Register now to gain access to all of our forum features. Once registered and logged in, you will be able to create topics, post replies, send private messages, manage your profile, chat with other players in the shoutbox and much more. Once you sign in, this message will disappear.

Register Login

1

Update Notes / Updates December 17th - Grand Exchange Insight, 3D Audio and Toolbelt Tweaks

« on: December 17, 2024, 08:30:00 am »

Hello everybody!

We're improving the Toolbelt even further with more items and utility added! The audio system received a massive overhaul with spatial information. Last but not least the Grand Exchange received an insight option allowing you to browse or look for specific transactions.

Grand Exchange Insight
The Grand Exchange clerks now allow you more insight into their daily business! You can view newest transactions to find offers that you find interesting:
You can browse a maximum of 9 pages with 25 results per page. Please bear in mind that these transactions are updated every minute. So it is possible that a transaction is no longer available when you view it. The same pagination logic has also been applied to your Transaction History. You can also search for transactions for specific items. Items that are being sold have a right-click buy option to instantly go the the Grand Exchange interface to place an offer. The game doesn't guarantee you get that specific offer when trying to buy an item!

Further Toolbelt Tweaks
Items created that can be put in the Toolbelt are now automatically placed there. The condition for this to happen is that you have at least one item in your Toolbelt available. You will receive a chat message when this happens. You can now go to any fountain and start filling empty vials which will be used from and put into your Toolbelt. A "Dig-here" option has been added to the Toolbelt's right-click menu. You no longer need to bring a Spade with you for clue scrolls or the Barrows. More items can now be added to the Toolbelt:

• Balls of wool. Unstrung amulets received a "String" option.
• Glassblowing pipe. Molten glass received a "Craft" option. While Molten glass cannot be obtained yet, this is a preparation for a future update for a fast way to obtain vials.
• Bowstrings and Crossbow strings. All fletching items including ammunition have received a "Fletch" option.

OpenAL Sounds
The game now plays sounds through the graphics driver. That's a lot faster and gives sounds coming from entities spatial information. You'll hear sounds coming more from the left or the right depending on where they are played in the game. In the future this system can also be used to have different sounds in caves than on surface. You can still use the old sound system by disabling "OpenAL sounds" from the Game Settings.

Game fixes / changes:

• The accuracy of hovering over ground items has been improved. There was a discrepancy between the rendered and clickable model for steep terrains.
• Ghostly robes and most rewards from Christmas crackers can now be deconstructed.
• The algorithm for text upscaling in the UI has been improved. Letters will be sharper and thus easier to read. You can adjust the Text Readability setting in your Interface Settings.
• Dragging interfaces now has the same delay as dragging items. This will prevent scenarios where you click quickly and accidentally drag interfaces around. An interface's background will now also be semi-transparent to indicate a dragging action.

This is the last update for 2024. We'll still be having a few bugfixes every now and then, but other than that we'll see each other with tons of new content in 2025! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year in advance from my side. Have fun playing!

All the best,
Thomy

2

Update Notes / Updates May 3rd - Weakness System for Monsters, Visual Improvements & More!

« on: May 03, 2024, 08:07:37 am »

Hello everybody!

Today's a bad day for monsters. Most enemies have received a weakness against specific damage types. We're re-introducing stab, slash and crush as well as arrow, bolt and thrown damage types. There have also been changes to the pathfinding system for combat and various engine parts have been optimized. Such as the option to change your anti-aliasing quality or to scale down the game's internal resolution for increased performance.

Weakness System
Due to recent discussions on OSRS I've decided to also implement a weakness system for Emps-World. Different damage types for melee and ranged are being reintroduced. Depending on your attack style and weapon you can now deal stab, slash or crush damage with melee weapons. For ranged weapons you can deal arrow, bolt or thrown damage. These don't affect your maxhit. Your damage type is shown in your equipment screen. Weapons with a dedicated damage type remain unchanged. That includes broad weapons, elemental weaponry, spells, etc. A weakness means that your accuracy is increased when dealing damage with a matching damage type. This bonus is multiplied with your base accuracy similarly to the slayer helm. If you wish to check a monster's weakness for yourself you can use the monster examine spell from the Lunar spell book. Alternatively you can find out a monster's weakness by examining them. I also expect the weakness system to be listed on the Wiki in the near future.



Following monsters have a weakness:

