It has been an exciting week for our developers! Experimentation continues on the hairstyles for the character classes of Erendorn by the 3D modelling team whilst the set design team work on more props for the city. During this time, the wizards of coding implemented some in-game events and worked on bugs that arose with the dialogue system. Finally, both the sound team and VFX team have been working on the abilities for a couple of character classes. As always, join us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit for daily updates on Depths of Erendorn. Alternatively, join our Discord for all the latest! - now let’s get into it!
3D Modelling
The 3D modelling team have been continuing their work experimenting with hairstyle tools. As the team get to grips with the new tools we get to see the hairstyles coming to life. The team continue to layer strands of hair over one another to build up the final style. From the example below, we can see the confidence in the team increasing as the hairpiece gets closer to resembling one that would be seen in our world. The team will continue to experiment and get to grips with the tools, and also complete more hairstyles in the coming weeks. Examples of the current experimentation can be seen below.
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Set Piece Design
The set design team have continued to work on props for the houses of Erendorn. After completing the Lionhead mirror, the team also worked on a couple of interesting models. Throughout the week, brand-new assets have been created such as a bench, decorative shield and wall-hanging torch. These assets have continued the theme of props in this set, with opulent details added throughout. Flourishes such as these would only be added to items that will furnish the houses of the more affluent of Erendorn. Once these assets were completed they were imported into the engine. Examples of the new models can be seen below.
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Programming
Client
This week has been about adding several new Session Logs and integrated functions for Player Progress as a result of World Combat/Dungeons/Adventures, Activity Updates for displaying progression through Event Objectives and further improvements to entering and exiting World Combat in different circumstances. More work completed by the client-side team can be seen below.
- Added Progress Granted, and Progression Data Logs and Steps to handle party progress updates.
- Added Activity Logs and Steps to update Event Activities as players explore and progress through Event Objectives.
- Implemented an Activity Controller to manage the state of and updates to player Progression and Activities with hooks for the Activity Book widget responsible for displaying updates.
- Continued testing of Adventures and Dungeons to ensure Combat functions correctly in various player configurations.
- After a long trawl and much assistance from the server team in bug fixing, the client dialogue system can run a full conversation.
- Adventure progression window now takes inputs of the correct types, and now had some safeguards in place to prevent visual overflow of UI elements, and the internal functions have been rearranged and cleaned up to fit the new input data.
Server
This week, the server team has all been focused on the Zone server and creating yet more events. Some of these events ended up complex enough that a few chunks of code had to be refactored, such as Active Effects becoming part of the server package, and applying an active effect had to be able to accept multiple entities to attach to it. On the plus side, these new events were created:
- Combat Shrine, a shrine that gives you a random, but powerful buff for the next fight you're in.
- Rangers with Lost Ring, go find it for them and they'll reward you handsomely!
- Dwarf's stolen Heirloom, some bandits took a Dwarf's heirloom, figure out where they're hidden and return his family jewels.
- Cursed Ground, destroy the dark braziers to remove the curse, and the zombies, from the surrounding land.
- Infinite Graveyard, a graveyard that will never stop spawning zombies until you manage to wipe them all out.
Additional work completed by the server-side team can be seen below.
- Added Assets for 3 More World Events.
- Expected players sent from other servers now update the Entity service.
- World move commands now check if the entity is in combat which stops a rare edge case around combat.
- Wrecked caravan World Event NPC is no longer considered to be a player.
- Caged NPC World Event NPC is no longer considered to be a player.
- Fixed the interact command which re-enables all interactables again.
- Refactored Expected players and new connection handling code.
- Players are no longer sent to prior-ended sessions instead of newly request ones when connecting to servers.
- Fixed a bug which made it impossible to change the character on future sessions.
- Refactored ProgressionData, Improved variable naming, and they now contain information about their origin.
- Added a command the client can use to request the current session ProgressionData.
- Fixed some bad ProgressionData building which caused some data loss.
- Summary logs are now sent to clients on the completion of Dungeons/Combats and Adventures.
- Zones are now pre-loaded on the server start reducing wait time on the first adventure on a server.
- Refactored combat start code, combat trigger distance is now a lot more consistent.
- Nearby party members are now dragged into combat when it triggers.
- World Events can now interact with each other if they are a parent or child of other events.
- Added subzone deactivation when the party moves too far away which will unload enemy groups.
- Fixed a bug which makes newly created dialogues accessible.
- Added a command to return to character select so players can change characters in settlements.
Sound Design
The sound team has focused on some of the abilities created throughout the last couple of weeks. Taking the visual effects for the Twilight Elf Assassin the team has created audio for Shadow Dagger, Incapacitate, From the Shadows and Assess Weakness. Continuing with the Elf Assassins' stealthy theme, the audio that has been created has a more subtle vibe, giving the assassin a chance to activate them whilst still being stealthy. Examples of the audio created for these abilities can be seen in the video below.
Visual Effects
The visual effects team have been continuing their work on the level 3 abilities for character classes. Throughout the week, the team completed the abilities for the Twilight Elf Assassin and also started work on the Human Knight's abilities. The theme of stealthy abilities continues for the Twilight Elf, with the team using purples and darker colours to portray Extreme Desperation, Shadow Fade and Carve. In direct contrast, the effects created for the Human Knight use a lot warmer colours for their abilities. Challenge, Subdue and Grevious Wounds utilise these warm colours to convey the neutral good that many Human Knights may be. Throughout these abilities, slashes have been employed to show the proficiency that these characters have with a sword. Examples of the newly created abilities can be seen below.
That’s it for this week’s devlog, but have you seen our monthly roundup of September yet?!
