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16

Update Notes / October 28th to November 1st - Double Experience Weekend

« on: October 16, 2022, 10:37:32 am »

Hi everyone!

We have an upcoming Double Experience weekend. Starting October 28th and ending November 1st to celebrate Halloween! During that time you can get double amount of Skulls from monster kills. They can be spent at the Grim Reaper's Halloween store for unique and limited items.


You can check out the latest patch notes for more details:
https://emps-world.net/forum/update-notes/updates-october-14th-halloween-event-bugfixes-sceptre-of-light!-22370/

Good luck and have fun during Halloween!

All the best,
Thomy

17

Update Notes / Updates October 14th - Halloween Event, Bugfixes & Sceptre of Light!

« on: October 13, 2022, 08:20:50 am »

Hey guys,

Halloween is around the corner and our event is starting today! The update also contains various fixes and final preparations for the Rot Caves. There have been extensive changes to the Grand Exchange to make market manipulation harder. The attack speeds of several weapon types have been adjusted and the Staff of light can now be upgraded into the Sceptre of light.

Halloween Event
You are able to obtain skulls from monster kills again! The selection of Halloween items have been extended in the Grim Reaper shop. You can now obtain colored versions of the Pumpkin lantern and Spider wings. Our Halloween Event starts today and will end November 15th.

Good luck on getting one or all of the colored Spider wings and Pumpkin lanterns!

Weapon Attack Speeds
I have created a system that automatically assigns attack speeds depending on the weapon type. I have taken the OSRS wiki page as inspiration for settings default attack speeds for our weapons. Please bear in mind that this might not be perfect and that "special" weapons have left untouched. That includes demon weapons, godswords, godblades, saradomin sword, etc. On top of that the new system has improved processing performance.

Grand Exchange
The Grand Exchange no longer considers offers that are older than one year. There are over 100,000 offers in the database and most of them are too old to ever be matched successfully. In order to improve performance and also make matching offers faster I've decided to reduce the amount of matches done. Offers older than one year won't be considered anymore when trying to match buy and sell offers. They are NOT automatically cancelled and will remain in the GE until manually taken. I understand that this might lock out old offers but it improves the speed at which the GE can match newly added offers. It's not worth it to look in large and ancient data with a minimal chances of finding a match.

I've also implemented an attempt that tries to fix a very rare bug that eats away a newly placed transaction. This happens when a newly placed transaction tries to overwrite an already existing transaction in the same slot. It's still a mystery how that happens but the game now tries to find an empty slot when overlaps happen.

Moreover, an issue with duplicating offers on the Grand Exchange was fixed. That resulted in a handful of people being able to spawn items into the game. We were able to identify the abusers over night and banned them away thanks to our extensive logging system. The Grand Exchange logs faulty transactions and thus it was quite easy to identify accounts and items involved in the case.


Game fixes / changes:

• More spawn locations have been added to the shooting star. The probability of it spawning inside the wilderness was left unchanged. Mining auras can now also trigger when mining the star. The star also despawns once a new star is ready to spawn and nobody has mined stardust in a while.
• Adding bolt tips to bolts and enchanting bolts now also create 45 items per action instead of 15.
• A bug was fixed where taunted enemies would search for new targets when unable to attack with melee.
• Observatory area has been fixed. Flashy white triangles were removed, dialogues polished and shooting star respawn has been fixed.
• Clicking entities that are far away get you stuck less frequently when they move. The game will now wait until the recommended walk path is finished before issuing the simplified following code.
• A bug was fixed where projectile crossability wasn't working properly in PvP zones. Meaning you couldn't shoot over tree stumps or heal-other spells would let you walk towards your target at all times.
• The phase changes for nex have been smoothed out.
• You can no longer walk on top of the banker and healer at center of the Grand Exchange square.
• Various noted item drops from clue scroll rewards have been fixed. The game wouldn't properly recognized certain noted items and would thus wrongly place them as clue scroll rewards. Don't worry though, the items are all correct and you are free to unnote them now.
• Yk'Lagor thunder attack now properly stuns you again for 3 seconds.
• Kalphite queen mage and range attacks have been slowed down. It's now easier to prayer flick her attacks.
• Scrolling while having a menu open no longer zooms the minimap.
• You should no longer be able to have left-over clipping settings when removing objects from construction. There was a bug where removing a hedge or trees would not allow you to walk through them without reloading your house.
• Colored chrysos equipment no longer degrades to dust but to its proper broken state.
• Yk'Lagor no longer attacks all targets when jumping or spawning thunder clouds. Another bug was fixed where a single spawn zone of thunder clouds could overlap and deal double damage.
• Fishing spots no longer turn towards you.
• Pets properly face you again when following or talking to you.
• The damage deflect code has been reworked. Tormented demons now deflect damage when they're actually being hit instead of when your attack animation starts.
• A bug was fixed where Inferno adze and Dragon pickaxe were giving too much mining bonus.
• The weight configs for nex armour has been fixed. Before the update all armour pieces weighed 0.2 kg.
• An issue with the collection log has been fixed. There was a way to manipulate the log and get entries through unfair ways.
• Staff of light can now be upgraded to sceptre of light through the invention skill. The sceptre of light provides the same damage mitigation effect as staff of light.  Additionally the sceptre of light special restores 60% of your missing health and prayer points. Sceptres can also be recolored through the EP shop.
• Rod of Ivandis no longer degrades to dust.
• A bug with collection logs was fixed that allowed you to cheat entries. Thanks a lot for the report and for not abusing it!
• Chrysos helm (nature) no longer has max cape requirements. There was an issue which made the game detect a very small selection of new items as max capes.

Engine fixes / changes:

• Living rock cavern has received map icons for fishing spots and mineral deposits.
• The brightness offset in caves is less severe. It's 85% instead of 70% now.
• Disabling "Item hovers" from the Game settings now also disables Special attack and Set effect hovers.
• Special attack information now also appears when hovering over the special attack orb near the minimap.
• The set bonus counter now appears next to the item name instead of the last line of the set bonus.
• The hover texts for the equipment interface have been fixed. Hovering over bonuses was always supposed to give you a description of what a given bonus does.
• Textures that are being loaded will no longer display their underlying model as invisible.
• A bug was fixed where the floor wouldn't load on devices only supporting openGL 2.0.

Other

• Forum search bar has been fixed for mobile view. Clipping issues for smaller screens on mobile phones have also been improved.

I hope you are all doing well! The Rot Caves update turned out to be way more work than anticipated. It is pretty much finished though, only a few finalizing touches are missing. We are currently beta testing the dungeon in our test world to make sure it's neither too easy nor too difficult on release.

All the best,
Thomy

18

Update Notes / Updates July 14th - Death Rework, Equipment Changes and New Areas!

« on: July 14, 2022, 10:41:00 am »

Hello everybody!

Today's update contains various new things, reworks and fixes. The biggest change being the rework of death mechanics and attack ranges of various ranged weapons. It is also a preparation for our next huge content release: Rot Cave. You can explore West Ardougne already if you find its hidden entrance.

West Ardougne & Rot Cave
West Ardougne can now be accessed. You can't come in through the main gates (yet) though. The Rot Cave hasn't opened, because there is still a lot to be tested to make sure it works the way it should. I would like to test all the new code in the game first and see how it works before opening all new areas. It'll be released as soon as I've finished testing everything.


Death Rework
The death mechanic has been worked. By default all degradeable items are kept and their charges are reduced by 12.5% (10% for members) of their maximum charges. If an item breaks during the process you will receive its broken version. Items that have a degraded state, such as the rune bag, will no longer degrade when dropped. You can just walk to the spot where you've died and pick up the item without any additional repair costs. Inventories also won't be destroyed. Your runes will magically be kept safe should you lose your rune bag.

The Items Kept on Death interface has also been reworked. It shows exactly what items will be kept and dropped on death. That makes it a lot easier to determine which items you risk losing. Item lists in the interface are a 1:1 copy of the items that are dropped upon death.

