The Repopulation - 0.0.4.3 Build Notes
by J.C. Smith · 01/07/2009 (3:07 am) · 2 comments
No screenshots in this update. Just the build notes and details from today's Alpha patch:
0.0.4.3 Build Notes
--------------------------
This patch introduces the first wave of our revamped combat and skills system, brings many additions to the Military and Engagement system, revamps the boss mob system, improves AI, adds Voice Chat support, introduces the achievement and titles system, integrates zone events, adds in a new options menu, and completely redesigns Plymouth for good measure. In addition to this there is a lot of code cleanup and refactoring going on. Xerves has been a madman in this area recently, bringing some things up to the kit standards, improving some ugly bits of code, and fixing little problems that have existed for some time. Many changes have also been made to make things more easily adjustable at a later point. Previously many numbers which were hard coded are now represented as more easily adjusted baseline figures. This will allow for better balancing through the course of beta testing.
Our previous skills system had been built on top of the original MOM system, tweaking it as necessary to allow for skills management and give a reasonable approximation of balance in the process. This system did not scale very well though, and we had various pieces of code that weren't really necessary, either adding unnecessary complexity or throwing balance out of whack in certain cases. Xerves has developed a new formula for skills and a slew of new changes to make Combat more interesting and allow for more tactics, and easier balance modification. This patch introduces the first wave of changes, with the skills system being significantly overhauled.
The tick rate has been nearly doubled, from 6 ticks per second to 10 per second. This allows us to speed up the speed of combat and to make everything more responsive. Combat skills can now have skills based bonuses that work with diminishing returns. The generic Offense, Defense and Armor values have been replaced with Physical Absorption, Physical Absorption Percentage, Block Percentage, Dodge, Evasion, Parry, Counter, and Accuracy. Ranged offense is now determined by the weapon's accuracy and then adjusted by the character's skill levels. There are now five types of armor: Ultra Light, Light, Medium, Heavy, and Ultra Heavy.
Characters will now receive medals and achievements as a result of the engagements if they performed in exemplary fashion and were lucky enough to catch the attention of their commanding officers. These achievements and medals will each offer a small but permanent skill boost to certain skills when they are acquired. This works very similar to how Exploration points works. For example someone who earns a Commendation Medal might see their Leadership and Defensive Tactics skills increased slightly, they've gained the respect of the men. Certain medals will also offer titles.
Titles allow your character to add both a Prefix and a Suffix to their Character name in-game. The prefixes and suffixes become available based on the characters achievements. All starting characters will automatically earn the suffix "of Plymouth" or "of Freedomtown" and the prefix "Private", depending on their starting location. By default these titles does not display, but you can turn them on through your Achievements Tab. So for example you if your name were Erasmus Hurt you could be entitled, "Private Erasmus Hurt of Plymouth" if you so choose. As you gain military rank the Private would be replaced by options of your current ranking, and as you earn medals, explore locations or earn achievements you will receive new suffixes. There will also be non-military prefixes in the future, for things such as guild or political titles.
We have integrated Green-Ear for voice chat capabilities, and in preparation for this we turned audio back on in the client. There's some mobs missing audio, and steaming audio is still not working properly, but basic audio is functional again.
Our Options Menu has been upgraded signifcantly. There are now sliders for adjusting how quickly to fade your detail levels for interiors and other shapes, for adjusting maximum view distance, at which range to display objects at all, adjusting precipitation density, and for adjusting the amount of groundcover to display, as well as the radius to display it in. There are also on/off toggles to allow players to disable Cubemapping, Normal Mapping,.Screen Space Ambient Occlusion, and Specular Highlighting. There are on/off options to display player or NPC names over their heads or not, as well as being able to toggle Player Lights on or off. And finally there are options to tweak the quality of your Screen Space Ambient Occlusion. Last but not least, there are now some quick auto-configuration options that will set your default settings based on the speed of your system.
We revamped our boss mob system in this update significantly. Our bosses are still split into tiers and support bosses targeted at solo players, small groups and raids. Bosses are assigned from a number of tiers which determine the special abilities they can have. In our former iimplementation though each boss could have access to all of the special abilities on that tier. The new system allows us to choose how many special abilities each boss mob has at their disposal, as well as selecting a tier of those abilities for them. Rather than having the full compliment of special abilities at their disposal they will randomly choose that number of abilities from the total pool. They are chosen from a pool of 127 abilities across 7 tiers and include a wide variety of different effects. This should allow our generated bosses to be challenging, but to allow players to adopt strategies during the course of a battle based on what that particular boss can do.