• Wildy wyrm: water & slash
• Ice strykewyrm: fire & crush
• Glacor: fire & crush
• Skeletal Wyvern: fire & crush
• Tormented demon: water & stab
• Frost dragon: fire & stab
• Metal dagons: earth & crush
• Dragons: water & stab
• Fire giant: water & bolt
• Ice giant: fire & bolt
• Gulega: stab
• Dark and light beast: slash
• Turoths: crush
• Aquanite: earth
• Magmanite: water
• Aviansies: air & stab
• Bloodveld: slash
• Jelly: crush
• Cockatrice: stab
• Smoke & dust devil: air
• Gargoyle: crush
• Nechryaels: earth & stab
• Tzhaar excluding hardmode fight caves: water & crush
• Vampires: silver & fire
• Undeads: air & thrown
• Demons & hellhounds: water
• Spiders: fire & crush
• Kal'Ger: water
• Yk'Lagor: arrow
• Har'Lakk: slash
• Nex: bolt
• Vanstrom Klause, Ranis & Vanescula: silver and fire
• Lucien van Rot & followers: crush
• K'ril Tsutsaroth: water & arrow
• Kree'Arra: air & stab
• General Graardor: fire & thrown
• Commander Zilyana: earth & crush
• Giant mole: slash & fire
• King black dragon: water & stab
• Corporeal beast 1st form: stab & slash
• Corporeal beast 2nd form: air & thrown
• Kalphite queen 1st form: stab & crush
• Kalphite queen 2nd form: fire & thrown
• Smoke demon champion: water & arrow
• Chaos elemental: earth & bolt
• Kolodion: crush & fire
• Dagannoth supreme: stab
• Dagannoth prime: arrow
• Dagannoth rex: fire
• Barrow brothers: air & thrown

These changes will bring more weapon variety to the game and give me more freedom for future content. Instead of having the best weapon or spell you now have the best weapon or spell per damage type.

Human Verification on Homepage
We've added a human verification process called Turnstile to various pages. This aims at resolving an issue with spam landing on the forums. If you are having troubles logging in please don't hesitate to post in the Helpdesk. There shouldn't be any issues with the mechanism in modern browsers. Afterall almost the entire web uses such a verification mechanism.

Game fixes / changes:

• The combat skill advancements interface has been cleaned up. Additional categories Hitpoints & Other have been added and the Special & Milestones categories were removed. Requirements for Defenders and Culinaromancer's gloves (barrow gloves, dragon gloves, etc.) have been fixed. The other category now also includes items such as the fire cape, completionist cape, etc.
• It is no longer possible to hit a 0 when passing the hit chance roll. Your lowest hit will be 1 and your maxhit remains unchanged.
• The prayer drain rate for lower level prayers has been reduced by roughtly 30%. It should be possible to keep the beginner prayers active for quite some time before running out of prayer points. Their impact isn't too big and prayer points on lower levels aren't high either.
• The internal calculations for pathfinding have been updated. It applies to PvP and some PvM content. Nex for example uses pathfinding to walk towards her target. The code has been optimized to quicker find a path towards the target. This improves situations where you are too slow when following an enemy during PvP.
• Nex has received fixed attack patterns: 2 distant attacks, phase special attack, 2 distant attacks, melee attack, 2 distant attacks, phase special attack, etc. If a phase has no special attack it is replaced by a melee attack. If she is unable to do a melee attack she'll attack with the phase special attack or a distant attack. Phase changes reset the attack pattern and she'll begin with 2 distant attacks. The HP of her followers were reduced by a small amount and their attack speed was lowered. Moreover, there's a delay of 5 seconds before a follower starts attacking, giving you time to taunt or kill quickly.
• An issue was fixed where Kal'Ger wouldn't spawn meteors anymore after a person left the boss instance.
• Future double drop chance events will now also work for Barrows and Clue scrolls.
• The accuracy bonus of promethium daggers and spears has been lowered. This brings them more in line with other promethium items in terms of dps.
• The Ranged strength bonus of bolts has been increased by 10%. They were lacking in damage and accuracy in comparison with longbows. That gives the demon crossbow slightly more dps than the demon longbow but with less accuracy.
• Various old npcs have had their bonuses and levels updated. The current system, which the majority of npcs already use, calculates npc combat power through their combat level. Boss monsters are excluded from these calculations and have not been changed.
• Dragons now belong to the neutral combat class. Their defence bonuses are the same against every combat style.
• Barbarian villagers have received additional dialogue to help newcomers.

Engine fixes / changes:

• The visuals of doors, ores, trees, etc. while the map is loading has been improved. You can now interact with these objects while the map is still loading instead of having to wait. This is a big improvement for game settings with large render distances or on slower machines.
• Obsidian caves visuals have been improved. This also includes Obsidian dragons and Tzhaar spawns. It's now also possible to shoot over the lava to use safespots.
• The loot beam for rare item drops has been updated. It now has a lighting effect and displays longer making sure you definitely realize when a valuable item was dropped.
• You can now change the anti-aliasing quality to get even smoother edges.
• The high and very high shadow settings now also work with large rendering distances. They give the entire map shadows instead of fading out at some point. The quality of closer shadows remain unchanged.
• The game render resolution can now be changed. This improves performance a lot on slower machines. I could get 35-40% fps boost on my laptop using this technique. You'll find this especially useful on large screens with high pixel densities. It reduces the internal resolution at which the game is rendered and scales it up before sending it to your monitor.
• The resolution at which water reflections are rendered has been changed. Lower water qualities now require significantly less GPU power to render reflections. This change is an overall improvement for water reflection performance with little to no loss in quality.
• More progress has been made towards the first person mode. You can toggle the camera mode by typing ::firstperson. The camera now shakes with your character's movement and animations. Is this mode something you'd like to see fully released in the future?
• Healthbars now fade out during a death animation.
• The height calculation for overhead prayers and healthbars has been improved. The healthbar now tries to better follow an entity's head position.

