The past week has been mostly about fixing various bugs, adding server-side modding support, anti-hack, fixing exploits, and adding polish.
This week mostly consisted of implementing server-side modding support for various systems. Farming will now allow for changing of growth times and yields. Siege weapons can be altered with respect to reload speed and damage. Finally, the social system allows for changes with crest conquering and sieging.
Fishing is also configurable, so you can have larger or smaller fish schools, and change how much nutrition and thirst fishes give you. You can also configure how fish are attracted to the hook, for example, what bait type each fish likes, or how much the depth of your hook affects the fish's attraction. You can also change how easy or hard it is for the fish to break your line. Character proportions are now configurable, so you play around with those values to make some goofy characters. Tiny arms, huge legs, big heads, and miniature people are all possible! You can also change the color of each block tier, if you always wanted red cobblestone, purple thatch and blue wood, that's now a possibility.
Server operators may also customize the positions of player and animal spawn points as well as several parameters for animal spawning such as respawn timers, spawning ranges and time-of-day restrictions.
Also added support for loot modding, allowing server administrators to completely customize the items that drop from creatures and containers, their drop chances and the quantity that can drop.
Instrument buffs can also be customized to alter the power of their effects, the duration, descriptions and even some of the behavior.
Various player movement and physics properties can now be modded by the server. This includes properties dealing with walking/running speeds, acceleration, jumping height and rate, slope angle stability, collision damage, and several others.
Furthermore, many different animal-related properties can be changed by the server:
- Animal Health values can be adjusted.
- The metrics by which animals may become aware of the player, such as distance and viewing angle, can be adjusted. Also, the distance and time it takes for an animal to stop chasing after the player can be changed.
- The speed at which animals run away, charge after you, or wander around can be adjusted. Plus the behavior of having damaged animals move more slowly can be tweaked by server owners.
Modding for atmosphere goes into a bit of detail. Not only can you change the frequency of certain weather conditions, but basic aspects about the world's ambiance. The sun and moon color can be made brighter or darker, as well as adjusting their color, the global fog can have its density changed to be thinner or thicker and the color tweaked as well. Finally the longitude and latitude of the island on the globe can be changed to manipulate the behavior of the sun in the sky, giving the potential for full day or full night. The resource nodes on the map can also be removed or more added by changing a list of positions. The grass and tree densities can be changed as well for a more bushy or sparse island. Changing these values could drastically change the scarcity of certain resources, or allow for specific distributions of resources.
Other than doing modding support, many bugs were fixed along with much attention paid to the decay system. The system was made to be more performant so the actual time when things decay are closer to the specified times. Also there was some bugs with the crest having issues with timers, it some cases the times would be negative, and not allow the
crest to destroy itself if the times would run out.
One ancient bug we fixed was the in-game music only playing the menu song after re-logging into a server. Now the menu song will stay in the menu, and the game music will be chosen correctly even after re-logging. More model bone weighting was adjusted, so characters with really thin jaws and elongated mandibles won't show their bottom teeth like some strange mouth-guard. Also the fern skirt will show over the loin cloth even when you have a tiny belly. We also found some of the flower armors weren't applying any damage resistance: Though they don't apply much to begin with, they will do their proper defensive behavior when hit.
We also fixed the exploit reports we received. We saw complaints of people getting inside of areas they should not be in, so we patched those areas up.
We are now really close to the 1.0 release of the game. We believe this will be between the 15th-17th next week. The official servers will be wiped when the next update is released.
Enjoy your weekend of gaming,
- The Code}{atch Team