Release notes for 0.20.0.56
Here are the changes since the last build. There are a LOT of them. Enjoy!
Known issues:[]
PLEASE DON'T BUG THESE!
- Avatar motion: We’re in the process of breaking this so we can make it better. You’ve been living all along with avatars bopping about in strange ways. They may be even stranger and even seem a bit laggy in this build. Or maybe they’re no worse than before. But in any case, you don’t need to log bugs against this yet. A number of changes/fixes went in while I was typing this up so even though this is a very recent build, avatar motion is already different from what you’re seeing here. Hopefully by our next build we'll be done with this work.
- Work on factions has just begun. If you run across anything that lets you muck about with Factions, ignore it. Run from it. God only knows what will happen if you play with it.
- Character Creation: You're going to love our new character creation UI. But! If you hit the Back button, you can get into a bad situation. Also there are bugs with selecting a character from your list. Also in the next build, hitting Reset All will clear all locks. In other words, this is a new, fragile UI and work is in progress. You don’t need to log bugs against it at this time.
- Ship durability is mostly implemented but hasn’t been thoroughly tested yet. We expect this to be buggy and we expect you to refrain from logging bugs against it until the next update.
- Sound: We fixed a bug and now all sounds need to be changed. We have a new sound person starting this last week who will be working through every environment in the game to make them sound good. In some towns we have already yanked out *all* sounds in preparation for her work there, so don't be surprised if towns are very quiet.
General[]
- “Someone is already logged in to that account” bug fixed: Used to be that if you tried to log on and some other client was logged on to your account, or if you'd logged out in a strange way, you'd get an error and not be able to log in. Now you grab the connection at whatever they are doing in the world, and they get disconnected. Currently the disconnection happens without any messages. This fixes the bug where, if you didn’t get logged in all the way and then you tried again, you’d get told “someone is already logged in to that account.”
- “Player leak” is fixed. When you level up during a mission, you should stay leveled up upon returning to the Open Sea or town. Inventory changes should stay changed when you leave port. Etc.
- Some “client crash on shutdown” bugs have been fixed. Others may remain, however. We prioritize these low for fixing because they don’t cause data loss and don’t affect game-play.
- Network lag issue worked around: We changed UDP handling in a way that will hopefully prevent problems for folks whose routers were laggy, laggy, laggy.
- Some memory leaks fixed: We changed where and when we dump memory. We now check to see if the card has free space and if the system has free space. We dump appropriately. Or so Heidi claims. :)
- XP to get from level 16 to 50 has been changed – it’s now harder than ever to level up. We're doing this because the very next beta build will have mission content for 16-30, as well as nav zone NPCs from 16-50. We want to slow the level progression down for this range and see how it goes.
- /emote shows a list of all emotes
- User surveys: We now give you the opportunity to give us feedback after mission encounters.
- System Message of the Day: Look for words of wisdom from Misha when you log in.
- Low-end video cards: We changed the way we calculate whether you have a low-end video card. We default to using a different preference file for such cards so that they start the game more functional than if they started with the best looking textures and such. In theory, we now do a better job of this.
- We have a new system for caching data that should accomplish two things: 1) Make loading of instances faster on the server and 2) Hinder efforts of hackers plundering around on the client. They weren’t able to trick the server into believing their lies but they were able to make their client behave badly even to the point of crashing. You really shouldn’t notice much difference except somewhat faster response from the servers when entering a new zone but this hasn’t been tested thoroughly.
- No more Test_Town: If you ever wind up in Test_Town again, I’ll just shoot myself. You might wind up in the Open Sea for no apparent reason on occasion, but never should you get stuck in Test_Town from which there is no return.
Character Creation[]
- Revamped character creation UI. Much cooler now. Some of you will get to tell the n00bs about the bad old days when you had to use the previous Character Creation UI. One new feature is that, when you find a hat you like, you can “lock” it in place and it won’t change when you hit Randomize.
- If you log in and don’t have any characters, you’re immediately taken to character creation and from there into the game. If you do have a character, you’re taken to character selection from which you can opt to use an existing character or to create a new one.
- Character creation now requires you to pick a nation, then pick a gender, then you get the rest of the settings. You can still change nation and gender at any time.
- Character creation doesn't automatically generate random appearance or names any more. You need to click the random app/name buttons.
- There’s undo/redo now in Character Creation. This lets you step back one change at a time through the last several changes that you made.
- There are now tailors in the n00b towns. She’s standing in the tavern near the bar.
UI/Keybinding[]
- Arrow keys now work for movement and are permanently bound that way. (WASD also still control movement but those keys can be rebound.) We’ve had to wipe your previous keybindings in order to set this up. Hopefully, we won’t have to do that again.
