Secondhand Lands
Patch on Jan 6th
* Fixed up all chalices on quest giving NPCs.
* Fixed up Indie's cloud of doom.
* Fixed market display of items posted
- Tokens now have a label.
- Tokens are the tokens instead of the gold value.
* FYI, badges of victory are only awarded when you turn in a resource collection. It's always been this way.
I'm trying to track down a client crasher, but my attempts to even reproduce it have been unsuccessful. I'm working with Steam to try to get any minidumps. There won't be any updates until the appearance customization changes have been implemented. Exceptions will be made for newly discovered problems.
Patch later today
- Water reflection and refraction are now correct.
- Non-collidables are a little more advanced.
* You might notice some new meshes in the game. More will appear too.
Just realize that 2hl was developed ten years ago when fixed pipeline and 1.1 shader cards were common. In order to update the shaders to either 2.0 or 3.0 shaders, a lot of changes had to be made. I mostly had to rip out a lot of horrible code to get around the limitations of older hardware. I'm hoping that we can update to a modern version of DirectX and implement deferred shading later. The biggest limitation is my free time.
The next major release will feature updated appearance customization. Instead of two colors per character, we will have four colors per character texture. Since each character mesh typically has two textures, this means the makeup kits will allow the player to choose between eight tinting colors. Also, the system will allow players to choose a base texture, a pattern texture, and other textures that control specular and emmisive attributes per textual. Overall, this is a big upgrade and will take a lot of time.
Patch: Wednesday, November 11th, 2018
- Occlusion queries have been removed.
- The engine paints the z-buffer first and then runs the shaders normally.
- Water reflection and refraction both use the same method.
- Although it sounds bad to run the render pipe twice, the z-pass is fast, and we only render the necessary pixels.
* A super embarrassing bug was removed where all the skinned meshes were rendered twice.
The next patch is going to be centered on fixing a rendering error for the AMD Radeon r9 200 series. I had to buy one of these and setup a computer just to be able to reproduce this problem.
After this next patch is done, I'll be working on a huge patch centering upon appearance customization.
Patch: Friday, October 26 around 7pm (Central time zone)
- They use the diffuse lighting in a more correct and realistic way.
- Some non-collidables have specular and emissive lighting.
- They look more purdy(sic).
* All particle effects on skinned meshes were broken, but that got fixed.
* The Wolf's hell hound ability looks much better.
* The Sheep's static ability looks even more awesome than hell hound just because.
* The sheep's eyes stay white and don't tint. The eyebrows now tintable though.
* The appearance of the smelter in the Mother Goose village has been fixed. The metals parts are shiny too.
* The gem polisher's metal parts are now shiny too.
* Each map can now have independent ambient light settings.
- The main world is set to almost 50% light even at night.
- The rabbit hole is a dark dark place.
* The next update will concentrate on increasing rendering efficiency.
Patch Thursday October 18th
* The evil crystal that was crashing clients in the Lord Sittish area has been fixed.
* A lot of static meshes such as houses had some corrupted normal vectors. They look much nicer.
* The weather vanes now are shiny.
* Fixed a movement bug where critters retreated too early.
* I have temporarily disabled terrain navigation in the main world, so critter might walk through walls and trees more often.
This will be done around 6pm (ish) Central Time.
More Rabbit Hole Fine Tuning
* Sheep skins are only usable by wolves.
* Halos are now emissive and shiny in sunlight and point lights.
* The Drainer is now a light source when it blinks on.
* The Teleporter is now a flickery light source.
* There are now fewer minions per lair, but they are stronger. (less lag)
* A vendor in Nod now sells reveal maps, but he charges you extra!
* There are now three reveal map vendors in the rabbit hole, two horn vendors, and still only one sheep skin vendor.
* Lair Health has been decreased for gameplay enjoyment.
* Equipped Sheep Skins will emit a sheep sound if used. The final effect polishes the sheep appearance and fools even the most skeptical sheep.
* The fiery thorns of the Fire Weed now are totally static.
* If you destroy a lair too fast for the boss to spawn, it'll spawn anyways now. (more chances for loot)
* Dandelions go crazy and run around. (Still looking into this one.)
* Combat monkey experience gain has been tripled. No one asked for this, but why not.
* Group teleports work within the rabbit hole, AND you can even pull a player to or from the rabbit hole. (insert funny joke here)
* Finally, the largest feature was the rewriting of the static object shader code to include far more point light sources per object. Previously, you could have about four. For 2.0 shaders it's still four, but for 3.0 shaders, you can have twenty.
* We now have a discord server is called "Secondhand Lands - Official Discord" and is administered by DaGras.
* The Rabbit Hole is still NOT live, but we will be having a player run through. The Discord server seems to be where the players plot their next invasion.
Quickie Stealth Patch tonight
I also, added a few more point lights to the Mother Goose village and other places as well. As time goes on, I'll probably pepper the game with them. :)
Patch Coming Friday August, 23rd at 8pm Central Time
* In order to bring you a hyper-realistic player experience,(sarcasm) the shake effect will now use the terrain height under the water drops instead of the player's terrain height. Get wet on a hillside, and shake. You can see the difference.
* Several effects didn't alway preserve attributes upon serialization. This resulted in effects looking not so good. They look better now.
* A client crash from using tool tips in a collection album has been fixed.
* The error message when the server is down is a bit better, but I need to spend more time on it.
* Certain instances now serialize the world map and send it to the client. Maps are important if you're in a dark rabbit hole.
* Some vendors may choose to limit the number of items they sell to a player. Previously, the limit was always 100.
* Certain instances will "slow reveal" the world map to you as you explore the area. (Rabbit Hole)
* The server does a better job of tracking an entity with multiple stuns.
* If your client crashes in a player instance or rabbit hole, the server records your last location and instance. So, if you log back into the game, AND the instance you were last in is still around, the server will offer to teleport you back.
* I made an attempt to smooth the terrain around the Mother Goose village a bit.
* New gems, patterns, schematics, items, and recipes are included in this patch. I won't elaborate.
* If you leave the rabbit hole, and come back, the revealed portion of your world map should be preserved. Going into other instances in between such as a player instance will invalidate this.
* Several server and client optimizations were done, but they're too boring to specifically identify.
* The player's personal light has been dimmed.
* Ambient lighting in the world has been darkened.
* Some lighting problems with point lights and normals were fixed.
Quick Patch Today around 7pm Central Time
* Two client crashes were fixed.
Downtime January 27th, Between 2pm - 6pm Central Time
Also, I'll be adding a lot of tracing changes to track down some Steam features such as Accomplishments and Microtransactions. I'm puzzled because my test server seems to be performing just fine.
There won't be any client changes, and no significant user visible bugs.