July 30th, 2024

Patch Notes: July 2024

Source: Official Forum Thread - July 30th, What's New

This month's patch includes a number of optimizations, under-the-hood updates, and QoL improvements. You may notice things are a little light on the content side of things, but that is because the content we are currently working on requires some design changes before it can be fully realized in the game. In other words: content is light because the content we are working on is taking longer than a month to work on :)

Tech / NPCs

• Updated Unity engine to the latest 2022 subversion.
• Updated internal Unity packages.
• Updated skybox shaders to the latest version. This should yield higher fidelity clouds & night skies along with a minor performance boost.
• Updated vegetation shaders to the latest version. These should offer a minor performance boost while paving the way for future tech.
• Updated internal Rock shader to reduce texture samples (performance optimization) and ready them for upcoming weather events.
• Fixed a bug that was causing your backpack to not be destroyed after picking it up.
• Fixed a bug preventing NPCs from receiving stats from their equipped weapons.
• Adjusted the size of a number of textures to keep the client's memory footprint in check.
• Screenshot file names now include milliseconds for all of you burst photographers.
• Improved the reliability of the client pinging the login server to refresh session keys. This reduces the chances of getting kicked back to login in cases where the game takes too long to load a scene or fails to contact the login server for a brief period of time.

Environment / Art

• Fixed a number of stuck spots in Newhaven Valley, Grizzled Peaks, Dryfoot Fortress, and Ember Veins.
• Fixed Triage VFX not applying to all targets.
• Fixed Greenscale Boots coloring to match the rest of the set.
• Fixed Winter Wool Shirt coloring to match the rest of the set.
• Adjusted a number of prop LODs in various zones to reduce LOD popping.
• Added missing walk/run animation events from Mangroves. They should now have footstep audio!
• Normalized execution times and animations for potions, food, and drink.
• Improved hand IK for consumable use to reduce the chances of broken arms.

UI

• Fixed non-NPC dialogues not closing when walking away.
• Fixed recipes window not deselecting recipes on hide uncraftable.
• Improved tooltips on tooltip consumables indicating if they are currently known.
• Improved tooltip for abilities that have a triggered effect to better describe what triggers them.
• Improved tooltip for abilities that have a threat scaling bonus (TSB) to describe the actual bonus value.
• Updated provoke AA2 description to make it more clear that it has 100% threat scaling bonus.
• Updated Ember Stone tooltip to put Travel count above Essence count to be more consistent with their respective fill bars.

Design

• Adjusted poison fog in the Noxious Bog solo loop to be more clear when it will apply.
• Increased node spawns in Cragscale Caverns EV.
• Raw components are now their own category so that they are not auto-passed when using the basic auto pass filter.
• Duelist's Aura "Upper Hand" increased from 5% to 15% damage.
• Sentinel's Aura "Fortify" now also increases block and parry.
• Reduced damage of Ashen Spider Poison.

Quests / Dialogue / Tasks

• Ensured that all Quillbacks count for a Grimstone Canyon task.
• Adjusted Grimstone Marauder spawn chance in 1^ and 2^ camps for Grimstone task.
• Adjusted Ridgeback spawns in Redshore to help with task.
• New Quests:
  • The Dark Heart of the Depths - Drauen in Newhaven City has a new request for those of you level 25+.
  • Salvaging the Salvage Operation - Starts at a new NPC near one of the Grimstone Canyon Ember Rings.

New Stuff

Scene Unload Improvements

We have done an optimization pass on the unloading process while changing scenes. In some instances on our test machines, this has resulted in cutting up to 60 seconds from the unload time. This will impact some zones more than others but overall should be a substantial improvement to how long it takes you to switch zones.

Tree Billboard Improvements

Distant trees are typically rendered as a billboard, meaning they are represented as a flat plane that rotates to face the camera. This reduces the load on your GPU while maintaining the illusion that trees exist in the distance. For the longest time, however, our game's tree billboards have not played nicely with our lighting. They can frequently look washed out and out of place with the rest of the environment. In zones like Meadowlands where trees change colors with the seasons and lose their leaves, our billboards did not undergo these changes, leading to them looking even more out of place. In addition, those with AMD graphics cards have started to experience distant flashing at certain times of the day.

