Shroud of the Avatar – Update of the Avatar #140

by GolemDragon · Published August 29, 2015 · Updated August 30, 2015

Greetings Fellow Avatars!

Here’s what we have for you in this week’s edition of Update of the Avatar:

Play Release 21 Now!
R21 Patch Notes
New Dev Team Members
Very Large Creatures: Dragons (Work-in-Progress)
Highlights of New Use Based System

Play Release 21 Now!

Release 21 successfully launched yesterday, August 27, with thousands of backers downloading, patching, logging in, and checking out the new changes! Lots of new content to explore, including:

New Use Based Skill System
38 new Player Owned Towns, including the Syndicate’s Arx Draconis
Snowy Mountain Template and NPC Homes Added to Dynamic Lot Placement Tool for Player Owned Towns
New Creatures, including Boss Phoenix and Under Dwellers
Scene Polishing and new underground scene, The Epitaph
Crafting Skills Coming Online
…and more!

Check out the Release 21 Instructions update for detailed information about all the new R21 content.

The Grand Tour Quest
Just as in the last several releases, the team have included a Grand Tour Quest designed to guide you through all the new content. You will be able to get the Highwayman Hat by completing the Release 21 Grand Tour Quest. This reward can only be unlocked during Release 21 (did someone say rares?), so be sure to log in soon and talk to all the Tour Guides!

We need all your help with testing the new patches, putting more stress on our multiplayer servers, and testing the new game content, so please join us in playing Release 21!

If you have not backed the game yet, you will need to register and login at www.shroudoftheavatar.com, select the “Pledge or Send Gift!” button in the right side-bar, and purchase a pledge at the $45 Adventurer level or above. The basic Adventurer level pledge is also available on Steam Early Access.

Release 21 Player Instructions

Release 21 Known Issues

Avatars Radio FireLotus Release 21 Party hosted at Darkstarr’s Queen of Chaos Airship, currently located in Hometown.

Check out more screenshots in the Release 21 Screenshot Gallery.

R21 Patch Notes

Thanks to all the community members that jumped right into this Release and started reporting bugs. the dev team already fixed quite a few of them and pushed out several patches. Click here for the most up-to-date Patch Notes.

August 28, 2015 6:00PM

Build Number 315:

Fixes:

Fix for null exception in combat code.
Removing the entrance to Dragon caves from the sewers as the dragon caves have been removed…for now!
Tap soul was not giving focus, now changed to give a fixed amount of focus and then reduce damage based on level
Myra in Owl’s Head now correctly responds to all standard variations of “goodbye”
Fixes for mail delivery quest/tasks
Distraught after seeing so much death and suffering around it, the tour guide in Wynton’s Folly has moved to a very slightly safer spot
The Oracle is no longer silent about your progress along the path of virtues.
Small build process improvement
Fixing issue with being unable to loot some kobolds
Added log message for teleporters that point to invalid scenes and skipping going to black screen
Reverting creature speeds to R20 values
Baron Benefactor City home bugs fixed
Hopefully fixed getting stuck in a certain spot in The Epitaph
Clicking noise whenever walking around fixed
Fix initial zoom for camera
Since we can no longer salvage an item with 0 value, then it is ok to give back a low value item upon a bad roll. Salvage dice rolls resulting in a 0 value result will be adjusted to 1 to give back a very small value instead of nothing
White Hart Player Owned Town, changed template from Forest to Alpine
Obsidian Town Tower doors updated
Malus Player Owned Town, changed to PvP
Vengeance Player Owned Town, reactivated exits
Anomalous graphics on woodworking crafting table possible fix
Snowy Mountain Player Owned Town, added collision wall
New skies in more Novia maps
Bag mode now has tooltips! Yay!
Bodan Koren in Braemar once again giving a reward for killing wolfpack leaders
Toned down the difficulty of entrance crocs in The Epitaph, they shouldn’t be the toughest creatures in the place!
Addressed environmental lighting issues in Grunvald and Verdantis Shardfall maps
Set troll pathing surfaces – removing playlots, water, etc…
Rat’s Nest exit changed to nearby shoreline in Norgard
All pets take damage when they should now
Queen of Chaos visual bug fixes
Player Owned Town NPC buildings, added signs to the Weapon Shop and Bank
Citizen Benefactor Village home bugs fixed
Iron Gate Player Owned Town, added new town into Novia
Wizard’s Rest Player Owned Town data updated.
Performance drain fixed, no longer updating tiny radio at distance of more than 20
Prevent damage from unreachable targets
Prevent experience gain for using combos without hitting anything
Ornate Wood Streetlamp has a working light
Serpent’s Watch Player Owned Town, moved floating town to ground level (but it still inaccessible, will be addressed in a future patch.)
Fixed taming focus drain to be less than non-combat focus regen-fixed issue with taming effect subtracting base regen-set value to 0.4 focus per tick
Removed Grunvald Shardfall access from incorrect hexes
Ornate Iron Streetlamp has a working light
Blackrock Cove Player Owned Town information updated.
Don’t apply experience for interrupted skill
Allow player lots surfaces for gustballing
[Enter] key opens chat after rebind

