Welcome adventurers to update V0.15 – The Black Gate! A new super hard pillage area for a group of players, are you tough enough?
The Black Gate
Players will have to make their way through a cave, a beach-side village, up a cliff path, through a small settlement and into the castle itself. Watch your step as there are traps, barricades and Bandits a' plenty! On your way, you’ll encounter new NPCs; such as Infected Merchants, narrow bridges and traps that require careful navigation with plenty of loot along the way.
Grab your friends and Guild mates and tackle The Black Gate, how far can you survive?
New UI
With V0.15 we introduce more of our updated UI. This includes our Main Menu, Inventory & Crafting, Shopkeeper, Door Lock and also Player house names. Players will also be able to see their door code in the bottom left panel of their Inventory. The focus has been to generally making everything look nicer and being easier to navigate and distinguish between various elements.
Main Menu
Inventory
Loot Window
Shopkeeper
Player House Names
Door Lock
Rats!
Watch your step as you venture into The Black Gate as this is home to Mercia's rats! Those adorable little heralds of death have finally arrived in The Black Death. It’s something we’ve been planning on for a long, long time.
I felt it was time to introduce rats since they we’re considered one of the main sources of the plague, it also helps with telegraphing areas that are infected to players. We obviously had to be careful with performance so we opted for a particle system to provide their logic using a simple static mesh instead of a skeletal, this allows for hundreds rather than killing performance for just a few! – Cam
Server Optimisations
We may have found what is causing the servers to slow down over time. We think it could have something to do with VFX particles building up on the server. We have put a large amount of optimisations and fixes to help solve this. It may require more work but we are working hard to fix any further problems, server stability is one of our top priorities.
Patch Knock On Effects
- Removed footstep VFX on run temporarily until we fix problems relating to the vfx
- New destructible barricades sometimes don’t reflect their state accurately among all players and sometimes will appear fine when broken
New
- The code to your door can now be seen in your inventory in case you forget
- Destructible barricades
- Rat swarms that give infection
- Infected merchants
- 3 tiers of difficulty logic for A.I.
- You can now sort servers by, population, server name and by ping
- The in-game exit menu now has the exact build version in the bottom left
- Iron, silver and gold ores are now more procedurally placed
- Iron, silver and gold ingot loot items
- Name of house is now shown when you look at the door
- Name of house is now shown when you are on the door lock screen
- Reworked the look of the inventory UI
- Reworked the look of the looting UI
- Reworked the look of the shop UI
- Reworked the look of the door lock UI
Fixes:
- Attempted to fix a VFX not destroying problem
- Fixed problem that would stop you from foraging water from rivers, also fixed the UI popping up so you can see that they are forage-able
- Fixed problem that stopped per item pickup sound playing
- Fixed divide by zero error in inventory, to do with the secondary durability bar in the inventory info section
- Fixed a bug where the exit menu could block your NPC chat options
- Fixed a bug that would let you pay twice for repairing your doors by mistake
- Fixed a bug that made the house repair cost incorrect
- Fixed a bug that would stop the HUD bounty cost updating when you pay it off via your house workbench
Updated:
- Optimised Network settings across a large number of systems to help relieve server problems
- Normal guards now merged with archer guards
- Optimised VFX across a large number of VFX to help relieve server problems
- Optimised AI weapons in regards to animation tick rate based on ai screen size
- Optimised and deleted old texture relating to UI
- Increased pickup collision for the sword so that it is easier to pick up
- Updated early access number
- Main menu graphics
Known issues:
- Removed footstep VFX on run temporarily until we fix problems relating to VFX causing possibly causing lag.
- New destructible barricades sometimes don’t reflect their state accurately among all players and sometimes will appear fine when broken.
Community Thanks
Throughout The Black Deaths development we’ve had a huge number of bug submissions, which help us out a great deal! In the past we’ve collated these into lists as part of the patch notes – but we’ve decided to make a slight change of format.
In this post you can see everyone who has contributed by submitting bugs they’ve encountered during the games development – THANK YOU ALL!!!
Current total contributors: 1558
The Hall Of Heroes
…see you in Mercia!
// The SIG Team