The left part of the image shows a death outside of the wilderness. You see that you keep most of your items. The right part is a death inside the wilderness to another player. You see that all untradeable items are transformed to either their broken state, currency, contents or coins. You can toggle the view at any time by clicking the "PvP" button in the bottom right corner.

Construction System
I've rewritten major parts of the construction skill that loads your house. It will be faster and without the need to reload the entire map when you place or remove rooms. You will still see some objects loading in and out but without a dedicated loading screen going blue. There have also been fixes to the clipping system which would sometimes get you stuck in corners of rooms.

Weakness & Resistance System
I have expanded the weakness system to also support resistances. Weaknesses and resistances apply damage modifiers to certain types of damage. For example you cast a fire spell dealing 10 damage:

• 10% fire weakness: 11 damage
• 10% fire resistance: 9 damage

Weaknesses and immunities can be examined by casting the monster examine spell from the Lunar spell book. All rot monsters have 100% rot resistance meaning they cannot be damaged by any kind of rot.

Tank gear and PvP
There have been recent concerns that tank equipment is too strong for PvP - specifically chrysos items. Not that it kills other players but that it creates almost invincible targets. Since tank armour is healthy for the game by offering equipment variety I don't want to introduce special PvP bonuses or nerf the items into the ground. All tank armours can now ONLY be repaired with their respective bars. Meaning repairing a chrysos cuirass requires one chrysos bar to add back all charges. The total amount of charges have also been increased from 20,000 to 30,000 for armours and from 30,000 to 45,000 for weapons. Flat damage reduction was also slightly reduced. A full chrysos set now blocks 14 damage instead of 15. Moreover, chrysos equipment can now be colored using dyes from the EC store.

Vanstrom necklaces
All vanstrom necklaces have received more raw stats. These items are supposed to be bis and should not be out performed by other items. Accuracy bonus has been increased to 32 from 25 and strength bonus from 20 to 28. That gives them 2 additional max hits making it stronger than Vyrewatch necklace (b).

Emps Credits & Inflation
Due to global inflation I've adjusted the EC prices of following items:

• Member ticket: 500EC --> 700EC
• Scroll of double exp: 150EC --> 200EC

I understand that this is a very unpopular change but inflation happens world-wide and we haven't had any price adjustments in roughly 10 years. I haven't changed the price of any other EC item because I think only consumables such as membership or xp boosts should be adjusted to inflation. Newly released items purchasable with credits will just get a fixed price at their time of release. I also don't think changing the amount of EC you get by buying packages on the homepage is a fair change. I would like to keep these adjustments to a minimum to remain fair.

Ranged Weapons - Attack Range
The attack ranges for various ranged weapons have been adjusted. There were various issues with bosses or other monsters when attacking them from large ranges. Especially the hand cannon or longbows on ranged style were causing troubles. Below's a list of weapon types with their new attack range:

• Shortbows: 7
• Longbows: 9
• Crossbows: 8
• Hand cannon: 10
• Darts: 3
• Knives: 4
• Thrown axes: 5
• Javelins: 6
• Staves: 9
• Wands: 7

The longrange option can no longer exceed a maximum attack range of 10. Meaning that it doesn't give any additional attack range for the hand cannon and +1 for longbows. The attack range of weapons is now also shown in the attack interface next to attack speed.

Game fixes / changes:

• The minimum render distance for Vanstrom Klause dungeon has been increased.
• Entity render distance has been increased by 5.
• An issue with pot share spell and heal / cure others has been fixed.
• Using the share potion spell or healing other players is working again.
• The rune essences in the Wizard tower store are no longer noted.
• Group ice plateau teleport can only be used in the wilderness now.
• An issue causing various problems to use the create item screen was fixed.
• Removing a daily task no longer costs any Event Points and is free now. Due to how daily tasks are generated it is difficult to always have tasks that are balanced or completable in a reasonable amount of time.
• Cooking tasks requiring you to create dishes from recipes require less dishes to be created.
• A bug was fixed that would disband groups upon login when the database connection failed.
• Ghasts in the swap have been made aggressive. Being attacked while holding a shadow sword will make them attackable once again.
• Emps-Wars flags can be dropped on top castle floors again. There was a bug that identified them as unspawnable objects. With this update you can also no longer target your team's npcs in fights - their attack options are hidden. The minimum amount of players needed to start the minigame has also been reduced to 2.
• Lunar spells can be used once again on other players accepting aid.
• Magic notepaper now notes all identical items in your entire inventory. If you have 10 manta rays in your inventory they will all be noted when using a single magic notepaper.
• Telegrab spell has been added.
• Dagannoth kings boss instance no longer has all 3 boss spawns synchronized. The kings now have individual respawn timers.
• GWD boss doors can no longer get you stuck when being used by two or more players at the same time. They no longer function as global doors but as local doors that only show state changes to the player operating them. Meaning multiple players can use the doors at the same time without interfering with eachother.
• Ardougne teleport can be right-clicked to select the western city as destination.
• Burnt pie dishes can now be emptied.
• Glory (t) amulets are now charge- and usable.
• The dragon claws special attack has been fixed. It was ignoring protection prayers due to how it was being calculated.
• A bug has been fixed where noted statuettes from Revenants would not prevent you from teleporting.
• Supportive lunar spells can no longer be used on two other players fighting in the wilderness in single combat zone.
• New idle animations have been added to human npcs.
• Npcs now face you during and after dialogue until you move away a few tiles.
• More life has been brought into Ardougne. Various npcs have been added to the city and doors, stairs, stiles, gates, etc. have been made usable.
• Npc dialogue code has been updated. It's no longer possible to talk through walls and npcs will face you until you move at least 2 tiles away.
• All GE booths now have clerks.
• Varrock west-bank cellar has received static gold drops for you to test the telegrab spell on.
• Clicking npcs when they are using a static movement animation was changed. You will now walk to the interpolated coordinates instead of the start coordinates. This fixes a problem where clicking Kal'Ger during his flight animation would let you walk to his start and not current position.
• The item you smith is now displayed on the anvil for a few game ticks. This item cannot be picked up and is only seen by the player smithing it.

Engine fixes / changes:

• The dynamic roof removal code has been optimized. It's now linked to your camera zoom and clears more appropriate roof area for you to view.
• Clipping configurations for closing and opening doors are now properly removed again. There was a bug that would leave one direction not walkable when opening and closing doors.
• The floor blending code has been worked. I've also changed a few textures to have smoother transitions between tiles.
• Water shaders have received wave movements that affect the water's transparency slightly.
• A bug in the water terrain generator has been fixed. There was a problem where the western parts of water areas would not properly calculate their underwater depth. Especially rivers or narrow water areas were suffering from this issue. You can see the change when taking a look at the river in Barbarian Village.
• The minimap marker code has been overhauled. A flashing marker arrow now rotates properly to a target that it outside of visible minimap area.
• Animations no longer pause completely when the worldmap viewer is open. They will, however, render in lowest quality possible to save resources for rendering the map.
• Dyed items no longer affect your eye color.
• Terrain rotations for entities have been fixed. Dragons no longer "fly" on steep terrain but are properly aligned towards it.

Let me know what you think of the changes! Is the death rework a good idea? I was thinking of giving you the option to protect all items on death in exchange for paying a fee to return them? I hope to finish the Rot Cave in the coming weeks, it's become quite a large project with lots of different enemies.

All the best,
Thomy



July 15th changes:

• Player health bars have been fixed. There was a bug where damage onto players wouldn't display correct health values. This issue was only within the display code, damage calculations were and are correct.
• Magic is hitting properly again. There was a bug that enabled magic protection prayer for almost every npc.
• Chrysos can now be dyed with barrow, blood, third-age and shadow colors.
• Mud patches no longer appear invisible.
• Loading issues with assets (models, textures, etc.) have been fixed. Our update server went down without me noticing.
• A bug was fixed where following npcs that were very far away would not work.
• Pickpocketing farmers now yields seeds again instead of coins.
• Max cape (fire) color has been fixed.
• Karamja agility course saws can now be clipped again.
• Respawn timer for dagannoth kings have been adjusted. They are now 15 seconds just like in any other instance. The spawn locations have also been moved together towards the center. The dagannoth areas also no longer render terrain that doesn't belong to the cave itself.

