Progress Update for April

It is Developer update time! In this update we have included progress on the Repop cleanup, recap of the A.00.00.00 update, new changes/fixes coming and some new additions coming into the next Repop Update.

We have a new survey up:

This one is asking about your current gaming systems so we have a good idea of what our development target is now and for the future. You can find the new Technical Survey and others here: https://therepopulation.com/media-gallery/surveys

During this process, we'll continue to release additional key surveys to gather your input.

As always we welcome your input be it positive or negative. Feel free to post your feedback on our official, and steam forums. We welcome you to join us in our Discord channel anytime here https://discord.gg/eSJDk2Q

Don’t forget the Official forums as well. Our developers are checking these daily, so share your thoughts, questions, game play, cool guild events and screenshots: https://therepopulation.com/forums

The Update:

We know everyone is desperately waiting on this update, especially with the combat changes. We share your frustrations. We have been doing multiple pushes and tests each week, while tracking down the problem areas. The overall size of the total game and 5+ years of assets and scripts as well as the trouble scripts/areas are slowly being reduced. Each try we find the problem area, clean it up, test and try it again. Each attempt gets us closer to the ability to use HeroEngines Live Push system. There are many changes coming down the pipeline with this latest patch.

To summarize quickly, with this patch we'll be seeing; UI Changes, changes to the map, changes to the combat and tradeskill systems, nation changes, skill tweaks, along with some temporary tweaks while we revise and re-code certain systems.Though we have another option to do a full push, this would not help us nor you in the long run. At some point we have to do this clean up so we can begin using the HE Push system as is done for other games.

This clean up work will continue beyond this update, with the goal to be able to do systematic and regular clean updates for you. We are still working on many other things despite this delay, so development and optimizations/bug fixing does continue. We will keep you updated. While part of our development team continues to work towards the current update, other staff members continue to work on content for future updates. This helps diminish both information harvesting and design time during future development. Our Content Team is feverishly working on documenting current systems while planning redesign/updates.

Graphical and World changes:

Work is currently underway to update and polish the assets that will be used when creating the new Starter Island and later, the rest of the world map. You will notice some of these assets present in Ghetti Gorge, located in Timbertol. This area was in need of maintenance which allowed us to improve performance by reducing draws and texture calls. This in turn slightly improved performance in surrounding areas. Seams to adjacent areas were fixed by creating a new heightmap for Ghetti. We also relinked areas removed during 10.1 and 10.2 which will allow players to pass from ghetti into the surrounding zones.

Us working on Ghettie Gorge:

↑ Click on the image to see the GIF ↑

Other geographical tweaks include the Plymouth City spawn point which will now spawn players in the correct place. Purplefield and Souza Springs will now have Scrounging regions added in as well. From now on Kaavo Ridge will properly display as Kaavo Ridge opposed to the name, “Fana plains” that seemed to randomly display in various places. A temporary change will be made to the Engagements located in Fort Pharynx. These Engagements have been disabled temporarily due to a number of issues. They will be recreated and brought back in the future.

In upcoming updates, the first major world update will be the new Starter Island. The premise of starting with the island as the first world revamp release is two fold: Provide some visual feedback whilst creating the world, Provide the player base something that will also allow them to see what type of world the new assets will be able to create. What we do and learn from the new Island will be going into the world when we get to that stage. So player feedback will be important.

There will not be new content yet on the Island, this will only be the new layout with some of the new art. Content such as quests/missions, NPC updates and such will be added as we rebuild those systems. There are some dialog changes to help clarify some of missions and help new players begin their journey in Rhyldan. If you have been around for a while, you might recognize some of the older/original NPC’s and dialog.

Changes have been made to the Scrounging mechanic which will allow players to once again scrounge in one place without incurring an immediate penalty affecting the quality of the obtained water. That does not mean that a person will be able to go afk and scrounge however, because the penalty will still be in place for scrounging too long in a specific region. The goal behind this was to alleviate the harshness imposed by the system since before would penalize people for scrounging too long, in one spot while also penalizing them for scrounging in the area. This caused a sudden drop in the resources given to the player instead of a gradual drop in quality. That said, this like all things is open to adjustment based on how well the mechanic works. So if you still find it is too severe please do provide some feedback!