- The camera keyboard controls have moved to the numeric keypad:
8 & 2: Zoom in/Zoom out
4 & 6: Orbit left/Orbit right
9 & 3: Tilt down/Tilt up
7 & 1: Dolly up/Dolly down
0: Reset to default camera position
Shift, Ctrl, Alt: These still modify camera speed.
All of these are rebindable as you like.
- Because we got the camera controls off the main keyboard, we also bound keys to toggle every window in the windows palette:
K: Character
Y: Skills & Recipes
J: Missions
M: Map
L: Social
I: Inventory
G: Buildings
You can rebind all of these to whatever you want.
- For that matter, you should look through the keybinding to find what else we did. J
- While we were at it, we fixed some of the more commonly seen bugs in keybinding.
- Numpad keybinding seemed particularly problematic to Dev so that might still be a bug motherload.
- Mousewheel will now switch between ships at the harbor master.
- Chat: Key bindings for reply: CTRL-R and BACKSPACE put "/tell <reply-person>," in the chat window. Watch Misha dance a little jig. J
- Chat: You can now use /gu, /soc, or /sg instead of /society in chat. Or you can continue to click on the little button until you get to the society channel. But I often forget to do that.
- Windows Palette: Tooltips are back!
- Windows Palette: Help has been moved from the Window Palette to the Options menu. Still non-functional, though.
- Preferences UI: We converted it to C++ from LUA and tweaked the UI a bit.
- Secondary chat windows don't close on ESC key anymore. They don't save their settings, so it's better if you have to explicitly close them with the button.
- Combat UI: Ghost sails icon has been moved down.
- Character Sheet UI: Reload times should display accurately now.
- Auction UI: Column numbers are now right aligned
- Ship healthbars now have numeric values for structure and armor.
Camera[]
- Camera: Tweaked camera settings in ship space. See what you think. The camera's settings are now relative to your ship's size, so rotating around a big ship is now just as reasonable as rotating around a small ship. We're looking for feedback on the new values.
Open Sea[]
- Getting out of town: In the n00b towns (except for Marsh Harbour) and in larger British towns (towns that look like Georgetown), you now click on the longboat at the end of the dock to board your ship and sail out of town. (In other words, clicking the sign post in some towns has been replaced w/ clicking a longboat to get to the Open Sea.) In future builds, we hope to add *your* ship out in the harbor and the fiction will be that you use the longboat to get to your ship to get sail out into the world. In future builds…
- We’ve reprocessed almost all rooms (towns, ship spaces, Open Sea, etc.) multiples times. This should’ve fixed a number of art and other bugs.
- Zoning to the Open Sea shouldn’t take as long as it used to.
Ships/Combat/Skills[]
- Grapple: We tuned to make it easier to grapple than it used to be.
- Grapple: The tooltip on the grapple skill will now give you some direction about how to improve your odds.
- Ammo: We made the certification for various types of ammo automatic at level 0.
- Call for Help: Now can be used after 2 minutes instead of forcing you to wait 10 which could easily be too late. It’s still true that your groupmates can join your battle at any time but other ships from your nation can now join sooner.
- Can Fire indicator over the selected ship now reports red instead of green if you can only fire a partially loaded battery and Alt isn't down. It's not ideal, since the batteries themselves show yellow, but it's better than showing green.
- PvP areas: They’re now much larger than they were, encompassing a bigger chunk of the map.
- User Ships: Deeds for the raft, Capriciux, and Couronne are in now so I can hand them out.
- User ship: Bark (or Endeavor) in game. The bark is (should be) a level 20 ship designed for hauling goods. Similar to the flute, but tougher, faster, and with a slightly smaller carrying capacity.
- User Ships: There are now recipes for the Bark and the Raft.
- User Ships: Names of user created ships have been changed to what the creator requested.
- Ships: Renamed all ships and ship deeds to remove small/medium/large confusion between names and actual ship sizes for outfitting.
- Ships: slowed the flute a bit, sped up the small frigate a bit, fixed East & West Indiaman bow & stern arcs (they were 1/2 what they should’ve been).
- Ships now accelerate and decelerate SLOWER than they used to. Given that all ships could reach their top speed in less than 4 seconds before, it makes our ships feel much more like sailing ships now. We found that slowing acceleration made it look like lag for several seconds after you raised the throttle since you couldn't easily tell your ship was moving. To help combat this, Augustus increased the sail furl/unfurl time to 12 seconds, so at least it looks like you're still trying to get underway. Note that furl/unfurl time is purely a visual thing; acceleration/deceleration is what actually affects your movement.
