Hello everybody!
I've got some interesting changes ready in this update. Please take your time and read through them.
MinimapWe've completely overhauled and customized all minimap icons with meaningful descriptions. The worldmap viewer reflects this change and you can even search for places of interest. I think it's easier to just show a screenshot of what I'm talking about:
If some places are missing or are wrong, please let us know! Also special thanks to
JP writing and collecting most of the data. Really helped me to get this update done sooner.
Barrow, Shadow, Blood and Third-age DyeI've added a new reward to clue scrolls: Dye shards. Combine 500 of these shards with a Dye bottle (costs 2 EP) to create one out of 4 dyes that can be used on several items:
- Torva
- Pernix
- Virtus
- Full slayer helm
- Max cape and hood
Please bear in mind that once you've used the dye it will vanish and your equipment will become untradeable. The dyed item is reverted back into its original form if lost in PvP zones (if someone kills you in wildy). Each hard clue scroll rewards you with 1-4 random shards and every elite clue scroll with 2-8 random shards. Our calculation here is that on average you need to complete 200 hard or 100 elite clue scrolls to get the total amount of shards for 1 bottle. This does sound a lot, but bear in mind that a lot of people are doing clue scrolls and that the shards can be traded! It requires level 90 Herblore to mix the dye.
This is a screenshot of colored Torva armours. Other dyed items look similarly.
Engine Updates:- Shadow calculations improved. There's now a smooth transition when shadows are no longer rendered. The rendering distance now also has an impact on the shadow distance. This overall reduces performance on high rendering distances a little, but therefore renders shadows in a more correct way.
- MMB has been finalized. All objects that aren't animated are now stored in large area buffers. Previously to this update, certain objects (ones you could click on) weren't put into those buffers, because they had interactions and updates of those buffers wouldn't work. Besides the tech talk, you'll feel a performance gain in the whole game. I've jumped from 80 to 95 fps in Barbarian village.
- Spell hovers are no longer white boxes but a white border matching the icon layout.
- The keys 1-5 can now be used to answer dialogues.
Fixes and Changes:- Skilling auras now use up 1 charge per skilling action instead of 10. This was intentional, but it made auras pretty much useless for their price.
- Pest control fixes: Void knights and portals how correctly have their defence level again. The amount of players in the minigame also affects the portal's hitpoints and monster spawn rates more now.
- Nex drop chances for torva, pernix and virtus slighty buffed from 0.3% to 0.5%. That buffs the team drop chance from 1.2% to 2%. I'm really happy with the update and that those items are rare, but so far there hasn't been a lot of armour drops.
- String amulet spell updated - now requires earth runes instead of fires.
- Stringing amulets now gives crafting xp.
- Changing your boots / hair color no longer has an impact on some items, e.g. apprentice wand.
- Barrage ice block will now only appear if your opponent is definitely frozen. Before the update there was a 0.5-1sec timeframe where the ice block could appear and your opponent still had a freezing immunity timer running.
- Monsters will no longer reset combat when one person dies or teleports away. This caused a bug in the Nex teamfight where she would reset and respawn her minions and heal up to almost full health.
- Everything else from the bug reports section that I forgot to mention. Big thanks for all the reports!
Oldschool Emps-WorldSadly I couldn't find the time to continue any work on the project because of irl work and updates. I will be posting news if available on Facebook or in patch notes topics. Since I've heard it quite a few times in-game or read it on the forums already, I'll be giving a short statement regarding the project:
I know there's hype around the project and some of you want to see this soon, but it's a huge step and a huge project! So give me some (many) months to get it finished. I assume that an alpha can be ready in a few months, but there's no way to promise that. I also would like to make clear, that the current Emps-World is the main game and will receive way more attention and updates than the oldschool project. We've recently gained a lot of players and that shows me that a correct mix of fun updates and advertisement campaigns are progressing Emps-World. I also want to make clear that the whole oldschool Emps-World will get 300+ players, 1k+ players, 2k+ players... (whatever random number you insert here) is straight up nonsense. It will probably be even harder to get oldschool running when taking into consideration how difficult it is to keep a game alive and running. So please... do yourself and me a big favor and quit that nonsense.
All the best,
Thomy