Hey guys,
I hope you've all had a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! In this update I'm attempting to fix a few annoying issues and am improving certain aspects of the game. Please take your time and read through the changes.
Boss InstancesI wasn't really satisfied with the way instances worked and it also sometimes was really confusing. I'm not changing the system that instances don't immediately destroy when there's no longer an active player inside. There's now a 2 minute timer that needs to pass before an instance is completely deleted. This change also fixes a problem where hitting a boss once inside an instance and immediately leaving had counted as a kill and yielded an item drop. Moreover, Smoke Demon Champion and Kalphite Queen can now be fought in instances.
Player / NPC Position IssuesI still wasn't very satisfied with the maploader, because there was the possibility that certain players or npcs would just disappear in certain scenarios. This includes walking around in Edgeville and fighting Har'lakk. I've fixed those issues, but am unable to verify if it really works flawlessly in all situations. It's rarely occurring and isn't that easy to track down. In my tests I couldn't reproduce the disappearance bugs anymore, so they seem to be fixed. Please let me know if I have to investigate this problem in more detail! Overall, I'm pretty sure the issue is fixed now though.
PvP Armours - Spectral EquipmentAncient energy is now called Spectral energy to avoid communication issues when talking about ancient equipment (torva, virtus, pernix) and spectral equipment (morrigan, zuriel, vesta, statius). Where ancient equipment was ambiguous before the update.
Thanks to a topic pointing out that PvP armours (vesta, statius, morrigan and zuriel) are in a really bad state right now, I'm now changing the way those are obtained and degrade. (topic:
https://emps-world.net/forum/index.php?topic=20613.0) Before the update, you'd have a really small chance of obtaining a corrupt or non-corrupt PvP item. This was really frustrating, because the chances of obtaining one were really rare and thus the whole equipment was also never really used a lot in PvP areas. Spectrals now only drop corrupt items (3% drop chance) and a fixed amount of Spectral energy (80-120 per kill). You can create the non-corrupt version by upgrading its corrupt version with 6,000 Spectral energy. This equals to fully repairing a non-corrupt item. When a non-corrupt item is lost on death or completely degrades, it turns into its corrupt version and can be upgraded again. With this change all non-corrupt items are now untradeable. Morrigan's javelins and throwing axes also need to be upgraded from their corrupt versions. However once upgraded they'll never degrade. You require 50 Spectral energy per axe or javelin to upgrade (max 100 at once).
I've also visually changed the way corrupt armours look like. The picture below shows Corrupt Zuriel (left) and normal Zuriel (right):
Engine updates:- Further map loader improvements have been done. I've been on holidays and developed Emps-World on my laptop and I wasn't quite satisfied with how the map was loading. I know that laptops have worse performance than desktop PCs in general when playing games... but I knew it could be done better. There'll now be less fps drops when a new map is loading. This is felt especially when being on a laptop and using high quality ground settings, because that needs additional calculations.
- The equipment screen no longer shows flashing npcs when being transformed into a snowman. With this patch the performance of rendering the equipment screen has also been improved.
- Blood altar can now be accessed correctly again. Its water plane has also been fixed as well as walking and clicking areas.
- Brightness setting now affects water color.
- Camera height changes have been smoothened out. You feel this when traveling over hilly terrain. Your camera won't instantly jump/down anymore, but do it in a smooth transition.
- Animation pre-loading has been improved. You will find less flickering effects when an animation is loaded for the first time.
- A bug was fixed where clicking objects on bridges or upper terrains wouldn't register the walking queue. (Al-Kharid and Canifis bank, Port sarim, etc.)
Game updates:- Granite maul special attack finetuning. Activating the special attack without being close to your enemy won't buffer your attack timer anymore and stop you from attacking immediately. It's basically a bugfix. The attack speed has also been reduced by 1 tick (0.5 seconds) to make it easier and faster to weapon swap and attack again after the special attack.
- The "I've lost the items" message in scripts (lost delivery notes during Christmas event for example) will now tell you which item (in that case the delivery notes) are required to continue the dialogue. This response has been causing a lot of confusion.
- Heal spells from the lunar spellbook are now correctly working again.
- Dragonfire shield special attack (right-click operate in equipment screen) has been fixed. You'll no longer get stuck during PvP scenarios.
- A bug was fixed where disconnecting and reconnecting to the game immediately wouldn't spawn any npcs anymore.
- Santa has left the Grand Exchange and will be happy to meet you again later this year.
- Commander Zilyana can no longer be bugged into a wall.
- More damage bonuses can now be seen in the equipment interface: Slayer helm, salve amulet, chaotic weapons, anger weapons, etc. The additional damage shown in brackets assumes you're hitting the correct target.
- Swapping staves is now consistently saving the state of your current spell. There was a bug when swapping staves that both had uniquely casted spells (zuriel & ivandis for example).
Since our previous 2 bossing updates (Nex and Har'Lakk) have been a great success, I'll now be focusing on a third boss. It'll be a challenge with similar difficulty and the drops will be brand-new tier 85 Magic weapons!
I'll try to get it done with the next update, but I cannot promise a release date.
All the best,
Thomy
Fixes of 21st:
- Noted corrupt items are no longer invisible.
- Non-corrupted items can no longer be traded.
- Non-corrupt items now correctly turn into their corrupted versions upon death.
- A bug was fixed where autocast spells have been reset when swapping weapons. Your autocast spell only resets when swapping spellbooks or when swapping between staves that can only cast a single spell and staves that can cast spells from the spellbook.
- A coloring problem with corrupt spectral items was fixed.
- Random staff attack interfaces should no longer appear.
- Ending a Pest Control minigame will no longer show you invisible npcs.