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Update Notes / Updates November 25th - Vampire Catacombs with Vanstrom Klause!
« on: November 25, 2021, 11:46:28 am »
Hey guys,
In the depths of Canifis' swamp a catacomb filled with ancient vampires has been found. You can challenge the ancient Vampire Vanstrom Klause in groups of up to four players in an instanced dungeon. There's new weapons to find, new clothes and new best in slot necklaces for every combat style. In other news we have lots of smaller reworks and fixes improving overall gameplay.
Vampire Catacombs - Vanstrom Klause
A new and unique dungeon has opened in the depths of Canifis' swamp. The catacombs are in the south-eastern part of the swamp just north of the vyrewatch city. Vanstrom Klause is an elder vampire that rests with many other vampires beneath the ground. You need to complete the dungeon and kill Vanstrom Klause for every boss drop. It's an instanced group experience for up to 4 players. The difficulty of this dungeon has been increased when comparing it to other group bosses. It is also highly recommended to have a dedicated tank in your group because some mechanics require taking a lot of damage.
Vanstrom Necklace
You need to become creative when utilizing the blood of an elder vampire that even comes in different forms. A high Invention skill level of 85 is required to create powerful necklaces. These items do not degrade and offer the highest combat bonuses for a given attack style:
Blisterwood weapons
There's three new and degradeable weapons that can be fletched and smithed from blisterwood logs:
Two-handed Magic Weapons
With the blisterwood staff we now have our first two-handed magic weapon that hits harder but attacks slower. I would like to expand on this idea in the future to have more diversity for magical weapons similar to melee and ranged variants.
Darkmeyer Clothes
Broken pieces can be found as drops from vampires. These need to be repaired with a needle and thread to create Darkmeyer clothes. They give protection against aggression from vampires and offer bonuses for all combat styles. You need to be at least level 62 in all combat stats to equip Darkmeyer parts.
Death Item Spawn Locations
It was sometimes unclear and often also random where items would spawn if you died inside of a bossing area. I've changed the item spawn locations for bossing areas to always be OUTSIDE the actual dungeon. For example if you died while fighting a God Wars Dungeon boss, your items would have dropped outside of the bossing room. Which might be difficult to get or you might just die again while trying to retrieve your items. The item drop location will now be outside of the actual dungeon. Meaning they will show up just before you enter the God Wars Dungeon. This rule was applied to all item spawn locations including Har'Lakk, Kal'Ger, Yk'Lagor, entire GWD, Smoke dungeon, Kalphite lair, King black dragon and Vanstrom Klause. The Corporeal Beast spawn location was left untouched.
Hit Splats and Entity Height - Avoiding Visual Clutter
I've updated the way entity heights for health bars and head icons are calculated. They will be more constant and move around less when animations play. You will feel this especially when fighting vampires in their flying form. Hit splats now also have constant positions with a fade-in and fade-out effect. The aim of this change is to give a smoother experience of combat information and avoid visual clutter. That is done by trying to avoid having too many things that move around a lot. This was especially a problem when a lot of hit splats needed to be rendered on a single entity.
Hiscores
New activity scores have been added to the Hiscores. There have also been changes to the layout to better support future filters for desktop and mobile layouts. Player names and skill names have become clickable throughout the page so that navigation becomes easier. The loading gif was removed because it was always flashing up for a split second - it came from a time where loading data took longer than a second.
Animation Quality
This setting how has a larger impact on actual animation smoothness and resulting performance. Lower settings will help slower computers much more to get higher fps rates. I've also improved the animation streaming code a little by only updating color buffers when necessary. This results in overall better performance when rendering a lot of animations on screen.
Game fixes / changes:
Engine fixes / changes:
I hope you're enjoying the new boss Vanstrom Klause. It's a unique experience and also is more difficult than other existing content. I wanted to give you a dungeon that is similar to a smaller raid in other games. Please let me know what you think of it! Do you prefer single bosses or an entire dungeon combined with an endboss?
All the best,
Thomy
Fixes November 26th:
In the depths of Canifis' swamp a catacomb filled with ancient vampires has been found. You can challenge the ancient Vampire Vanstrom Klause in groups of up to four players in an instanced dungeon. There's new weapons to find, new clothes and new best in slot necklaces for every combat style. In other news we have lots of smaller reworks and fixes improving overall gameplay.
Vampire Catacombs - Vanstrom Klause
A new and unique dungeon has opened in the depths of Canifis' swamp. The catacombs are in the south-eastern part of the swamp just north of the vyrewatch city. Vanstrom Klause is an elder vampire that rests with many other vampires beneath the ground. You need to complete the dungeon and kill Vanstrom Klause for every boss drop. It's an instanced group experience for up to 4 players. The difficulty of this dungeon has been increased when comparing it to other group bosses. It is also highly recommended to have a dedicated tank in your group because some mechanics require taking a lot of damage.
Vanstrom Necklace
You need to become creative when utilizing the blood of an elder vampire that even comes in different forms. A high Invention skill level of 85 is required to create powerful necklaces. These items do not degrade and offer the highest combat bonuses for a given attack style:
- Frenzy: melee necklace
- Hawkeye: ranged necklace
- Mystic: magic necklace
- Holy: tank necklace
Blisterwood weapons
There's three new and degradeable weapons that can be fletched and smithed from blisterwood logs:
- Blisterwood stake: level 70 thrown weapons
- Blisterwood staff: level 70 two-handed magic weapon
- Blisterwood pole: level 70 two-handed halberd
Two-handed Magic Weapons
With the blisterwood staff we now have our first two-handed magic weapon that hits harder but attacks slower. I would like to expand on this idea in the future to have more diversity for magical weapons similar to melee and ranged variants.
