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Citan
04-19-2017, 09:35 PM
This is just a quick update to last week's blog post, because I'm still working the same things! Progress on the Serbule revisions and the Brewing skill are coming along, but we're still a week or so away from being ready to launch.

Serbule Updates
This particular iteration of Serbule is focusing on three things: the textures and models in Serbule city (some of which are already live), the terrain (the grasses, trees, and so on), and the sky. We develop iteratively, so I'm not trying to make the "perfect Serbule" here, just a "better Serbule". And it turns out to be easy to make Serbule look better... the trick is making it look better AND have better framerate -- or at the very least, not-worse framerate.

Graphics work always seems to take vastly longer than I hope it will. Part of that is because it needs to be tested on lots of hardware -- and we don't have a full set of testing hardware, so we also have to try to "simulate" low-end machines, which requires some development work. But it's coming along, slowly but surely. Here's a few screenshots. They're a couple days old, and the game already looks a bit different from these, but it will give you an idea of where we are in the process.

http://i.imgur.com/EaqkDl6.png
This first screenshot shows the sky system. Dawn is just breaking, and it looks to be a foggy morning outside of Serbule Keep. The sun, moon, fog levels, and clouds are all modeled, and later on rain will be modeled too, with the Weather Witch skill intertwined into the weather systems!

http://i.imgur.com/Y3NA1h5.png
Here's late at night. I turned off the nearby lamps to get a feel for how dark it can get. I'm still not happy here -- it's a work in progress. (That building is the "cow barn" in Serbule, which is undergoing renovations, as you can see.)

http://i.imgur.com/vvFMrhv.png
The grass and trees can be rendered at a farther distance now, with higher detail density. (This is just before dusk.)

http://i.imgur.com/oGpyBjb.jpg
Another foliage shot. I just liked this one. We still need to do more work on the grass details that you can see in the medium-distance, but I think it's already a notable improvement from the old foliage. (This is the afternoon.)

Brewing Skill
Working on graphics optimization is very time-consuming, but it has a lot of downtime. It takes 30 minutes to compile and copy each test build, and I need to make a whole lot of tests each day. While I wait for it to compile, I've been working on the brewing skill. Brewing has been one of the most-requested crafting skills, so I want it to be fun.

The basic ideas of brewing are the same as I described last week, but the details have changed many times. In fact, I think this is the most times I've ever iterated on a craft skill before it went live! The first few versions were prototypes, trying to figure out what the system's goals were and how it would achieve them. I blogged about the system last week based on a fairly fun prototype version. But then I needed to future-proof the system, which turned out to require a full rewrite.

I don't usually bother trying to future-proof crafting skills, because rewriting it later doesn't usually cause alpha-testers too much pain. When I rewrite a craft skill, you keep your old level and recipes, but the contents of those recipes change. No big deal. But brewing is different: brewing recipes have randomized results which will require a lot of player experimentation, so I want to protect that time investment. For instance, if I later decide that apples aren't a low-level fruit anymore, and replace them with, I dunno, kiwifruit, what happens to brewing recipes that can take apples? Obviously, kiwi should be a drop-in replacement in those brewing recipes, doing the same things as apples used to do, so that you don't have to re-try every brewing ingredient combination. But that's not an automatic feature -- it had to be coded that way. I brainstormed other ways that the skill might change in the future, and I tried to make sure those changes wouldn’t mess brewers up too badly. I can't guarantee that everything will work out right -- who knows, a bug might screw everything up. But I've given it my best shot.

After that, I realized the skill was way TOO random: every time you learned a new recipe, you had to start your experimentation all over again. That's fine at low level when there's not too many ingredient combinations, but by level 50 there's over a hundred brewing outcomes! If levels 50, 60, 70, 80, etc. each had 100% different random outcomes, it wouldn't make economic sense to experiment at lower levels. Instead, players would just grind as fast as they could to the highest level and experiment with only the high-level recipes. That's a boring design! I needed a system that lets you "carry over" some of your brewing-experiment knowledge from mid-levels to higher levels. I've got a system that does that now -- although it might carry over a bit too much info... I'm still fiddling with things here.

