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Update Notes / Updates October 3rd - Vyrewatch, Weakness System and Engine Improvements
« on: October 03, 2018, 07:45:16 am »
Hey guys,
I'm very happy with how the past 2 updates turned out and improved our overall activity; wilderness especially. I'd like to continue improving the wilderness because I think it's a place that ensures the overall game economy stays healthy by creating demand for equipment and resources. I'm also introducing weaknesses to make PvMing more interesting and to give elemental weapons places where they out-scale demon weapons. The aim is trying to create a system where every high level weapon can be useful at some point. As always there's also a ton of bugfixes and balancing updates. Many thanks for your reporting and feedback!
Vyrewatch - New Necklace
Vampires or also called Vyrewatch have been added to the Wilderness. They range levels between 110 to 140 and are all weak to fire attacks. The strong versions (130 & 140) can be found at the Bone Yard whereas the weaker versions can be found at the Graveyard of Shadows. In general Vyrewatch are not aggressive except for them seeing an opportunity to kill you. I recommend not getting too low health else you may trigger their blood rush and find yourself out numbered in seconds. You are able to collect Vampire blood from every kill which can be used to upgrade the Vyrewatch necklace. The new necklace can also be received as a rare drop from Vyrewatch. The upgraded version degrades after inflicting 15,000 hits and requires 1,000 Vampire blood to be upgraded. Their flying form is also immune against melee attacks. They can be reached with spears and halberds though. The upgraded Vyrewatch necklace has bonuses equal to the best range, magic and melee amulet combined. It also has a passive effect allowing you to deal 5% more damage while also taking 5% more damage.
Weakness System
I've wanted to implement this for quite a while already and am now doing it in a very basic way. Certain monsters now heave weaknesses:
Cooking Skill
With recent changes to Fishing the experience gains for Cooking are just wrong right now. I've tripled the experience rates and changed the code that decides when to burn food. By default you now require a 25% higher level of the food's requirement to no longer burn it at all. That means if Sharks require level 70 Cooking you need level 88 (87.5) Cooking to stop burning them. Cooking gauntlets reduce 10% of that requirement. With the shark example it'd mean that you need a Cooking level of 79 (78.75) to no longer burn Sharks when wearing Cooking gauntlets. There's one exception: You can't burn anything at level 99 Cooking. Burning food now also gives 25% of the original experience.
GWD Changes
I am really happy with how the drops for top 3 damage dealers turned out, but I think it backfired a little bit in the God Wars Dungeon. I've halved the drop rates of rare and unique items from bosses. Don't worry, the drop rates are still better than before the top 3 damage dealer update if you go in with 2 friends! I've also done some changes to boss combat:
Game fixes / changes:
Engine fixes / changes:
Map & Tile System Rewritten
I've completely rewritten the client's internal management of tiles. This goes hand in hand with the map loader and its underlying system managing the area you see. This improves the memory management of the map and loading times. It also sets the first step for supporting gigantic rendering distances without the map being cut off at some point. I've been messing around with rendering distances of 200 and got good 50-60 fps without any optimizations yet! In the end this should also completely remove small loading times and never show map edges anymore. However this is the final version and I'm still pretty far way from that, but the changes in the tile system now allow me to do that. For those of you who are interested in the technical changes: The map has been represented in a 3d array consisting of 4 104x104 arrays representing a plane each. When loading a new map this would have to be fully reloaded with new objects. The new system now consists of a hash table of tiles allowing to add and delete tiles easily.
All the best,
Thomy
I'm very happy with how the past 2 updates turned out and improved our overall activity; wilderness especially. I'd like to continue improving the wilderness because I think it's a place that ensures the overall game economy stays healthy by creating demand for equipment and resources. I'm also introducing weaknesses to make PvMing more interesting and to give elemental weapons places where they out-scale demon weapons. The aim is trying to create a system where every high level weapon can be useful at some point. As always there's also a ton of bugfixes and balancing updates. Many thanks for your reporting and feedback!
Vyrewatch - New Necklace
Vampires or also called Vyrewatch have been added to the Wilderness. They range levels between 110 to 140 and are all weak to fire attacks. The strong versions (130 & 140) can be found at the Bone Yard whereas the weaker versions can be found at the Graveyard of Shadows. In general Vyrewatch are not aggressive except for them seeing an opportunity to kill you. I recommend not getting too low health else you may trigger their blood rush and find yourself out numbered in seconds. You are able to collect Vampire blood from every kill which can be used to upgrade the Vyrewatch necklace. The new necklace can also be received as a rare drop from Vyrewatch. The upgraded version degrades after inflicting 15,000 hits and requires 1,000 Vampire blood to be upgraded. Their flying form is also immune against melee attacks. They can be reached with spears and halberds though. The upgraded Vyrewatch necklace has bonuses equal to the best range, magic and melee amulet combined. It also has a passive effect allowing you to deal 5% more damage while also taking 5% more damage.
