to give a quick overview of the area. The tutorials are completely optional and can be canceled at any time by using the potion again.
Those locations that do not currently have a tutorial are either going to be change significantly in the future (such as the item selection system) or have not been set up yet (such as the table to be used for PvP related activities).
There is also a single, longer-form tutorial started using the Help Potion at the central pool which will give you an overview of the core game systems including using your bow, teleporters, wrist panel, and aimed shots.
This tutorial is still optional, as a few banners have been added to the general environment (and more will be added in the future) that give pictographic representations of the most basic mechanics (shooting and teleporting)
The tutorials are now also context aware, capable of giving you information based on what VR system you are currently using!
Because of the new tutorial, we've put QuiVr on Sale for the next week to get new players into the game and hopefully giving feedback on the tutorials (from a first-time QuiVr player perspective) in either the forums here on Steam or on the Official QuiVr Discord!
Other Changes and Fixes
Fixed abilities not affecting enemies
Fixed leftover enemies when joining multiplayer game
Fixed enemy collision not triggering player death
Added more Halloween festivities
Removed Tile-Reroll Die due to bugs
Added cooldown reset button at Summit target range
Fixed Reforge station quiver orbs not despawning
Added Reforge station item descriptions on mannequin
Patch 0.42.73
Engine Upgrade
This week's update has a significant engine upgrade from Unity 2017.1 to Unity 2017.2. There are lots of bug/crash fixes, improvements, and new platforms supported (like Microsoft MR Headsets), as well as one massive new feature that we will be working on supporting: Single Pass Stereo Instanced Rendering.
While SPSIR is quite a mouthful and a pretty awful acronym, the performance improvements that it can provide are no joke. Not only improved GPU performance, but up to 50% CPU rendering performance improvement. It is not currently enabled in the game yet, as no post effects (bloom, black & white filter, etc) work with it, however we're actively working on the functionality and hope to bring some incredible performance improvements to everyone very soon!
As with all engine upgrades, there is a chance that some features that worked perfectly fine before are now broken. It's impossible to test them all, so please be sure to report any issues either in the discussion forums here on Steam or in the QuiVr Discord!
PvP Progress
The Player vs Player features have sat a bit by the wayside recently due to some issues with the matchmaking system. However, we brought in some web development talent to overhaul the system, resulting in a much more robust and extendable matchmaking system that will be able to handle group queuing, 1v1, 2v2, and even possibly 4v4 matches.
The PvP map has also been brought into the main scene (though disabled when not in use) so that no loading screens will be required when switching from a normal game to PvP and back. The intent is to have a single scene for all actions in the game, eliminating all loading screens except the initial one at the start of the game!
Other News
We have a number of other features and aspects under development including:
Microsoft MR Headset support
New custom composed music
Art assets for Event Tiles
Updated tutorials
We'll have more information to share about all these topics soon, but it's good to let everyone know what to be expecting over the next few week!
Patch 0.42.65
New Enemy
Another new enemy has joined the fight, this one tests a few new mechanics that will be used in the upcoming event tiles. It is one of the more agressive enemies so keey your eyes and ears peeled lest you get caught off guard!
Enemy Navigation
Previously, ground enemies have followed a fairly direct path toward their destination. The paths are created by hand per-tile and then combined procedurally as the tiles are added together.
However, even with numerous path options, the enemies are very easy to anticipate and can eventually lead to a feeling of 'shooting fish in a barrel'. To fix this, the path following system has been adjusted.
Enemies still follow the exact same path contour, however for each enemy the path has been shifted a small amount. In cases where shifting would cause the path to move into a rock or other obstacle at a particular point, the original path point is used, leading to a more diverse and organic feel to enemy movement.
The system still has a few quirks which are being worked on, but the new system brings a lot more variation with zero performance overhead and should give some more replayability when you don't know exactly where an enemy will move.
Updated Music
This update introduces a new music system to replace the layered, but unvarried combat music with a new environment based music system.
The actual music choices themselves are going to be changed in the future, but the new system of fading between and changing music based on the tile environment you're currently in has been implemented for testing.
Other Changes/Fixes
Updated to Unity 2017.1.1p4 for bug/crash fixes
Fixed some issue with saving reforged items
Fixed issue when getting duplicate gloves saving worse item
Fixed issue with knuckles controllers being incorrectly detected
Adjusted Baron fireball cast time
Reduced Escort shield channel duration
Update 0.42.68 Mid-Week Update due to errors:
Fixed duplicate items saving worse value
Fixed enemy player targeting system
Fixed multiplayer ground enemies not moving
Patch 0.42.56
New Enemies
This week's patch has been in the works for quite a while. From concept, to modeling and animation, to system design, to testing. These enemies started development months ago and are now ready to be released for public testing. I'll be taking note of feedback on difficulty tuning, issues, and suggestions for improvements, but I'm quite happy with our new cast of creatures and I hope you will be as well.
