How to Access the UE5 PTR
- Open your Steam client and right click Mortal Online 2 in your games library.
- Click ‘Properties’
- Click ‘Betas’ on the left
- Using the ‘Beta Participation’ dropdown menu, click on the Mortal Online PTR branch.
- Your Steam client will then patch your game over to the test branch, and if the servers are up already you will be free to log in as normal.
Upgrade to Unreal Engine 5
Mortal Online 2 is now running on Unreal Engine 5. This upgrade brings the real-time global illumination system Lumen to the game for improved lighting in the world. Lumen is enabled for everyone. The engine upgrade also brings Nanite and Virtual Shadow Maps which are available in the game settings for those with higher end systems. The team is still working on converting the world to make full use of Nanite so expect little visual difference if you enable it at this moment. Temporal Super Resolution (TSR) is added as an alternative to NVIDIA DLSS and is supported by all GPUs.
The team has worked hard to optimize the game so that the performance is as similar as possible to Mortal Online 2 in Unreal Engine 4. UE5 is more demanding on the GPU and we have increased the minimum requirements to a GTX 1060 or equivalent. The CPU performance has gotten improvements in multiple areas, particularly with characters. We expect a performance improvement in crowded areas like large battles compared to UE4.
The upgrade to Unreal Engine 5 has not been without its challenges. Multiple areas of the game world got completely broken and we had to repair many parts of it. Level streaming got much worse due to a core change from PhysX in UE4 to Chaos physics in UE5. This increased some of the loading stalls to several seconds. The team managed to solve it by reworking some of the level streaming systems. It not only restored the level streaming stalls to previous levels but even improved them in several areas. There are however stutters present in places like Tindrem, we were forced to enable level streaming-specific garbage collection settings to solve an engine level bug. The bug causes landscapes to lose collisions during level streaming which would make players fall through the world. We are confident that once we solve the landscape collision bug without these settings enabled we can return to a much smoother gaming experience.
We're immensely grateful to our community for their patience and support throughout this transition. The future of Mortal Online 2 is bright, and together, we're paving the way for many more thrilling adventures and unforgettable moments in this expansive world. Thank you for being on this journey with us.
PTR Servers
- A copy of the live server database has been moved over to the PTR server. This does NOT include the broker or friends.
Optimizations
- All cities have received a dedicated art optimization pass to improve performance for UE5.
- Improved CPU performance by reducing the number of active components on humanoids.
- Improved CPU performance by making some parts of the character static when far away.
- Fixed issue where player character render bounds were bigger than necessary.
- Reduced the number of active bones in character skeletons for improved animation performance.
- Added a new render priority system where characters will be changed to a low detail state when far away. This version of characters is much cheaper. This mainly affects players and humanoids like zombies and guards. We will extend it to creatures in a future update.
- The game will now target a max number of high detail characters using the priority system to maintain CPU performance.
- Turned off post process anim instances when anim physics alpha is set to 0.
- Made camera wall intersection tests cheaper on the CPU.
- Replaced parts of the engine level streaming behavior to eliminate loading stalls due to registration of collision shapes. Large areas of trees and foliage should no longer produce large loading stalls as the collision shapes are now streamed over multiple frames.
- Fixed issue where the game would start loading levels from position 0,0,0 during loading screen before switching to the spawn location. This caused the game to load unnecessary assets when entering the world.
Flags and Standing
- Murderers will now have red names. If you have more than 10 murder counts, your name will change from blue to red.
- Increased the number of murdercounts required to be considered a murderer from 5 to 10.
- With a red name, other players will be able to attack you without turning criminal themselves, however the guards will not attack you on sight as a murderer. This means you are free to attempt to enter a Guarded Town you have positive Standing with, however the guards will not defend you if the players living in that town decide to attack you.
- This means murderers are no longer favored by the flagging system, as you will instantly know if someone is a murderer or not when encountering them outside of a town.
- This will allow more people to make better informed decisions about what they should do when encountering other players, while making the gameplay as a murderer feel more like your actions have had a tangible effect on your reputation within the world, along with bringing more action toward you.
Territory Zones
- The world map is now split into two different kinds of zones, Guarded Areas and Wilderness.