Here's what my Yk'Lagor looked like in first person:


I hope you're liking these changes. Please give feedback on the weakness system. It might still require some finetuning for special cases. I am still working on the Karamja expansion. I think a quest would be nice and possibly the introduction of Ape Atoll where you can find a new solo dungeon.

All the best,
Thomy

3

Update Notes / Updates April 5th - Completionist Cape Upgrades & Additional Bank Functions

« on: April 05, 2024, 08:44:19 am »

Hey guys,

In this update you can upgrade your completionist cape with your lava capes. This increases the cape's offensive stats and requires level 99 Invention. Your bank space was doubled and the bank interface has been updated. You can now swap, insert and merge entire bank tabs. Read the bank section below for all the details on these bank tab operations.

Completionist Cape Upgrade
It's now possible to use your Invention skill to combine fire/lava capes with the completionist cape. Doing so requires level 99 Invention and high level energies. The ice and range completionist cape invention also requires ava's accumulator to include the arrow preserving effect. The upgraded completionist capes cannot be recolored and provide slightly better bonuses than the completionist and lava capes combined. This is what the new capes look like:

With this update you are now also able to own multiple completionist capes. Visit the completionist cape rack upstairs of the Varrock museum with multiple max capes for the free exchange. You still have to pay ~5m for each max cape though.

Bank Interface Improvements
I've added new features to the bank interface to improve usability. The bank space for everyone has also been doubled.


Here's all the bank interface improvements:

• Each bank tab can now hold 200 items instead of 100. This applies to both members and non-members.
• All items in a bank tab can now be configured as placeholders when right-clicking the bank tab header.
• Bank tabs can now be swapped, inserted and merged. You can drag bank tabs around the same way as other items. The insert and merge options are available when switching from swap to insert mode on the bottom left of the bank interface.
• Empty rows are collapsed in the all items tab. You can scroll through all your items without having to go over lots of empty spots.
• Bank loading speeds have been improved. The game will draw more item images per render cycle and switching between tabs no longer causes any flickering.

Game fixes & changes:

• Items kept on death interface now shows the items you lose in the wilderness as cash drop. This is now also properly logged as a destroy item action. An issue with the scrollbar of the interface has also been fixed.
• Various textures for GWD monsters have been updated.
• The completionist and max cape received reflective textures for golden trim parts.
• The particle system has been modernized and several particle emitters have been updated. Abyssal weaponry, elemental staff and incense burners received a smoother particle texture.
• The offensive bonuses for Necator equipment have been increased.
• The dagannoth area has been graphically updated with water and lighting. Drops for low-level dagannoths have also been configured.
• Various water area borders have been improved.
• Daily rewards now go straight into your bank.
• The deconstruction speed of items has been increased by one tick.
• The zoom in and out operation of the worldmap viewer have been improved. The absolute position on the map will no longer jump around.
• The loading window in the top left corner of the game was removed. Instead you will see the loading text at the top of the screen that appears only when teleporting far away. The popup only occurs when a short loading screen is required.

I've made more progress on Karamja. Various npcs have been spawned and I started configuring a new solo dungeon. Feel free to check it out already, but it's still in an unfinished state and not everything may be accessible!

All the best,
Thomy

4

Update Notes / Updates October 12th - PvP Changes and Equipment Rebalancing

« on: October 12, 2023, 08:44:46 am »

Hey guys,

In this updated we're revisiting balancing for PvP. Various items with PvP specific block modifiers have been balanced. we are also introducing negative accuracy bonuses for equipment to encourage gear switches. The run energy system was also reworked to overall restore energy faster but to also drain faster with heavy equipment.

PvP Equipment Buffs
Accuracy and damage mitigation for equipment was lust lacking for PvP. With this update the pvp damage block modifier is also added to your accuracy. This doesn't only give PvP great defensive capabilities but also increases hit chances. Following items have been adjusted:

• Zuriel, morrigan, vesta and statius: 1.0 --> 3.0/4.0
• Corrupt zuriel, morrigan, vesta and statius: 0.5 --> 1.5/2.0
• Third-age: 0 --> 2.0/3.0
• Barrow: 1.0/2.0 --> 2.0/3.0/6.0
• Trickster, vanguard and templar: 1.0/1.5 --> 2.0/3.0/4.0
• Clue scroll reward items: 0.0 --> 1.0/2.0
• Zaryte bow: 0.0 --> 4.0

The aim of this change is to have different specialized gear for PvP and PvM. That makes buffing and nerfing equipment a lot easier while also not destroying item balancing completely for either PvM or PvP.

On top of these changes negative equipment bonuses are also added. Equipment received negative accuracy bonuses for opposing combat styles. For a melee equipment piece you'd get full negative bonuses for mage and some for range accuracy. Following equipment slots have negative bonuses:

• Body: -30 to counter combat style and -15 to weak combat style
• Legs: -21 to counter combat style and -11 to weak combat style
• Helmet: -6 to counter combat style and -3 to weak combat style
• Gloves: -5 to counter combat style and -3 to weak combat style
• Boots: -3 to counter combat style and -2 to weak combat style
• Shields: -8 to counter combat style and -4 to weak combat style

Negative bonuses will promote gear switches for increased accuracy. So no more casting in full metal plate armour. There are no negative bonuses for melee accuracy. You can always use a melee special attack weapon without suffering from any gear penalties.