Finally, Plymouth has been redesigned. We felt the old Plymouth zone was not homely enough for the first zone that most players will be introduced to. The new zone is the first to take advantage of us doubling the number of textures per terrain, and also the first to take advantage of some multiple detail texturing code. Beyond the technical improvements though, this is a completely new zone. The previous zone was dry and barren. We wanted for the pinnacle of humanity on Plymouth to be a bit more extravagant so it is now a lush green zone in the middle of some mountains, featuring a pond, lush foliage, cliffs and overhangs. It also features oingoing battles from Lesoo invaders. It also is the first zone to support time swapped changes to lighting and materials. At various times of day, different lights and signs will be turned on or off across town. We can also change the sound effects, to give certain areas night or day time only sounds. We hope that this adds some more realism and variety to the world.
Along with this redesign we have added in zone events. These are similar to, and part of the Battle system. The difference is that these events take place within a random time period and will repeat. Players who participate in these zone wide events will be rewarded with military experience, and a chance at loot or medals. This system works very similar to our Engagement system, except that it is not instanced. None of these events are solo events, they are aimed at one or more groups of players.
We now have a short list of things that we want to have improved before the re-opening of testing, and will be relaunching a web site with beta application forms some time in the near future. We are currently looking for artists. We have some UI work which needs to be done (2d art) and we need various bits of 3d art completed, primarily some new character and monster models, but also including some environment and building work. If you are an artist who is interested in working on The Repopulation, please send an email to erasmushurt2002@yahoo.com and we'll be in touch.
General
- The worlddocs and encyclopedia code has seen many modifications
- We have added the ability to turn lights on or off, and to swap materials or sound effects based on the time of day.
- Players may now only ran on a maximum 45 degree angle.
- Adjusted the military experience and rank curve. You now gain military experience easier, but the progression curve as you gain rank is steeper.
- The switch target code has been adjusted so that it will only select monsters within your line of sight. The exception to this rule is if a monster is within 4 meters, in which case it will be given priority on selection.
Audio
- Audio was disabled after the 1.7 port due to some issues. It is now functional again. Some things do not yet have sound effects, but we'll fill them up as it goes.
Character
- Gladiator wins and losses are now tracked on your character.
- You will no longer be able to advance past military rank 10.
- There is a new flag for each Character which is meant to track Achievements. Achievements can come in the form of Military Medals or other quest rewarded items.
- Characters can now earn both prefix and suffix titles through achieving various things in game. They can then select from a title to be displayed next to their name by using a drop down Menu on their Achievements Tab in the Character Window. This is explained above in the patch notes.
Combat
- The tickrate has been increased from 6 times per second to 10 times per second.
- Removed the influence of Presence from combat actions.
- The stock weapon rate has been increased from once per 3.5 seconds to once per 2 seconds.
- Added a new damage and resistance type: Energy
- Energy Shields have been introduced. When energy shields are active you will see a shield be created whenever when attacked by ranged physical damage. These shields can absorb damage, but will eat up up some of the shields energy. This will replenish over time, but the lower your shields energy the less effective it will be at stopping attacks.
- There is now a check to ensure that players can only attack monsters that they are facing.
Engagements
- Fixed an issue that was causing mobs in the Base Invasion engagement to be non-aggro.
- Engagements now track participants performance and use that in a calculation to determine medals. We have integrated several ribbons for use in this system.
- When completing an engagement the winning team will now receive a chance at items based on their contributions. This is automatically determined and assigned. The item rewards vary from Skill Cards to unique Engagement Items.
- Fixed a bug that was causing characters to not receive Military Experience after completing an engagement.
- Added two new waves of monsters to the Base Invasion engagements.
- Fixed a bug that was causing players to hang while loading after completing or failing an Engagement.
- The invitation into an engagement will now cancel after one minute.
- Players who perform extremely well in an engagement could earn one of several medals. These medals are permanent character flags and can be displayed under your achievements tab once it is created. Each medal earned gives a permanent boost to a particular skill as you have earned the respect of your peers.
- Engagement Item rewards are now auto assigned after a match.
- Modified the reward code so that only players who were active participants in an Engagement or Event will have a chance at rewards. This should help alleviate zone AFKers from soaking up rewards or military experience.
- When gaining a military rank, players will now be informed of the rank they have attained.
- Gave engagement bosses random special abilities.
Immortal Comands
- Added a few new immortal commands, which are documented below. These commands are i place to test Engagement functionality.
- Immortals can now do an /imm engagementgen to automatically generate a new engagement, bypassing any queue.
