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61

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

62

Update Notes / Re: Updates November 25th - Vampire Catacombs with Vanstrom Klause!

« on: November 27, 2021, 10:23:11 am »

Scared clay is still not fixed...

Try the altar in Edgeville's Monastery? That one worked for me.

63

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.

64

Help me! / Re: Scared clay

« on: November 24, 2021, 04:53:45 pm »

It's currently bugged and will be fixed with our next update. Thanks!

65

Help me! / Re: client issues

« on: November 24, 2021, 03:19:23 pm »

It would be helpful if you posted more details. I recommend reading this: https://emps-world.net/forum/faq-and-rules/troubleshooting/
Try to restart your computer and reinstall your game: https://emps-world.net/uninstall

66

Off-Topic / Re: Lets count to 10,000

« on: October 20, 2021, 03:46:25 pm »

3693

67

Help me! / Re: CANT'T PLAY EMPS-WORLD ON MACBOOK

« on: October 11, 2021, 06:18:44 am »

I know this sounds stupid but right-click the application and click open. That gives you a popup to execute emps albeit being an unknown application for your macbook.

68

Help me! / Re: I need my acc back

« on: September 26, 2021, 05:29:42 pm »

If you've got access to the e-mail address, you can use the automated recovery here: https://emps-world.net/recover

Other than that, please create a helpdesk ticket: https://emps-world.net/forum/index.php?action=helpdesk;sa=newticket

69

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

« on: September 19, 2021, 12:02:25 pm »

The skilling pets are dope!

Thanks! Got a favorite one?

70

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

71

General Discussion / Re: Login/Download struggles

« on: September 05, 2021, 04:19:21 pm »

Have you checked out this yet? https://emps-world.net/forum/faq-and-rules/troubleshooting/?~18745

EDIT: user said it's fixed.

72

Help me! / Re: give back rasa

« on: August 18, 2021, 06:48:06 pm »

Explain what you need in a helpdesk ticket: https://emps-world.net/forum/index.php?action=helpdesk;sa=newticket

Do not share private information publicly!!!

73

Help me! / Re: Barrow brothers reward

« on: August 02, 2021, 03:22:25 pm »

I don't see any problem with the chest on my end. Can you provide additional details or try to reinstall your game? I think it's a model loading problem with the chest.

74

Help me! / Re: pls hellp me

« on: April 29, 2021, 05:07:36 pm »

Helpdesk ticket was posted.

75

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