Here are two example setups:


Following mechanics related to PvP have also been changed:

• Protection prayer damage reduction for PvP has been reduced from 60% to 50%.
• Protect from magic no longer reduces any freeze timers.
• Using a special attack on another player puts a short teleblock on yourself in the wilderness.
• Revenants cave is now single combat only.

Run Energy Rework
The way run energy drain and recovery is being calculated has been reworked. You restore 4x more run energy when standing still and even more when resting. Run energy is restored at a reduced rate when frozen. The factor at which you restore run energy is heavily impacted by your Agility level as well. Unless you are wearing heavy armour you have pretty much infinite run energy at higher Agility levels.

Your run energy reduction is determined by the amount of weight you carry. To keep things simple your run energy drain per second is 5% of your weight. If you carry items that weigh a total of 20kg you lose 1 run energy point every second. The weight of 20kg is roughly what a melee setup with a full inventory of manta rays weighs.

The weight values of various items have been updated. This includes skilling resource items, equipment. etc. It's impossible that I've set a correct weight value for all items in the game. So please let me know if there are mistakes! Moreover, equipped items only affect your total weight by 50%. If you have to carry heavy armour or weaponry it is recommended to wield it instead of having it in your backpack.


Game fixes / changes:

• An issue was fixed that kept forgetting the clan chat you were in.
• Guthans had his lifesteal mechanic fixed. He was healing too much too randomly.
• Lifesteal effects for npcs received a visual indication.
• Broadcasts inside dangerous pvp zones have been disabled. It's unfair to wait for a message to run to a given spot and hunt down a player.
• Protect from magic no longer reduces freeze timers.
• A bug was fixed where sending a private message by clicking a name from the online clan chat list didn't work.
• The projectile system (magic spells, arrows, etc.) has been improved. Projectiles are now calculated from one entity to another rather than from stationary coordinates. This fixes visual issues where arrows or spells drop out of thin air during combat with a lot of movement.
• Teleporting now cleares the in combat timer allowing you to instantly logout or bank after a successful teleport.
• The logout delay inside the wilderness has been increased from 20 to 30 seconds. It should be impossible to get away from a fight by closing the game client.
• You are now notified about new Collection Log entries.
• Revenants are once again dropping third-age. The drop rate for a random third-age piece is half the drop rate of statues.
• With the introduction of negative magic bonuses the experience gain system for magic has been reworked. This allows you to create a setup where you permanently splash your spells. Your Magic experience gain is now divided into two parts: flat experience per spell cast plus damage dealt on enemies.
• Energy potion now restores 15 run energy up from 10. Super energy potion now restores 30 run energy up from 20.

Engine fixes / changes:

• An option to the "Interface Settings" has been added that improves text readability. By default it is set to 50%. This setting sharpens text and increases its contrast. Moving the sharpness slider to the left completely disables the option and renders text as it always used to.
• A bug was fixed where loading sprites could result in the engine locking because it was waiting for the file system. This happened when installing another game (this is how I found out about it) or reaching 100% disk read usage by other means.
• The model for female torva helm has been corrected.
• The lighting and water system have seen minor performance improvements. There were fps issues when many lights had to be rendered on the scene, e.g. Slayer Tower.
• Lower light quality settings no longer render small light sources, such as torches, candles or lanterns mounted to walls. This improves performance by a lot for only a small change in scenery.

I hope you're enjoying these changes and test out some PvP! We've got more things planned for the wilderness. Please give feedback on how the current changes affect gameplay. We frequently discuss ideas and changes on Discord.

All the best,
Thomy

5

Update Notes / Updates September 22nd - Mining Rework, Dyed Items and Material Lighting

« on: September 22, 2023, 06:51:20 am »

Hello everybody!

We're extending the veteran ranks of up to 16 years. The item pool that can be dyed has been expanded with Chrysos, Promethium and Necator. There have also been changes to the Mining skill lowering level requirements for existing. We also added bane ore, which can be smithed into powerful ammunition against certain types of enemies. Moreover, the lighting system has reached its final stage allowing us to configure material properties.

Specular Lighting and Material Properties
The lighting system is reaching its final state. We introduce global illumination aka the sun light. This means that small amounts of light is cast on everything in the game. This results in more realistic scenery. The specular lighting system was improved, which allows us to give materials different reflective properties. Meaning that light shining on metal looks different from light shining on grass. These properties have been applied to various different kinds of armours and floors. Please let me know if something is too shiny or not quite shiny enough. Defining reflective properties of materials is still work in progress and takes quite some time to for finetuning. If you want to check it out by yourself try equipping some metal armour and move the camera around. Here's a screenshot of what it looks like:


Mining Rework
The Mining skill has been reworked to make it more user-friendly and afkable. Pickaxes and Mining levels now also have a heavier impact on ore retrieval speeds. Following things have been changed:

• You no longer get 2 ores per successful mine action. You get single ores at faster intervals now.
• Your pickaxe bonus was doubled. This directly reflects the speed at which you get ores.
• Rocks containing ores now have a resource count which represents the amount of ores you can obtain before switching to an empty state. You can obtain at least 4 ores per rock. The higher level rocks contain around 8-12 ores.
• The mining animation was changed. It's faster and thus offers you more ticks at which you can obtain ores. This results in faster mining speeds for lower level ores.
• Several level requirements to mine ores have been lowered. They have been made equal to the Smithing requirement for smelting a bar. Mining difficulties, which determine when you get ore remained untouched.