And in between all these revisions, I've been trying out tons of different possible buffs that could come from drinking booze. I had to answer some tricky questions, like: how many drink-effects can you have at once? If you can "stack" too many booze buffs then each individual drink would have to be weak and uninteresting. But if they don't stack at all, there's no chance to mix-and-match drink effects. After some experiments, I've decided that you can have three beers (or glasses of wine) at once, plus one drink of hard liquor, for a total of four stacking alcohol buffs. That's a lot of buffs! I'm trying to make the drink effects somewhat useful by themselves, but also make them more impressive when stacked together. It's a delicate balance. However, the specific buff effects can be changed later as balance demands, so I'm not TOO worried about this part.

I've also made sure there's room for various systemic interactions later on. For instance, I was thinking it might be fun if beer brewed during the full moon is more random, with a chance to have higher or lower stats than normal. But what would it mean for a beer to be "extra effective" or "less effective" than normal? I had to work all that out too.

In other words, there's lots and lots of design questions! Nothing earth-shatteringly hard, but it's been keeping me busy.

So what's the time table for this next snapshot? Probably the middle of next week. I really wanted to get it out the door by Friday, but there's still too much left to do. But the results will be worth the wait. I'll talk to you again soon, with more screenshots -- maybe some brewing screenshots next time!

ANT3RA
04-20-2017, 12:58 AM
Absolutely stunning mate. I honestly cannot wait for the finished product.

Mortitia
04-20-2017, 02:14 AM
There is a thing that bothered me in every MMO. High grass is nice, it looks cool, i put it on to take SS but then i cant see small monsters from a distance, i cant see wood or seeds on floor, so in the end i play with with grass off.

cr00cy
04-20-2017, 04:26 AM
Screenshoots look really good. With graphic like that i think there wouldnt be too much complains when game goes on steam.

Well i dont play much recently, but i sure as hell pop in to try this brewign skill.

Niph
04-20-2017, 05:54 AM
I know a new GUI is in the pipe, but it would be nice to have more buffs displayed, if that's not too much work. Right now, I often need to wait the end of a fight, and that all temporary buffs are gone, to know if all my food buffs are active. Not to mention meditation and calligraphy. And curses. I've played for hours thinking I had escaped a curse.

Tsugumori
04-20-2017, 08:01 AM
I know a new GUI is in the pipe, but it would be nice to have more buffs displayed, if that's not too much work. Right now, I often need to wait the end of a fight, and that all temporary buffs are gone, to know if all my food buffs are active. Not to mention meditation and calligraphy. And curses. I've played for hours thinking I had escaped a curse.

I'd second this, could just make the buff icons smaller. and have em across two or three bars maybe.

(Adding to it, add more icons for buffs etc, can be confusing when certain buffs share icons that do different things.)

- -

Asides from that, looking forward to the next patch, looks stunning!

Hood
04-20-2017, 08:25 AM
These changes to Serbule are far more than I hoped for! The screenshots look fantastic and I'm excited to see it when its done.

Yertle
04-20-2017, 09:24 AM
There is a thing that bothered me in every MMO. High grass is nice, it looks cool, i put it on to take SS but then i cant see small monsters from a distance, i cant see wood or seeds on floor, so in the end i play with with grass off.

Exactly! High Grass is pretty much a terrible idea to have enabled when actually playing it seems.

*edit* There's a similar case for darkness IMO.

drivendawn
04-20-2017, 03:18 PM
Awesome looking and much improved! :D

takatoka
04-20-2017, 04:51 PM
things like apples, grapes seeds might be a problem, unless there's somekind of pointer option

Tagamogi
04-21-2017, 07:35 AM
There is a thing that bothered me in every MMO. High grass is nice, it looks cool, i put it on to take SS but then i cant see small monsters from a distance, i cant see wood or seeds on floor, so in the end i play with with grass off.

I have the same problem. Whenever I visit South Serbule, I think how pretty it is, then I have a brief debate with myself whether I want to admire the zone or find wood, and the wood usually wins and I turn the graphics down. :( The new Serbule screenshots look gorgeous, I just hope there is going to be a way to find wood and other items without turning the graphics down.

Dragone
04-21-2017, 07:48 AM
I usually see the trees and occasionally the flowers/fruit but there's the search button and find items to be picked up, now if you want to see it all from miles away then do turn graphics down.