The theme of these new enemies is Range. Previously, enemies affected the game only once they reached the gate, providing a simplistic targeting order of "shoot the enemy closest to the gate". These new enemies provide a new challenge and reason to pick your targets more carefully and make you move around the canyon more frequently.
Escorts
Escorts are defensive enemies that stop periodically during their march to the gate, setting up a defensive spell that shields enemies within a wide range, including themselves.
Escorts are vulnerable while moving, but allowing them to reach the gate and shield attacking enemies can prove disastrous.
Barons
Barons are enemies forged from fire. They move toward the gate but stop well before reaching it and summon fireballs to throw at the gate (and if annoyed, you).
While summoning a fireball, Barons create a fiery shield that arrows cannot pierce, so you will have to find another way to deal with their onslaught. Additionally, due to their molten interior they are immune to both fire and freeze effects.
Tyrants
Tyrants are forces of pure destruction. While rare, they are much smarter than most of their companions, preferring to attack players instead of gates. They can emit a powerful beam of energy that rakes across the canyon to attack players, though they don't much care what gets in their way.
Their thick armor is nearly impenetrable, so it is wise to avoid attacks instead of launching an offensive on them.
Other changes and Fixes
<*> Updated to Unity 2017.1.1p3 for crash fixed and performance improvements
<*> Updated Home Base flags with more clear iconography
<*> Changed starting pool to be more intuitive to use
<*> Various bug/error fixes
I hope you enjoy these new enemies and improvements and I want to thank everyone who helped beta test them over the past few weeks.
If you would like to be more involved with testing and getting the latest QuiVr news and info (updates are made every day to the beta branch), consider joining us on the QuiVr Discord!
Patch 0.42.48
New Home Base
This patch introduces the first phase of the new home area. It will be replacing the watchtower and is meant to provide a less claustrophobic, and more versatile area to stage your defense of the Spirit Anchor.
The first change to the new staging area is spreading out the different mechanics to their own areas. Instead of being bombarded with many different items with complex interactions all around you, each station in the new home area has a particular purpose. You can go to the Reforging station to re-roll your items for better stats, or you can go to the Armory to change your current equipment.
For this first phase, we have simply moved all of the existing mechanics out of the watchtower and into this new area. For the next phase we will be improving on these mechanics so that each station feels unique and useful by itself without the previous space limitations of the watchtower (For instance a scrolling shelf full of items to chose from and place on the mannequin instead of switching through items with flat UI)
New Home Features
As we continue we will also be expanding the home area to include new areas and features. For example the new target practice range has a number of targets that can show you your damage output using various abilities if Combat Text is turned on in the Interface settings.
The new home area has a lot of room for growth as the game evolves, so don't forget to take a look around once in a while for new areas!
Scene Merging
In addition to the new and existing features being included in the new home base, the Target Range scene is being merged in to provide a single access point to all features without a loading screen. Not only will this give you more to do while waiting for friends to test out a new item or reforge their gear, but it will also let you play against each other in the Archery mini-game.
The tutorial will also eventually be merged into the base so that everything in the game can be easily accessed from a single place.
Bow Power Curve Adjustment
A few players have raised concerns about the accuracy of the bow draw-to-power ratio. Previously we used a logarithmic curve to give new players and those with different arm lengths a similar experience. However with the addition of more bow adjustment options and a few other tweaks, it is now more reasonable to use a much more realistic curve to model the bow strength.
This is the actual bow power-to-pull curve for a recurve bow, and here is our new curve (with the old curve for comparison). Hopefully this will improve the experience for those of you who are used to shooting bows outside of VR and will give everyone a more authentic archery experience.
Patch 0.42.33
User Account Improvements
User accounts are an incredibly important part of any game that has item permanence. Previously there have been two major issues that (rarely) could affect players negatively with items and accounts.
Local user file corruption
Inventory/Resource resets
Both of these issues did have solutions, but they were both manual and required significant effort on both parties (player and developer) to resolve.
With this update, two new systems have been implemented to handle these issues.
The first is auto-repair for corrupted/expired local user files. This should be invisible to players and will simply remove and regenerate the local user file (using online copy) if an issue is detected. This will hopefully lead to fewer (hopefully 0) instances of needing to delete the Parse.settings file.