July 22th changes:Game fixes / changes:

• Thieving aura now works the same way as other auras. When it triggers the loot is doubled and one charge is consumed.
• Descriptions of skilling auras have been updated. They now better reflect how auras internally trigger and work. You have a chance to get twice the resource and xp when a skilling aura is active.
• Runecrafting aura no longer consumes 1 charge per rune essence in your inventory. It now consumes a charge for every rune essence that was doubled in the calculation. Runecrafting III aura increases runes gained by 25%. Meaning that 4 rune essences would be transformed into 5 rune essences for determining the amount of runes gained. This will now cost you 1 charge instead of 4.
• Faulty items can no longer be received as rewards from clue scrolls. Feel free to hand them in for their working versions. The faulty items will be deleted in the coming week(s).
• Herblore aura has been changed. It now has a chance to create two finished potions instead of one. This also works on overloads.
• Various other issues were fixed that got mentioned on Discord. Thanks everyone for the hard work to report bugs!

19

Update Notes / Updates February 19th - Yanille, Cooking Expansion, PvP Balancing and Reworks!

« on: February 19, 2022, 09:10:06 am »

Hey guys,

This update consists of many small additions to the game. There's a new teleport that leads to Yanille, more Cooking recipes, additional Hiscores, PvP changes and many other smaller improvements. There might also be some small spoilers of what one of the next updates might contain.

Yanille
The city has received some life with new npc spawns and shops. The Wizard tower has opened its own shop and provides a teleport to the Rune essence mine. You might find some of the items in that shop quite useful. The Watchtower teleport has been renamed to Wizard tower teleport and puts you in front of the tower. You can visit Frenita to buy local products from her store for a (questionably) fair price. These ingredients can be used for new cooking recipes that have been added to the game. Guards among other spawns have been added inside the city and a pet shop is planning to open soon.


Cooking Recipes
It was a bit unclear how to create dough, pie or generally speaking anything that has multiple ingredients from the Cooking skill. I've created a separate tab in the skill interface that has a list of ingredients required for various dishes. Some level requirements and experience gains have also been reworked to better reflect their usefulness. The internal cooking system was also completely reworked to support more complicated recipes for higher level combination food. You can click on the "Recipes" tab to view dish creation:


Shop System Rework
The shop system was updated. It will show bought / sold item changes quicker and also more often. Shops also have individual buy and sell price modifiers. The restock timer for standard shop items was also reduced significantly. Most shops also restock their standard items a lot quicker now. It's rather difficult to buy out all items now.

Additional Hiscore Data
I've added more fields to the Hiscores. You can now see boss kill times (where available!) at activity scores. Some kills or data points from the past didn't include kill times and thus those cannot be displayed. However most entries have this data. The timers are rounded to 0.5 second intervals because of how the game operates - in 0.5s game ticks. There's also hiscores for Collections which is the progress of your in-game Collection Log.

PvP Protection Prayers
The amount of protected damage from protection prayers was increased from 40% to 60% for player damage. With stronger equipment over the years the damage dealt on players has become quite high. A flat damage reduction has already been introduced in previous patches but there are still scenarios that don't leave too much room for counters. The increase of protectable damage aims at creating counters for high incoming damage numbers from a single combat style. It also promotes having switches for more raw damage output.
With this change I have also updated the prayer interface descriptions. Most decriptions received distinct colors to immediately see what damage type is boosted. The names Chivalry and Piety have also been renamed for all combat styles.

Chart Overhaul & Player Statistics
The Grand Exchange Market tool has received an overhaul with a new chart library called apexcharts. It looks better and has more options to inspect item price data properly. Moreover, I've also created a tool to view player statistics. They are publicly available for the past month: https://emps-world.net/stat#statplot,30
You can view up to one year when being logged in on the homepage. The online player count doesn't go back further than March last year because that's when our server burnt down. Sadly the online player count wasn't included in the backup. The unique online players and usernames goes back to 2014 though. I cannot let you view everything because querying a ~10 year chart takes a lot of time and would put too much pressure on the database.


Special Attacks
Clicking a special attack now attacks the last target you were fighting. You no longer need another click on your enemy. This change was done in order to make combo special attacks smoother. The granite maul was also adjusted. You can now also use it in the beginning of a combo instead of only at the end of a combo. Any current attack timer is left untouched when using a granite maul special attack. Should it be your initial attack the game will give you a delay of 2 ticks (1 second) before attacking the next time. This 2 second window can be used to swap weapons and use another special attack for follow up damage. OSRS videos with gmaul spec have been taken as inspiration for this change.

CTRL and SHIFT Buttons
Holding down the CTRL button works the same way as before by prioritizing various right-click options in the game. The SHIFT button no longer does this but has a different prioritization mechanism. It takes actions containing an "X" for left-clicking in menus. You can use this in any interface that allows you to buy, sell, withdraw, store, etc. items.

Installable Game Client
It's now possible to install the windows client as application on your computer. This allows you run the game without having to install and maintain Java. The game client installer comes with Java 17 packaged for you. The game registers as native Windows application meaning you can pin it to taskbar, assign a specific graphics processor to it and find it as Emps-World.exe on your task manager. You can download the newest game launcher here: https://emps-world.net/play

Rendering Engine
I have reworked and improved several parts of our rendering engine. There are now fade-in effects for npcs and players. The rendering distance for ground decoration, players and npcs has also been adjusted and is now synchronized with the server. Loading regions including cached areas has slightly been improved. The game will make more use of systems with many cores for loading The maximum render distance is now capped 200. You won't really feel this change unless you max out rendering distance and graphic settings. The rendering technique for drawing opaque objects has been improved. Resulting in more fps especially on lower-end devices.

Game fixes / changes:

• Dragon claws special attack damage was changed from 110% to 100%.
• Fletching arrows and headless arrows no longer requires intensive clicking. You can use the make interface and define how many sets you'd like to make. The game creates 45 items per 3 ticks. Before this update the maximum creation amount possible was 15 per tick.
• All wilderness teleports have received a warning. The group ice plateau teleport has also been re-enabled.
• Further restrictions have been put on the ability to use player emotes. This fixes a problem where spamming emotes could get you stuck on agility obstacles.
• The taunting animation has been sped up. There is now also a projectile targeting the npc that is being taunted to make it easier to see what monster was taunted.
• A problem was fixed where players would stay invisible after a duel. The issue was being stuck on the death animation without it resetting properly after reviving.
• Item shop value for Amulet of ranging has been added. You will now protect it over other items upon death. The shop values of all (t) amulets were also increased.
• More items have been added to the larder in POHs.
• Players get +10% maximum hitpoints in PvP zones. This value is rounded meaning that all hitpoints levels above 95 result in 10 additional max health.

Engine fixes / changes:

• Objects out of your frustum (the part of the map you can see) are now also loaded in background. This solves a problem where roofs would not cast any shadows while spawning beneath them.
• An issue was fixed where typing long messages would display them out of your chat area.

I hope you're enjoying this expansion on the Cooking skill and Yanille receiving some life. In the coming patches I'd like to work on further area expansions a potentially a new skill - Summoning.