- Ship Durability: Ships have 100 durability points to start. This is a huge number we're just using for now until we get this system fully implemented.
- Ship Durability: When your ship runs out of durability, you zone to your nearest docked ship. If you don’t have any other ships, you are sent to the nearest friendly port and you'll be given a free ship.
- Ship Durability: The character info and dockyard UI have been modified to display durability along with the ship type. This is probably not the final plan for how to display that info.
- Ship Durability: Secured cargo from your lost ship gets transferred to your new ship instead of port storage. Not sure what happens if you overload your cargo hold by doing that… This is an issue we’re aware of and working on.
- Cannonballs fly much faster. Rev thinks they are still slow enough that you can see them in flight, but fast enough that they don't appear to be floating.
Outfitting/Inventory[]
- General Outfitting effects have been tuned, mostly reduced. You'll find that outfitting is no longer the overwhelming advantage it was before.
- Levels of all basic outfitting have been adjusted based on the size of ship it's intended for. Medium +10 levels, Large +20 levels, Huge +45 levels. If the adjusted level was over 50, the outfitting was *cut*. This means all of the 5th-rank Large outfitting, and all Huge outfitting over 2nd rank was cut.
- Rarity has been added to uncommon outfitting and now we have "unique" outfitting, which isn't actually unique but there you go. Outfitting has been added to the loot table for all levels, including a small chance of uncommon outfitting, and a very small chance of unique outfitting.
- Uncommon and unique outfitting has been removed from the shops. It was never meant to be there for real.
- Inventory items now have frequency colors: white=normal, green=uncommon, gold=unique. I'm not sure if we've implemented those colors for all the outfitting yet.
- Outfitting that’s invalid for your ship is now invalid in the shop. You will no longer see Huge outfitting if you currently are using a Small ship. You can still view and buy that stuff on the All Items tab.
- Personal inventory now has its own pane in your Inventory window. Personal inventory includes books, mission items, avatar outfitting, structure deeds, and some other random items. Now cargo items go into either your ship hold or your personal inventory. You can't move them back and forth. You can put either kind of inventory in port storage, for instance. Trading isn't quite up to speed here yet.
Avatars/NPCs[]
- We’ve mucked about with avatar faces. Should be improved. Do you agree?
- We’ve changed the skeletons and reprocessed all the avatars multiple times. Hopefully, this fixed more issues than it caused.
- We’ve changed the walk animations and added some new ones along with a *bunch* of other anims. We're still improving these.
- We’ve changed the way avatar motion works. This is part of a “planned breakage.” It’s currently more broken than fixed, but you shoulda seen it last week! :P
- NPCs should be smarter about not using up all their energy, causing their toggle skills to turn on and off.
- NPCs in the Open Sea will no longer attack you. Feel free to gank them at your pleasure, but they’ll leave you alone for now. Obviously, this is *not* our final answer but the way they were sucked too bad – we had to take drastic measures. We are already doing the work to revamp the aggro system in the nav zone and menacing NPCs will return very soon.
Missions[]
- Tutorial is in. We believe this to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad tutorial. However, I personally think it’s better than nothing. Do not log bugs against it as it will be replaced from scratch, but do give us feedback in the forums about how we can teach you to play the game better.
- Multi-exit selection: If two missions share a door, when you click on the door, you’ll be given a context menu from which you can choose the mission you’d like to enter.
- Lots and lots of mission fixes including to ForTheGoodOfTheTown, CatchingABreak, SaveTheTown, PickettFence, PressTheAttack, MerryParty, CoastPatrol, ConvoyRaid, HolyGhost, MagistrateLetter, Soiree, KnowtheDevil, HunttheDevil, TricktheDevil, SpitetheDevil, GlimpsetheDevil, BeatTheDevil, WeddingTragedy and many, many more…
Grouping/Societies/Factions[]
- Society Message of the Day should work now. J
- Group Leader indicator has changed and we fixed some group leader commands
Economy[]
- The economy changes Isildur mentions in this post (http://www.flyinglab.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=260734#post260734) are in this build.
- Bootstrap shops have been added to every local & regional auctioneer. One-stop shopping!
- Added recipes, books, etc. for producing basic outfitting.
- Removed some high-end stuff from the outfitting shop to encourage crafting.
- Removed loot-drop special outfitting from the shop.
- Revised some resource distribution to account for the to-be-cut ports. We have not actually removed those ports in this build.
- Added teak planks and teak strakes.
- Belle Isle now has public docks so the French can have sulfur.
- You can now have 10 items listed in the local auction house if you have at least a warehouse in the port.