To remedy this problem, we are introducing a more advanced tree billboard called an imposter. Instead of using a single image of the tree at a distance, imposters use multiple images of said tree and blend between them depending on the camera angle. Not only does this improve the visual fidelity of these far-off trees, it also allows us to manipulate their color and drop their leaves with the seasons. These imposters will also more consistently react to wind, rain, and snow once added to the game.

In the following clip, I am scrubbing through the days of the year, and you can observe the distance trees changing color and losing their leaves (shadows are a result of sun position and cloud coverage changing). All trees rendered here are imposters (the previous billboards would have remained static). https://youtu.be/eJg255L3lMY

The downside, however, is that imposters use more texture memory (GPU memory), have a more complex shader (GPU time), and do not integrate with our current vegetation system (requires a custom culling solution). This could potentially result in a performance hit on your machine. To that end, we have added two new graphics options:

• High Quality Tree Billboards toggle: When enabled, these new imposters will be rendered. Disabling this will revert back to the previous static billboards and unload the imposters. Expect a small framerate hiccup during this transition. This option is enabled by default.
• Tree Billboard Distance dropdown: This option dictates at what distance we start rendering billboards or imposters. Previously, this was the "Extra Tree" distance slider. But because of the custom culling system required for the imposters, this had to be changed to discrete values. Higher distances result in rendering full trees farther out and can have a significant performance cost. Lower distances render fewer full trees and should result in improved performance. Default value is set to 250m.

I should also note that neither of the above two options impact the login scene. To compare performance differences, you will want to be in a tree-heavy overland zone.

New LFG/LFM Chat Commands

We've added a couple new slash commands for your convenience: /lfg and /lfm. These commands enable you to quickly flag/unflag yourself as LFG or LFM. You may include a message in the command (via /lfg [message]) to set your LFG note at the same time. While flagged as LFG, /lfg will unflag you as LFG. Both commands work similarly. The remaining properties of LFG/LFM status, such as tags, levels, etc., are set to a sensible default when using these commands and may be further adjusted in the social window.

Chat Window Improvements

We finally managed to find time to continue our chat window UI work to allow dragging tabs and all the functionality that that entails. You may now:

• Create new windows by dragging tabs off any existing windows and placing them elsewhere on the screen.
• Destroy any window (except the last one) by removing all tabs in that window.
• Rearrange tabs within windows by dragging them to either side of another tab.

Chat Window Tab Dragging

In addition to draggable tabs, we also added a "New Message" alert when new messages come in and the window is scrolled away from (and thus unlocked from) the bottom. We've also done some work to try and make said scroll locking more reliable (thank you for the reports).

Chat Window New Message Alert

There are still some known issues/annoyances with the chat windows, as well as further improvements we'd like to make, including, but not limited to:

• The tab names sometimes get cut off and show ellipses.
• Some tabs will reset to the say channel when logging back in, depending on the channel they were left on.
• Smarter closing of the chat settings is needed rather than having to explicitly close it using the gear icon.
• Better discoverability of chat channels.

GM Event Improvements

One of the primary issues raised regarding GM-run events is the difficulty of getting any sort of reward other than participating. To that end, we have added a new account-wide currency called "Bloops". This currency is distributed to all nearby players when an event mob is killed; different event mobs will distribute different amounts based on their difficulty. You do not need to be in a group or raid, you simply need to be nearby when the NPC is killed.

Marta Merrigold in Newhaven City now accepts Bloops as currency for her wares. We also plan to cycle her wares based on the real-life season, so some things may not stick around for long. She currently sells a variety of cosmetic gear, fireworks, a unique torch, unique dyes, and new emotes. Subscribers will have a 20% discount applied to their purchase.

Marta Merrigold's Bloop Vendor

Bloops Currency in Equipment UI

We do not plan on offering any sort of consumable that might give you a leg up while adventuring. The reason for this is that not everyone will be able to make all of our events due to different schedules, jobs, or other constraints, and we do not want people to feel like they missed out on any sort of adventuring benefit.

Bloops can be tracked on your equipment UI under the tools slots. As a reminder: this currency is account-wide, which should allow you to participate in the events with any of your characters.

This is our first pass at improving GM events by giving players a choice of reward rather than leaving it up to the dice. We fully recognize that there is room for improvement here, and there have already been some great suggestions from the community we are exploring (equipment unlocks, titles, etc). For now, however, we hope this will be an improvement to your experience and allow us to run more frequent events.