The Repopulation v0.0.4.9 Build Notes

This update stretched on a bit longer than our usual patch period. We've made a heavy push towards being feature complete code wise. The Dynamic Mission system and Clan systems have undergone many changes, as have vehicles, combat and Artificial Intelligence. We have also upgraded to the latest beta (beta 4) of the Torque 3D engine. The next patch will focus heavily on content additions, and will likely be our final patch before beginning to open the game up to more testers.

NOTE: There's no screenshots this time around. The vast majority of this update was mechanics related. The next patch will be primarily content related and we'll show off new eye candy.

Artificial Intelligence

- Monsters or NPCs will now seek cover when it is available if they feel it is advantageous.
- Monsters now are assigned a sliding scale of AI difficult based on their species and spawn settings. More intelligent monsters will be smarter, be warned.
- Monsters can now target individual body parts if they are intelligent enough. Previously they always targeted the body.

Character

- All characters now start with the Take Cover ability, and its usage will be added into the tutorial in a future patch. This ability, when used near a Cover Area will allow you to hide behind the covering object for a defence and line of sight bonus.
- There is now a variable vault size. In the future we will be tying this into our microtransaction system, allowing players to purchase additional inventory or vault space.
- Hair and facial hair materials have been redone. This should result in better looking hair.
- We have rewritten our Achievements, Titles, Explorations and Recipe systems. The new systems should be easier to maintain and is more efficient.
- Tweaked the skill up rates of various abilities to either make them easier or more difficult to skill up.

Clan

- We have added a Clan GUI. This GUI will allow you to easily view Clan Events, the Clan Roster, and membership levels. This will be expanded on further in the future.
- Clans now accrue experience and can increase in power over time. Things that can contribute to your clans reputation growing include killing boss mobs, attaining higher levels of skill, and conquering control points. The power level of a clan will grant them options to special perks.
- Rogue Nations will now be able to set laws to be applied in all areas under their control. For those not wishing to use the GUI the commands here are listed below:
- Rogue nations can specify to have zones controlled by them to be openpvp (free for all who are not in your clan or allied) by using the command /copenpvp <0 or 1>.
- Rogue nations can specify to have zones controlled by them to be allow others to pass through their teleport space by using the command /cteleportals <value>. Valid values are "ffa" (free for all), "ally" (allied clans only), or "clan" (your clan only).
- Clan Points are tracked now as a member contributes to the growth of a Clan. These may later be tied into to a DKP like optional loot reward system, but for the time being they are tracked.
- Clan events can now be tracked and filtered by members if they would like to see them. Clan Events ar like a list of clan specific recent news. This includes when members reach major skill milestones, when major boss mobs are defeated, when epic quests are completed, or when powerful items are discovered.
- In addition to the normal option levels, guild leaders and officers can grant special titles to certian members. You can do this by typing /ctitle <charactername>, <title>. Titles will automatically be used for all character on this account. This command is only available to guilds of sufficient reputation.
- To form a new clan you must have three players in your alliance who are not in a clan, and each must have a Clan Application Form. This form can be found at City Hall. You ca then form the clan by speaking to the Registration Official or typing /ccreate <clan name>.
- Clans now have access to an account wide ban list, which will allow them to block certain players from ever joining their guild. This is stored server side and guild leaders can add players to the ban list by typing /cban <character name>. it will automatically ban their entire account and is only usable by officers or clan leaders.
- If a clan wishes to unban a banned account, they can do a /cunban <character name> to accomplish this.
- Clan Leaders or officers can view a list of banned accounts by doing using the /cbanlist command.
- Created some extra guild testing and manipulations for Immortals.
- Clans can now set a clan Description, which can be read by others. This is intended to describe some information on your Clan. Officers can set the description by typing /cdesc <description>.

Combat

- Integrated the concept of Momentum. Momentum will slowly build when positive things are happening for your character. When you are winning battles, accomplishing feats, etc it will increase. When things are going poorly, it will decrease. We have added a number of new abilities which will require Momentum to be built to a certain point in order to use, and will cost Momentum to pull off. The goal here is to add another layer of tactics to our combat system.
- Implemented Cover Areas. These are things like barricades, bunkers, walls, etc that a player can hide behind to make yourself a more difficult target. You can use the take cover ability to hide behind these objects. Combat has been adjusted to take cover into account.
- NPCs now have generic ranged style abilities, allowing us to tweak their combat styles further.
- Positional attacks are now implemented.
- Some abilities now require a user to be stealthed to use.
- There is now a visual indication when you land a critical blow.
- Critical hits will now negate armor.
- Critical hits against your character will significantly reduce their momentum.
- Fixed a bug in our damage application which was sometimes causing damage to not be applied correctly.

