Vizaris Weekly Update - 38 news

This week we have an exciting new first taste of a new combat personality system, some continued progress on the landscape revisions, and some critical bug fixes to issues that were either created or made more apparent in last week's update. Once the northern sections of the game map have been revised, we'll move down south and more heavily revise those areas, as they're some of the oldest in the game. The revisions in those areas may be more significant. As a reminder, if you find yourself stuck inside a rock that didn't exist last time you played, you can use the "Stuck" button in game menu to relocate yourself to camp or the nearest relocation point.

This week's additions

• Combat AI - The vast majority of the code work this week was spent on developing a new combat AI / personality system for the NPCs which will help to give them more unique and varied combat behavior. This is a massive task, and certainly can’t’ be fully completed in one week. The only difference you will be seeing in the game this week is a modification to how enemies can approach you , and the possibility for enemy NPCs to surrender or flee from combat. The different aged dolfogs will exhibit different personalities based on how old they are.

• Revised Da’te’coro Gap - In continuation with our work to revise the older landscapes and bring them up to par with the latest techniques, the Da’te’coro Gap has been completely overhauled. Featuring foliage, and much more significant rock overhangs (and maybe some treasure).

• Revised Da’te’coro Canyon (North) - Da’te’coro Canyon (North) was also revised. Because Da’te’coro canyon was fairly recently added to the game, the revision for this area wasn’t as significant as it was for other areas. Simple modification to the landscape and the addition of foliage was enough to bring it up to the standard.

• Revised Sa’le’talo Canyon (The Eastern Half) - The eastern half of Sa’le’talo Canyon was also revised with new landscape paint, new foliage, and some additional rocks. Keep in mind Sa’le’talo canyon does not have an East/West distinction ingame, but the eastern half of the canyon itself was revised (The canyon was expanded eastward a few updates ago, so it’s already using a newer style, while the western half will take more work to revised.).

• Rotated Copper, Silver, and Gold coin previews - We added some code to the game last week which allowed us to rotate the angle that objects are displayed. This was used to make copper, silver, and gold coins display their faces, rather than their edges.

• Updated ‘Take Damage’ Screen Effect - Some modifications were done to make the screen effect which occurs when the player takes damage a little more distinct. This effect was also modified to change intensity based on how much the damage the player took (as a percentage of their total health)

• New screen effects for low Vitals and Needs - New screen effects were added for when the player is low on health, stamina, hunger, or thirst. Most effects have a primary effect which begins fading in at P, and a secondary effect (aside from stamina) which begins fading in at lower values. Stamina, being the most frequent to be drained, has the most subtle effect.

• Mousewheel camera zoom speed increase - We increased the zoom in/zoom out speed for camera distance when using the mouse wheel by @, making it a little less annoying to change camera angles.

• Fixed: Item Previews not Rotating - That code we added last week for changing the angle of the object preview also happened to break object rotation in the preview. This has been fixed.

• Fixed: Mousewheel View Mode Toggle Fix - Last week we added mousewheel zooming for first/third person toggling. Unfortunately, this new ability wasn’t properly triggering the standard first person toggle code, causing the player character to become visually glitched when leaving first person.

• Fixed: Ingame Time Handling - Fixed a bug that was causing time to be improperly handled in the back end of the code causing minutes ingame to pass at different speeds from one minute to the next. Now all time should be stable at 5 seconds per ingame minute.

• Fixed: Conversation Check Bug - There was a fairly major bug which was uncovered last week which was causing conditional conversation checks to improperly return the wrong value. This was very damaging to the functionality of the quests, as once one conversation option appeared, it had the potential to make some or all of the conversation options appear.

• Backend: AI Personality System - As mentioned at the start of the changelog, there was a massive amount of work done on the AI personality system this week. There is much more to come as the system was only just getting started. Most of the work done this week didn’t make it into the game in any way that would affect the player.

This coming week we’ll continue terrain revisions, combat personality work, and a few other small improvements here and there. We got our first looks at the new dolfog animations, and they’re glorious – we’re really looking forward to seeing them ingame, along with all the new functionality they’re going to bring.

We’re moving forward with some new and exciting things behind the scenes, including a new focus on making unique scenes for Vizaris (not to mention finally getting the village into the game), as well as a new marketing push, upgrades to our content delivery system, and much much more.

–Luke

Vizaris is an open world, fantasy roleplaying game, with singleplayer and 6 player co-op multiplayer. Vizaris focuses on player choice and freedom.

You can play Vizaris right now by going to www.VizarisGame.com/play , Every dollar goes to supporting the development of the game, meaning more content at a faster rate. Free press access available! Questions, comments, help, and feedback welcome!