Good evening community, it’s time to announce the next patch date. Push A.00.02.37 will be deployed, and the server brought down on 02/15/2020 Saturday at 10:00 AM EST (3:00 PM BST). We’ll make sure to update you when it is back online. A.00.02.39 Feedback and Updates:
As always we’d like to extend our thanks to all who have taken the time to test and provide feedback. Your continued support allows us to continue to improve The Repopulation with each patch. Below you will find a brief outline of changes/updates for the coming patch.
Knowledge Questions updated for the Island. Waypoint access updated. NPC Inquiry Knowledge updated for the Island.
Item System Updates:
Cleanup of Item scripts Additional fixes to item backend (odd, very old revert) Fixed item display and conflict Final cleanup for current update/prep work for next update
Area Updates:
Double doors have been added to their corresponding buildings in multiple areas. Terrain adjusted for a smoother transition Fixed seams between heightmap nodes
Asset Optimizations:
Trees: Now all single trees are under 1k, all grouped trees are under 2k Flora: all flora is now under .75k, all grouped are under 1.2k Shaders: Cleaned up shader files, fixed math conflicts/bad math.
Player Feedback and Changes:
Thanks to the players and testers for all of their feedback and discussions. This has helped us a lot with the Stress Test of the island and to isolate most (but not all) of the errors and issues that have plagued The Repopulation.
Optimizing the art and trees is to help lower the overhead to give a little boost in loading time. As we work through the issues, the higher res assets will be brought back in. This includes buildings, flora, trees, geological art and other environment art and clutter.
Because of this feedback and player interactions we have much work ahead of us, and look forward to the upcoming update. There will be a lot more to test as some of the changes may seem drastic.
Don’t worry, we are still keeping to the same basic style and layout. We hope that this will help with some of the remaining issues and help alleviate some of the crashing associated with area 02 (RIN District).
Upcoming Changes:
Players can expect the patch following this one to focus on terrain/area optimizations as well as continued work towards the new item system. Testers can expect changes to the Island terrain which will address:
Crashing to desktop related to area strt_02 (RIN District) Terrain/area adjustments may provide us with a temporary resolution. We’ll continue to monitor for persisting issues and track them down. Continued Error Cleanup Continue to address outstanding script errors for cleanup. Old HJ character reference errors still present (character_sample.dat) Old HJ Animation reference still present (PxVolume) Old NpScene.cpp errors from old art (location and removal or update) Old Redefinition errors for 12 skills/abilities (grid_glow_xxx) Additional misc errors that add to the overhead Continued work on Item and Container systems. Breaking and recreation of the current Item system Creating and Testing Migration of item association Begin to work on character items and association with new changes/system
As always we continue to look forward to your constructive feedback so we can continue to improve The Repopulation and bring the original vision to life. We hope you’ll continue to follow our progress, and test alongside us.
Thank you again for all the testing, and tickets. Your feedback is valuable to us during our development phases.
Game update A.00.02.36
It is Game Update time! We are happy to say that we are releasing a small update that includes a few performance boosts to the mainland, a small one to the Island and a bit more detail added to the world.
It is the year of the Rat. The rat symbolizes overcoming disasters and troubles. It is good for future development and prosperity and seeing the completion of projects or tasks. It is a time that begins with the past years difficulties and overcoming the to a more relaxed, peaceful and completed year. This is perfect for The Repopulation! Lets hope there is some truth when it comes to the Zodiac.
This update focuses on additional bug fixes for the last update as well as to some of the core systems. Though these fixes may not all be directly seen by the players it does help fix some of the conflicts and prepares us for the next state of development for the next quarter.
In an upcoming update after we have cleared the next set of current tasks for performance and optimizations we will be adding in a new panel to the UI for players. This panel will display the Repository Requests. In other words, it will expose/display what is loading or updating.
This will help new players see something other than black screen or long loading screen with nothing on it and help some of that confusion.
