Shroud of the Avatar – Update of the Avatar #263
Greetings Friends! Here’s what we have for you in this week’s edition of Update of the Avatar:
Game Development
- New Wolves Attack!
- Making of Sunless Barrens (cont.)
- Introducing the Watermill Home
- Release 49 Postmortem Missed Questions
New Wolves Attack!
[From a Dev+ Forum Post by Starr “Darkstarr” Long]
The wolves throughout New Britannia are getting a makeover! We originally purchased our wolf from the Unity Asset store to save time and money, but it was not visually competitive. To address this shortcoming, Kevin @UglyFist Wells completely rebuilt the wolves for Release 50, including all the variations, the wolf hat, wolf mask, wolf trophies and the wolf clan barbarians. The wolf trophies will be updated in Release 50 with the updated Timber Wolf and in R51 we will add all the variants!
Timber Wolf
Grey Wolf
Arctic Wolf
Desert Wolf / Coyote
Obsidian Wolf
Wolf Hat:
Making of Sunless Barrens (cont.)
[From a A Dev+ Forum Post by Chris “Sea Wolf” Wolf]
I have a few updated screenshots
The Ritual Site
The Cultist’s lair (now with more bones!)
One of the Hellfire Fingers (visuals updated by Hutch)
Chris “Seawolf” Wolf
Level Designer
Introducing the Watermill Home
The Dev’s newest water based home is two stories and includes a water wheel that rotates. It will be available in the Add On Store next week for Release 50!
Release 49 Postmortem Missed Questions
Devs had over pages of questions left unanswered after the R49 Postmortem! With assistance from the team they were able to get to those questions and posted them to the forums Thursday.
[From a Forum Post by Starr “Darkstarr” Long]
Here are the questions that we did not have time to get to during the R49 Postmortem. I tried my best to answer these (with help from the rest of the team) but some we just don’t have details yet to provide. I probably won’t have time to do any follow ups to these. The community did a great job assisting us this telethon to make sure we didn’t miss a single question.
Please note I deleted a bunch of duplicated questions and also deleted any questions that we answered with the Q1 post or with the release of R49. Also note that we are generally going to stop answering questions about “when?” as those are answered by our quarterly schedule posts and any other answers are going to be either “No ETA” or “soon” or “will update with the next quarterly post”.
A final thought: we see a LOT of repeat questions and requests. Please consider reading one of the other missed question posts, watching one of the previous post mortems, reading one of the post mortem transcripts, and/or reading our Post Episode 1 plan post before posting a question. Your question might have already been answered.
Xee: Can we get spell books, mystical items as another caster option vs a wands/staffs?
We have discussed these as offhand items
SmokerKGB: Why is AI hard to develop for NPCs, Pets, etc.?
Because AI must simulate millions of years of evolutionary biology that resulted in the computational power of your brain that lets you make decisions about real time data with the equivalent of the brain of a mosquito trying to communicate with paper cups and string. Seriously the amount of decisions a single NPC has to make about where to step, who to attack, who to ignore, which spell/skill to use, whether they should call for help, whether they should go back to home or venture farther, etc all while the data is constantly changing makes them very hard to keep on a trajectory that is in any way meaningful. All of those decisions have to be weighted against each other and they are constantly being interrupted as new data emerges (players attacking, players moving, players dying, players resurrecting, players appearing in the scene, players leaving the scene, players summoning pets, players using spells/skills, etc.). On top of all that the NPCs rely on a simulation layer of collision shapes, pathfinding nodes, interest points, data hooks (ex lights, fires, lava), etc. that has to be “perfect” which is rarely that. Finally most projects have an AI team of multiple programmers and at least one designer. We have a single programmer and a part time designer.
Cypher Black: What are you planning to do to turn the shard falls (pvp zones) into locations that players will want to risk entering?
Dhanas: What do you think about adding more special rewards and resources (related to pvp) in pvp zones like you did with “The Fall”‘s artifacts?
When we have higher player populations and we have the tech feature to control spawning based on the number of players in a scene we do plan to balance the risk vs. reward by increasing resource yields of certain resource types (ex. Obsidian).
Atos:
Step 1: Make PVP more fun. That means get some more balance in the combat systems and more Rock paper scissors. Also, it means improving performance in high player situations and fewer hitches. It also means MORE PLAYERS that we should see post launch.
Step 2: Give more global reasons for players to PVP. In the long run, this means ladders, bounties, more ransom options, more trophies.
Step 3: A raid system, so more than one group can get together.
Step 4: Give more location specific reasons for players to play in PVP scenes. It isn’t just enough to have extra loot there but unique drops or resources is a start. Eventually we need content in PVP scenes to be driven by the players. For example, sequence boss mob fights where you have to fight large PVE elements, followed by a rewarding boss mob or treasure exposure. Make those fight challenging enough that a few opposing PVP players could disrupt it all. Obviously that isn’t all happening by release but we’re working on the top
Ancev: My guildmates were wondering if a subterranean level could be added to deep ravenswood, particularly in multiplayer mode, where more obsidian bears and obsidian wolves could be found, and the entrances could be at the bear cave and wolf den?
We will consider but will be super low priority versus rebuilding scenes that are currently clones, making maps for scenes that don’t have maps, and updating maps that have errors.
TeddyMIT: I hope that the respawn number and respawn speed of the monster in the Multiplayer online mode is much higher. For example, triple the number of respawn monsters and reduce the respawn time to about 10-15 seconds.
We need a new tech feature to control spawning based on the number of players in a scene to do that because we don’t want single players or small groups swamped by groups of NPCs respawning too quickly.
Atos: We tune this frequently. I think we had things on the low side to keep the high level farmers in mid tier scenes from getting too much benefit. I think now that the XP is in place and only ruffled a few feathers, we can look at turning up spawn rates in more areas.