Crafting

- Fixed a bug that was causing you to note receive the items you had crafted under certain circumstances.

Effects and Abilities

- Abilities and effects can now simultaneously damage the user while causing different effects on the target.
- Certain Ability timers are now persistant. This is generally used for abilities that have long reuse times, so that players can not simply log out to bypass the timer.
- We've added in the ability to have positional attacks, and as a result added a number of new abilities to various skill trees.
- Added the ability for certain effects to hide their duration timers.
- Added the Assassination Ability: Backstab. This ability does high damage, but must be used from behind, and has a 45 second reuse time.
- Added the Assassination Ability: Slice Throat. This ability does moderate damage initially, but high damage over time. It requires you to be hidden and behind your opponent.
- Added the Assassination Ability: Blindside. This ability requires you to be behind your opponent and stuns them, as well as doing good damage. It has a quicker reuse time than other Assassination abilities at just 20 seconds.
- Added the Assassination Ability: Assassinate. This is a rare high end ability that does massive damage with a long reuse time. It requires you to be behind your opponent and hidden.
- Added the Knife Tactics ability: Sneaking Thrust. It does reasonable damage and requires you to be behind your opponent.
- Added the Knife Tactics ability: Kidney Puncture. This causes a long duration bleed, but must be performed from behind. This is a rare high end ability.
- Added the Martial Tactics ability: Kidney Punch. This is a high end hand to hand skill which drains your opponents energy over time. It must be performed from behind.
- Added the Polearm Tactics ability: Phalanx. This is a damaging attack which must be performed from behind.
- Added the Swordfighting Tactics ability: Back Slash. This ability must be performed from behind and does enhanced damage.
- Added in combination abilities. Unlike other games where combos only open up if a certain criteria is met, we allow you to perform your combo moves out of order. They will have additional effects however, if the proper conditions are met, where they may have very minor effect otherwise.
- Added in the ability for certain effects to cancel once a player has moved.
- Added the ability for certain abilities to Knockback the target. This can be used as both a form of crowd control, and also to knock players off of ledges.
- Abilities can now have multiple effects, one for if certain conditions are met, and one if they are not. This is used in our chained abilities system.

Graphics

- We've upgraded the our engine to the version of the Torque 3D engine (beta 4). This resulted in performance boosts, and additional eye candy features.
- Added in Occlusion Blockers. These allow us to cull geometry in more controlled fashion than before and should increase performance.
- Made various tweaks to how our animation system works. One of the key additions is the ability to adjust animation speeds, such as your running speed matching your movement speed.
- Fixed an issue that was causing players to "glide" into animations.
- Added in numerous new animations for the player class. This includes new croutching and swimming animations, as well as new styles of attack moves.
- Plymouth is now a dts shape rather than a dif interior. This has resulted in some performance gains.
- Crawlers have new attack animations, and their size has been reduced.
- We've added some new graphical configuration settings to the Options Menu.
- Fixed a bug that was causing the Crawler's normal maps to not be displayed.

Items

- Launchers will now do additional damage to structures and objects, they have essentially been given siege bonuses.