We will also be adding an optional panel that players can turn on that will display the same information while in game. This will help you see what is loading and when. So when you see those hitches in the game right now, you can view what is loading. It will also help you (and us) see what assets or files take too long to load, get stuck or a possible cause to crashing.
We will release more information on this once we are finished building this into the player client and GUI.
Island Performance:
We want to thank everyone that has submitted bug reports and feedback, from our great testers to the production players. All of that information has been most valuable, especially in the area of style and performance.
With your help we have been able to confirm a few of the old bugs and help narrow down additional issues that came from the mainland into the Island test. With this we should see a large improvement in the crashing, and should be mostly related only to area strt_02, with some possibly remaining in strt_04. However, the rest of the island areas should be much more stable. Work is continuing on the Island and the systems involved, and with the continued testing and work behind the scenes we will get our island working nicely.
Crashing: A lot of the focus has been on tracking down areas that are still causing an overload of the memCache that builds up and can cause the crashing to desktop on both the HeroBlade and the game client. We have optimized several aspects of the Island with a lot more to go.
Optimizations: The primary focus on optimizations was to bring file size down. Because of the replication issues, we have had to focus on file size of assets and game nodes. This includes redoing a few assets to the creation of LOD’s.
Primary areas of work for visual and server communication optimizations are (but not limited to):
Terrain heightmap node file size
SpeedTree file size
Updated (additional) Speed Tree LOD’s
LOD Creation for architectural assets
Removed Dynamic Occlusion culling from assets (due to changes in the HeroEngines core scripts)
Addition of static occlusion culling walls in the 6 areas.
Scripts, Systems and Missions:
Optimizations and the fixes behind the scenes range from item and skill systems to the Mission and dialogue.
Scripting Systems: We have been focused on building the base for the new Iten system. Several fixes have also come in to help with things like stacking, visible representation to counts, and more. The new changes now and coming up will improve performance by removing some of the extra overhead (clent and server alike) and move us into the container system revamp.
Missions and Dialogue: Thanks to the great feedback we were able to make additional adjustments to the old dialogue and missions to help fit the island a bit more.
We want to remind all players that once we have the core systems recreated and new tools, like the Mission/Dialogue system, we will be revamping the Missions on the island.
With your feedback using the old missions, we have been able to develop and tweak/adjust the direction to flow a bit better with the huge change to the starting area. This will give you in turn a more cohesive and natural flow of the Island Missions, introducing players to the game and allow players to pick their own path. The goal is to have a more sandbox (or sandpark) aspect as the game was promised and should have.
Forward development:
All changes and new development work has been done with the purpose of “forward development”. This means that as we update or create new, we are working towards the point for when we can update the Repoulations engine version to a more recent and not have to rely on the 2013/14 version with several years of changes made to the core files.
Once we are able to update the engine, it will revert all core files back to default. The changes we are putting in now helps both current game build as well as allowing us to develop on top of clean scripts and make the correct changes without having to search for bandaids.
This does mean we will have a lot of work ahead of us, but it will also allow us to make more frequent game updates once that phase of development is completed. We will announce when we begin this phase. Before we begin this next big step, we want to make sure we have as much fixed and ready for this massive change as possible. Hence the forward facing development method.
Happy New Year community, it’s patch day! Here’s to starting the New Year off on a new and exciting note, or Island in this case!
A.00.02.29 PATCH TIME:
Servers are going down at 10:00 AM EST (3:00 PM BST) for the A.00.02.29 Island patch and update. The estimated downtime is 6 hours. We will announce on the forum when servers are back up in the thread at the bottom of this article. This update is to release Terra Corp Island. This new island will be our testbed for changes and new features, as well as a stress test. This serves as a good ground for developers and players/testers to work together towards the world revamp that is planned for The Repopulation.
You can navigate to our patch notes via the link below: Patch Notes
READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE: https://therepopulation.com/news/updates/december-holiday-patch
Holiday Update and Patch!
Happy holidays! Merry Christmas, Yuletide Greetings, Happy Hanukkah, Joyous Kwanzaa, Joyeux Noël, and a Happy New Year!