Weakness System
I've wanted to implement this for quite a while already and am now doing it in a very basic way. Certain monsters now heave weaknesses:
- Fire: Ice wyrm, Glacor, Vyrewatch
- Water: WildyWyrm
Cooking Skill
With recent changes to Fishing the experience gains for Cooking are just wrong right now. I've tripled the experience rates and changed the code that decides when to burn food. By default you now require a 25% higher level of the food's requirement to no longer burn it at all. That means if Sharks require level 70 Cooking you need level 88 (87.5) Cooking to stop burning them. Cooking gauntlets reduce 10% of that requirement. With the shark example it'd mean that you need a Cooking level of 79 (78.75) to no longer burn Sharks when wearing Cooking gauntlets. There's one exception: You can't burn anything at level 99 Cooking. Burning food now also gives 25% of the original experience.
GWD Changes
I am really happy with how the drops for top 3 damage dealers turned out, but I think it backfired a little bit in the God Wars Dungeon. I've halved the drop rates of rare and unique items from bosses. Don't worry, the drop rates are still better than before the top 3 damage dealer update if you go in with 2 friends! I've also done some changes to boss combat:
- Commander Zilyana: Attacks faster and harder with melee attacks.
- Kree'arra: Ranged attack is now a Mage attack. It can hit a maximum of 30 unprotected.
- K'ril Tsutsaroth: Melee damage of 2 fast hits increased. All melee attacks are now multi attacks hitting an area of 3x3.
- General Graardor: Melee attacks are now multi attacks hitting an area of 3x3.
Game fixes / changes:
- Ice shield freeze reduction timer fixed - it was 2.5s instead of 5s.
- A bug with spell casting has been fixed that sometimes caused you to attack with your staff. It also makes casting spells manually smoother and less delayed in PvP situations.
- It's no longer possible to click objects when frozen. That means that using stairs or dungeon entrances is now impossible when frozen. The logic behind this change is that being frozen means being unable to move and using objects is actually moving your character.
- The wilderness teleport lever in Edgeville is now working.
- Horvik can now make Dragonfire shields and Godsword blades for 1,000k each. You don't require level 90 Smithing when doing so.
- Killing opponents in the wilderness now gives more ELO. The rules for farming kills and killing the same opponent(s) have been made stricter as well.
- The combat power of Spectrals in the wilderness has been reduced. They now have 242 HP and their defensive bonuses have been reduced by 20. They are already in a dangerous area and thus don't need to be that strong.
- Teleporting now clear freeze timers.
- Projectiles now properly hit flying monsters in the air: Armadyl GWD monsters, flying vampires and KQ 2nd form.
- Weapon poison (p++) can now be noted.
- The equipment screen now shows damage types.
- Autocast button now shows the spell you will be casting.
- An issue with beards on the slayer helm has been fixed.
- A bug with the 2 set piece bonus not activating on Vanguard, Templar and Trickster has been fixed.
- The Demon halberd special attack no longer deals 25% additional damage. You still have 2 hits on larger enemies though. This nerf is necessary, because the halberd just hits way too much in PvP.
- Special attack with dark bow using a quiver has been fixed. The special attack damage wouldn't increase.
- Magic shortbow and Seercull special attack buffed. The first hit now also deals 100% of the damage.
- The Karil set effect has been changed. Your attack speed is now decreased by 0.5 when successfully inflicting damage. It's also no longer possible to fire bolt racks with other crossbows.
- Hit effects (vengeance, recoil, spirit shields, etc.) are now always applied. Also when applying a lethal hit!
- Gilded chaotics can now be bought from the Slayer reward shop. They cost 200,000 Slayer points each.
- A rounding issue for weapon repairs has been fixed. Chaotics should no longer cost an additional 10k to be repaired.
- The barrow rewards chest now has a 1 in 1000 chance to give you one of the 6 new Barrow pets. They are miniature versions of the actual Barrow npc models.
- Monsters that cannot be reached by melee attacks can now be attacked with spears or halberds. In general weapons that increase your attack distance.
- Some Grenwall spawns have been added to the wilderness. The green area south-west of Red Dragon Isle.
Engine fixes / changes:
- The internal way of how animations are pre-loaded and cached was updated. You should find newly loaded animations flicker less in crowded areas.
- The kill logs interface has been overhauled. It should cause less performance issues and no longer flicker. You now also have a button at the equipment tab to open the interface. The ::killlogs command was removed as well.
- Spell icons now appear when viewing spell names in menus.
- On-demand fetcher has been updated. The timeouts of requesting model files have been increased. Every download is now also initially enforced through the custom protocol before trying a http request. Overall this will reduce initial loading and downloading times.
- Searching for items in the bank or for npcs in the kill logs now resets scroll position.
- Worldmap viewer has been optimized. It's now loading the map faster on multi-core systems.
- Destroy option can now be navigated by clicking keys 1 or 2.
Map & Tile System Rewritten
I've completely rewritten the client's internal management of tiles. This goes hand in hand with the map loader and its underlying system managing the area you see. This improves the memory management of the map and loading times. It also sets the first step for supporting gigantic rendering distances without the map being cut off at some point. I've been messing around with rendering distances of 200 and got good 50-60 fps without any optimizations yet! In the end this should also completely remove small loading times and never show map edges anymore. However this is the final version and I'm still pretty far way from that, but the changes in the tile system now allow me to do that. For those of you who are interested in the technical changes: The map has been represented in a 3d array consisting of 4 104x104 arrays representing a plane each. When loading a new map this would have to be fully reloaded with new objects. The new system now consists of a hash table of tiles allowing to add and delete tiles easily.
All the best,
Thomy
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