Our sprint meeting happened today and we heard presentations on what people have been working on for the past few weeks. A lot of the work done in the last couple of weeks had to do with the large patch we issued yesterday, so you already know about what was done there. As far as the patch is concerned, since it was launched there was a crash bug which we fixed, there’s one in progress on the NA server as I write this update,  and a quick patch we issued today to make adjustments to the melee and crafting skill gains which were not working properly. We have been following your feedback on the alignment system changes and on the way the shock charges work. Edit: We’re also looking into a faster option for players to get back from a negative alignment. We have some more changes we’re debating, and we would like your feedback on one of them: We were thinking of making deep water areas and remote land areas “lawless” areas, while civilized areas would be “lawful”. This would mean that you wouldn’t take alignment hits in the lawless areas, just in the lawful ones. Please let us know what you think, we’re interested in your comments.

Work on Darkfall’s relaunch:

Worldbuilders have finalized the Mirdain and Alfar areas, went back to make some fixes on the completed areas and have finished remaking all clan cities and hamlets in the Mirdain and the Desert areas. The Wasteland has also been redone. Chaos chests have been redistributed and several dungeons have been remade. On dungeons: we also heard from our programmers about adding gameplay physics and new assets to the dungeons in the form of various traps and doors etc. which should make the dungeon experience and flow a lot more exciting. We also saw some of the new lighting system tests in some of the dungeons and it makes them look pretty awesome. This goes beyond just the lighting system, it is a custom configurable lighting environment for the dungeons. You can get an idea of how the lighting system changes things by some of the new tests we’ve posted at the bottom of the article.

The art department has been hard at work making new buildings and art assets for the arctic areas, new and really exciting monsters, remaking existing monsters, several monster tweaks and adding a few new weapons for them. We saw some very cool animations for some of the epic monsters we’re adding to the game. The largest monster to ever appear on Agon is getting a lot of testing since it will occupy a very large area. 70 percent of all monster spawns have been redistributed. A lot of work is also going into the updated player character models, new armors are being fitted to all the races and sexes, and customizations for the new characters are also being made. New water shaders and underwater shaders have been made that look very realistic.  The animators are  working on more motion capture tests.

New features of the political map were demonstrated for us, where you can select an area, on the map and search within that radius. A lot cooler than it probably sounds here, also very useful.

We were given a very good demonstration of the new sound system. It’s pretty amazing. We have a video coming up next week where we can show you some of the features. Some things that made an impression on all of us: sounds of weapons swings vary on weapon type, there is a separate sound engine for the monsters, we have implemented an audio quality check tool which ensures consistency in sound quality, continuous randomization of sound throughout the world, 3d sounds, multiple sound layers per area that blend into each other, and logical triggered music for areas of interest. Also: Sound is affected by the time of the day and weather conditions and it changes form environment to environment. Acoustic sound reverberation demonstrated by weapon swings and explosions in various locations within a cave made for a very impressive demonstration. Sound felt very natural and very immersive throughout the test areas.

The development of the new GUI has led to a lot of further development: Darkfall is a distributed asynchronous system. We are making the client more asynchronous and this will end all memory issues we’ve had so far, and will speed things up even more. Darkfall will also get more utility out of multiprocessor systems.

We’ll have another patch coming up after the next sprint where among a lot of other things we’ll be increasing drop rates of books and scrolls and put in some bug fixes having to do with shock charges

Thank you for reading.