A.0.02.29 ALPHA GAME UPDATE
We are very excited to send out the Announcement of the patch A.00.02.29.. This is the first phase of the new island and the very most basics of our content that will be coming to the game throughout the year.
Patch details:
November Update: Update News
READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE: https://therepopulation.com/news/updates/november-update-update-news
Good morning Rhyldan community, our team would like to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving, and a festive start to the holiday season. To start the season of giving off properly we wanted to bring you another early update. We'll resume a normal scheduled update schedule after the new year. Today's update article is one we've all been highly anticipating. It's time to give some information about our next scheduled patch!
Progress and changes
Over the course of the past several months, our focus has been to design and execute a suitable base from which to build the newest version of The Repopulations Tutorial area. These areas play a fundamental role in helping us progress toward the World Revamp.
Current Issues
As with any project, there are ups and downs in the development process. Some of which we have had a continuous battle with since island production began. Rather than ask you to wait while we wrestle with these issues seeking perfection we have opted to move forward. What you’ll experience will not be a polished and perfected area, but rather an ongoing cycle of development.
Upcoming Update
This update is pretty large. Though it may not seem so visually, we have done a lot of work
October Update: Halloween Progress Report
Good morning community, Happy Halloween, Dia de Los Muertos, and Diwali! The majority of this month's updates are of the technical variety. We are going to focus on a few things from Server work completed to the new artwork for the island. Let’s jump in!
Good morning community! We hope your Friday the 13th is a safe one. While late updates can feel a bit frightening this update is less than spooky. We are happy to report on a major internal update which was completed on the 7th of September.
This month’s update is primarily a technical one that will entail our collective work on the backend over the last two months. We’ll also explain the server merges and the server updates we mentioned in previous posts. We have improved the development workflow which in turn provided us with a performance boost for the Development and Production servers.
Server merge and upgrades: Our engineers have been diligently working to help us get the server transfers established for migration and implementation. Originally The Repopulation was spread across multiple servers and clusters. We now have the development server onto the same cluster as Test, Staging and Production (live). This means that though there is a clear separation between the different worlds they are now on the same server cluster.
Good afternoon community! We’d like to start by apologizing for running a little behind on our update post this month. Work to clone Sarrene continues in hopes of building a super army of developers fueled by coffee. Should we succeed the game will be done three days later. Joking aside let’s get this update off to a roaring start and jump into today’s topic.
We’ll be covering planned changes for vehicles and mounts. With the world rebuild, and terrain changes ahead of us we wanted to address how players will navigate their new landscape. As always the process had to be considered from several angles.
This revamp will allow us to update the existing system while adding new features. These changes are still in the design phase and subject to change. We look forward to your feedback as we progress. During this revamp we will be recreating both the mechanical and creature models.
This post covers:
Mechanical vehicles
Creature Mounts
Display of your Vehicle and Mounts
Vehicles and Mounts using the Dynamic System
Location Use
Limited Inventory System for Vehicles and Mounts
Health, Durability, and Condition
Read the full article here: https://therepopulation.com/news/updates/july-update-vehicles-and-mounts
May Update: Let’s Talk Crafting
READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE: https://therepopulation.com/news/updates/may-update-lets-talk-crafting
Good day community! We hope your Friday is off to a good start, and that today’s update is a positive addition to your day. Earlier in May, we released a brief update which included news of an issue with our main office and crafting. This update will launch from those topics.
The watery woes of our office endeavor have been resolved, and Sarrene has returned to her office. It will still be a short time before all of the damaged equipment is up and running again.
However, this hasn’t stopped the team from continuing work. As mentioned in the previous update work on the crafting system design has been ongoing. Work on other supporting systems has continued as well.
One of our community members recently gave feedback on a few key topics that we thought we might elaborate on slightly today that cover a combination of systems. Our team would like to thank them and the community for all the feedback they provide. So this months update will focus on The Repopulations crafting and related systems. The crafting image is from 2013. We used that as an example because we want to get back to the original vision of The Repopulation's in depth crafting without the bloated confusion for new players.