- Immortals can now do an /imm militarylevel command to increase their military rank
- Immortals can now do an /imm givemedal medaltype command to reward themselves with a particular medal
- Added the immortal commands /imm suffix suffix and /imm prefix prefix commands. These commands allow you to assign your character a unique suffix or prefix.
- Added the immortal command /imm eventstart to automatically restart a zone event.
Graphics
- Our Atlas terrains now support 8 textures, instead of 4. You should see a bit more variation on our maps as a result of this. This comes to us thanks to the work of Matt Kronyak.
- Added over 15 new building types.
- Added a wide variety of new trees, bushes and other assorted plant-life.
- Added a number of new cave models.
- During early alpha testing we had Selectrons working, but there were networking issues with them which caused us to turn them off. These issues have been corrected and selectrons are again available. There are numerous different selectron options.
- Adjusted numerous monster textures, adding DDS mipmap chains.
- Added new normal and specular maps to a good number of objects
- Reducing the visible distance now properly clips the objects out of view.
- Fixed an issue that was causing distance fog to display incorrectly at times.
- Added new animated billboards to Plymouth.
- Modified the day/night code to multiply the sun color before other lights are applied, rather than after.
- Plymouth has been largely redone. The wall has been removed. Lights and billboards have been added. Textures have been replaced and materials improved.
- Player light sources are now functioning properly. The lighting is no longer overbright, and now affects interiors as well.
- Fixed a problem with our water in previous versions.
- Added in new vehicle models and textures.
- You can now choose to only draw billboard grass with the groudcover or to use actual shapes. This is a user option toggle. Shapes look better but are harder on your video card.
- Groundcover radius may now be scaled through the options. By maxing this radius you can see groundcover a good range into the distance, and by minimizing it you can set it to display only when it is right up on yhou.
- In addition to the two options that were added to groundcover we have adjusted some of the math for groundcover. The number of billboards is adjusted per grid point now, and the grid point is adjustable via options. This should allow for a more even and more customizable performance ratio.
- The default graphics options have been adjusted.
- Fixed a bug that was causing animated materials to not animate properly
- The return of multiple detail textures. Those in early alpha may recall that we implemented multiple detail textures earlier this year, but this was removed due to some graphical glitches resulting in the detail texture needing to be moved extremely near the player to avoid nasty popping. We have reimplemented multiple details, without the graphical issues and in a more efficient manner. This is a completely different approach than before and we are happy with the results.
- Added in an energy shield effect which displays any time that an energy shield is activated.
- Added in an additional Robotic model
Vehicles
- Added new graphics for our vehicles. There are currently three different vehicles available for purchase.
- Fixed a bug that was causing the Hypercross Runner Vehicle to use the data from the Hypercross Skimmer unintentionally.
World
- Plymouth has been completely redesigned, this is Plymouth v3.0. This should be the final revision of Plymouth. The zone was redesigned to make it more visually pleasing and homely to new players. Where the original Plymouth was set in a desert area where water processors pumped the soil for water, the new Plymouth is in a lush green mountain range that includes a small lake and other water pouches. All spawns and NPCs have been adjusted and added to this new area.
- Fixed a bug that was causing mob that spawned based on certain areas being triggered to not work. As a result the Baroe Pup and Lurker Menace quests in Plymouth are again completable.
- Military recruiters and bounty hunters have been moved out of the city and into military bases. Plymouth features two such bases on opposite sides of the zone.
- A Lesoo battlefield event has been added to Plymouth. Periodically Lesoo will stage an assault. Players can participate in this event to earn Military Experience and a chance at loot.
- Modified the Battle code so that there could be zone wide battles and all players who participated could be rewarded.
- Each zone can now have specific events attached to it. These events will happen randomly over time and are typically larger scale battle events. Anyone who participates in these events will gain military experience and have a chance at loot.
- Bosses have been populated across Plymouth and we have adjusted our tiered boss system.
- Granted random special abilities to the generated instance bosses.
NPC
- NPCs with ranged weapons will now attack from effective range.
- NPCs should no longer crowd the player to the extent that they are right up on top of them.
- Fixed a bug in the new canAttack NPC code.
- Made significant changes to mob stat calculations to make them scale in a more balanced
- Mobs can now be flagged to grant military experience. This is set on a per mob basis. OWON and FPR military targets should all reward military experience, and other mobs will, as well.fashion.
- Fixed a bug that was causing monsters to not reward faction upon death.
- There is now a military vendor in Plymouth. This vendor will sell military perks. These perks each require a player to be of a certain level in order to purchase.
