Update Notes: November 18, 2021

[srand]

Happy Thanksgiving! It's harvest season in Alharth and you know what that means: turkeys are hiding in all the bushes, and there's classic fall foods to eat. High-level crafters should visit Ricatu in Povus to learn to craft some new kinds of food! We also have many fixes and improvements for you.

Are you on a new Mac? Is the screen opaque? Scroll down to "MacOS Visual Fog Bug" below.

Povus

• - Povus ratkin drop more cheese mold, especially root-tenders and miners.
  - Povus nightly quest "Undead Surprise" has been revised.
  - Povus nightly quest "Warmaster Brukal" more reliably has the necessary elite orcs.
  - Fixed Povus buildings that could have frogs spawn trapped inside the ceiling.

UI

• There are two new chat commands to let you see login screen information while you are in-game: /events will display upcoming events, and /news will display login news.
• Improved the clarity of genetic-info tooltips in the genome-view window:
  
  • H, S, and V are now shown as "hue", "saturation", or "intensity".
  • If both the dominant and recessive behaviors boost the same attribute (but to different amounts), only the more potent behavior is listed.
• VIP players now see a "Save" button on the Genome View window. This saves the genome as a .txt file in the user's "reports" folder. (The format is subject to change based on your feedback, so let us know what you'd like to see here!)
• Abilities in the Skills and Abilities window that are different levels of the same ability will now sort correctly. For example, Blocking Stance 5 no longer sorts before Blocking Stance 4.
• Sub-skills are now sorted alphabetically in the Skills and Abilities window.
• Recipes that share cooldown timers, such as Mushroom Recall and Mushroom Un-Recall, will now all display the appropriate timer in their recipe.
• Closing the corpse window too quickly after performing an action will no longer cause the loot window to pop right back up again.
• The show/hide effects UI is now handled properly when player doesn't have sufficient anatomy skill level.
• It's possible to drag the "NPC talk" window far enough left on your screen that the left-side menu doesn't show. New players often do this by mistake because the first few NPCs they talk to have no side-menu. Later when they're talking to NPCs with side-menus, they have no idea what they're missing. To fix this, the left-side menu on an NPC's talk window is now prevented from going off the left side of the screen. (If you really want to drag the sidebar off-screen for whatever reason, you can use special setting, AllowSideMenusOffScreen.)

New Tab-Targeting Option
Tab-targeting will sometimes target something far away rather than something that is right next to you. This is because we take the monster's "hated target" into account -- for example, an archer who is attacking you from far away will be selected before a docile monster that's closer to you. We believe this is usually desirable behavior, but some players have found it confusing or inappropriate for their needs, so we've added a special setting, RemoveHateFromTabTargeting, which causes tab-targeting to completely ignore monster-hate and sort targets solely by distance. Give it a try (by adding that word to the "Special Settings" box in the Settings window) and let us know if the new behavior is useful!

Other

• Knockdowns are considered stuns for purposes of dispelling them. This applies to both player and monster knockdowns.
• Fixed a bug with NPC_Errruka that prevented some dye recipes from showing up in her barters.
• "Analyze Arthropod Genes" ability was incorrectly making a skill-check against the Arthropod Anatomy skill instead of the Arthropod Genetics skill.
• "Proclamation" note in Serbule is targetable again.
• You can no longer sit in a chair that you are already sitting in.
• All instances of the name "Davlos" should now correctly use "Dalvos" instead. Just for you, Beta Notus!
• Some archery abilities were missing the text "(or better)".
• Many typos have been fixed.
• New bandwidth improvements to networking protocol. This will not be detectable during gameplay except to players with VERY poor networks -- it's mainly intended as a feature for players on metered or limited bandwidth, so that the game uses less bandwidth overall.

Food Tweaks
Non-cheese food items have been buffed to also provide direct damage mitigation. The numbers we're using here are very preliminary -- we're not as focused on the exact balance of the idea as much as figuring out if this idea is useful. We want both cheese and non-cheese foods to be valuable, and we'll also need to accomodate one more planned food-making skill, Baking, in the future. All this food should have uses or at least niches where they're valuable. So expect more iteration on food buffs!

MacOS Visual "Fog" Bug
We're aware that certain MacOS users (mainly those with the latest laptops) can't play the game because the 3D world is opaque. We're unable to reproduce the problem. Our guess is that it's a video driver problem for specific macs, but since we don't know if/when Apple will update their drivers, we'd like to find a work-around. Since we can't reproduce it, we're taking the "shotgun approach": we have three potential work-arounds, and hopefully one of them will help.

While in-game, open the Settings window and find the Special Settings tab. In the text box, type the words MacHack1 MacHack2 MacHack3 and save your settings. This will enable all three hacks. The effect should be immediate: you'll instantly either be able to see stuff... or you won't. If none of these work, we'll try some more hacks soon!

If the hacks DO help, please let us know which one(s) are needed. You can remove each of the words in the settings box to turn off the corresponding hack. Remove MacHack3 first and see if the problem comes back; if not, try removing MacHack2 or MacHack1. It may be that several combinations of hacks remove the problem -- that info would also help us narrow it down.

These hacks are VERY hacky. They disable major graphical systems (like the entire weather system!). The game will definitely be uglier with these hacks on, but hopefully the game will be playable. And once we know of a hack that helps, we can start refining the hack with less-aggressive mini-hacks. Once we have some clues to start with, we may reactivate the Steam "beta" channel to iterate on the problem more quickly. Thanks for your patience!

[Citan]

Addendum for Mac users whose screens are covered in opaque "fog": of the three hacky potentional-fixes we added, it appears the third one is the winner. So you should open the Settings window in-game, find the Special Settings tab, and add the word MacHack3.

As a side-effect of this hack, the outdoor sky will look weird: cloud cover, stars, and even the sun and moon will not be rendered accurately. But more importantly, you'll be able to see the screen!

We'll keep looking into this and try to improve our hack in the future.