To let the cat out of the bag straight away, we’re aiming for the late next week to release the content update! We’re currently testing the new build and fixing the issues that are popping up, and, depending on how many of those we find, the patch might be a little earlier or a little later. As always, we’ll post an announcement as soon as we know more, so keep an eye out!
To let you in on what we’ve been doing and what our latest priorities are, we’re writing this short post with some of the details from “the frontlines” of the development.
Exploits and reports
With the majority of known cheating issues gone (we’re at four digits with bans by now), the next big thing you’ve all been reporting is exploiting. To make it clear, we take exploits very seriously and prioritize your reports about them above most other issues, as they tend to get worse quickly over time with more people finding them, unlike many other bugs.
Being one of the most reported issues so far, undermeshing has been at the top of our fixing list. Some of the bugs that allowed to build or just hide inside large objects like rocks have been already fixed in previous hotfixes, but we believe that all other known ways to abuse it will be eliminated with the content patch. Another major exploit that we’re fixing with the update occurred when a character would leave their starting cradle below level 20 to maintain the inventory protection, which will no longer work and all of the players who abused it will lose their protection as well. Many of the less global exploits like hiding your attack stances by crouching are also being addressed with the patch.
Please report any potential exploits you see someone abuse or find yourself. In addition to all of the issues we’re fixing that resulted in exploiting, we’re working on implementing a Code of Conduct, which will outline the expected behavior when encountering an exploit and lead to punishments for taking advantage of them.
To make it easier for you to let us know about any of the exploiters, we’re adding a feature to report a player inside the game. In addition to exploiters, this will include cheaters, people attempting to scam others in chat, or any other abusers.
Performance and lag
We share your concerns regarding issues with performance, especially recently, and we want to assure you that we’re doing our best to address those problems as soon as possible. Many of our developers have been working on optimizing the game for the past few weeks, especially for situations in combat and around large structures.
The tests we’re doing are showing significant improvements so far with FPS being much more stable. All of those fixes will be included in the content patch, but we’ll continue to look into it to provide the best possible experience while playing, no matter the size of a battle or the abundance of structures.
Another frequently reported issue is related to inconsistent grappling hook functionality and laggy movement in general. We’ve identified and solved most of those bugs by now and will be adding the fixes with the update. Some of the less frequent issues with movement like characters sometimes getting thrown off walkers after unmanning weapons or a specific issue resulting in visual rubberbending are still being investigated.
Scorching Sun and private servers
We’re long overdue on both the oases burning feature and the access to private server hosting. As those parts of the game are heavily intertwined and majorly contributed to the issues with the servers on release, we’ve been postponing them to be absolutely sure that the problems won’t repeat once they’re enabled. Our engineers are still working on tweaking and testing everything surrounding those features, but we’re expecting to bring out both within the next two weeks. We’ll be sharing a more precise date once it’s set in stone and might be doing some public tests before that.
On zerging problem
We’ve been brainstorming solutions for zerging problems, which is especially critical in a sandbox game like Last Oasis, and will be implementing some initial fixes after some testing. The solution will incorporate oases with different clan size restrictions, which will allow everyone to travel between best suited tiles depending on their group size. We’ll use the first changes to keep collecting more information about the problem and iterate on it based on your feedback.
More improvements and fixes
There are many more changes and improvements coming! We’ve solved many issues resulting in problems with balance that you’ve reported such as respawning on a walker without water causing the respawn timer to be stuck at 180 seconds even after refilling it or Spider Walkers being damageable with melee weapons, unlike all other walkers.
Some other things that we’re fixing with the content patch include large bases becoming invisible after packing and rejoining or muting other players resulting only in text chat mute, leaving their VOIP unmuted, and hundreds of other things like all the changes to creatures. Various of their AI behaviors were improved, specifically for Okkam and Nurr, like new better-working taunts, properly defined habitats where they live and defend their territories, and so on. Bugs like creatures sometimes falling through the ground while moving or ridiculous numbers of rupus spawning in camps were also fixed.
We are, of course, also working on many more creatures and other types of content like new maps, both to expand the current list of oases and add new mechanics like exploration-based dungeons, new mechanics like unique character perks, and more!