TAR 3 Weeks Update, as of Feb 18th news - The Arcane Relics™

Greetings again,

We're getting closer, and here's what we've accomplished during these 3 weeks of development:

Over the past few months Jon has been working here and there on the revised horseback controls and finally they are at a point we can call sufficient for the 1st public demo.

• Pressing ‘forward’ causes the horse to accelerate. The horse will maintain its current speed even when ‘forward’ is released, ‘back’ slows the horse down.
• ‘left/right’ steers the horse, which is more effective at slower speeds.
• Holding ‘back’ while stationary will make the horse step backwards.
• If you attack, you will attack on the side your camera is facing relative to the horse.

Previously, Jon had setup a simple trap in the Playground scene for testing, but now he has come up with a better solution for randomizing traps/locks everywhere.

Also, doors can now be locked or unlocked by interacting with their locks.

Now in the Player-Select menu, when you select a profile/character, their equipment will appear as last saved.

Also in the setup scene, users can now only select a user profile that has not already been chosen by another player. An exiting player now resets their chosen profile to ‘guest.’ The user text display, unlike before, will now show this.

In the Grand Arena, players that are in one of the indoor sections have the sunlight culled from their view. This has caused a couple of issues for a while, but Jon has finally found the solution!

He found that deactivating the sun (deactivating the sun’s GameObject) per camera was causing the sun to unassign itself from the lighting settings, so he tried disabling the Light component. When disabling the sunlight per camera, the normal light would work, but reflected light would not be correct.

The solution – for each player camera, use OnPreCull to disable the sun, sun default state must be enabled, and use OnPostRender to turn it back on. The sun seems to cull and have reflected light correctly on each player’s camera.

Focusing on making areas into more believable environments and adding distant areas along the horizon, there are now mountain ranges off in the distance.

At the moment, it is not climbable like the maples or cone. We’ll have to improve our climbing system, adding support for curved/angular trunks, to allow this to happen.

There are a lot of calculations that occur when damage is inflicted, especially on another humanoid/thing that can get crippled limbs. For the past few weeks, Jon worked on improving the damage logging, which led to many damage bug fixes.

Jon found that arm damage multipliers were higher than they should’ve been (x0.9) and the bonus damage of hitting a crippled limb wasn’t working correctly.

Blocking per damage type is now working… So far. This allows damage types, such as fire, to still deliver higher percentages of damage compared to bludgeon and piercing while blocking.

• Fixed issue where animation states would reset after a tele-roll.
• Z’s particle now emits evenly for all sleepers (if max particle count is not met…).
• When incapacitated, the revive effect should now work properly when consuming alchemical results.

• Setup belt equip BlendShapes for all tunics. (They fit under the belt now.)

• Homestead paths now have some curviness to them, looking a bit more natural.
• Dirt patches have appeared in the Homestead. What could this entail?
• Crossbow improvements:
  • Crossbow firing sound now in.
  • Bolts use a more reliable hit detection system now. The bolts fly more predictably and face forward, unlike before, when fired.
• Dialog will now exit if the player or the chat target ragdolls, is forced too far away, or is incapacitated.
• Fixed issue with incorrect head mounting angles, especially for horses. Mount angle was always the same for people and horses.
• Setup a different cursor icon when targeting doors.
• Started setting up Font Style Templates, to ease the pain of tweaking UI Elements. Instead of going through all prefabs to change font values, all prefabs are set to use a font style template, allowing just the one asset to be edited and all will update.
• Improved UVs for the Homestead cottage, wooden parts.
• Added next iteration of Arena Battle music, now using sampled instruments.
• Warp sounds are back in for stepping on scene transition warp pads. Level load now has a slight delay to allow the sound to trigger.
• Fixed elusive bug that would cause an additional rogue player to join in setup scene. Reproduced by the following: In setup scene – P1 joins. P2 joins. P1 Leaves. P1 rejoins, & lastly P2 presses ‘confirm’ button. Another player (P3) is added that was also controlled by P2!
• Fixed audio bug when multiple players enter/exit a reverb audio zone simultaneously causing only one player’s reverb zone to update.

Until next time.