Small update this time, mostly focused around character movement. It gives us better behaviour in general, improves our "worst case" scenarios, and even slightly improves performance, too!
There's actually a *big* new system under the hood powering these changes; it was developed for use in the upcoming Dungeons update, but it gives us enough benefits on the main map that I thought I should backport it into our live build so you can see the benefits now!
New in this build:
- While idle, monsters now remain strictly inside their monster zones (previously they could wander up to 20 meters outside of their monster zones). Additionally, they should no longer walk through obstructions (walls/fences/etc) at any time.
- While kiting enemies, players would sometimes accidentally travel through obstructions or over mountains or into the sea -- this shouldn't happen any more!
- When considering what to do, players no longer consider activities which are unreachable from their current position. This fixes the old (old!) problem of players sometimes getting stuck repeatedly trying to figure out how to reach a building which was fully walled-off and inaccessible.
- Various pathfinding bugfixes and performance improvements, especially related to detecting impossible paths.
- Buffed "consult online guide" action to give a much wider knowledge of the subscriber's surroundings and made it last longer (33% chance to expire at the end of each play session, instead of a 100% chance).
- Guards on patrol no longer accidentally teach nearby subscribers to fight better; they now only provide directions, as intended. Guard directions now give region knowledge similar to that acquired from online guides (but are much faster and don't require the subscriber alt-tab out of the game).
- Fixed a rare bug which could result in a player's combat abilities getting stuck in a 'charging' state such that the player thought they were using the ability but no attack ever happened. (this would usually end up looking like the player repeatedly approaching and then running away from monsters, when they actually thought they were kiting the monsters)
- This build also contains an experimental fix to our data file format, to theoretically make them work much better with Steam's delta patching system, which should result in smaller patch sizes for future patches.
...plus a bunch of smaller UI bug fixes!
-T