This past week we've been working on many bugs, exploits fixes, anti-hack, and balancing issues.
The main work is on bug fixes and polishing at this time. Many chat bugs have been fixed, along with some server issues. Players who are offline will now show their proper name instead of just "Player". Some long standing starting inventory issues (inventory not appearing) have been fixed. Along with many other bug fixes.
We've also been looking into issues a few people were having playing the game after an install. If you have problems starting the game, ensure you have the latest updates from windows and you have the latest graphics driver installed for your graphics card. We noticed that there was a problem starting the game if your graphics drivers were out of date but they disappeared after installing the latest graphics drivers. We also noticed that some computers may not have the proper version of DirectX 9 installed if they have a fresh copy of Windows 7, so we now ensure that it is prerequisite now when our game is installed.
We've been polishing up how the animals move and animate. Aggressive animals will charge after you when you become visible in a more threatening manner. However, if you decide to run away, they will consume stamina chasing you, so that they will eventually tire out, allowing you to escape.
Some audio is being added to the GUI to add additional polish to the game. As well, administrators may now kick or ban players directly from the "Statistics", "Leaderboards", and "Reports" menus through their context menus.
We've also been looking to track down some of the more ancient and obscure bugs. The ones this week fixed so far include: Killing rocks and shrubs by hitting them, some unusually low resolution stone textures in Crownland, poor bone weighting on the man-belly, phantom water effects around a Crownland river, and missing shadows on weapons. As well the third person camera has been given another look at to reduce its ability to clip into walls.
Now onto the design front. Upon removing blocks, we now include a small "cube loader". This is the same one that appears when you build a cube. We hope this will discourage players from trying to trap players who are attacking them in blocks, or at least make it a more risky tactic.
We also added a new effect to the armor system, to help encourage players to put on their armor before battle. Now when all your armor slots are equipped with armor, each piece of armor gets a 10% boost to its defense stats, making them able to absorb a bit of extra damage when the going gets rough.
Enjoy your weekend of gaming,
- The Code}{atch Team