Welcome one and all to our weekly Dev Blog!
This week we're looking at ongoing work on our latest pillage area, a new enemy and asset clean-ups.
The update forecast: currently all signs show that V0.16 will be landing on your steam accounts on Friday 14th of July!
New Pillage Area Development
Yes, that's right we have a new Pillage area on the way! (don't worry Black Gate fans we haven't already forgotten you, balancing and fixes will be making their way into that area soon too!)
Set in the far West of the map the new Pillage area is a catacomb hewn into the side of the mountains. It's still early days in development so we can't give details on the interior look, exactly how it will play and how difficult it will be just yet. But we will be revealing more in next week's Dev Blog.
Name The Pillage Area Competition
We want YOU the community to choose the name for our upcoming new Pillage area in The Black Death! We will pick the best names to shortlist and then have a final Poll for the name of our new Pillage area. Good luck and may the best name win!
For all you fans of Lore and setting within The Black Death. To get those creative juices flowing here is some context and background around the theme of the new pillage area. The outside of this area will feature a large detailed archway that leads into a path to an underground catacomb. This catacomb will be guarded by a new type of enemy, never seen before in the lands of Mercia. The area will feature hazards, aggressive enemies and of course loot rewards at the end for those brave enough!
Click the link below to enter!
Name The New Pillage Area For The Black Death
We will be closing the submission form this Wednesday (12th July 2017) at midnight BST time, so get those entries in!
We at SIG will then have the hard task of selecting 5 of our favourite entries to go into a Poll. This Poll will then run for the whole of this Thursday (13th July 2017) until midnight BST for the Community to vote for their favourite out of these 5 names!
The winner of our Community Poll will be selected as the final name for our new catacombs pillage area!
Good Luck adventurers!
New Enemy NPC
This regal armour set is what our new Bandits will be adorned with! These will be the new enemies that players can find deep within the catacombs, watching over the spirits that rest there. If you are worthy enough and can take down these tough foes they may have a chance at dropping this fancy armour. A truly royal set of armour for any Knight!
Asset Revamps
During our optimization push we've discovered a few assets being a bit greedy with resources so we took the opportunity to polish them up, improve how they look and modify their material setup to make sure they take up fewer resources. Expect this to be an ongoing thing.
The windmill, now with a door! This is currently blocked off (but I've been assured we're likely to see it open up in the future, windmill house anybody?)
All of the merchant stalls have had an update.
And the archer guard towers have received a bit of love too.
More Optimisations
More optimisations are happening behind the scenes!
This week data collection has been our area of focus, profiling servers and clients to get a breakdown of the cost of each object in the world. This allows us to sort through and find any outliers or any areas we need to look into. This takes a while as we generated a table 265,000 rows long...
Team code has also been running some tests on the Megaserver. This server now restarts itself every day at 04:00am (BST time). This allows the server to clear out any unused data that doesn't need to be hanging around and should result in improved performance, depending on how this experiment goes we may introduce this to other servers. If you happen to be playing at that ungodly hour and are kicked off the server this is why, you will be able to re-join again within a few minutes.
Server Setup Guide Update
We've updated the dedicated server setup guide! It now how some useful additional info, check it out here:
Dedicated Server Setup
…See you in Mercia!
// The SIG Team