Known Issues:

We do not yet officially support Windows 10. If you have upgraded to Windows 10 you may experience instability
Flame Fist DoT effect expires too quickly
Verdantis Shardfall light and sky settings are wrong
Adding a Gem to a weapon will break crafting, forcing a relog
Fireball DoT does not work
Lighting and fog levels are still being tuned to work with the new weather system, expect anomalies
Weather has not been propagated to all scenes yet so there may be mismatches
Zooming into First Person camera leaves floating hair in view
Two-handed swords cannot be crafted
Round Rugs cannot be placed
Some skills have not been fully adjusted to work properly with the new use based system
Phoenix flight movements are not working correctly in some cases
Sound effects are not always playing properly
Players in the same scene will sometimes be invisible to each other, usually leaving the scene and returning will fix
Death and Resurrection do not work properly in the team arena
Crafting Recipe book is not opening when you use a crafting station
Water lots in Dynamic Player Owned Towns can currently only be placed along shorelines, not on docks
If you upgrade from a property owning pledge between data wipes you will receive extra lot deeds.
Troll does not have all visual effects
Not all Player Owned Towns in the list are in the game yet
Some objects and NPCs in game are missing textures and show up bright pink
Time is not in synchronized between scenes that have the new sky vs. the old sky
Red crystal nodes in Etceter Crag Mines are all yielding blue crystals.
If your video drivers are out of date characters will appear as if they are covered in triangles.
Some cities are experiencing performance spikes
Some assets create flash bulb like sparks on screen
Many pledge, add on, and stretch goal items have not yet been built and/or do not yet have tech support. These will not be complete until later this year
The update to Unity 5 caused a host of general texture and lighting related issues, and not all of these have been resolved.
Distant tree billboards may have a white outline that is especially noticeable at night, and some trees may shimmer with white at night.
Skin tone will sometimes not match properly on different parts of the body
Unity 5 engine bug: Terrain is not accepting shadow casting lights and terrain lighting shows up on grid vs. radius
ALT key can no longer be bound. This was necessary to re-enable quick self cast with ALT
Unity 5 Engine Bug: Objects in the foreground sort incorrectly against objects in the distance like trees and the horizon

[Complete Patch Notes…]

New Dev Team Members

Please join us in welcoming Matthew Nowacki and Michael Dameron to the SotA Dev Team!

Matthew Nowacki joined Portalarium a few weeks ago as a World Builder/Level Designer. Born and raised in Austin, Texas, Matthew has wanted to make games since he received a Game Boy for his 11^th birthday. He attended college at Texas State University in San Marcos, TX, where he studied Computer Science and Japanese. In 2010, he entered the game industry as an Associate Designer at Junction Point Studios, working on Disney Epic Mickey 1 & 2 through 2013. After the studio’s closure, he switched tracks from design to programming and joined Hellfire Games, an independent studio in Austin specializing in games and apps for PlayStation platforms. Most recently, he completed a 9-month stint at UT Austin’s new post-baccalaureate leadership and management program, the Denius-Sams Gaming Academy. When Matthew isn’t designing game systems and levels, he enjoys going to the symphony, playing fantasy football, and watching arthouse films.