- Adjusted our boss mob system so that random bosses will select a number of random special abilities from their tier and use those abilities in combat. The special abiltiies vary in power by the boss and are randomly generated when they are spawned. They are chosen from a pool of 127 abilities across 7 tiers and include a wide variety of different effects. In addition to the generated effects bosses can also have unique effects of their own.
Items
- Weapons now have a variable accuracy setting. Previously we handled accuracy through effects, but this system allows us to scale better with skill level.
- OWON and FPR military members will now drop insignias which can be turned into bounty collectors for faction and military experience.
- Many weapons have had their attack rate tweaked.
- Added a variety of new military gear. Each of these items has a minimum military rank required to purchase. In general a comparable military rank item will be cheaper to purchase than a civilian would be able to spend for a similar quality piece of equipment.
- Added in Energy Tanks. These items are used as power sources for energy shields and weapons. These items are equipped in their own slot.
Robotics
- Added various new robotics to military vendors. These robots all require a specific military rank to purchase.
Stats, Skills and Abilities
- As mentioned previously we have made numerous changes to the internal calculations for skills and abilities. As a result of this a good number of abilities have seen modification.
- Your characters stats will now be Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Reflex, Intelligences, and Charisma. Wisdom and Intelligence have been merged and Agility has been renamed as Reflex.
- Optimized the skills display screen.
- Stats and skills now cap much lower but are gained slower than before. This provides us better room for expansion and requires less data changes.
- We have replaced min/max reuse time with a single reuse time since there is no leveling curve to scale these up with.
- There is no longer a level options for abilities. This was a remnant from MOM. It has been replaced by a flag to indicate if this is a player spell or not.
- Made numerous internal changes which will only affect modders/scripters but which makes editing a bit easier.
- Removed a number of vestigal areas of code.
- Most of our internal calculations for things such as health, energy, attack rate, etc have been modified to offer more balanced scaling for players and monsters as their skills increase.
- Removed skill based cast range reduction.
- Fixed an issue with numerous spells that were intended to affect the entire group, but were only affecting the caster.
- Added a variety of new abilities which are available as Military Perks. These are documented below
- Added the Hold Tight ability. This ability will grant your entire group an armor bonus, but it will also reduce their movement speed for a short time. It requires a Military Rank of Sergeant (Rank 3), as well as some skill in Defensive Tactics.
- Artillery Strike is available at Lieutenant (Rank 5), and also requires a decent amout of Leadership skill. It allows players to call in an artillery strike at the target location.
- Evacuate requires a hefty amount of Defensive Tactics skill and Rank 6 (Major). It allows you to teleport your entire group to a safe location, but has a slow use time and a long reuse time.
- Air strike allows you to radio in for an Air strike at your target location. It requires a rank of Colonel (Rank 8) and a large amount of Leadership skill.
- Emergency Evacuation is similar to Evacuate except that it requires Brigadier General status (Rank 9) and a very high amount of Defensive Tactics. It has a faster usage time than Evacuate, but still has a long reuse.
- Ranged defense is now derived from Reflexes.
Quests
- Added a flag to allow certain npcs or monsters to never be involved in any generated quests.
- Added collection five collection NPCs to Plymouth. This includes FPR Insignia, Rare Nickel, Hofkig Armor, Brute Hide Armor and Setlang Armor collections. It should be noted that the Hokfig and Brute Armor NPC slot is shared and only one will be up at any given time.
- Fixed an issue that was preventing NPC activated static quests from functioning.
- OWON and FPR military members will now drop insignias which can be turned into bounty collectors for faction and military experience
UI
- Multiple Information windows are once again functional. You can still get a tooltip just by mousing over an item, but right clicking the item will now open up separate information windows.
- Added a new line to the QuestHelper which will display the objectives of an engagement if you are in one.
- Fixed a bug that was causing the damage numbers to sometimes not appear over monsters heads.
- Significantly upgraded the options system. There are now sliders and on/off switches for a wide variety of different options. Most of these options had been available previously by tweaking your prefs.cs file manually, but now they are available in a much more user friendly manner.
- The options menu now has 5 different baseline graphics configurations: Very Low, Low, Medium, High and Very High. These are a good starting point for any graphics customization.
- Player lights can now be toggled on or off
- A new status bar has been created. Health, Energy and Energy Tank bars can be seen here. This area is transparent but draggable.
- The tomeGUI can now be closed if players so desire.
- Added an Achievements Tab to the Character Window. This tab will display things that your character has accomplished in their career. This includes medals earned, and things accomplished.