All the best,
Thomy





Fixes of February 20th:

• The minimum render distance for Vanstrom Klause dungeon has been increased.
• Entity render distance has been increased by 5.
• Using the share potion spell or healing other players is working again.
• The rune essences in the Wizard tower store are no longer noted.
• Group ice plateau teleport can only be used in the wilderness now.
• An issue causing various problems to use the create item screen was fixed.
• Removing a daily task no longer costs any Event Points and is free now. Due to how daily tasks are generated it is difficult to always have tasks that are balanced or completable in a reasonable amount of time.
• Cooking tasks requiring you to create dishes from recipes require less dishes to be created.
• A bug in the Collection Hiscores was fixed. It's now going to properly display your total completion status in-game and on the homepage. The progress percentage is calculated by the unique amount of items you've obtained.

20

Update Notes / Updates December 13th - Christmas Event, Double XP Week and Rares!

« on: December 13, 2021, 10:15:37 am »

Hey guys,

Christmas is just around the corner and it's time for Santa to request your help for another year. We also have more than week of double experience planned starting December 24th and ending next year January 2nd! I wish you Merry Christmas in advance and a Happy New Year from my side as well.

Christmas Event
Our annual present delivery has returned! Talk to Santa south of the Grand Exchange to complete previous holiday quests in order to be eligible for present deliveries. Each delivery rewards you with a Christmas cracker that can be used on another player for unique items. The Christmas cracker has a droptable with a super rare item pool that has been expanded this year:

• Bunny ears
• Bug lantern
• Bow-sword
• Candy cane
• Salty claws hat

You have a chance of 0.2% per player to roll ANY of these items. Discontinued items are bad design and will result in them not being available anymore at some point. I don't expect many new rare items entering the game through Christmas crackers.

Game fixes / changes:

• There is now a warning when trying to drop an item stack worth more than 5M.
• Balance beams are no longer assigned as daily task for Construction.
• Reindeer hat and Facemasks can now be added to the Fancy box.
• Dye shards can now be added to the Treasure rewards box.

Engine fixes / changes:

• The priority for Nex animation overrides has been improved.
• An issue with faulty colors on the chat head model of dyed items has been fixed.
• A mode was added that allows you to (almost) freely move the camera. You can toggle it with ::freecamera
• The first person mode has been improved. You can toggle it with ::firstperson
• The command to view your available commands has been updated. I made it colorful, removed old commands and added new ones. You can view commands by typing ::commands

Let me know what you think of the re-introduction of unobtainable items as very rare drops from annual holiday events! I can imagine adding more items to these pools to keep the yearly events interesting.

All the best,
Thomy

21

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.

22

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

23

Update Notes / Updates April 29th - Living Rock Caverns, QoL and Engine Improvements!

« on: April 29, 2021, 07:09:21 am »

Hey guys,

A new part of the Dwarven mines can be accessed: The Living Rock Caverns. You will find new creatures and resources. It's a dangerous place, so don't come unprepared! I've also worked on several Quality of Life improvements such as the coal bag automatically filling itself or the Giant Mole no longer digging away frequently. There's also been minor changes and improvements to the rendering engine. You can read the full details below.

Living Rock Caverns
The deeper parts of the Dwarven mines can now be accessed. You will find Living rock creatures, ore deposits and new fishes. The cave is designed for higher level players requiring at least level 75 Mining or 80 Fishing to participate. It's also a dangerous area with aggressive rock creatures. Their aggression radius is rather small but you should not underestimate them.


The caverns contain following activities:

• Cavefish & Rocktails: level 80 and 90 Fishing required. When cooked these fishes allow you to overheal. Meaning that you can get a higher maximum HP value. This effect is temporary and fades away similar to brews.
• Mineral deposits: level 75 and 80 Mining required. Deposits contain about 50 ores before they collapse.
• Living rock creatures: drop a random amount of Living Minerals which can be used for Cavefish and Rocktails.

I've also rewritten a few parts of the Fishing and Mining skill to have more flexibility for future skilling resources. That means choosing more flexible respawn timers for rocks, fishing spots, etc. will be possible. The respawn timers for skilling resources in the caverns are longer than usual. You will need to walk around the caves for a bit for min-maxing.

Deposit Box
With this update various deposit boxes can now be used. The deposit box in your house still acts as a bank chest, so no worries there! You can use these boxes without having to enter your bank pin. You can only deposit items and not withdraw any. Here's what it looks like:



Game fixes / changes:

• Construction daily tasks can no longer be any expensive furniture containing either one of a marble block, gold leaf or magic stone.
• Crumble undead spell damage bonus is now shown in equipment screen when autocasting it.
• The repair costs of dyed items have been adjusted. They now require the same amount of gold as their uncolored counterparts.
• An issue was fixed where question dialogues could overwrite each other.
• The south-eastern wall of Varrock can now be climbed with level 43 Agility.
• A problem with monsters losing aggro when being attacked from afar has been fixed.
• Right-clicking stairs to climb up/down is working again.
• Spinolyps in the Dagannoth boss fight have been fixed. They now also spawn in instances and had their aggression radius increased.
• The double experience timer is now a timer orb instead of being rendered on top of the inventory as text.
• Coal bags will now fill themselves automatically when mining coal.
• An additional small multi area zone has been added east of the Chaos elemental. This was done to avoid single-combat scenarios when fighting the Chaos elemental or Kolodion.
• Potion share spells can no longer be used inside of the Duel Arena.
• Bandos, Armadyl and Zaros books can now be obtained from the Magic chest. Their pages are rewards from clue scrolls. All clue scroll pages have also been added to the collection log.
• Magic chest in Dark Knight Fortress has been added to the collection log.
• The hardmode version of Giant mole is digging away less often.

Engine fixes / changes:

• An issue where you could click through a highlighted menu in tab area was fixed.
• Black overland areas are now turned to water by default. You can see these changes in certain parts of the desert or at Poison Waste area. This was added in order to avoid seeing just blank and black area when standing next to a region that doesn't exist.
• Skilling and timer orbs have been updated. Their font size was reduced to support larger numbers.
• A fadeout effect has been added to ending projectiles.
• A display issue with players standing in shallow water has been fixed. This also fixes a problems where items would not be properly aligned to the floor when standing on those exact spots.
• The music and sound buttons can now be clicked to quickly enable or disable sound and music effects.
• A rounding issue for numbers when selecting UI size has been fixed.
• Missing images of various menu styles have been fixed and re-added.
• An issue with a water area inside the Fight Caves was fixed. In rare occasions the lava could turn into swamp water.

I couldn't quite finish Invention improvements which contain additional deconstruction of various items. I'll try to get it done next update and also look into creating new hardmodes for existing content.

All the best,
Thomy

24

Update Notes / Updates February 20th - Wildy Areas, New Food, Skilling Improvements and More!

« on: February 20, 2021, 08:10:52 am »

Hey guys,

Today's update is a collection of many smaller changes and adjustments. I've focused on adding more content to existing areas and making those feel more alive. There's also improvements for Agility and new food to be fished and consumed. The main focus of those changes was the wilderness.

Wilderness Changes
I've changed the target switching delay for PvP zones from 5 seconds to 8 seconds plus your weapon's current attack speed. It shouldn't be possible for multiple people to take turns on attacking you in single combat zones. This timer is immediately reduced to 2.5 seconds whenever the player you are fighting can no longer be seen. This includes death, teleports, running too far away, etc. The rendering distance for NPCs inside the wilderness has also been changed to be the same as everywhere else. You can still only see players a maximum of 20 tiles away though.


Several areas have been improved:

• Lava Maze: new monsters, Agility shortcuts and an underground area was added.
• Lava Maze Underground: greater demons and black dragons can be found here.
• Rogue's Castle: a farmer and a master farmer have been added to the first floor.
• Bandit Camp: bandit spawns have been added
• Dark Knight Fortress: Npc spawns have been added to the castle. There's also elite dark warrior versions that are much stronger and drop better items.
• Chaos Altar & Chaos Temple: You can now offer bones to all altars. However the two altars in wilderness are giving additional experience rates. The Chaos altar gives 400% xp per offered bone and the Chaos temple altar gives 250%
• Northern wilderness underground: monsters have been added and 4 fishing spots for lava eels.
• Lost Spirits: a new area has been named and added. For now there's Spirit scorpions and fishing spots for Fury sharks. See the Fishing section below for more details.
• Pirate's hideout: few pirates have joined the hideout.

