Regarding recent player controller changes
Had some problems with new characters not properly assigning the basic attack to skill slot 1 upon creation, along with no sort of click to engage auto-attack, causing fully understandable frustration for some players. This patch, among other things, fixes the "Basic Attack" skill (found under the general skills tab) not being assigned for new characters, but also adds the ability to simply right-click on targets within range to engage auto-attack. I've also fixed auto-run as well as Q and E for keyboard turning.
The player controller overhaul was a huge undertaking, and I ended up releasing it a bit early causing us to take on some pretty nasty reviews due to the bugs. Hopefully this patch cleans up the majority if not all of the player controller related bugs, but I also take solace in the knowledge that we shouldn't have any hurdles from here on as far reaching as a player controller update is.
Looking forward
I also wanted to share a bit about what we've lined up for the near future:
- A new procedural dungeon generator to improve the current undead and goblin dungeons and make adding new dungeons quick and easy.
- New and revamped small encounters, adding variety to what are currently only the stone elemental guarded monoliths.
- Improved enemy combat AI.
- Monster classes & abilities. This system is already implemented on a few mobs, for example some rock elementals spawn as a ranged class and throw rocks. I have laid out a plan for around 36 new monster abilities, including hero specific area attacks to be implemented to animals and monsters.
- Monster equipment randomization. Some monsters will randomize their equipment when spawned based on their class to increase variety.
- Monster champion & hero damage and health rework.
- Improved loot tables, including adding sockets to global loot.
- Runes. Several new types of sockets attainable as loot. These may also be dropped as recipes using the Masonry profession instead of Enchanting to add more use for stone and Masonry in general.
- Full controller support. Work on this started today and aims to make menus, crafting, hotkeys and all functions within the game possible with a controller.
- Further town capabilities, including resource transferring, trading with currency, and food production.
- Nutrition system & improved cooking. I have planned out a simple yet pretty deep set of systems designed to compliment one another for nutrition and cooking, and have only to implement them into the game. Note that these will only be beneficial, offering a way to further increase a characters performance through their food and drink.
- Fishing.
- NPC towns. The spawning and randomization of these is already mostly implemented, but I want to add more functionality to these NPC towns before we switch them on, such as trading and possibly questing.
- Revising the multi-lingual support. There are a lot of holes in the current multi-lingual system that for the most part simply need to be added into the current, working system, along with some organization to make the game fully multi-lingual.
I also paid for some work on building piece revisions and prepared 9 new textures to expand upon the current wood and stone, but unfortunately the work was very low quality and pretty much unusable. I was hoping to get some of that up for the Base Builder Fest, so ongoing, but they really need to be redone properly. So I've pushed work on that area to the side for the moment, but I will definitely be adding more building textures, and likely the ability to color buildings freely, along with some other building and town building specific upgrades in mind.
There are a number of other things on the back burners, but I don't really want to blab about things that may or may not be scrapped. For the most part, all of the functions mentioned above are things we're actually working on and hope to have ready for testing in the near future!
How to report bugs
I also wanted to real quick mention fast that this is still primarily a solo developer project, massive though it is. I have some paid freelancers working on the things I tell them to, but it is not part of their responsibilities to monitor customer support, and I cannot yet afford hiring someone to manage things like that and social media and marketing and 7-8 other things. It's up to me to find, verify, and organize bug reports, and that can be very time consuming sometimes.
If you do run into something that needs my/our attention, the best way is to either add it to the bug-tracker, linked at the bottom of this and every news post, or to post in the #bug-discussions channel in our Discord server, also linked at the bottom of every post I make.
More important than where though is how. If you run into an error, opening up the console with F1 will show a print out of what caused the error. Often a screenshot of this is enough for me to go straight to the problem and fix it. If you can further provide the following details it often makes fixing the problem much much easier for me:
- What version were you playing
- Did it happen in single-player, or as a multiplayer client, or as a multiplayer host.
- What were you doing and what did you expect to happen
- What happened instead of what you were expecting
And honestly any other details can sometimes provide a massive clue into what happened. It is and always will be in my highest interest to find and repair any and all bugs as soon as I can, but sometimes it takes hours just to figure out what really went wrong. That's the price of such a big project being developed and run by so few people (mostly just me! XD ), but solid bug reports are a serious godsend, and are always very much appreciated.
Patch notes
v 1.0.2.13 2023.01.24
- Enabled right-click to target enemies + engage auto-attack
- Updated a number of tutorial steps
- Improved Blink skill
- Disabled small encounters, monsters, and hostile animals from spawning in the starter area (250m radius by default)
- Fixed autorun immediately cancelling itself
- Fixed Q and E (default keys) not turning the player properly
- Fixed the quest helper not engaging automatically when tracking a quest or starting a new character
- Fixed weather particle generators not initializing collision quality properly
- Fixed several harmless startup errors client side when connecting to a server
- Fixed a multiplayer client specific undead & goblin dungeon bug
- Fixed Charge and Jump Back skills not working with new controller
- Fixed new characters not properly starting with basic attack in skill slot 1
You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.
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