The second change is a modification to how item rewards work. Instead of pulling down, modifying and reuploading your inventory locally (which could pull down nothing, add one new item, and upload the blank inventory, overwriting the correct one on the server), item generation will happen both locally and on the server, and no inventory upload will ever be performed by the client. This way, even if your local machine fails to download the correct inventory at launch, it will not be able to update the server with that incorrect information.
Hopefully these changes will lead to fewer issues of losing items and reduce the severity of issues with connecting to the server.
Temporary Items
With this new item reward system, a new type of item is possible! By giving items to the player on the client only, and rewarding them on the server, temporary items (given for that play session) are possible.
To test this system, two new bows have been added to the game!
These bows will be a temporary award that will be given to players currently on the Single or Multiplayer Leaderboards and will only be available while the player remains on the board.
If this is successful and seems like a fun addition I will look at adding more temporary items, potentially even ones only to be used during a particular round of play.
Other Changes and Fixes
Updated engine to Unity 2017.1.1p2
Graphical improvements for some effects
Fixed navigation area performance and accuracy on many tiles
Added community buttons to menu that lead to QuiVr Discord
While this update is a bit light on content additions, I think the infrastructure changes will be extremely helpful, and there is a lot of content on the way!
Teaser:
Edit: New update to address issues saving new items, also preloading new content assets
Patch 0.42.0
Cave Environment
A new tile set has been added to the game this week - caves! This is a test of enclosed spaces, dynamic lighting adjustment, and some atmospheric effects which will hopefully lead to some more interesting and unique environment tile sets in the future!
The transition tiles from Snow/Highland environments to the caves were the biggest challenge as lighting information changes on a per-tile basis after teleporting, I think the results look quite promising.
Gate Healthbars
Thanks to some community brainstorming, a new gate healthbar system has been added that strikes a good balance between useful player information, unobtrusive UI, and thematic styling. These healthbars are also extremely lightweight in terms of performance using a sprite shader instead of dynamic UI slider adjustment.
Enemy Death Effects
Ragdoll physics are one of my favorite effects in games. They make each enemy kill a unique and rewarding experience. However not everyone's computer is capable of running the expensive physics simulation on many bodies at once, and not every enemy death needs the same treatment.
Therefore a new system has been put into place that allows enemy deaths to be quick and cheap for the computer. The effects will be used in a few different scenarios.
If the death occurred without player action (when a gate is closed)
If ragdolls are turned off in the settings menu
If there are too many other ragdolls in the scene already (> 10)
This will add a large performance boost for those without beefy CPUs, removes unnecessary overhead when certain actions in the game are taken, and puts a limit on the amount of CPU power the game can allocate just to ragdoll physics.
Other Additions and Fixes
Added contextual Leave Game button to menu
Scaled down gate energy requirements in 4-player games
Scatter Arrow should no longer trigger teleporters
Warp enemies color changed to match teleporting effect
Fixed issue with AoE effects not triggering when enemies entered
Fireballs are now cleared when a gate is closed
Fixed energy not being rewarded to non-host players in multiplayer
Edit: Graphicstest branch updated to 0.42.0 as well
Patch 0.41.5
Map Tile Optimizations
Most of this week's work has come in the form of map tile optimizations. Two systems have been implemented:
Rock Visible Sides
Rock Level Of Detail (LOD) models
The rock side system lets me quickly set the visible rock side via script so that only the part of the model that is facing into the canyon is used at all, reducing the amount of mesh data per tile by close to 50%.
Additionally, each major rock model now has two lower quality models (levels of detail) that are swapped in when the rock is far away to preserve quality up close but require less processing at a distance.
Enemy Hitbox Improvements
This update changes one of the enemy hitbox sets with a different style of collision detection to collect information about a more simplistic but less accurate setup.
The shielded enemy now uses 14 primitive colliders as opposed to the previous 25 colliders. This will improve performance and give you more leeway with collision detection (fewer false negatives) while potentially allowing for arrows that seem to float a few inches in the air when embedded in the enemy. We'll see how it feels with more player data.
Aimed Shot Changes
The previous implementation of Aimed Shots was a bit too complex to work with effectively, both for new and experienced players. It has now been changed to a simple aimed/not-aimed value that occurs after 2.5 seconds of charging.
In addition, this allows for a new mechanic type when particular objects are hit with an aimed shot. The first implementation of which is in the shielded enemies. They will now drop their shield if it is hit with an aimed shot.
Other Changes
Update to Unity 2017.1p5 for crash fixes
Fixed enemy footstep audio spatialization
Minimum gate HP after loosing set to 100
Energy requirements for progressing through gates reduced