Disconnect Handling
The way the game handles disconnects has been changed. Closing the game client and actually disconnecting now result in roughly the same time required before your character fully logs out. Before this change closing the game would slightly be faster because the game could detect an immediate interruption sooner than a timeout. The game marks a player as disconnected when not receiving at least one response in 10 seconds. Don't worry, the game client automatically says hi to the game server every 2.5 seconds, this system does not require any user input! When detecting such a disconnect the game subtracts 10 seconds from the in combat timer (should you be in combat) and tries to log you out. The subtraction takes place because we already know at this point that a player couldn't respond for 10 seconds! This subtraction is a change to the system that was used before. When outside of the wilderness you shouldn't be online for longer than 10 seconds when losing connection to the game or closing the game client. Inside the wilderness it's a maximum of 20 seconds when being in combat. Any disconnects that happen outside of being in combat are instant. This wait timer exists to avoid people from trying to escape deaths while also making sure that actually disconnecting from the game isn't punished too hard.

Yk'Lagor
I've talked to various players and identified a few issues with the boss. One of them being that you can just have lucky RNG when a mage freezes you and the boss hits his special attack on you. I've given the minions, Necro archer and Necrolord fixed attack rotations. Every fourth attack will be a "special attack". This should remove some of the randomness of the fight and also give you enough time to properly taunt or kill spawns. I've also decreased his leap damage a bit and added some delay so that receiving combos after failing a mechanic isn't that punishing.

NPC Aggression Code
I've changed the aggression code for non-boss npcs. Their aggression range has slightly been reduced and they also stop following you once a certain amount of distance is between you and the npc. The target switching delay for npcs has been reduced to 1 second plus its attack timer. That means if you are running away from an npc and it cannot attack you, another npc can attack you quicker than before. This change was made that npcs aren't idle for too long when you're passing by or running away. Bear in mind that this doesn't affect bossing at all! It makes target switches initiated by npc aggression likelier and gives you less aggression immunity from npcs.

Agility Shortcuts
I've reworked the Agility skill interface and added reasonable level requirements for Agility arenas. There's now also a Shortcuts section that shows you all shortcuts available with their respective level requirement. All shortcuts can also be found on the worldmap with their respective level requirement.


Fishing & Cooking
I've added some new fishes that can also be cooked on higher levels:

• Karambwanji: can be fished in Brimhaven and stack in your inventory.
• Karambwan: can also be fished in Brimhaven and requires a Karambwan vessel with loaded Karambwanji. The vessel is dropped by pirates or can be found somewhere in Brimhaven. Karambwan can be cooked in two different styles: Fully cooked and poisonous. Eating a fully cooked Karambwan has a shorter delay for your next attack and can be eaten directly after other food. It is possible to combo heal more than 50 in a single tick. Following example heals for 54 in one tick: eat a Shark, Karambwan and drink zip of Saradomin brew.
• Lava eel: can be fished at several areas in the wilderness and stack in your inventory. You need an oily fishing rod and fishing bait to catch them. An oily fishing rod can be made by applying blamish oil onto it. You can create this oil by using snail carcasses with a pestle and mortar while having an empty vial in your inventory.
• Fury shark: can be fished in the north-eastern part of the wilderness and require Lava eels. The healing has also been increased from 25 to 28.

In the next update I will further expand on fishing and cooking variations with Cavefish and Rocktails. They will allow you to "overheal" and give you a new maximum HP stat. Rocktails have also already been added to a few droptables so you can already try it out.




Game fixes / changes:

• Ice shield has been reworked to only work on magical spells instead of every freeze. It's supposed to be a direct counter to the ice crown and it interfered with a few mechanics that applied minor freezes from non-magical sources.
• Higher tier logs can now be crafted into more arrow shards.
• A few issues with slayer task names have been fixed.
• Runecrafting pouches will now automatically be used when crafting runes. You no longer need to empty them.
• Saradomin strike now correctly drains prayer points again.
• The shop value of God swords has been decreased to 1,830k so that they are no longer protected over Demon weaponry
• Grand Exchange messages now only appear when there's items or coins available to be collected.
• Brutal green dragons can no longer be assigned as a Slayer task. You are free to kill them when being on a Green dragon task though.
• The animations of Kolodion have been updated. They have been slowed down a lot to properly make him act like a large and not a small spider.
• A banker has been added to the northern part of Brimhaven.
• Fury sharks have been removed from all drop tables and were replaced by other items of similar value.
• The cooking guild just north-west of the Grand Exchange how has a working bank booth including a banker.
• Aubury now recharges all Glories in your inventory.
• The target dummy that can be built in the games room in POH can now be activated and attacked. It yields no exp. but shows dps and max hits.
• Warrior, beserker, seer and archer ring can now be noted.
• Check-charges and Clean options have been added to dyed items.
• The prayer altar in Rimmington is working again.
• The Monster Kill Logs for Bosses and Slayer are now exhaustive, meaning that all monsters are shown no matter the amount of kills you have.

Engine fixes / changes:

• The color picker interface has received a few fixes and a little rework. Your current color selection is now immediately shown on the comp cape model inside the interface. There was also a bug where some overlay of the color picker wasn't shown correctly.
• There is now a boss respawn timer for instances. There were also changes to the kill score calculation which is now started once one NPC out of the instance is attacked or becoming aggressive towards a player. Moreover, an instance is only eligible for a Hiscores entry if the player group doesn't change during the fight and doesn't exceed a maximum of 4 participants. If you don't get a kill score message your kill won't count for Hiscores.
• The amount of pieces worn of an item set is now shown when hovering over items in the equipment interface. This makes it easier to see if a set effect is currently active or not. For now this works with all Barrow sets, PvP sets and Void equipment.

I hope you're enjoying this update. Please let me know what you think of new target switching (pj) delay. Also, what do you think of the improvements that happened to wildy areas and Brimhaven? Would you like to see more of those?

All the best,
Thomy

25

Update Notes / Updates December 19th - Christmas Event, Group Ironman, Wildy Slayer and More!

« on: December 19, 2020, 07:59:06 am »

Hey guys,

2020 is nearing its end and I have one last update in this year for you. I've re-enabled our classic present delivery Christmas event and added new rewards that are quite fitting for our current situation. There is also the introduction of a grouping system and on top of that a group ironman mode. I've also fixed a few annoying issues that caused problems in the Collection Logs and reworked the Slayer skill interface. You can also get wilderness-specific tasks from a new Slayer master in Edgeville now.

Christmas Event
You can once again talk to Santa south of the Grand Exchange for holiday quests and present deliveries. I've added some new items to the reward pool that are fitting the year 2020. I don't want to spoil what items exactly you can get, but there's a pool of new recolors of an existing item.


Double Experience Weeks
We'll be having almost 2 weeks of Double Experience starting on December 24th until January 4th. I know this announcement is a bit late but the patch notes just weren't ready yet. If you'd like to get news faster feel free to join our Discord group. Good luck on your level-ups and make sure to also waste some xp during Christmas time!

Grouping System & Group Ironman
You can now form a group with other players that shows their online status and health value. You can send group requests by right-clicking a friend in your friends list and selecting the "Group" option. The aim of this system is to support activities that require keeping an eye on your group members. This can be group bosses, PvP or just any other combat activity you do together. You can leave a group at any time by right-clicking your name inside the group interface. Group leaders (the one initiating the very first group request) can remove other players from a group at any time.

On top of the grouping system you are now also able to create group ironman accounts. They are able to trade items between group members. Only group ironmen can trade items with other group ironmen if they are in the same group! You can leave and join a group at any time, but group ironman members can only join a group on Tutorial Island. Make sure everybody gets online and joins their group on Tutorial Island before heading out! Should a group ironman group become inactive there is the option to join another group by using a "Group change token". Changing your group shouldn't be something do you frequently because it basically offers a way to trade items between accounts. At the moment this token can be purchased for 5k Emps Credits. I will be monitoring this token and see if it makes sense to have it locked behind a paywall for emergencies or just remove it completely in the future.

