Welcome Mercian's to our V0.27 update!
This update adds a lot of fixes and additions to The Black Death. We are introducing an engine upgrade, to the Unreal Engine V4.19, this brings with it increases to performance and fixes to help with the recent connection issues. We have also included much needed additions to the building mechanics such as being able to destroy your own constructions with a single click!
The Unreal Engine update may clear server side data.
A Note For Admins Of Community Hosted Servers
If you own a Community Server please note that you will need to update your server with the latest update. To do this you will need to update the folder/files on your Server or update using our Steam Server Build in SteamCMD.
If you do not have the latest update to The Black Death your server will not appear in our in game Server Browser.
Declare War On Guilds!
In this update we have introduced a new Guild feature, which we teased in our Patch notes for V0.26 as an upcoming feature. You will now be able to Declare War with another guild on your server!
You can now gain Clan points and climb the ranks on your server by killing players in your enemy Guilds that you have declared war on and be the top Guild on the server.
Select guilds to attack or make peace with recent foe
Enemy guilds that you are at war with will be highlighted red including their NPC guards
Hold "E" on your constructed objects and click "Destroy" to remove them, they'll even be some debris loot left over with some of the material cost it took to craft them
Here are the patch notes in full:
New:
- Declare war on other guilds
- Gain guild points and climb the ranks by killing enemy guild members
- Now using latest version of the Unreal Engine 4.19 for better performance and access to more features
- Ability to destroy built items (if you were the person who built them, does not cover pre V0.27 update buildings)
- Destroying buildable objects have a chance of dropping items called “debris” loot
- New tooltip while hovering over an inventory profession gives you a list of recipes that you will unlock at the next level
Updated:
- You can now use the right click options menu on your gold coin to take/stash specific amounts of gold into storage chests
- If you sleep in a new bed then that becomes the new place you will spawn at
- Removed the “Peasant Contract” reward from the tutorial as it is no longer used in-game
- Updated the siege/catapults rotate and tilt controls allowing you to hold down the direction instead of having to click repeatedly
- Each guild now has a cap to how many guards they can create
- Doors Adopt the current rotation and automatically snap to door frames
- Added a tooltip when you hover over a quick slot in inventory, which shows you the name of the item
- Garlic resource now spawns throughout the world
- Updated version number
Fixed:
- Fixes added to stop players getting kicked back to main menu/infinite loading screen bug
- Fix added for door problems: including being visually out of sync and defaulting to open after a server restart/relogging
- Fix added to stop a bug where if you slept in a bed placed in bad place (collision wise), when you try to respawn the character would fail to spawn
- Fixed a bug/exploit that let you get double items from shops
- Fixes added to utility crafting to stop a periodical problem where a craft would take the ingredients but would not give you the resulting item
- Fixed a bug where you couldn't build in the same place as an object that had been destroyed
- Fixed a bug where building a “Stone Gatehouse” would give you a “Large Wooden House” instead
- Fixed a bug which caused a “Palisade Wall Corner” to actually craft a “Palisade Wall”
- Fixed a bug which caused the cross-hair to stay up in the dissection screen
- Fixed a bug which caused building objects to take a while to update e.g. constructing, showing health damage, destroying etc
- Fixed a bug with the weapon shader
- Fixed a bug that made planted crops float
- Fixed A.i sitting on no benches in starter town
- Fixed issue that stopped your steam name being filled in across the UI
- Fixed a bug that meant the manor house didn't have health and couldn't be damaged
- Fixed shader problem with the underwater post material
- Fixed the network cull range of the siege weapon/catapults so that they don't visually pop in as much any more
- Fixed the network cull range for beds so that they don't visually pop in as much any more
- Fixed a bug where you could get stuck unable to look around after reading a book and closing it
- Fixed a bug with the A.I.bowmen where they would not play a reloading animation
- Fixed a bug in the context wheel where if you look at another player who is part of a clan you would get a random weight/gold value and their clan logo would be a white square
- Fixed a bug that made names that were too long for inventory items wrap badly (e.g. “Archer Guard Contract”). They will no longer overlap other elements
- Fixed bugs with crafting timers across the UI which made their formatting incorrect as they counted down
- Fixed a bug that meant you could continue to send invites to someone who was already in a clan
- Removed a white floating cube floating in Dunstead
- Fixed a bug which stopped footsteps sounds playing when you turn on the spot
- Fixed a bug which caused the Ballista to not visually tilt up and down (animation wise) as you change the angle of firing
- Fixed harsh lods on loot bags
- Fixed character movement update errors: UpdateMovementSettingsOnServer, UpdateMovementSpeedOnServer
- Put in some fixes to help stop the wrong skills showing when you level up and it shows you what you unlocked
- Fix added for a bug that could cause you to get kicked back to main menu when using the inventory button via the context wheel
- Fixed a bug which would let you (when you should not be able to) place down a guard without being part of a guild
- Fixed a bug which caused guild guards clothing not to be the colours of the guild after a relog
Balancing:
- All Recipes/Craftable Items have had their XP rewards re-balanced so its more gradual
- Gold Ore now spawns more regularly throughout the world
- Increased XP reward for killing harder A.I.
- XP rewards for days survive is now more gradual
- Rebalanced enemy Monk A.I and resources around the Bywick area
- Rebalanced tutorial rewards
- Rebalanced the amount for Xp required for a single skill point
- Reduced the simple bed health
- Removed a duplicate catapult ammo recipes
- Increased the damage done by Catapults/siege weapons
- Renamed catapult shot to Mangonel shot
Optimised:
- Optimised bone LODS for all skeletal meshes
- Removed skeletal mesh crows and replaced them with cheaper VFX version
Known Problems:
- Guilds that have been declared war with will sometimes provide a white highlight instead of a red one
- Killing enemy guild members sometimes does not provide guild points
- Collision being left behind on some destroyed player built structures.
- Sometimes the automatic door snapping to door frames on houses will be off and give a red error it just needs to be re-equipped to correct itself
- All Built Objects prior to this update are subject to severe bugs, them being destroyed and re built will address these issues.
Unreal Engine Upgrade To V4.19
Previously, we were using version 4.18 of the Unreal Engine to craft The Black Death. This brought with it an issue with intermittent server connection issues, which arose from a bug in the Unreal Engine itself. Check this thread link if you would like to learn more about this. Part of the issues with logging into a server is to do with PC memory being overloaded by the Unreal Engine. This upgrade should address some of the connection and lag issues that are being experienced by some players
With this update, V0.27, we have now migrated to the Unreal Engine V4.19. You can read the release notes from Epic Games at this link.
We also plan to do this again to version 4.20 later this month, as there are optimisations that have been found from the game Fortnite implemented into the newest version of the Unreal Engine.
That’s all for now, thanks for reading and we will see you next time!
// The SIG Team
09/04 Hotfix-V.0271
[New] Doors will be destroyed if Attached building is destroyed
[Fix] Doors can take damage again
[Fix] Door creator can destroy door with context menu
[Fix] SERVER CRASH Steam non Authenticated clients crashing server on game exit
[Fix] SERVER CRASH Steam not supporting IpNetDriver issue
[FIX] SERVER CRASH Steam, Playerstate Crash on login
[FIX] SERVER CRASH Steam, SteamNetConnection InValid ID
[FIX] Steam Players not registering correctly on server player numbers