The aim of this change was to let the Mining skill feel similar to other gathering skills, such as Fishing or Woodcutting. It is definitely become more afk-able resulting in better experience rates and less clicking.

Dye System
Our dye system has completely been reworked making it much easier to add new items. With this change the recolor algorithms for Barrow, Shadow, Blood and Third-age dyes have been adjusted to give colored items more depth. You've already been enjoying this change for weeks by the way. Here's an image of all new recolors you can create now:


Veteran Ranks
I didn't think I'd ever expand the pool of veteran icons in the game. Nonetheless, I am proud to expand the pool for veteran icons in the game. By today we are officially older than 9 years. You can now choose from icons of up to 16 years. Let's see if we have to expand the veteran icon pool again in 8 years.

Bane ammunition
With the change to ore requirements for the Mining skill we've got quite some space left for the higher levels. This gap is filled with a new type of metal to mine: Bane ore. Starting at level 85 Mining you can obtain one out of 4 Bane ores. You can smelt those into bane bars which are futher refined into arrows and bolts. This ammunition deals additional damage against certain higher level Slayer creatures. Bane ore can be found in the Glacors cave, just before visiting Yk'Lagor.


Game fixes / changes:

• A bug was fixed where dropped items would not show after using stairs or ladders.
• The login code has been overhauled and made more robust. This was done in an attempt to fix a bug that gets you stuck during the login phase.
• It is no longer possible to get duplicate slayer tasks from the task selection interface. This also fixes a problem where you'd not always get the full task selection prompt.
• Promethium maul and 2h weapon now count as 2 items towards the promethium set bonus.
• Various teleportation spells received proper experience gains.
• Antirot potion can now be created.
• The probability for slayer tasks of slayer creature has been lowered. Metal dragons have been combined into a single task and Shenven no longer assigns every slayer creature. Have a look at the wiki for all changed tasks lists.

In the coming updates I'd like to revisit Hiscores and think of another Competitive season during winter. I think that we could have Hiscores for who earns the most xp every in a given cycle. Maybe 3-6 months and reward the top ranks with unique weaponry similar to Competitive season winners. What are your thoughts on this? Feel free to comment here or on our Discord.

All the best,
Thomy

6

Update Notes / Updates August 14th - Slayer Expansion, Evil Tree & Lighting Improvements

« on: August 14, 2023, 08:11:18 am »

Hello everybody!

Prepare yourselves for a new challenge with the Slayer skill. Collect components for the Abyssal defender and Necator hides to craft new ranged armour. Moreover, evil trees started to appear on the worldmap. On top of that the lighting system receveived visual improvements.

Slayer Expansion - Superior Creatures
The Slayer skill has been expanded to offer challenges beyond level 99. Complete a miniquest from Shenven to enable spawn chances for stronger slayer creatures to appear during tasks. You will be challenged by tougher monsters that offer drops for a new tier 85 Ranged armour and components for the Abyssal defender.


Evil Tree
Every few hours an evil tree will be spawning on random locations on the map. You can ask Evil Dave who lives north of Barbarian village about the phenomenon and how to get started. Cutting down evil trees rewards large amounts of logs as well as a chance to obtain the Woodcutter set which gives you a chance to directly burn logs when chopping trees.


Game fixes / changes:

• The default attack attack speed for 2h swords and mauls have been lowered from 4.5s to 4s.
• Emps Credits can now be transformed into a stackable item by purchasing Emps Credits from Bolkoy. This item can be traded with other players and be sold on the Grand Exchange. The item is also tradeable for ironmen.
• Lower level Revenants now also count towards Slayer task completion.
• Casting a magic spell when having special attack enabled no longer reduces special attack energy.
• You can no longer light any item with a tinderbox.
• Building a trapdoor is no longer possible for the floor space in POH.
• Splashing a magical spell no longer grants xp nor deals damage.
• Ceremonial swords can now be traded on ironman accounts.
• Experience lamps can no longer be used when xp lock is enabled.

Engine fixes / changes:

• The roofs of edgeville have been straightened out.
• An issue was fixed where equipping items that only differ in colour would not update the character model.
• Lights at the Grand Exchange have been improved. This also includes the application of light sources with a larger radius.
• Lights of fires have received a flicker effect and a specular component. This results in more realistic scenes for fires including reflective parts.
• A bug was fixed where shadows inside houses would not render properly when the roof hasn't been seen yet.

I hope you're having fun with the slayer expansion and evil tree.

All the best,
Thomy

7

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:

• Frenzy: melee necklace
• Hawkeye: ranged necklace
• Mystic: magic necklace
• Holy: tank necklace

You will find those new pieces of equipment useful on your adventures. These necklaces cannot be traded and turn into a degraded state when lost upon death. Meaning that once created you cannot lose them unless you manually destroy the items.

