TAR June - July Dev Update news - The Arcane Relics™

Hey everyone! Here's our development update since early June:

After much feedback we’ve finally started addressing some movement speed issues. Here’s some changes that we’ve made:

• The default movement speed is now a bit quicker, and the increase in speed while sprinting is greater than before.
• Item Burden has less effect, using an exponential curve vs. a linear, upon your movement speed.
• Sprinting with Stamina, ignores a certain % of Item Burden. Once stamina is depleted, Item Burden will take a greater effect.

Added another skill group, Trades. Currently, it contains the skills pertaining to Alchemy, Repairing, and Reviving others.

Since repairing is now tied to a skill, lower skills values can now result in failed attempts, causing damage to the targeted item.

It is very much a WIP, but is functional and we’re still trying to decide if we want to keep the ‘move into it’ approach, or use an ‘interact to enter push mode’ approach.

• The crossbow now requires a reload between shots, making it a bit more reasonable for how powerful it is.
• An audible animation pulling the rope back is in. The animation is very much WIP (why it's not shown).
• Added an ’empty’ item action for crossbow, so the loaded bolt can be removed after.

I’ve also been messing around with redoing the clouds. They look a bit better and aren’t as flat looking as the previous ones (in the public demo). The biggest improvement is that they no longer take fog – fixing issues with fog rendering on top of clouds, encountered after upgrading Unity to v5.6.

• Pickpocketing:
  • Being detected while pickpocketing an NPC will cause them to get hostile. The inventory menu will also immediately close as well.
  • Items will no longer transfer if the pickpocket was unsuccessful.
• Magic:
  • Started experimenting with magic chants for magic in the Spelling school.
  • Added a projectile healing spell.

• UI:
  • Menu navigation in the Book screen should no longer highlight the inventory buttons that reside behind.
  • Got a popup, “How Many?” menu functioning (still WIP) when dropping items. Still need to get it set up for bartering/placing/taking items out of containers.
  • Inventory character offset has returned:

• Tavern:
  • Started new NPC, Tavernkeeper.
  • Chandelier, in Tavern, improvements:

• New wood texture:

• Jon made the dialog response/loading screen title text style easier to read (Increased contrast between outline and font).
• Continued assigning entity common names: items are complete, maybe.
• Improved animation scaling with movement speeds, most noticeable while crouching.
• Head-look has been improved, possibly fixing the bug where characters would oddly look to the side at no apparent target.
• Added ‘xp popups’ to console commands, to help us test/balance XP gained.
• Sky horizon, fog, & cloud gradients have been tweaked.
• Wooden chair is now textured:

• Optimized various materials, removing unneeded details and creating better main texture maps, improving appearance in the process.
• Persuasion skill now affects bartering prices.
• Experience Points (XP) in the status menu now displays the total XP you’ve acquired out of the amount you need to reach, in order to level up. Previously, the XP would reset back to zero, every level up, and the latter number would just display the amount needed.
• Reviving a combatant in an arena match will now place that combatant back into the match, preventing the other team from winning. In other words, all members of the opposing team must be incapacitated in order for your team to win, instead of defeating each of them once.
• Dummy skills in a skill grid can no longer be highlighted through menu navigation.
• Fixed incorrect raycast on scene transitions/starts that would cause players to start in the ground, about waist high.
• Dropped default look sensitivities.
• Started creating LODs for buildings and optimizing them to improve Town scene performance.