RISK, REWARD, AND COMMUNITY
These three topics will be briefly covered via different supporting topics below. Our goal with the revamp of systems including crafting is to build a community. Being a sandbox game should give players a multitude of options when planning gameplay. Which means a cookie cutter crafting system will not work for this goal. Players need the ability to be flexible and gain the knowledge and skills that best support their goal. To ensure this we’ve addressed such issues as:
CRAFTING RECIPE CATEGORIES
We will be changing the definition of what Blueprints and Recipe mean in-game. With the new crafting system “recipes” will be organized in three categories for easier organization, searching, and sorting. These three categories are terms for recipes that will be saved into your crafting journal.
CRAFTING MECHANICS: MACHINES AND TOOLS
Currently, The Repopulation utilizes a single type of crafting machine. In an attempt to create more versatility and room for the players, we have elected to create additional crafting machine types and tools. This will work in favor of:
ABILITIES & SYSTEM CHANGES
With the revamp of systems comes the task of balancing, and ensuring they work well with each other. This means considering how inventory is affected by items, and how those items affect harvesting. How does harvesting affect farming, and hydroponics? How do those, in turn, affect nutrition/buffs and recipes? How do those buffs affect the player and so on and so forth? Which is why you’ve probably noticed so many different topics and systems seem to be mentioned in parallel with each other.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE: https://therepopulation.com/news/updates/may-update-lets-talk-crafting
April - May Update: Water Water Everywhere
April - May Update: Water Water Everywhere
READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE: https://therepopulation.com/news/updates/april-may-update-water-water-everywhere
Good Sunday! We want to apologize for the late update. As many of you know we had a bit of an incident at the office. A water main for the fire suppression system went, and sadly, it rained down on half the office.
Though it is late and not quite what we had planned, here is the update for April's updates, changes and what is to come. In this update we will be covering current updates and fixes, container and inventory system, LOD's and their benefits, more art development, basic crafting system redesign, updating ability system documentation, and more.
Water Water Everywhere!:
Several of our PCs including mine were damaged and currently waiting on insurance to get back with us for the repairs. At this time, I am the only one really affected by the water damage and has any real downtime. They had put four industrial fans throughout the office to try to help dry things out.
The good news is with the Repop team being remote this has not affected their work in any way for Repop design, testing, and development.
Container System and Inventor
Inventory is a popular discussion, due in part to its lack of availability in its current state in-game. We have been going over several options and designs to find the perfect type of inventory, as well as a more optimized approach for the entire container system.
Artwork
Despite the setback of some of the artwork being on hold till the office and such is put back together, we have accomplished a lot over the last month. The LOD’s for the new village adobe buildings are finished, as well as the first run for the Nation Embassies.
LOD'S Galore!
One of the first things that I noticed was that Repop did not have much art that included LODs. Levels of Detail, or LODs, are used for optimizing an entire game scene.
In our case, it is used for multiple areas that are connected and helps to keep the total number of polygons and vertices down at distance. This improves performance by limiting the amount that needs to be loaded by the game as you move around the world. For those interested, here is some more detailed information...
Current and upcoming work
Skills
Recently we've set our sights on prepping for the revamp of the Ability system. This includes documenting the existing system, and abilities. During this process, we realized there are many abilities that exist as duplications in the back end. After reviewing the documentation we began refining the information in order to begin planning basic ability changes.
Crafting
First, we want to thank everyone that has helped with feedback, input, bug reports and suggestions regarding crafting. Much thanks to both the old and new players. Your feedback has played an integral part in the redesign to keep the spirit of The Repopulation crafting alive.
We'd like to share with you a very brief and basic overview of some of the coming changes. We hope you enjoy the small teaser and look forward to your input. This is one of our more labor-intensive systems to revamp.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE: https://therepopulation.com/news/updates/april-may-update-water-water-everywhere