Collection Logs
An issue with collection logs not saving properly has been fixed. This could only occur when the game was restarted and caused some people to lose certain entries. I'm sorry for the inconvenience but we are not able to bring back lost collection log entries. However, the bug has been fixed and won't cause issues anymore. I've also added a total completion percentage in the interface's title.

Data Storage Overhaul
I've analysed and rewritten parts of how specific data is stored in the database. The new way ensures that removing items from inventories won't cause artifacts inside of the database in the future. This change has also been applied to farming patches and degradable items. Please rest assured that this has been tested thoroughly and your items are safe! This change went live weeks ago already in a small bugfix patch.

Slayer QoL Improvements
The Slayer skill interface has been worked. It now contains level requirements for equippable items and Slayer masters. This introduces some level restrictions for players with lower Slayer levels to ensure that their tasks are not too difficult to complete. Some items from the Slayer point reward shop have also received level requirements. What you are probably most interested in is the ability to choose from multiple tasks now. Initially you can choose from two tasks. Being a member grants an additional task roll as well as having level 99 Slayer and reaching 200M Slayer exp. That means that you can get up to 5 Slayer tasks to choose from with 200M Slayer exp.


Game fixes / changes:

• Music player also unlocks new song names now when you have music disabled completely.
• Farming patches are now being loaded and stored correctly again.
• It is now possible to store a few auras inside of the Invention energy box.
• Dagannoth kings now offer an instance. Their spawn and walking zones have slightly been updated to support the instance creation.
• Zaryte bow no longer gives Ancient energy. I know this might not be a popular change but the bow was never intended to completely bypass the deconstruction process of Nex drops for Invention. The Zaryte bow now gives one Abyssal, Void and Third-age energy each as well as some Woodworking energy.
• The Dharok set effect has been updated. Previously to the update it would scale your strength bonus based on your missing health. It now works the exact same way as it does in OSRS by increasing your max hit by 1% for every HP missing. You cannot empower the Dharok set effect with HP boosts because it starts triggering once your HP goes below your base level. You can reach the maximum hit bonus of 98% with 1 HP and level 99 Hitpoints.
• An issue with displaying the beard model for Veracs has been fixed.
• A bug was fixed where you could create Invention items you didn't have the level requirement for.

Engine fixes / changes:

• The camera movement code has been optimized. A few instances where it would shake when zoomed in were removed.
• Skill and combat timers now show in minute instead of comma format: 4.5 will now show as 4:30.

I'm sorry but I was unable to list all fixes in the game that happened over the past weeks. I've been quite busy with life recently and kind of forgot to update this topic. Rest assured though that bugs you've reported and some things we discussed on Discord and on the Forums have been implemented into the game!

I hope you're all going to have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year's Eve. Looking forward to 2021 and also all the new cool things we can put into Emps-World. Keep the ideas you have for the game coming. Take care everyone!

Thank you all for your continuous support and all the best,
Thomy

26

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.

27

Update Notes / Updates August 18th 2020 - Giant Mole, Boss Reworks and Invention Improvements!

« on: August 18, 2020, 08:32:56 am »

Hey guys,

Today's update brings the Giant mole and a rework of the King Black Dragon. Both offer hardmodes, unique collectibles and new pets! There have also been changes to Yk'Lagor and Har'Lakk to make their fights more convenient. Our Double Experience Weekend is now also officially ending. I am sorry for it being a bit chaotic, but I hope you still had fun.

Boss Mechanic Updates
I've updated the boss mechanics of Har'Lakk and Yk'Lagor. Their combat behaviour remains untouched but they now have a fixed rotation of attacks. So that you always know what special mechanic or attack rotation will occur:

• Har'Lakk: Every third attack is a special attack which is different for every phase. The last phase is a rotation of all special attacks.
• Yk'Lagor: Every fourth attack is a special attack which is different for every phase. The last phase is a rotation of all special attacks. There is also a new jump attack that leaves a thunder cross at the target location.

This change doesn't make Demon bosses easier nor more difficult but more convenient to battle. Knowing what attacks are to be expected doesn't increase the skill level for kills but can increase your kills per trip once you remember every attack and phase. I think that giving bosses a fixed rotation of attacks is a better approach instead of them randomly doing attacks. What do you think?

King Black Dragon
There is now a little lava pond before the King Black Dragon lair. It requires level 20 Agility to cross and offers the ability to create instances. I've also added a hardmode for an additional challenge. You can get a Magic dragon stone that upgrades a Granite maul to a Dragon maul. Its special attack let's you attack again in quick succession, similar to the Granite maul. Every King Black Dragon kill also rewards you with 1-2 Black dragon scales. They can be used to create Super antifire potions offering higher protection and duration than normal antifire potions.


Giant Mole
You can now click Mole hills in Falador park to enter the Giant Mole underground area. It is a medium level boss and isn't supposed to be very difficult. If you'd like a little bit more of a challenge you can try the hardmode. You can exchange mole skin, claws and nose for Bird nests by using them on Sir Tiffy Cashien. He can be found on a bench in Falador park, just outside of the Giant Mole entrance.


Invention Deconstruction Energies
Some high level Invention items weren't giving a lot of basic energy (blacksmith, woodwork and clothing) types. I have changed the formula that calculates basic energy drops and applied it to all items that can be deconstructed. The aim was to increase energy drops for higher level items. So that deconstructing items with higher value becomes a bit more worthwhile. You can click the Invention skill interface to have a look at the changes or visit the wiki page, which will be updated shortly: https://emps-world.net/wiki/Invention

Emps Server Services
This is only internal and technical changes, but for those interested continue reading. I've changed the way emps is started / stopped on the linux machine. It's now registered as service and supports updates directly from git as well as graceful shutdowns. I can also tell the service to install itself on a new machine. This makes maintenance and switching servers in the future easier, more convenient and safer. Also deploying updates is now automated instead of having to copy all the files manually.

Game fixes / changes:

• The logout delay (when closing client or disconnecting) in the wilderness has been changed from 15 to 20 seconds.
• A graphical issue in the Fight caves when fighting level 360 mages has been fixed.
• Using noted herbs on the Tool Leprechaun no longer deletes them.
• A bugged silver rock has been fixed in the area north of Al-Kharid
• High alch prices are no longer changing after shopping.
• A few issues within the Asgarnian and Glacor dungeons have been fixed.
• Wilderness lever animation has been updated and fixed.
• Shantay pass now needs to be clicked and can no longer be walked through.
• Three new Agility shortcuts have been added to the Lava Maze and Red Dragon Isle inside the wilderness.
• A teleport animation bug was fixed when the new map being loaded wasn't far away.
• Wedding has been renamed to Entrana. There are now also monks in Port Sarim that allow you to travel to and return from Entrana.
• All seasonal reward items (hammers & ceremonial swords) now scale up to level 70 and have the attack speed of scimitars.
• A bug with spawns not appearing on the correct position at Pest Control was fixed.
• Vyrewatch amulet can now properly be charged again with 1,000 Vampire blood.
• You now get random bird nests while Woodcutting instead of Crushed nests. You can turn them into Crushed nests by looting whatever you find and then using a Pestle and Mortar on the empty nest.
• Your progress in-game is now auto-saved every 30 minutes.

Engine fixes / changes:

• Text sharpness for UI scaling on 1080p monitors has been improved.
• The minimap viewer now properly opens with your position centered on all screen sizes.

Please let me know what you think of the new Demon bosses, as well as the Giant mole and the King Black Dragon hardmodes. Are fixed attack rotations better than random ones? If you enjoy such mechanics I can also re-design the GWD hardmodes to follow similar patterns.