Michael Dameron joined the Portalarium Tribe a few months ago as a Quality Assurance Tester and Customer Service Account Specialist. He is a recent Game Design graduate from ACC’s Game Development Institute, and Lead Designer on the 1st place team in the 2014 Captivate Conference’s student game competition. While completing his degree he interned at Virtuix as a technical designer aiding electrical engineers in the development of the Omni. Upon completion of his internship, Michael worked as an independent Unity Developer for Chaotic Moon Studios here in Austin programming an interactive motion sensing experience and UI for a mobile app.

When Michael is not working, he spends time with his wife, preparing for their first child.

Very Large Creatures: Dragons (Work-in-Progress)

Here is the latest work-in-progress image of our next Very Large Creature: Dragons (for Release 22), by Geoff Mellon (character artist), Kevin Wells (character artist), and Bren Wilson (animator):

Highlights of New Use Based System

[Excerpt from a Public Forum Post by Chris “Dippy Dragon” Spears]

Last week I made a few posts to the Dev plus forums for feedback on the use based systems. As we get closer to release 21 [now launched] I wanted to share these with everyone. First I’ll go with the stuff for people who don’t care about the math and just want to play:

You only have to train a skill once now to unlock it which will give you a 1 in the skill

Skills can be set to train or not train on the upper left corner of the skill in the tree

A small green bar on the bottom of each skill shows current progression on the current skill point

Using an active skill set to train will slowly increase the skill

Passive skills that are set to train will increase slowly as related active skills are used

Players will be able to artificially train skills by using them in pointless ways but these gains will be rapidly diminishing until the player goes and uses the skills in real world settings

In game terms we refer to skill level 40 as competent, 80 as master, and 100+ as grandmaster

Skills will very slowly decay over the period of a month or more real time so you should not stop training a skill until you have a bit of a buffer on the level you want to keep

Most skills require a 10 skill level in the parent skill before they can be trained

Those who leveled more in R20 will find that they more quickly learn skills to a higher level than those who did not level up in R20

For those who play with deck mode, glyphs are gained at 1,10,20,40, and 80

Now for those that aren’t afraid of the details:

Underneath the covers, experience is still earned from adventuring and goes into a pool. A tiny percentage is applied to skills when they are used. Without earning exps, this pool will empty out over time

For R21 only, that experience pool is set to the amount of experience players earned in R20

Passives divide experience gained among all related passives set to train so they will level slower if all are set to train

Most skills increase in effectiveness based on square root curve. So a 100 vs a 50 is not 100% more effective but rather 41% more effective.

Parent skills that decay below the minimum level will auto train back up to the min level

Decay is currently set to lose 1 full point every 40 days of accumulated loss

Decay is only applied on death or skill advancement

Decay only accumulates up to a maximum of 2 days worth of loss

Behind the scenes there are still player levels but they are only used as a small modifier on hp and focus pools and for modifying attack chances on NPCs that are significantly higher level

The curve for experience is exponential so every 10 points more than doubles the exps needed. So going from 90 -100 is more effort than 1-90

No matter how powerful a target is or how many defensive skills they have, players will always have a chance equal to their critical hit chance to land a regular hit

This was obviously a HUGE switch for us to make so not everything is quite in place for this release. The following are some future features we plan on adding but are not in R21:

In future releases there will be ways to stop decay (likely through the Oracle)

Through the use of special crafted books, grandmasters will be able to create books that will let others use them and learn a skill up to a certain point

Achievements and titles will be added for those who reach Grandmaster status

Grouping with a player with grandmaster skills will allow party members to more quickly advance in those skills

We are considering exposing more of the numbers behind the scenes

Trainers will allow players to get a lesson in a skill that will give the player a buff that increases training speed in a specific skill for some amount of time

Not all skills will be available at all trainers and prices will be adjusted to be more varied

Some skills will not yet scale with skill level in R21

Chris “Dippy Dragon” Spears