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

All blisterwood weapons deal silver type damage and thus give additional 20% accuracy and damage against vampires. The damage type of magic spells is overwritten when using blisterwood. They degrade after 5000 hits in combat or being thrown away. The weapons cannot be traded.

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.

8

Update Notes / Updates September 16th - Skilling Pets & Many Minor Overhauls

« on: September 16, 2021, 08:35:09 am »

Hey guys,

In today's update I have a lot of smaller reworks and improvements that I've seen as problematic over the past months. One of the major aims was to improve the game on slower devices because it just was not performing as well as it actually could. Most of these smaller updates already went live a while ago as incremental client patches. The largest part of this update is Skilling Pets, which can now be obtained randomly while training skills.

Skilling Pets
You can now find Skilling pets while skilling. The chances of obtaining those are quite rare but do scale linearly with the amount of experience gained. Additional modifiers are included when being a member and also the amount of total experience points in a specific skill. The modifier for receiving a combat pet are halved because experience gains are generally higher than those of non-combat skills. You can receive pets multiple times and having a full inventory will just drop the pet item on the floor. You can find a list of all skilling pets in your collection log.

Below's a screenshot of all pets:


I'm sure you'll find your favorite pets. Good luck hunting for those!

Invention
I've added many more items that can be deconstructed. That filled up the skilling interface quite a lot and I decided to group certain items together. There's no longer every bronze item listed with every energy you get but instead a group of bronze items. You can still find the list with all details on the wiki though.


Item Sprites
The way item sprites were calculated was a bit questionable and also very outdated. In order to fix some bugs in the old system I decided to rewrite it. Item icons are now rendered as 64x64 pixel sprites and downscaled instead of 32x32 pixels. This results in much better visual clarity of items and fixes visual problems that existed previously.

Shadows
I've identified a few issues with shadows regarding their performance and the way they looked unless being on the highest setting. I've reworked the shadow filtering technique from a simple anti-aliasing window to a poisson filter. This results in sharper shadows with increased performance. This gives us higher quality shadows for a bit less of GPU power required than before. It improves gameplay with shadows on lower-end devices and increases visual quality on high-end machines. I basically modernized the way shadows are smoothed out. I have also implemented cascading shadow maps. That is a technique which renders the shadows of distant objects in lower quality. This allowed me to put shadows on basically every model on higher graphic settings. We now have nicer shadows that render performant. Let me know what you think!

Sprite Positions & Minimap
I have reworked the internal Sprite positioning system which now supports comma values. That results in much smoother minimap transitions, experience drops, hit splats, etc. Any kind of moving text or image is affected by this. This change allowed me to create a zoom option for the minimap. You can use your mouse wheel while on top of the minimap to zoom in and out. There's a limit of how far you can zoom out because you might hit too much of unloaded terrain. Clicking the compass sets the minimap zoom back to its original value.

Camera
I have rewritten the camera system. It was tedious to use for mathematical calculations and also being juddery. You could feel this especially when moving around or zooming in/out. Moreover, the game was doing the same calculation many times per rendered frame. The new system brings better performance for slower systems and a smoother experience when using camera controls.

Boss Drops
It has recently been pointed out that there is no real advantage trying to solo a boss. I'm introducing a minimum and maximum drops system for bosses. You will get at least two drops for killing a group or hardmode boss. That means a solo attempt will result in 2 rolls on the drop table rewarding the much more difficult fight. I understand that this increases the amount of drops for solo kills. However, bear in mind that duo or trio kills are much quicker and result in way more drops than soloing! This is a small QoL improvement for trying to solo group content. The resource drop amounts for hardmode bosses are now also scaled by 120%. If the boss drops 100k in normal mode, it will drop 120k in hardmode.

Login & Reconnecting
I've reworked the way you login or reconnect to the game. The process was sped up by a lot and will now transfer all data required immediately when logging in. This results in a much faster initial load as well as smoother reconnects should your internet connection get interrupted. Online timers such as being in combat or in the wilderness are unaffected by this change. The rework is about quicker and smoother logins.

Game fixes / changes:

• The amount for alch warnings can now be configured by right-clicking either low or high level alchemy spells.
• Combat power of Demon wand has been increased. It is the most expensive weapon to use and should also reflect its high cost by providing more damage. I've increased Magic accuracy by 15 and strength by 4.
• The Chaos elemental's combat was visually updated. Attack animations no longer walking resulting in weird positions. Its attack speed was also nerfed and combat power slightly buffed to remain equally strong.
• Item bonuses for dragon full helm (sp) and dragon platebody sp) have been fixed. There was also an issue with poisoned dragon spear bonuses that got fixed.
• K'ril now counts as demon when using Demon aura.
• King Black Dragon collection log now contains the construction heads item as well.
• Collection fairies can be bought for having 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% completion of the Collection log from the Event Point store.
• Mining rune essences is back to its old speed.
• Nex is now considered a demon.
• The bonuses from Demon slayer aura have been increased from 15% to 20%.