Darkmeyer Clothes
Broken pieces can be found as drops from vampires. These need to be repaired with a needle and thread to create Darkmeyer clothes. They give protection against aggression from vampires and offer bonuses for all combat styles. You need to be at least level 62 in all combat stats to equip Darkmeyer parts.
Death Item Spawn Locations
It was sometimes unclear and often also random where items would spawn if you died inside of a bossing area. I've changed the item spawn locations for bossing areas to always be OUTSIDE the actual dungeon. For example if you died while fighting a God Wars Dungeon boss, your items would have dropped outside of the bossing room. Which might be difficult to get or you might just die again while trying to retrieve your items. The item drop location will now be outside of the actual dungeon. Meaning they will show up just before you enter the God Wars Dungeon. This rule was applied to all item spawn locations including Har'Lakk, Kal'Ger, Yk'Lagor, entire GWD, Smoke dungeon, Kalphite lair, King black dragon and Vanstrom Klause. The Corporeal Beast spawn location was left untouched.
Hit Splats and Entity Height - Avoiding Visual Clutter
I've updated the way entity heights for health bars and head icons are calculated. They will be more constant and move around less when animations play. You will feel this especially when fighting vampires in their flying form. Hit splats now also have constant positions with a fade-in and fade-out effect. The aim of this change is to give a smoother experience of combat information and avoid visual clutter. That is done by trying to avoid having too many things that move around a lot. This was especially a problem when a lot of hit splats needed to be rendered on a single entity.
Hiscores
New activity scores have been added to the Hiscores. There have also been changes to the layout to better support future filters for desktop and mobile layouts. Player names and skill names have become clickable throughout the page so that navigation becomes easier. The loading gif was removed because it was always flashing up for a split second - it came from a time where loading data took longer than a second.
Animation Quality
This setting how has a larger impact on actual animation smoothness and resulting performance. Lower settings will help slower computers much more to get higher fps rates. I've also improved the animation streaming code a little by only updating color buffers when necessary. This results in overall better performance when rendering a lot of animations on screen.
Game fixes / changes:
- The size of POH's menagerie was increased from 30 to 40 pets.
- Dragon ornament kit is now correctly named on the Grand Exchange.
- The God Wars Dungeon entrance has been fixed. It was too far into the ground.
- You now get the correct message when reaching the dimension limit of your POH.
- Getting a set piece of the chicken costume is now broadcasted.
- The aggression of monsters in the Abyss has been changed. They are now always aggressive towards all combat levels.
- The right-click option "collect" of bankers can now be used to retrieve sold or bought items from the Grand Exchange.
- Tool Leprechauns have been added to every Farming location on the map.
- Invention tasks that require you to obtain Demon, Ancient or Spiritual energies have been removed.
- The daily task variety has been reworked for skills with a lot of different potential tasks such as Invention or Construction. Your task will now be drawn out of a larger pool of potential tasks.
- The up / down dialogue options for various stairs have been fixed.
- Being afk and sitting down no longer triggers while skilling.
- Bleed damage can now be reduced by armour block values.
- Sacred clay can once again be created by using clay on an altar. The speed at which you offer items to altars has been increased significantly as well.
- The Lunar spell 'Monster Examine' now also shows weaknesses of enemies.
- Pure essence have been added to the game. They count as double the amount of normal rune essence when creating runes. At the moment they can only be received as a drop but will become available through other means shortly.
Engine fixes / changes:
- Flying vyrewtach now have a fixed position of their health bar to avoid too much visual clutter during animations.
- Bosses or monsters with a lot of hitpoints now have a larger hitpoints bar.
- Shadows received a second pass for outline smoothening.
- Game tick is now calculated more accurately.
- The radius and height calculation of animated npcs has been improved. It's now done during animations instead of a separate pass resulting in better performance.
- The projectile calculation has been improved. Overshooting is no longer possible which resulted in weird flickering and a fadeout animation has been added.
- It's no longer possible to have the map viewer open while the map is loading. That combination was causing weird flickering issues of animated objects in the world. The map viewer automatically closes when the map starts loading.
- A bug in the asset updater was found and fixed. Fresh game installs will now download much quicker and more reliably. The download speed for missing assets is using full capacty when on the login screen.
I hope you're enjoying the new boss Vanstrom Klause. It's a unique experience and also is more difficult than other existing content. I wanted to give you a dungeon that is similar to a smaller raid in other games. Please let me know what you think of it! Do you prefer single bosses or an entire dungeon combined with an endboss?
All the best,
Thomy
Fixes November 26th:
- An attempt was made to fix the buggy transformation animations that sometimes occur for vampires. I will keep monitoring if this fixes the problem all together and apply patches when necessary.
- Vanstrom Klause can no longer get stuck in his frenzy. If he is stuck and cannot attack a player he will start attacking everyone with mage instead.
- A portal was added when Vanstrom Klause dies that allows you to leave the dungeon.
- Teleporting out of the Vampire catacombs no longer places you outside but at the location you wanted to teleport to.
- Kill logs and kill counters for Vanstrom Klause have been fixed.
- Smithing chrysos armour is working again.
- Crafting black leather is working again.
- There will be no more drop messages when you get a drop in the Vampire catacombs but have died and aren't in the dungeon anymore. This wasn't a bug, you are not supposed to get a drop when you aren't around when the kill happens. Kill scores also only count when nobody dies in the dungeon!
- Instances no longer spawn double bosses.
- Various monster aggressions have been fixed.
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