All the best,
Thomy

28

Update Notes / Emps Competitive Season 2 End and Double Experience Weekend!

« on: August 03, 2020, 10:01:26 am »

Hey guys,

Our Competitive Season 2 has successfully ended. I am announcing the winners and schedule a Double Experience Weekend to celebrate! Thanks to all participants and have fun during the upcoming xp weekend.

Competitive Season 2 Winners
Our second season competitive season has ended and I am proud to announce the winners:

• Untouchable: The Fiend
• Richest account: Polina
• Special comeback: Competitive
• Over achiever: Botlife
• Sleep is xp waste #1: The Fiend
• Sleep is xp waste #2: Competitive
• 500 boss kills: Polina
• Clue scrolls #1: Competitive
• Clue scrolls #2: Crandor
• Clue scrolls #3: The Fiend
• Clue scrolls #4: Null 404

Congratulations to all the winners! We will be handing out rewards in the coming days. The winners (#1, #2 and unique categories) please let us know what sword color (and type for unique categories) you would like to receive.

Here's what different colors (and types) you can choose from. Also feel free to contact us in-game for a live preview of the item(s)!



To celebrate the end I am also announcing a Double Experience Weekend. Starting on Friday 12:00 GMT 14th of August until Monday 12:00 GMT 17th of August.

What skills are you going to train?

All the best,
Thomy

29

Update Notes / Updates June 15th - Collection Log, Map Viewer, Wilderness Multi Areas and More!

« on: June 15, 2020, 08:05:09 am »

Hey guys,

Today's update a bit of a larger one with a lot of new features and improvements! Collection Logs have found their way into the game offering you a way to check which unique items you've already collected. The clan chat system has received a major (database) overhaul and now supports display names in the online list. We have a new map viewer interface that also works on the software renderer. I've also rewritten the code that determines how objects are aligned to the floor resulting in much cleaner ground alignments of rocks, trees, cave entrances, fences, etc. I have reviewed and reworked multi areas in the wilderness to make solo content fairer and certain areas less risky. There have also been some engine tweaks over the previous weeks improving and fixing some fps issues in various render parts. You can read the shadow part later in the patch notes if you are interested in the technical details.

Collection Log
Some of you may already have spotted the Treasure chest icon within the Quest tab. It's a new feature called Collection Log. This interface shows you a list of activities that give unique items. The Collection Log tells you how many unique items you collected. I couldn't pre-fill it with all items you've received in the past because some of them can be traded with other players and it is impossible to track an item back to its roots. So only unique and untradeable drops have been added to your Collection Log. Let me know if you think some items are wrongly placed or missing! This is automatically generated from npc drop tables, shopping configurations and minigame drop tables. Here's what it looks like:

Please let me know what other activities or monsters could be added. Also good luck on trying to fill your Collection Log!

Clan Chat Display Names
It has taken a while but I have finally taken the time to rewrite the internal clan chat system to support display names. It was impossible to get different names for user accounts into the old system because it was heavily relying on the user's name for pretty much all operations. The new system will now update a user's display name in the online list as well as clan owners. Clan chat lists are now also alphabetically sorted prioritizing higher ranks first. This counts for the online user list in clan chat tab and the configuration menu with member and ban lists. I had to write a converter to move database data from the old to new system. It worked fine in my tests but let me know if something is missing in your clan chat!

Map Viewer Interface
The map viewer has always been a little bit of a buggy and unfinished project. I've taken the time to rewrite some parts of it and to create an interface where the map background is rendered. You also have a few options to add additional layers or change what is displayed. The worldmap viewer now also works with the software renderer. It might be a bit laggy but it will open and be usable. Here's an example:


Ground Alignment Code
I've reworked the code that aligns models to the floor. That includes items, objects and npcs. I've found and identified several issues on bridges where it wouldn't work properly with determining the correct height. So before the update you'd have items floating on top or beneath of bridges. I've also improved the code that aligns objects to the floor. A good example for this algorithm can be seen on the picture below:

The oak tree is the same model internally but depending on where it is placed it will align differently to the ground. This code was in the game before but it just didn't work well for large objects or on uneven terrain. This change will improve the visual quality of many areas throughout the game.

Wilderness Multi Combat Areas
I've updated multi combat areas in the wilderness because they were quite outdated. The default multi combat area code for eastern and northern parts was removed. There is now multi zones for following areas:

• Bandit Camp and Dark Knight Fortress
• North of GE up to Chaos Temple including lava spots
• Bone Yard and Graveyard of Shadows
• Western part of mage arena
• Frozen Waste plateau (lunar teleport area)
• Revenants cave (except for entrance areas)

I will be having a look how these new multi areas perform but I feel like this is a fairer approach for the wilderness. The spawn locations of Kolodion have also been updated ensuring he spawns in multi-only zones. There are a few new spawn locations but they shouldn't be difficult to find with the hints given.

Shadow Quality and Performance
There have been several improvements to the shadow rendering code. The shadow frustum now moves with your player in order to give your currently rendered scene more shadow pixels. This isn't perfect but quite an improvement to how it was before. The (imaginary) sun position for casting shadows has been moved up to give the scenery a more natural look. For those interested, I have added a calculation for the shadow frustum to be around the current player coordinates instead of the entire loaded map. This gives the shadow render code more pixels for geometry, especially on lower quality settings. I have also removed the very large shadow maps of 8192x8192. Shadow resolutions are now always 1024, 2048, 3072 and 4096 for low, medium, high and very high settings. With this update I can change the light direction easier and theoretically support a day and night cycle at some point.

Game fixes / changes:

• The climb animation for entering Nex lair has been improved.
• The timer for sharing potions when using stat share spells from the Lunar spell book have been increased from 1.5 to 4 seconds. That means that you cast the spell and have 4 seconds to drink a potion that will be shared with players around you.
• K'ril Tsutsaroth's double slashes no longer hit everyone in the boss room.
• A bug where Rod of Ivandis, Crystal shield and Crystal bow wouldn't degrade correctly was fixed.
• Salamanders can now be noted.
• Abyssal cannon now works with the Abyssal master aura.
• The game no longer applies a hit delay for the granite maul special attack when activating its special attack before attacking an entity.
• The cost function for repairing items in your house has been adjusted and fixed. Smithing levels can no longer have a negative impact on repair costs. Moreover, the repair function has been changed which will make repair prices overall more expensive than they were before. The previous -35% cost reduction was just way too much. You now get up to -6% cost reduction from the repair stand (higher level = better) and up to 8% cost reduction from your Smithing level.
• The rune requirements of several Lunar teleports have been fixed.
• The gates leading outside of the Barbarian agility course can now be opened.
• Walking through double doors that automatically close has been optimized.
• Spamclicking Firemaking no longer cancels your current lighting fire animation. Ironmen will now also get their ashes from their burnt out fires.
• The Lunar spell NPC Contact has been fixed. You can now correctly use all dialogue options without them mixing or bugging out.
• Animation and spawn code of Mutant tarns has been optimized. The transformation happens faster and they (hopefully) should no longer get stuck. I have also added 2 additional Mutant tarns to the spawn area.
• The fly animation of Kal'Ger has been reworked to better reflect his current position.
• Armour case in POH can now be used to store shields and defenders.
• Yk'Lagor has received a few adjustments to its drop table and combat mechanics. There is now a delay of 2 seconds for spawns before they start attacking. Their health and attack range has also been reduced. The heal of Necrolord is now 5-25 instead of flat 25. These changes won't necessarily make the fight easier but make it more convenient and easier to play the actual boss mechanics.
• There are now 2 Agility shortcuts for the upper Kalphite queen lair.
• Chalkos, Sidero, Atsali and Chrysos bars can now be used to repair their corresponding smithable equipment. One bar counts for 125% of their bar requirement when smithing the original item. That means that a Chrysos platebody (5 bars to smith and 20,000 charges) can be repaired with 1 Chrysos bar for 5,000 (20,000 / 5 * 1.25) charges. Broken equipment cannot be repaired with bars. They will require a full repair.
• A bug was fixed where it was possible to train skills while being in combat.
• You can no longer get yourself stuck when planting while standing on a Farming patch.