- Wilderness is a new type of area where players can not be reported for murder or lose Nation Standing. Certain areas on Myrland will become Wilderness, such as the Gaul’Kor area, the jungle, and most dungeons which contain bosses.
- If you die while inside the Wilderness you will not be able to report your killer for murder, so come prepared, at your own risk, and with the knowledge that you will be in significant danger with no recourse from the NPC Nations.
- Added an overlay to the map to show where the different zones are.
- Added game messages when entering a different zone.
- Changed murder reporting so that you now always lose Standing with the Nation owning the zone you were in when you died. This means if you kill someone outside Tindrem, you can only lose Standing with the Tindremic Provinces for that murder.
- The Republic of Nordveld zone around Hyllspeia is missing on PTR but will be present for the release.
- The exact locations of these zone boundaries may change.
Bounty Hunting
- Added the ability to name a partner when taking a new bounty. If your partner accepts, both players will receive the same bounty contract and can both use Seeker Corakis to locate them.
- Added a distance limit when taking a new bounty. A random murderer within 5,000m of you will be selected, if there are none within that range it will expand the search until you find one.
Guilds and Territory Control
- A Claiming stone can now only be placed in a building with full health.
- Guild tiers now increase the max supply the guild can hold.
- Guild related tabs in the Social window no longer appear if you are not in a guild.
- Guilds with no leader now get a new leader when the server restarts, GMs also now have the tools to set members to leaders.
- Guild Buildings that belong to a guild that have been removed now lose health.
- Guild Buildings should no longer duplicate NPCs.
- Price for production goods from Steward decreased from 5 to 3 Gold.
- Guild defence gained from buildings no longer gives an instant 1% on placement or claiming.
- Time it takes to gain 1% guild defence increased from 900 seconds to 1800 seconds.
- Rank Settler and above are now allowed to withdraw production goods.
- Fixed an issue causing taxes from vendors to not apply correctly.
- Increased the "tax" the owning guild earns from TC vendor transactions from 5% to 10%
- Improved territory logs for guild taxes.These are the logs shown in the territory tab.
Buildings and Placement
- Added ctrl+scroll input to slow down the rotation for building placement. Keybinds added in the options menu.
- Changed stronghold windows so that players no longer can walk through them. Players can still shoot and aim through them.
- Wall decorations should no longer be hidden when far away from a building. Other decorations will still be distance culled for performance reasons.
- Fixed crash that could happen while trying to place decorations in a house.
- You can no longer add resources to destroyed houses.
Magic
- Icebarrier updated to 5.5s cast time, 30 mana cost and 7 second duration.
- Ignition no longer damages the caster when hitting a very close target.
- Fixed issue where the Spiritism Kau beam could be heard from the living world.
Movement and Combat
- Fixed issue with "aim with arrow tip" option to cause players to shoot straight down. It got broken after we stopped players from being able to shoot through walls.
- Removed movement input fix we added in UE4 for floating point precision issues at the edges of the world that caused players not to be able to walk in straight lines at high frame rates. That is no longer needed in UE5.
- Increased minimum attack charge duration slightly to raise the damage dealt by clicking to attack. Hitting for zero when attacking should now happen less frequently.
- Weakspot calculation on daggers has been adjusted so that heavier daggers weakspot less often than lighter daggers.
- Changed out-of-world recovery so that it can't be abused as an elevator to get out of caves. Players will now return to their last known location.
- Enabled cast shadows on the player torch in first person view. Torches from other players do not cast shadows yet for performance reasons.
Networking
- Fixed issue where players would load in on other clients but it would take a few seconds before they started moving because of missing movement updates. This made it look like other players would teleport/rubberband when first loading in. It was very apparent when loading in mounted players riding at full speed.
- Multiple updates and fixes to player and AI movement updates to reduce desync issues where characters sometimes end up in outdated positions. This sometimes happened to pets that were following their owner and appeared in a previous location to other players.
- Reduced network overhead on the server side related to player movement updates.
- Improved package handling on the server side.
- Fixed several server memory leaks that were causing instability.
Characters, AI and NPCs
- Made outcasts/outlaws slightly weaker and slower.
- Closed doors in player buildings now block AI pathing again. AI was temporarily allowed to leave through closed doors due to a bug a few patches back where pets would randomly run into other player houses and get stuck there.