- Characters can now select prefix and suffix to be displayed under their name by using a drop down menu on the Achievements Tab of their Character Window.
0.0.4.3 Build Notes
--------------------------
This patch introduces the first wave of our revamped combat and skills system, brings many additions to the Military and Engagement system, revamps the boss mob system, improves AI, adds Voice Chat support, introduces the achievement and titles system, integrates zone events, adds in a new options menu, and completely redesigns Plymouth for good measure. In addition to this there is a lot of code cleanup and refactoring going on. Xerves has been a madman in this area recently, bringing some things up to the kit standards, improving some ugly bits of code, and fixing little problems that have existed for some time. Many changes have also been made to make things more easily adjustable at a later point. Previously many numbers which were hard coded are now represented as more easily adjusted baseline figures. This will allow for better balancing through the course of beta testing.
Our previous skills system had been built on top of the original MOM system, tweaking it as necessary to allow for skills management and give a reasonable approximation of balance in the process. This system did not scale very well though, and we had various pieces of code that weren't really necessary, either adding unnecessary complexity or throwing balance out of whack in certain cases. Xerves has developed a new formula for skills and a slew of new changes to make Combat more interesting and allow for more tactics, and easier balance modification. This patch introduces the first wave of changes, with the skills system being significantly overhauled.
The tick rate has been nearly doubled, from 6 ticks per second to 10 per second. This allows us to speed up the speed of combat and to make everything more responsive. Combat skills can now have skills based bonuses that work with diminishing returns. The generic Offense, Defense and Armor values have been replaced with Physical Absorption, Physical Absorption Percentage, Block Percentage, Dodge, Evasion, Parry, Counter, and Accuracy. Ranged offense is now determined by the weapon's accuracy and then adjusted by the character's skill levels. There are now five types of armor: Ultra Light, Light, Medium, Heavy, and Ultra Heavy.
Characters will now receive medals and achievements as a result of the engagements if they performed in exemplary fashion and were lucky enough to catch the attention of their commanding officers. These achievements and medals will each offer a small but permanent skill boost to certain skills when they are acquired. This works very similar to how Exploration points works. For example someone who earns a Commendation Medal might see their Leadership and Defensive Tactics skills increased slightly, they've gained the respect of the men. Certain medals will also offer titles.
Titles allow your character to add both a Prefix and a Suffix to their Character name in-game. The prefixes and suffixes become available based on the characters achievements. All starting characters will automatically earn the suffix "of Plymouth" or "of Freedomtown" and the prefix "Private", depending on their starting location. By default these titles does not display, but you can turn them on through your Achievements Tab. So for example you if your name were Erasmus Hurt you could be entitled, "Private Erasmus Hurt of Plymouth" if you so choose. As you gain military rank the Private would be replaced by options of your current ranking, and as you earn medals, explore locations or earn achievements you will receive new suffixes. There will also be non-military prefixes in the future, for things such as guild or political titles.
We have integrated Green-Ear for voice chat capabilities, and in preparation for this we turned audio back on in the client. There's some mobs missing audio, and steaming audio is still not working properly, but basic audio is functional again.
Our Options Menu has been upgraded signifcantly. There are now sliders for adjusting how quickly to fade your detail levels for interiors and other shapes, for adjusting maximum view distance, at which range to display objects at all, adjusting precipitation density, and for adjusting the amount of groundcover to display, as well as the radius to display it in. There are also on/off toggles to allow players to disable Cubemapping, Normal Mapping,.Screen Space Ambient Occlusion, and Specular Highlighting. There are on/off options to display player or NPC names over their heads or not, as well as being able to toggle Player Lights on or off. And finally there are options to tweak the quality of your Screen Space Ambient Occlusion. Last but not least, there are now some quick auto-configuration options that will set your default settings based on the speed of your system.
We revamped our boss mob system in this update significantly. Our bosses are still split into tiers and support bosses targeted at solo players, small groups and raids. Bosses are assigned from a number of tiers which determine the special abilities they can have. In our former iimplementation though each boss could have access to all of the special abilities on that tier. The new system allows us to choose how many special abilities each boss mob has at their disposal, as well as selecting a tier of those abilities for them. Rather than having the full compliment of special abilities at their disposal they will randomly choose that number of abilities from the total pool. They are chosen from a pool of 127 abilities across 7 tiers and include a wide variety of different effects. This should allow our generated bosses to be challenging, but to allow players to adopt strategies during the course of a battle based on what that particular boss can do.