Trapsin
04-21-2017, 02:04 PM
I'm super excited to see these in game!

Sasho
04-21-2017, 03:50 PM
I second the smaller icons for buffs.

I usually have 2 buffs from food, 4 calligraphy, 3 from meditation, a flower arrangement (maybe another from just eating a flower), sometimes a word-of-power, 1-2 role playing curses, and (very rarely) an actual curse. Then there's occasional druid event icon, combat xp buff icon, crafting xp buff icon. Don't forget the combat ones when you get 3-10 Mentalism buffs, extra toes, haste concoction, hunters speed, dehydration, frost bite, hypothermia, "you are on fire" stacked 6 times over from Ilmari worms mashed with "Open Wounds" 3 more times over that.

Oh, and one of the most trolling of all trolls - having a beetle in Labyrinth lay an explosive egg in you to blow up and do 300 dmg and you can't even see that you have it inside. Then you all-of-a-sudden die because you don't know you need to remove it! Seriously wtf?

Smaller icons please

Crissa
04-21-2017, 04:20 PM
I just hope there is going to be a way to find wood and other items without turning the graphics down.Tab-targeting, although sometimes things show up in the distance before they're targetable, I basically just comb tab-targeting.

Am I the only one to find South Serb super-boring and empty?

Maric
04-23-2017, 05:17 PM
Looking fantastic. Thanks for the update!

Corakhan
04-23-2017, 11:59 PM
Am I the only one to find South Serb super-boring and empty?

Nope, but that's because it's a very unfinished zone.

Eachna
04-25-2017, 05:37 AM
Exactly! High Grass is pretty much a terrible idea to have enabled when actually playing it seems.

*edit* There's a similar case for darkness IMO.

I love the look of high grass but I turn it off. I hate not being able to see the ground. The ground is where all the *stuff* is. While I'm thinking of it I'd love to come across mobs that roost in trees.

Darkness is okay as long as there's a way to see where you are...and see where you want to go. It doesn't have to be full visuals. Things like torches and campfires (at landmarks) that are visible from a distance are fine.

Tagamogi
04-25-2017, 12:10 PM
Tab-targeting, although sometimes things show up in the distance before they're targetable, I basically just comb tab-targeting.
I do use that, but for it to work, you have to be both fairly close to an object and facing it. In zones without grass, I can see things from miles away and run towards them long before I can target them.



Am I the only one to find South Serb super-boring and empty?

I actually thought it was getting pretty exciting these days. :) There's much more stuff in the zone now than when it was initially released. But yes, it could use a few more things - part of my problem with it is just that it's a very big zone with low mob density, so playing in it as a new character without run speed buffs gets frustrating since it takes an eternity to get from interesting point A to interesting point B.

CyclopsSlayer
04-26-2017, 08:26 AM
I do use that, but for it to work, you have to be both fairly close to an object and facing it. In zones without grass, I can see things from miles away and run towards them long before I can target them.



I actually thought it was getting pretty exciting these days. :) There's much more stuff in the zone now than when it was initially released. But yes, it could use a few more things - part of my problem with it is just that it's a very big zone with low mob density, so playing in it as a new character without run speed buffs gets frustrating since it takes an eternity to get from interesting point A to interesting point B.

There is almost nothing near the zone-in and respawn point, if you die as a newbie you have nothing but a several minute run through a wasteland to look forward to. suppose that is a 'death penalty' while Ranalons and Goblins are still a threat.
I do everything possible to avoid the zone.

CyclopsSlayer
04-26-2017, 08:36 AM
re: Brewing

Back in the day, getting drunk in EverQuest would give you a heavily distorted fish-eye lens effect and scramble your speech.
Combining that with the bobbing effect of Levitation and then trying to navigate your way across a zone, was, well... nauseating. :D

Of course, you had to do it while shouting to the zone; 'Oh, What do you do with a drunken sailor? What do you do with a drunken sailor? What do you do with a drunken sailor? Earli in the morning...' :p

Inker
05-12-2017, 10:54 AM
Do I see a "Hand Of Fate" monument sticking out of the ground on a couple those screen shots? :)