Our biggest priority this week has been working to resolve the problems that our testers have been reported with NPC and pet pathfinding and responsiveness. This issue impacts gameplay for everyone and skews the data and feedback that we gather from our Public Test Realm. However, there’s also been some progress in other areas this week as well. Please read below for the details.
Design and Narrative
- Wrapping up the implementation of overheard NPC dialogue for the Port of Rulun, and continuing to implement overheard dialogue in Detihauna. Final conversation trees are being drafted for important NPCs in both locations.
- Additional work on NPC abilities, including adding more types of abilities that NPCs will be able to use.
- Working through final NPC population adjustments in Badia de Cara as part of adding combat abilities to those NPCs, and staging for encounters for players adventuring in the area.
- More updates and fixes for game itemization, based on feedback from our testers on the Public Test Realm.
- Fleshing out the detailed list of NPCs for adventure areas in Faerthale, including the denizens of regions/areas such as the Faerthale Forest, Oldwood, Lo’thale Outskirts, Fae Hollow, and Mangle Rock.
- Wrapping up testing on a new game data entry tool. This tool will help address a number of bottlenecks that have historically slowed the team down when it comes to implementing class abilities and masteries, as well as NPC data and item data. Perhaps more importantly, the new toolset also comes with data enhancements that will help us better manage the game data and improve server and client performance.
- More prep work (mostly UI mockups and spreadsheet work) for starting on the crafting/gathering update implementation in the near future.
Programming
- Focused this week on finding the root cause for ongoing issues with NPC and pet pathfinding.
- Support for bug fixes as they come up.
- Finalizing the first release of the new game data tooling that the designers will leverage.
- Working on adding some additional code support to help realize a few special high-level enchanter and wizard abilities.
Worldbuilding and Environment Art
- Reshaping and updating the base terrain in Faerthale outside the city to help take into account everything we have learned from our other two starting areas on Kingsreach.
- Working on Faerthale assets, including finalizing and optimizing the Great Trees of the Oldwood (they are very large), as well as work on other environmental assets and NPCs that are unique to the zone.
- Wrapping up some collision optimizations for game objects that are used in many zones. These optimizations will help improve client performance in areas with a lot of objects that are used as set dressing, such as cities, towns, and some dungeon areas.
Character Art and Animation
- Significant progress on updated human base models for use with the new armor system, to help improve overall client performance (they look better and support more customization, too).
- Continued work on updated animations for player characters and player-race NPCs to use.
- Additional work in support of the updated armor system, with a focus on armor for female characters this week, and early meetings about how to handle armor for ogres and dwarves properly (the ogres and dwarves use a different body type from the other races).