Finally, Plymouth has been redesigned. We felt the old Plymouth zone was not homely enough for the first zone that most players will be introduced to. The new zone is the first to take advantage of us doubling the number of textures per terrain, and also the first to take advantage of some multiple detail texturing code. Beyond the technical improvements though, this is a completely new zone. The previous zone was dry and barren. We wanted for the pinnacle of humanity on Plymouth to be a bit more extravagant so it is now a lush green zone in the middle of some mountains, featuring a pond, lush foliage, cliffs and overhangs. It also features oingoing battles from Lesoo invaders. It also is the first zone to support time swapped changes to lighting and materials. At various times of day, different lights and signs will be turned on or off across town. We can also change the sound effects, to give certain areas night or day time only sounds. We hope that this adds some more realism and variety to the world.
Along with this redesign we have added in zone events. These are similar to, and part of the Battle system. The difference is that these events take place within a random time period and will repeat. Players who participate in these zone wide events will be rewarded with military experience, and a chance at loot or medals. This system works very similar to our Engagement system, except that it is not instanced. None of these events are solo events, they are aimed at one or more groups of players.
We now have a short list of things that we want to have improved before the re-opening of testing, and will be relaunching a web site with beta application forms some time in the near future. We are currently looking for artists. We have some UI work which needs to be done (2d art) and we need various bits of 3d art completed, primarily some new character and monster models, but also including some environment and building work. If you are an artist who is interested in working on The Repopulation, please send an email to erasmushurt2002@yahoo.com and we'll be in touch.
General
- The worlddocs and encyclopedia code has seen many modifications
- We have added the ability to turn lights on or off, and to swap materials or sound effects based on the time of day.
- Players may now only ran on a maximum 45 degree angle.
- Adjusted the military experience and rank curve. You now gain military experience easier, but the progression curve as you gain rank is steeper.
- The switch target code has been adjusted so that it will only select monsters within your line of sight. The exception to this rule is if a monster is within 4 meters, in which case it will be given priority on selection.
Audio
- Audio was disabled after the 1.7 port due to some issues. It is now functional again. Some things do not yet have sound effects, but we'll fill them up as it goes.
Character
- Gladiator wins and losses are now tracked on your character.
- You will no longer be able to advance past military rank 10.
- There is a new flag for each Character which is meant to track Achievements. Achievements can come in the form of Military Medals or other quest rewarded items.
- Characters can now earn both prefix and suffix titles through achieving various things in game. They can then select from a title to be displayed next to their name by using a drop down Menu on their Achievements Tab in the Character Window. This is explained above in the patch notes.
Combat
- The tickrate has been increased from 6 times per second to 10 times per second.
- Removed the influence of Presence from combat actions.
- The stock weapon rate has been increased from once per 3.5 seconds to once per 2 seconds.
- Added a new damage and resistance type: Energy
- Energy Shields have been introduced. When energy shields are active you will see a shield be created whenever when attacked by ranged physical damage. These shields can absorb damage, but will eat up up some of the shields energy. This will replenish over time, but the lower your shields energy the less effective it will be at stopping attacks.
- There is now a check to ensure that players can only attack monsters that they are facing.
Engagements
- Fixed an issue that was causing mobs in the Base Invasion engagement to be non-aggro.
- Engagements now track participants performance and use that in a calculation to determine medals. We have integrated several ribbons for use in this system.
- When completing an engagement the winning team will now receive a chance at items based on their contributions. This is automatically determined and assigned. The item rewards vary from Skill Cards to unique Engagement Items.
- Fixed a bug that was causing characters to not receive Military Experience after completing an engagement.
- Added two new waves of monsters to the Base Invasion engagements.
- Fixed a bug that was causing players to hang while loading after completing or failing an Engagement.
- The invitation into an engagement will now cancel after one minute.
- Players who perform extremely well in an engagement could earn one of several medals. These medals are permanent character flags and can be displayed under your achievements tab once it is created. Each medal earned gives a permanent boost to a particular skill as you have earned the respect of your peers.
- Engagement Item rewards are now auto assigned after a match.
- Modified the reward code so that only players who were active participants in an Engagement or Event will have a chance at rewards. This should help alleviate zone AFKers from soaking up rewards or military experience.
- When gaining a military rank, players will now be informed of the rank they have attained.
- Gave engagement bosses random special abilities.
Immortal Comands
- Added a few new immortal commands, which are documented below. These commands are i place to test Engagement functionality.
- Immortals can now do an /imm engagementgen to automatically generate a new engagement, bypassing any queue.
- Immortals can now do an /imm militarylevel command to increase their military rank
- Immortals can now do an /imm givemedal medaltype command to reward themselves with a particular medal
- Added the immortal commands /imm suffix suffix and /imm prefix prefix commands. These commands allow you to assign your character a unique suffix or prefix.