Getting back to the technical side of things, tweaks are going to also be made concerning the day/night cycle of the game. This means that one day cycle in game will be one hour long. So for clarification daylight will last 30 minutes, and night will last 30 minutes. This is subject to change as time goes on, but is being done so that shadow/time of day shaders can be put in place while also redoing sync issues across the different zones. Related to this, an issue with skydomes unloading and resetting across zones has now been fixed. All areas will now display the same skydome, or time of day.

UI changes:

There are some nice UI adjustments in this update. A few of the areas that were reworked involved additional tweaks to the Character Creation and Character Select. We added a few quality of life changes. These involve the various buttons and elements of the UI that people encounter as they first begin the game.

There was a bug affecting the character screen which would result in the deletion of multiple characters when attempting to delete a single character. This bug has now been squashed along with the similar bug previously mentioned that resulted in the inability to delete all of one's characters if they so desired.

The mail icon has a tooltip of it's own so new people can be aware of what exactly it means by mousing over it. This icon will no longer display once the mail has been read, or the hints window has been read and closed/tips disabled.

Taking a harvester off of it's node when you have a full inventory will no longer cause it to disappear into the abyss.

When crafting, you'll find that the easiest difficulty will now be selected by default when selecting a recipe.

One will now be able to determine in a more intuitive way as to how to go about fitting an item, since all empty fitting slots will now be shown by default.



We will have a technical survey coming up in the next few weeks, but we are planning a more Repop specific GUI/UX survey soon based on your input and suggestions from the post here: https://therepopulation.com/forums/repopulation/player-nations/gui-query-for-players-13314

Combat:

Oh boy, lots to say here. But it's a good thing I promise! First of all, when attacked, your target will automatically be set to the attacker ONLY if you do not already have a live/hostile target. The use of one's abilities has been redone so that abilities will now accurately reflect if and when it is possible to use them. Additionally the ones that require you to be in front of and facing the target will no longer fail since using this ability will rotate you to face your target.

The third item on the list of tweaks is the, “Auto Face On Attack” option. It has now been renamed to, “Auto Face Enemy Target” and will behave as such when enabled. That is, when attacked or when attacking; the character will turn to face the enemy AND keep turning to face the enemy as the target moves about. Now this will disable for the duration of that fight if you manually turn, or move your character.

Along the same lines, the camera will rotate so that you can view the attacking entity. Much like the rotation however, if you rotate the camera it will stop auto rotating to match the character. Your character however, will continue to rotate towards any newly hostile or engaging enemies. Much like the auto rotation of the character, when re engaging future hostiles the camera will default to automatically rotating unless the camera is manually rotated.

Saving the best for last regarding Combat; LOS and combat states have been redone so that if a player, or an npc stands between your character and the engaged target there will no issues attacking due to the lack of line of sight. Additionally, upon ending of combat whether it be due to the target being out of range, target is dead, you are dead, etc ; the combat animation pose will now be set to end.

Trade skills: Changes and Tweaks!

Fixes have been made to the following tradeskills. No major changes have been made as of yet.

Going forward, the recipe book, “Basic Metalworking”, will now also contain the recipe Curved Glass Production. This will allow for the creation of the item, “Curved Glass Pane”, which can be used to craft other items. A metal guard will now be needed to craft the following items: The Electrical Knuckle Blade, Electrical Light Blade, Heated Light Blade, Acid Light Blade, and the Chilling Knuckle Blade.

Next, the Robotics tutorial quest will now allow you to build up your robotics skill to 75 by using the given components through building, and breaking down the tutorial components. Feel free to delete them after you are done since the widgets and gadgets will have no use as of this time.

On a related note – the hacking minigame, going from the tutorial forward will once again give you a message if you have the correct sequence, but not the skills to create the programs used in Robotics crafting and abilities.

Nations:

Nations will no longer be able to have more than two cities. This is a forerunner to both the world and Player Nation revamps that will focus on adding more features and functionality to the nations, and cities sieges.

Misc changes/tweaks:

Vehicles will temporarily be set to only carry a maximum of one individual due to a bug that was found in the coding related to how vehicles handle additional passengers. This is only temporary until the coding for this system can be redone.

And last but not least; players will no longer make use of the /help updatecraftingdb command. The command will be going away since it is a leftover from when the crafting database would not update automatically provide the new database file when updating the game. To complicate matters the command itself would sometimes end up corrupting the crafting database because of how it would download the file. As such we will now be making use of steam to include the new database file when patches are released.

This about covers all of the major changes that are coming down the pipeline for the new patch! As always, things are subject to change and feedback. If you all have any questions or comments feel free to let us know!