- Fixed issue where Game Masters would not appear in the etherworld but still be targetable. Game Masters will now appear in both the living world and the etherworld when they choose to show themselves without being targetable.
- Removed the loud spawn sounds for Game Masters when they chose to appear.
- Fixed bug where the equip and unequip armor sounds were not playing on other players.
- Fixed issue where the Blainn fur was slightly emissive during the night, not becoming perfectly dark.
- Fixed server-side issues caused by spirits in the etherworld that moved too far away from their spawn position.
- Improved the issue where character parts are not completely synchronized in the animation. We are still troubleshooting the issue that only appears in release builds.
- Reduced the aggro range for wolves from 50 m to 20 m.
UI and Interactions
- You can now manipulate items with right-click while a TC bank container is open.
- Fixed a bug preventing you from accessing house chests after already having accessed them, leaving the area and returning to access them again.
- Fixed UI tutorial step crash in Haven.
- Fixed issue where deleting a character in the character selection screen would sometimes put the game in a permanent loading screen.
- Fixed issue where deleting a character and creating a new one would sometimes bug out the game and cause the player to login in a bad state.
- Fixed an issue allowing the "/bank" chat command to not respect the access restrictions on guild NPCs.
- Fixed crash that sometimes happened when deleting a character.
- Added tooltips to the territory tab.
Lighting, Weather and Environment
- Main menu scenery changed to signify the upgrade to UE5.
- Added new camps to points of interest.
- Added a fighting pit near the Meduli bank so that players can duel away from the main streets.
- Fixed multiple “elevator” exploit spots in the world where players intentionally glitched through the world and were teleported to a different location during out-of-world recovery.
- World fog is modified due to the engine upgrade to UE5.
- Fixed missing collision on rocks in necro dungeon that allowed players to safely hide and scout the dungeon.
- Updated textures and materials for vegetation with a new UE5 setting that reduces the issue of some trees and bushes to thin out or disappear in the distance.
- Fixed issue with some torches on the ground in some Point of Interests not emitting light at low video settings for Effects.
- Multiple art fixes in Tindrem, such as missing textures, gaps in the ground, broken meshes, etc.
- Various fixes on world textures and meshes.
- Fixed rare crash related to weather changes.
- Fixed grass not being gatherable in certain locations.
Changes to Game Settings
- Replace Shadows setting with Lighting and Shadows. The setting now updates Shadow Quality, Reflection Quality and Global Illumination Quality.
- Low and Medium lighting settings now use screen space reflections. High, Epic and Cinematic use Lumen reflections.
- Increased the minimum distance for enabling character shadows by 10 m for all quality levels. This ensures that characters cast shadows even on the lowest quality setting.
- Added setting for Nanite and Virtual Shadow Maps. VSM is a new shadow method in Unreal Engine 5 intended for use with Nanite.
- Replaced the DLSS setting with a shared Upscale setting. DLSS is in this list when the GPU supports it.
- Added Temporal Super Resolution (TSR) to Upscale setting. It is supported by all GPUs.
- Removed the Resolution Scale slider. Values are now controlled by the Upscale setting. We might restore the slider once some specific values no longer crash the game.
- Removed the character distance optimizations setting. It is now always on.
- Removed the Use Multithreaded Rendering setting. It is enabled by default in UE5 and is now always on.
- Changes to the Launcher and Game Startup
- Both DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 are still supported. DirectX 11 support is likely to be deprecated in the engine in a future engine upgrade.
- A splash screen with an EAC progress bar is now shown on startup. The game was previously hidden during this phase.
- Changed the game startup sequence. An initial loading sequence is now shown before the intro movie with detailed information if something goes wrong with EOS or EAC. This should reduce troubleshooting times.
Known Issues
- World lighting breaks when the character sheet preview window, the paperdoll, is updated.
- Some additional engine garbage collection settings related to level streaming are enabled due to a landscape collision bug. These GC settings cause lots of tiny stutters while playing the game. We are aiming to disable them again once we can fix the Unreal Engine 5 bug where landscapes are losing physics collision due to level streaming issues.
- A few locations like the Celaeno cave and south of colorful forest currently have broken terrain and you will fall through the ground. Please report if you find other locations.