Missions

- When players are in group and one of the group members zones into a Mission Instance, any additional members who enter will zone into that same instance with them, even if those other members do not have a quest for that instance. It should be noted that some missions can be flagged as solo only, and those missions will not follow this logic.
- There is now an autosplit any time you turn in a quest. We hope that this encourages players to group up with one another as there is a bonus chance at loot when grouped. The player whose journal the quest is from always receives a full chance at loot, and others in the group will receive a chance as well.
- Added many new mission types. This includes more tiers to each of the previous mission types, many more types of crafting categories, clan specific missions, bounty hunting missions, and PVP missions. There are now a total of 72 different mission categories.
- We have adjusted the way that our NPC personality, mood, profession and relationships systems work. This is both a server side optimization and a gameplay improvement. You can expect to see more use of these traits in the next patch, as we head into content building.
- Adjusted how mission combat difficulty levels work. Most of the time you should now have an appropriately combat leveled mission, with a smaller chance of having an easier combat leveled mission generated. Those who are far better adventurers than crafters, or vice versa, will get a larger share of the types of missions offered to them which they seem to prefer the most.
- Most mission templates are now generated from an NPC in your current zone, though not always.
- Mission templates can now specify how far away the generated NPCs or areas are from the players current location, as well as if that region must be hostile or friendly.
- There are now clan specific missions that will only be offered to players if they are in a Clan. These missions will generate Raid level encounters, and the difficulty of those encounters will be determined by your Clans Reputation, rather than by your own personal skill levels.
- Added fail on death quests. In these mission if you die, you will fail.
- Added Timed Missions. In these quests if you do not complete the mission before the time limit, you will fail.
- Missions are now generated more frequently.
- Optimized the way our quest generator works internally.
- There is now a mechanism for immortals to auto-assign certain missions to themselves for testing by using the immortal command GenerateQuest with the quest dialog name as the first argument.
- Fixed a bug that was causing NPCs flagged as questimmune to appear in generated quests on occasion.

Vehicles

- Implemented Vehicle Abilities. These abilities can only be used when controlling a vehicle. Different vehicles are more effective with different abilities. We will continue to add new Vehicle Special Abilities over time.
- Added the Vehicle Control Ability: Ram Into. This ability will damage your target by ramming into it, but will also cause damage you.
- Added the Vehicle Control Ability: Turbo Boost: This ability will increase your movement speed while in a vehicle for a short time.
- Added the Vehicle Control Ability: Fire Burst. This ability is only usable on vehicles that can use weapons. It does ranged damage.
- Players will now take less falling damage if they are in a hovering vehicle.
- Players will no longer skill up in Acrobatics while controlling a vehicle.
- Fixed a bug that was causing players to using the Hypercross hovercraft to not be flagged as being in a vehicle.

World

- Free For All PVP is now functional. Free For All is only allowed in zones that are controlled by a particular clan if that clan has set their laws to Free For All PVP. In zones that are under Free For All PVP rules OWON and FPR members can still not attack others in their alliance, but they may attack reserve military members of opposite factions. Under these rules Rogue Nation members can attack anyone who is not in their clan.
- We have added teleportals to most zones. These teleportals work under the laws of the controlling faction or clan of this region and allow instant travel for a fee to qualifying zones. Teleportals work by using teleportation devices, which need permission to connect through each zone. The permission is determined by the faction who controls the zone. OWON and FPR only allow those of the same faction to pass through their controlled zone space. For example if you are from OWON and you must pass through an FPR zone to reach your zone, then that zone will not be available. Rogue Nations can set their own teleportal laws, and choose who to allow to pass. Our hope with this system is to not only reduce travel times, but also to add another benefit of zone ownership.
- Instanced dungeons will be a bit easier for solo players or those in groups of two, and a bit more difficult for players in larger groups.
- You will now be able to visually see NPCs returning fire when they have ranged weapons.
- Added in a new species and model. The Faugea are a large insectoid species.
- Female NPCs should no longer be bald from certain angles.
- Resolved an issue that was causing clans to never properly take control of a zone.
- If a clan controls a particular zone, their laws are now used within it.
- Each zone has a new map.
- Standard item vendors will no longer sell upper tier items.
- The roads in Freedomtown should look somewhat nicer.
- You should no longer fall through the world while zoning into the Wailing Chasm from Freedomtown.
- Added in a number of new NPC personality traits and professions.
- Resolved an issue that was causing players to crash when entering the Sewers under Plymouth.

UI

- We've added a new menu for buying and selling from NPCs. This menu should be more visually attractive and easier to use than our previous implementation.
- You may now ctrl left click to open up an information window. Right click is now used for different functions, such as buying and selling items or auto-equipping items.
- We now have custom cursors from Evanion.
- Clicking on the chat text input area of the chat window will now highlight all of the text in the input box. This should allow players to easily delete it if they like by hitting the backspace key.
- You can again see abilities or items on your cursor when you are dragging them.
- Fixed a bug that was causing tooltips to not display most of the time since our port to T3D.
- The Character Skills Pane has been modified to be categorized with expandable drop down areas that are split by category.
- Momentum based abilities which do not have sufficient Momentum will appear greyed out.
- The Buff Window should now properly restore if you hit enter and your GUI is currently turned off.
- Expanded the Interface's resolution detection to properly adjust the UI in widescreen resolutions.