The past week has been mostly about fixing various bugs, anti-hack, and adding polish. EAC has banned another 50 players for hacking this week, and is working on additional prevention. We aim to have the next beta update for mid next week, as we were originally aiming for the end of this week but did not have it ready in time. We plan to wipe with the next update.
The major bugs consisted of fixing an issue where the trebuchet stone would sometimes not be present on users who joined at the exact same time, and an issue with the crests not filling up with wood right away.
Most of the work being done in the back-end code is to improve stability with saving, authentication and networking. We have fixed some stability problems with the save locations for servers. We had noticed that the save location can sometimes end up in the wrong location. This may only be a problem for us developers however it was a problem nonetheless. We also have switched our official servers to use a more reliable steam authentication service. This service is not currently available for community servers.
We also added a minor system to paging which allow us to know when a player has started and completely loaded a page. This allows us to actually wait until things are loaded on the client to send event and thus we should no longer miss events.
There's been work going into more of the rare bug fixes. For instance, there is a small point in the evening where the ambient light goes completely black for half a second only when the sky is clear. It turned out to be a small calculation error, but it's extreme rarity made it hard to track down and find the cause of. There was also a chance of bushes having sprites but no collectible instance up close, a bit like a ghost bush.
We've been furthering work on polishing the animal behavior. For all aggressive animals, visibility ranges differ. You will have to get closer to plague villagers in order for them to chase after you. However, bears, wolves and werewolves will be able to spot you at longer distances than before. Other minor adjustments have been made to improve how aggressive animals attack. Position synchronization has been improved for creatures, which should reduce the likelihood of teleportation.
Also, arm stretching has been reduced from swing animations. This was especially noticeable with very small characters or when swinging your weapon vertically. Also, clipping artifacts have been reduced for shields.
Controls are being adjusted for smoother gameplay and more customization. Specific hitches that have annoyed us for a while are being corrected, such as: your menus closing when you're struck, not being able to change weapons while falling, or kicking while you're captured. We have also enabled a virtual cursor that can be moved and clicked in place of the mouse. We are calling it the 'gamepad cursor', which makes its purpose clear. The cursor can be enabled in the "Options" menu, while the "Controls" menu allows you to customize the buttons. The "Controls" menu has also been missing 'modifier keys'. Modifier keys are currently in the works so that a player can assign new combinations like "Shift + E" or "Control + E" as different buttons from just "E".
We are also splitting the armor, ammo, and orifice items out of your inventory when you equip them. Players should feel free to wear life-saving gear without losing inventory space, even if their life-saver is a sharp rock.
The game will now give more detailed messages when you aren't allowed to place something, such as near resource nodes. Stations now have special destruction prefabs, so they look much nicer when you blow one up with a trebuchet, or just smack it to death. We also made some changes to reduce clipping of your face and helmets in a few scenarios, such as on login. Armor now also properly reduces damage taken from hostile creatures, and their attacks damage the correct body part, so armor up!
Enjoy your weekend of gaming,
- The Code}{atch Team