Engine fixes / changes:

• In-game time is now properly synced with server time again.
• Water configuration for areas above water (Pest Control boat) has been fixed.
• Orb timers are now displayed in minutes to cause even less visual clutter. They will show seconds once reaching values < 1 minute. So you definitely know when exactly an effect expires.
• Fairy wings wield model has been fixed.
• Items kept on death interface now shows up to 9 items instead of up to 6.
• A bug was found and fixed in the client's asset updater which could cause certain models not to be downloaded and displayed properly. I've also put a limit on parallel asset downloads to avoid overloading network traffic. Loading times are unaffected by this change.
• The color picker for completionist cape is now updating the interface's model colors immediately after selecting a color. You no longer need to hit the Confirm button to have a preview. The right-section hue image for color selection is now also constant. This makes it easier to select a specific color or when changing color tones.
• There was a problem with faulty sprite data that needed to be refreshed. The game now automatically detects faulty images on startup and rebuilds the image cache when necessary. Prior to this fix the game would always re-download images and store them on the disk. Images aren't too big but the game would continously store unnecessary data. A few megabytes will be freed up for some computers.
• The cursor code has been overhauled and performance was improved. In some cases (magic spells) the cursors would keep reloading putting some unnecessary stress on the GPU.

I hope you'll be enjoying this update. It took a while to put everything together and get it to a release. What would you think of letting your pets drink dye bottles to change their appearance in a future update?

All the best,
Thomy

9

Update Notes / Updates October 29th - Halloween Event, PvP Changes, Daily Rewards and More!

« on: October 29, 2020, 07:48:20 am »

Hey guys,

Today's update is a collection of many small patches. The Halloween skull collection event returns with new collectible rings that transform you into monsters. There's also been changes to PvP damage calculations and Hunter received new equipment through Crafting. There have also been several changes to the homepage and we now have Daily Login Rewards. You can read the rest of the patch notes below.

Happy Halloween - Grim Reaper Returns
The annual Halloween event returns! After the completion of the Draynor Manor quest you can use the Muncher pet to get Skull drops. Every monster has a 25% drop chance to drop Skulls - the currency for Grim Reaper's shop. Alternatively you can also use a Skeletal Raven or Mini Kolodion as a replacement for Muncher. You must have one of the pets following you in order to be eligible for Skull drops. The Grim Reaper has also decided to sell you 4 new rings that turn you into different monsters. With the Halloween event these transformations have also been reworked. They should mostly work in low level combat and also allow you to Poke enemy players. Similar to how snowballs or snowmen work.


Damage Soaking --> Damage Blocking
With recent concerns regarding max hits in PvP zones I've taken a look at a mechanic that has been in the game for a while but wasn't used properly: Blocking damage. There is now a new bonus that reduces incoming hits from players: PvP Block. You can see your Block values on equipment screen:

• Block: Reduces hits by a flat amount. A block value of 10 means that your enemy will hit 10 less: 10 --> 0, 50 --> 40
• PvP Block: Reduces hits by a percentage. A PvP block value of 10 means your enemy will hit 10% less: 10--> 9, 50 --> 45

Certain items have received the new PvP Block value. Meaning that these items only offer their blocking bonus against other players! Every player also gets 5% extra damage blocking inside a PvP zone. This change isn't going to affect PvM in any way and tries to fix the extremely high hits you can receive in PvP scenarios. The wiki has also been updated with all the new block values. Please let me know what you think of this change.

Hunter Additions
Kebbit furs can now be crafted into fashionable clothing. Dark kebbit fur allows you to create gloves of silence that decrease the chance of getting caught when pickpocketing. They come with 500 charges and degrade once fully used. Prickly kebbits no longer only drop kebbit spikes but spotted fur that can be crafted into spotted capes. The smaller versions of kebbit spikes, which are obtained randomly when catching prickly kebbits, can be crafted into spiked vambraces. Those offer slightly higher bonuses than their previous versions. All the new equipment mentioned above can be crafted by using a needle on furs or kebbit spikes obtained from hunting.


Attack Priorities for Single Combat Zones
I've rewritten the way attack priorities work. Generally speaking it was simplified in order to avoid scenarios where you could not attack NPCs or were spammed with "already under attack" messages. You can now always attack any NPC. Who ever is currently attacking you will stop doing so when you select a new target. That simplifies the attack checks and makes it easier for you to pick new targets. The scenario is different in PvP zones though. You can only attack other players that are not attacked by either an NPC or another player. However, a player attacking an NPC is free to choose a new target: either another NPC or a player!

Shoutbox Removal
These features were outdated and also no longer maintained. The shoutbox is not actively used and also mainly contained spam or troll comments. I've decided to no longer support it and remove the feature from the page. You probably already noticed this. I've also placed more Discord links on the forum and main page to ensure people will find our community.

Voting Removal and Daily Rewards
The voting page has been removed. It was not working and also was no longer actively maintained. We've run voting experiments in the past and they yielded no results. You now get a random (voting) box as daily reward for logging into the game. These boxes have also been updated to give you multiple runes on their drop tables for better and also updated reward distributions. Beginner, Adventurer and Veteran boxes gives you with 2-4 items whereas the rare box gives you 4-8 items. Members get an additional 1-2 items per box.