Engine fixes / changes:

• The floor rendering code has received some performance improvements. There was no check to not render areas that cannot be seen. The roof removal code was also improved to only remove roofs that are close to your camera.
• Farming patches are now shown on the worldmap viewer including their location and vegetation details.
• Further performance improvements determining what to render and what not have been made to large rendering distances. This improves fps rates and performance for large rendering distances.
• Dragged items are now always shown on top and only appear in the interface where they can be dragged. If you dragged an item out of the bank interface it won't be shown telling you that this action isn't possible.
• Improvements and fixes have been made to the ::flushmodels command. In rare instances it could crash the game if used in quick succession.
• The scaling mechanism for images has been improved. It was moved from the CPU to the GPU which now draws the image in full quality and resizes it afterwards. This results in sharper overall images, especially for smaller ones found in spell books, potion timers or name icons.
• Several models in the Dagannoth cave have been properly aligned to the floor.
• I've rewritten some core rendering code which allows the game to not pause when the window is resized or moved. Sometimes these events would have been detected as false crashes.
• The WatchDog popup has been reworked. It now has a "send crash report" button which automatically sends the crash report to me so that I can investigate and fix the problem. If the game cannot restore itself to a working state closing the WatchDog popup will also close the game.
• Chatbox has an opacity slider now. Some sliders now also show their percentages when hovering over them.
• The right-click menu can now show up to 128 items instead of 25. With this change the right-click menu now also supports scrolling when too many options are available. You can scroll through it by hovering the top or bottom of the interface.

I've received quite some feedback lately that new bosses our PvM content would be welcomed. I'll try to focus on new PvM content on the next update. This one has been a lot of utility changes, internal cleanup and improvements.

All the best,
Thomy





Patch notes for June 16th / 17th:

• Fires can now be seen by everyone again.
• A few issues with Collection Log interface have been fixed. Several new items and npcs were also added. Thanks for the instant feedback!
• Vyrewatch can now also drop third-age armour.
• K'ril Tsutsaroth multi attacks have been fixed. They should no longer hit the entire boss room.
• Dropped items now show amounts up to 2,147M.
• Construction song has been added to the music list.
• Several adjustments have been made to the clue completion code. It should no longer create steps that cannot be completed because multiple clues steps are trying to trigger and block each other out.
• The ropeswing Agility obstacle is no longer a 100% failure.
• Completionist cape no longer requires 100 Kolodion kills. Since Kolodion was marked as a boss the Completionist cape thought you also need 100 and not 25 kills.
• Astral runes can be smithed again. In fact using any ore or item on furnaces is once again possible.
• The music player has been fixed. Sometimes songs would not play or the game didn't know the current sound / music setting
• Team balancing in Emps-Wars has been improved. This also affects the HP calculation of bosses. The impact of high/low combat level has been reduced meaning that lower combat levels count more towards the team's total strength. An issue with the lobby interface has also been fixed.
• A bug which would not trigger the lap completion of wilderness and barbarian agility arena has been fixed.

30

Update Notes / Updates April 29th 2020 - Farming Patches, Login Screen Rework and More!

« on: April 29, 2020, 07:32:58 am »

Hey guys,

In this update I've added many more patches that you can farm on. I've also given spirit trees more functionality allowing you to teleport between fully grown ones. Our outdated login screen also received a little overhaul improving performance and visual feedback. Competitive Season 2 is also starting soon, have a look here: https://emps-world.net/forum/events/emps-competitive-season-2/?~22079

Farming Patches
I've rewritten the code that handles interactions with farming patches. You will now always be facing the patch you interact with. Moreover you can no longer walk over patches to ensure you cannot get yourself stuck. There's now also more plantation spawns resulting in no more empty spots. This doesn't affect any harvest rates, it's just visual improvements. I've also added about 50 new patches across the entire worldmap for plantations. All new patches being at least 3x3 in size support trees. Spirit trees can now also be used to teleport to other spirit trees you have planted. You can plant more than 5 Spirit trees but only the first 5 will be listed as teleport options.


Login Screen Overhauled
I've reworked the graphics of the game client's login screen. It now looks similar to the elements on the homepage and offers the option to remember your username. The background and logo image loaders have also been reworked to ensure they are rendered correctly. There were some rare instances where the background image would not occur. The login process was also reworked to work in background without affecting core game logic. Meaning that if you disconnect you can still see player animations playing and move the camera. The UI however remains unresponsive meaning that you cannot click it showing you that interactions are not possible at that point. The reconnect code has also been sped up allowing the game to try a reconnect quicker and more often. Here's what it looks like:


Hit Splat Size
I've fixed some issues with scaling head icons and also applied the same mechanism to hit splats. They scale depending on how far you are away from the text in 3d space. This has limiters, so they won't become smaller than 80% nor larger than 110% of their original size. My aim is to reduce visual clutter in larger fights. Hit splats and the HP bar of your player now also always renders on top of others.

Item Drop System and Death Item Timers
I've received quite a lot of reports recently about people  losing their items and requesting them back through our Helpdesk. We have taken a look at some cases and on rare occasions have decided to return items because they were impossible to be picked up in time. I'm now changing that policy that we are not returning any items lost upon death unless of course lost or deleted by a bug. I am additionally changing the death item timers to 10 minutes. That means that your items lost on death will be visible to you for 8 minutes and an additional 2 minutes to other players. This is more than enough time to run back and grab your gear even if your internet connection fails you. Below's a list of all (changed) item timers:

• Item drop: 2 minutes private and 2 minutes public
• Item drop (death): 8 minutes private and 2 minutes public
• Item spawns: public and refreshed every minute

I think this death mechanic is fairer and also won't punish failing internet connections too much anymore. I know that this has been mentioned in the previous update too but I want to make sure this is seen one more time since it's quite a big change!

Watch Dog for Game Client
I've created a watch dog process for the game client that monitors the client's state and gives you a popup in case a crash was detected. It also collects information about the crash and stores it on your computer for a maximum of 3 days. This feature was created to further investigate crashes on certain computers and also collect information about what could have gone wrong. If you get such a popup please send me the file it mentions and tell me what you've done. I will have a look at it and see if it can be fixed in a future update!

Game fixes / changes:

• Smoke demon champion attack animations and damage of magic projectile has been fixed. There could have been issues with other bosses as well that suffered from the same bug of multi projectile hits.
• You can now use the prayer orb to activate / deactivate your current prayers and set your quick prayers. You set your quick prayers by activating the desired and confirming them by clicking on the orb.
• A bug in the hit calculation system was fixed that allowed people to survive killing blows in PvP scenarios. Overkill was enabled a few patches ago to avoid tick-eating but this bug was still allowing it. Damage is now always applied for PvP scenarios.
• You no longer need a talisman for crafting runes. The abyss can once again be used without talismans.
• Being in combat and trying to open your bank no longer prompts the bank pin screen.
• Limbs for crossbows can now be smithed. Along with this change the smithing animation has also been improved.
• The cap for bonus experience gains is now 25k xp instead of 5k and 50k for Invention instead of 20k. This will make the Invention Experience aura and other experience boosts much more usable for various activities.
• Several bugfixes I forgot to mention or kept track of.

Engine fixes / changes:

• Fog color is now affected by brightness setting.
• An issue with flickering overlay menus has been fixed.
• A few issues within the water shader have been fixed: fog calculation, reflected object color, transparency and water color mixing.
• The visuals of lava has been improved. It's still not perfect but there'll be less overlapping and fewer missing areas.

Good luck in advance for our Competitive Season 2! We will be showing off some of the rewards in the game from now on. In the next updates I will probably be focusing on a new boss and some skilling additions.

All the best,
Thomy