- Added the immortal command /imm eventstart to automatically restart a zone event.
Graphics
- Our Atlas terrains now support 8 textures, instead of 4. You should see a bit more variation on our maps as a result of this. This comes to us thanks to the work of Matt Kronyak.
- Added over 15 new building types.
- Added a wide variety of new trees, bushes and other assorted plant-life.
- Added a number of new cave models.
- During early alpha testing we had Selectrons working, but there were networking issues with them which caused us to turn them off. These issues have been corrected and selectrons are again available. There are numerous different selectron options.
- Adjusted numerous monster textures, adding DDS mipmap chains.
- Added new normal and specular maps to a good number of objects
- Reducing the visible distance now properly clips the objects out of view.
- Fixed an issue that was causing distance fog to display incorrectly at times.
- Added new animated billboards to Plymouth.
- Modified the day/night code to multiply the sun color before other lights are applied, rather than after.
- Plymouth has been largely redone. The wall has been removed. Lights and billboards have been added. Textures have been replaced and materials improved.
- Player light sources are now functioning properly. The lighting is no longer overbright, and now affects interiors as well.
- Fixed a problem with our water in previous versions.
- Added in new vehicle models and textures.
- You can now choose to only draw billboard grass with the groudcover or to use actual shapes. This is a user option toggle. Shapes look better but are harder on your video card.
- Groundcover radius may now be scaled through the options. By maxing this radius you can see groundcover a good range into the distance, and by minimizing it you can set it to display only when it is right up on yhou.
- In addition to the two options that were added to groundcover we have adjusted some of the math for groundcover. The number of billboards is adjusted per grid point now, and the grid point is adjustable via options. This should allow for a more even and more customizable performance ratio.
- The default graphics options have been adjusted.
- Fixed a bug that was causing animated materials to not animate properly
- The return of multiple detail textures. Those in early alpha may recall that we implemented multiple detail textures earlier this year, but this was removed due to some graphical glitches resulting in the detail texture needing to be moved extremely near the player to avoid nasty popping. We have reimplemented multiple details, without the graphical issues and in a more efficient manner. This is a completely different approach than before and we are happy with the results.
- Added in an energy shield effect which displays any time that an energy shield is activated.
- Added in an additional Robotic model
Vehicles
- Added new graphics for our vehicles. There are currently three different vehicles available for purchase.
- Fixed a bug that was causing the Hypercross Runner Vehicle to use the data from the Hypercross Skimmer unintentionally.
World
- Plymouth has been completely redesigned, this is Plymouth v3.0. This should be the final revision of Plymouth. The zone was redesigned to make it more visually pleasing and homely to new players. Where the original Plymouth was set in a desert area where water processors pumped the soil for water, the new Plymouth is in a lush green mountain range that includes a small lake and other water pouches. All spawns and NPCs have been adjusted and added to this new area.
- Fixed a bug that was causing mob that spawned based on certain areas being triggered to not work. As a result the Baroe Pup and Lurker Menace quests in Plymouth are again completable.
- Military recruiters and bounty hunters have been moved out of the city and into military bases. Plymouth features two such bases on opposite sides of the zone.
- A Lesoo battlefield event has been added to Plymouth. Periodically Lesoo will stage an assault. Players can participate in this event to earn Military Experience and a chance at loot.
- Modified the Battle code so that there could be zone wide battles and all players who participated could be rewarded.
- Each zone can now have specific events attached to it. These events will happen randomly over time and are typically larger scale battle events. Anyone who participates in these events will gain military experience and have a chance at loot.
- Bosses have been populated across Plymouth and we have adjusted our tiered boss system.
- Granted random special abilities to the generated instance bosses.
NPC
- NPCs with ranged weapons will now attack from effective range.
- NPCs should no longer crowd the player to the extent that they are right up on top of them.
- Fixed a bug in the new canAttack NPC code.
- Made significant changes to mob stat calculations to make them scale in a more balanced
- Mobs can now be flagged to grant military experience. This is set on a per mob basis. OWON and FPR military targets should all reward military experience, and other mobs will, as well.fashion.
- Fixed a bug that was causing monsters to not reward faction upon death.
- There is now a military vendor in Plymouth. This vendor will sell military perks. These perks each require a player to be of a certain level in order to purchase.
