Hi everyone!

The game has received a visible sun in the background and you can preview item dyes in the Equipment Screen. Improvements have been made to rendering the game on Apple Silicon devices and our homepage and game launcher have received a style overhaul. Over the past weeks I've prepared the core game logic to support monster vs. monster combat. This patch is preparation for the Summoning release in late August.

Sun in Background

We now have a sun in the background! The sun is shining by default and can be disabled from the game settings. With this update the graphic quality presets have also been adjusted. The lower settings now include shadows and lighting.

Recolourable Item Preview

You can now see a preview of recolourable items in the Equipment Screen. Right-click any item that has a recolour option and select its recoloured versions. That includes dyes, abyssal whips, bows, staves, and other recolourable purchases from Bolkoy. Only you see this preview and it resets once you close the Equipment Screen interface.

Apple Silicon Compatibility
I've optimized the render engine to better support MacBooks. You're now able to select all graphic settings for better visuals. I've also fixed plenty of crashes on apple hardware. I've bought myself a MacBook which makes this a lot easier to work on. The game runs quite well on later models. I can run medium-high settings with stable 60fps on a MacBook Air M4.

Style Overhaul
Various buttons on the homepage and game client have been overhauled. Buttons that call to or continue an action are now orange-red and on the left side. These changes have also been applied to the game client. The top bar showing online player count has been moved. You can view online player count here: https://emps-world.net/stat#statplot,30

Game Launcher Improvements
The game loader now shows details of the past 50 patch notes including a short description. Clicking on the image still brings you to the patch notes post on the forum. Multiple fonts in the loader received shadows and were scaled up to improve readability.

Game fixes / changes:

• Disconnecting from the game now keeps your character online for 20 seconds. This allows you to reconnect to the game without any in-game actions resetting, such as dungeons, minigames, etc. Closing the game is handled as disconnecting from the game. If you wish to truly logout, use the logout button. The reconnect code has also been optimized to speed up the login.
• The support for graphics drivers lower than OpenGL 2.0 has been dropped. This means you now need graphics drivers that are from 2004 or newer to run the game through hardware renderer. I doubt we find a computer that doesn't meet those requirements by now. The fallback for such a case is now the software renderer.
• The rich presence feature for Discord has been enhanced. It now works on computers other than Windows as well. The old library we used was deprecated so we had to find a replacement.
• Many older dialogue select options have been reworked to use the newer select options system. This fixes issues where you could overlap multiple actions.
• An issue was fixed where exiting the Fight Caves would count as multiple completions.
• You can no longer get stuck on the Kal'Ger bridge when spam clicking it.
• Adding multiple tools to the Toolbelt in one go no longer deletes the surplus from your inventory.
• A bug was fixed where your character would spawn at a wrong initial position. This was only a client-sided position desync, you didn't actually spawn in the wilderness!
• Scrollbars in interfaces now retain their scroll position when resizing the game.
• Shadows have been added to various texts to improve readability with bright backgrounds. This improves the readability of the classic chatbox especially.
• Having the game closing dialog open for a few seconds no longer crashes the game client.
• The "New User" button now brings up a screen where you can click useful links. Your browser no longer automatically opens the registration page.

Some of you may or may not have seen me wandering around with various summons in the game. The Summoning skill is progressing nicely! The game supports full npc vs. npc combat with this patch and I'm continuing to configure more summons. You can already click on the Summoning skill icon to see what monsters will be available on release.

All the best,
Thomy

Always top-notch!