This is an example of a Rare box. You are eligible for receiving a daily reward box when having a total level over 500 and having played at least 30 minutes. This restriction is per user, so you can get them for multiple accounts.

Homepage Adjustments
I've fixed and improved a few elements on the homepage for smaller screen sizes. The look and feel of popup windows (play button, login, payment, etc.) has been improved. They will now try to align properly in the center of your screen. With this change I have also updated scrollbars: made them smaller and gave them a darker color to match the homepage design. The next and previous buttons of the screenshot/video viewbox on the index page are also no longer above popups on mobile phones.

Game fixes / changes:

• Attack ranges of spears / halberds has received a few adjustments when fighting NPCs and are now also working correctly again in multi combat zones.
• Loading issues with doors and the shooting star have been fixed.
• The attack distance of bosses was increased to avoid scenarios where you could safespot them.
• AFK kicker has been reduced from 15 to 9 minutes. When reaching 9 minutes of being afk the game now force a logout instead of suggesting one. When starting to rest (afk for 3 minutes) the game will also reset all skilling actions to avoid your account being locked to any actions.
• Items lost to deaths inside of the Giant mole and King black dragon instances will now be dropped outside their respective entrances.
• An issue with ranged attacks of the Giant mole has been fixed. It will now correctly deal damage in hard mode.
• Elemental staves and bows now passively apply their elemental effect with a proc chance of 15%.
• The demon orb special attack can now be activated again once the timer goes below 15 seconds. That makes refreshing the buff and constantly using it easier. You now also gain additional 2 base spell damage when using it with a Demon wand.
• The out of combat delay timer messages are now correctly shown in the wilderness. You need to be 15 seconds (instead of 5) out of being in combat for most actions inside the wilderness. The message modification has also been applied to the logout timer, 20 seconds instead of 10.
• The Demon wand now has a special attack that restores 150% of the damage you dealt in prayer points. There's also a unique animation that plays when using the special attack. It's also impossible to use (or waste) special attack energy when using a staff's special attack in melee combat - special attack will just disable itself automatically.
• An issue with using items on furnaces with specific rotations has been fixed.
• Crossbow limbs can now be noted.
• The melee attacks of K'ril Tsutsaroth no longer hit the entire room. They now have their correct attack range of 2 tiles.
• More poisonous spiders have been added to the Barbarian dungeon. There's now also red spider eggs spawns that can be picked up from the floor.

Engine fixes / changes:

• There is now a window option for vertical sync.
• Fullscreen mode is now applied to the monitor where the game is currently running on.
• An issue with flickering item options on the floor has been fixed. This could occur when moving the camera while hovering over ground items.
• The textures of guthan's chainskirt have been updated.
• Text color highlighting code has been improved.
• An animation issue that resulted in fps drops has been fixed. The reason was rendering a too high animation quality for wheat in Draynor village.
• The water configurations for 2 oases inside the desert have been improved.

In the next update I'll try to work on further improvements on combat, more specifically the attack speed and power of magic weapons. I'm also planning upgraded Barrow versions with better set effects and the ability to dye them. You can have a look at our current ideas here: https://trello.com/b/QGPVa5en/emps-world

All the best,
Thomy



Fixes for 30th of October:

• XP lamps can be used again on skills with levels 99 and above.
• Daily reward boxes are no longer added to every account. You now need a total level of at least 500 and play for 30 minutes in order to receive a box.
• Multiple people had issues with the game launcher. The problem was caused by starting multiple game instances that would try to update the game. In that scenario they would keep writing to the same file(s) and corrupt them. The newest launcher now locks local files properly and will validate the game client before every launch. If it finds any file corruption or is unable to launch the game it will re-download the game client.

Fixes for 1st of November:

• Collection log colors have been fixed.
• Damage blocking has been reverted to its old state for PvE - flat damage reduction for incoming hits. The PvP-only blocking value is still percentage based though and only counts when fighting players.
• An issue was fixed where NPCs were not attackable. They were stuck in their "returning to original position" state and wouldn't move quickly enough to reset properly.
• Water in a cellar of Port Phasmatys was fixed.
• Ice shield and crown received PvP blocking values.

10

Screenshots / lord of the chickens

« on: October 25, 2020, 04:24:52 pm »

i killed 448 evil chickens for this set plus i have 1wings 1head and 1legs duplicates.
by the way im first ?

11

Events / Re: Emps-Competitive: Season 2

« on: July 01, 2020, 07:07:57 pm »

12

Events / Re: Emps-Competitive: Season 2

« on: June 22, 2020, 08:18:27 am »

http://prntscr.com/t45k1h

13

Events / Re: Emps-Competitive: Season 2

« on: June 12, 2020, 07:52:36 pm »

https://gyazo.com/244f90380d8e08712a4fd1c582cb3427

14

Events / Re: Emps-Competitive: Season 2

« on: June 10, 2020, 07:58:35 pm »

15

Events / Re: Emps-Competitive: Season 2

« on: June 09, 2020, 06:40:39 am »

https://imgur.com/T64C8Pg