Travelers of the desert:
With the last updates, we've been making a range of adjustments to combat performance in the mid to late game, including:
●Restructured the code of our Tournament DLC to resolve progress blocks and some missing rewards;
●Reworked the logic behind combat text numbers to remedy combat lag in the mid to late game;
●Made changes to attack speed, improved attack hitboxes and the feel of attacks to further remedy lag and stutter in combat;
This time around, we've made changes to pathfinding logic and some map areas to remedy lag and stuttering experienced while exploring the map.
We've also further fleshed out the Tournament DLC with new content, and then we want to start a discourse with you, our players, regarding what other plans we have.
What's more, the base game will be available at 50% OFF and the DLCs at 33% OFF between Feb 4 and Feb 18 during the Spring Festival.
Optimizations
Most of our focus for the last while has been on improving mid and late-game performance. However, such changes often require us to make changes to the underlying code and we have to break down and tackle each issue at a time.
Following our changes to improve performance in combat, we'll now be putting our focus on the map, as that is an area regarding which we have received plenty of feedback. These include:
●NPC Generation:
Improving the computing costs used for pathfinding when new parties are generated and optimizing some features to stabilize FPS while exploring the map;
●Map Pathfinding:
We've realized that whenever you use auto-pathfinding to move on the map, the game will lag and the party's movement reset whenever you pass a pathfinding point. To solve this issue, we've improved the cooldown for movement resets and temporarily added motion slowdown to the camera to counteract the visual discrepancy of the movements.
●Party Collision Calculations:
Previously when exploring the map, every party member would be computed as a collision target. This led to plenty of extra calculations being made and could also lead to you getting stuck on certain terrains.
We've reworked this, so that only the party leader is used for such calculations, effectively removing a lot of unnecessary computations and fixing some pathfinding issues.
●Combat Maps:
To further fix such terrain issues, we've also removed and modified obstacles and collision zones on the two following maps:
Redstone Valley: Removed most terrain obstacles.
West Docana Desert: Switched the location and collision zone of the stone pillars that previously blocked the view.
●Siege Pathfinding Optimization:
reworked the pathfinding logic on siege maps.
New Tournament Content
While the Tournament does grant the winner a ton of rewards, you are unlikely to achieve victory in the early to mid-game. To smoothen out the overall experience, we've added two new tournaments with this update: Trials and Showdown.
·Trials: A tournament that can be held in any type of town. Speak to the Arena Keeper to start a round of 3v3 battles. You can take on this tournament as many times as you'd like, with the victor taking home some gold.
·Showdown: A tournament which is held in any town that is not a village every once in a while. While similar to the Tournament itself, this one is fairly frequent, but is smaller in scale and offers less handsome rewards.
Captives Preview
In the current build, once you defeat an enemy army, they will be able to rebuild a large army in just a few days and begin attacking you anew. This has led to overly frequent battles in the late game. Plus,
war has been the only means with which to annihilate your foes once and for all. Tons of repeated battles in a short amount of time have had an overall negative impact on the experience.
To remedy this, we are thinking of adding a mechanic called Captives in a future update, and would like to discuss our inspiration and ideas for this with you all:
·Once you've defeated an enemy army, you capture their hero and may choose to persuade or execute them.
·Once you've defeated an enemy army, you capture their soldiers and you may then choose to sell them for a ransom or force them to join your cause.
·Add a Prison to the town.
·To capture the enemy's leader and force them to cease their hostilities or surrender.
Apart from the aforementioned, we also have other ideas which we're considering. Anyway, it would mean the world to us if you left your valuable feedback in the comment section below!
That's all for this update! Feel free to join our Discord to get in touch! Our managers will try their best to help you solve any issues you encounter in the game!