- Adjusted our boss mob system so that random bosses will select a number of random special abilities from their tier and use those abilities in combat. The special abiltiies vary in power by the boss and are randomly generated when they are spawned. They are chosen from a pool of 127 abilities across 7 tiers and include a wide variety of different effects. In addition to the generated effects bosses can also have unique effects of their own.
Items
- Weapons now have a variable accuracy setting. Previously we handled accuracy through effects, but this system allows us to scale better with skill level.
- OWON and FPR military members will now drop insignias which can be turned into bounty collectors for faction and military experience.
- Many weapons have had their attack rate tweaked.
- Added a variety of new military gear. Each of these items has a minimum military rank required to purchase. In general a comparable military rank item will be cheaper to purchase than a civilian would be able to spend for a similar quality piece of equipment.
- Added in Energy Tanks. These items are used as power sources for energy shields and weapons. These items are equipped in their own slot.
Robotics
- Added various new robotics to military vendors. These robots all require a specific military rank to purchase.
Stats, Skills and Abilities
- As mentioned previously we have made numerous changes to the internal calculations for skills and abilities. As a result of this a good number of abilities have seen modification.
- Your characters stats will now be Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Reflex, Intelligences, and Charisma. Wisdom and Intelligence have been merged and Agility has been renamed as Reflex.
- Optimized the skills display screen.
- Stats and skills now cap much lower but are gained slower than before. This provides us better room for expansion and requires less data changes.
- We have replaced min/max reuse time with a single reuse time since there is no leveling curve to scale these up with.
- There is no longer a level options for abilities. This was a remnant from MOM. It has been replaced by a flag to indicate if this is a player spell or not.
- Made numerous internal changes which will only affect modders/scripters but which makes editing a bit easier.
- Removed a number of vestigal areas of code.
- Most of our internal calculations for things such as health, energy, attack rate, etc have been modified to offer more balanced scaling for players and monsters as their skills increase.
- Removed skill based cast range reduction.
- Fixed an issue with numerous spells that were intended to affect the entire group, but were only affecting the caster.
- Added a variety of new abilities which are available as Military Perks. These are documented below
- Added the Hold Tight ability. This ability will grant your entire group an armor bonus, but it will also reduce their movement speed for a short time. It requires a Military Rank of Sergeant (Rank 3), as well as some skill in Defensive Tactics.
- Artillery Strike is available at Lieutenant (Rank 5), and also requires a decent amout of Leadership skill. It allows players to call in an artillery strike at the target location.
- Evacuate requires a hefty amount of Defensive Tactics skill and Rank 6 (Major). It allows you to teleport your entire group to a safe location, but has a slow use time and a long reuse time.
- Air strike allows you to radio in for an Air strike at your target location. It requires a rank of Colonel (Rank 8) and a large amount of Leadership skill.
- Emergency Evacuation is similar to Evacuate except that it requires Brigadier General status (Rank 9) and a very high amount of Defensive Tactics. It has a faster usage time than Evacuate, but still has a long reuse.
- Ranged defense is now derived from Reflexes.
Quests
- Added a flag to allow certain npcs or monsters to never be involved in any generated quests.
- Added collection five collection NPCs to Plymouth. This includes FPR Insignia, Rare Nickel, Hofkig Armor, Brute Hide Armor and Setlang Armor collections. It should be noted that the Hokfig and Brute Armor NPC slot is shared and only one will be up at any given time.
- Fixed an issue that was preventing NPC activated static quests from functioning.
- OWON and FPR military members will now drop insignias which can be turned into bounty collectors for faction and military experience
UI
- Multiple Information windows are once again functional. You can still get a tooltip just by mousing over an item, but right clicking the item will now open up separate information windows.
- Added a new line to the QuestHelper which will display the objectives of an engagement if you are in one.
- Fixed a bug that was causing the damage numbers to sometimes not appear over monsters heads.
- Significantly upgraded the options system. There are now sliders and on/off switches for a wide variety of different options. Most of these options had been available previously by tweaking your prefs.cs file manually, but now they are available in a much more user friendly manner.
- The options menu now has 5 different baseline graphics configurations: Very Low, Low, Medium, High and Very High. These are a good starting point for any graphics customization.
- Player lights can now be toggled on or off
- A new status bar has been created. Health, Energy and Energy Tank bars can be seen here. This area is transparent but draggable.
- The tomeGUI can now be closed if players so desire.
- Added an Achievements Tab to the Character Window. This tab will display things that your character has accomplished in their career. This includes medals earned, and things accomplished.
- Characters can now select prefix and suffix to be displayed under their name by using a drop down menu on the Achievements Tab of their Character Window.
Torque 3D Owner Dave Young
Dave Young Games