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in: Beta

Patch Note:1.0.13.0

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Release Notes for 1.0.13.0

This is a milestone update so there are about a month’s worth of changes since the last build you saw. And because it includes all the changes we wanted in for the Gold Master, it’s a month of long hours and weekends worth of changes. A build very similar to this was put on DVDs in boxes and will hit store shelves in January. In the meantime, what do we need to patch before the unwashed hordes arrive?

The biggest changes in this build include:

  • Tabbed Chat! w00t! We had to wipe your preferences to implement this.
  • Quick Reference UI for avatar and ship gameplay. Read more in the Tutorial section below.
  • Cleaned up UI—better fonts, colors, backgrounds. Better?
  • New Tortuga! Set aside some time to go exploring in this amazing new city.
  • Since this is the Gold Master build (actually, it’s GM + some fixes already), we’ve removed the combat practice areas from the Bartenders and Tortuga.

Known Issues:

  • Some Highland loot is missing descriptions and some are missing icons. We’ll hook those up eventually.

Differences between 0.28.73.00 and 1.00.13.00 include but aren’t limited to:

Character Creation / Customization[]

  • Moved the name field to the bottom of the Character Creation UI. Seems to flow better that way for most people.
  • Cleaned up the Character Creation UI a bit.
  • New characters should not default to white clothes.
  • Corrected the names on several clothing items.
  • Added/clarified several tooltips in the Character Creation UI
  • Fixed a bug that allowed you to access career-restricted clothing items by clicking Random Appearance in Character Creation UI.

Tutorial[]

  • New Feature: Quick Reference Screens – New help screens for the game. When you take the Tutorial, two “items” are added to your Toolbar. Clicking them gives you Quick Reference Screens for Avatars and Ships. You can also access these via buttons in the Options menu so you don’t have to keep them on your skill bar if you don’t want once you know your way around the game.
  • Revised Tutorial! Mostly just a lot shorter, and also a lot few pop-up windows to read thanks to the new quick reference screens.
  • New Boarding Tutorial! You can take this new tutorial from each new-player town. It’s on the guy at the docks who you talk to when you complete the new-player tutorial.

Ship Combat / Skills[]

  • Reduced the AI aggro range in the Open Sea.
  • Wind direction now carries over from the Open Sea into ad hocs as it should.
  • Rare spawns: You will now sometimes encounter rare and tougher named NPC captains in Open Sea battles. They aren’t labeled when you’re in the Open Sea but once the battle starts, you will sometimes find one. If you defeat such a ship, it can drop new Elite loot. Rare spawns only occur when fighting a group of NPCs such as a convoy or a squadron. (What about rare spawns you actually find in the Open Sea itself? That will happen after launch.)
  • Increased the distance your camera is allowed to zoom away from your ship in ship combat. And the crowd goes wild!
  • All ad hoc combat encounters now have exit points around the outer edges. Any player who sails within 300y of one can then exit the encounter regardless of combat state. Leaving the vicinity of the exit point removes this ability. HUD and chat messages inform the player as he or she enters/leaves the vicinity of the exit point. We can’t notify other players about this but they can see that the player has the “can exit encounter” effect.
  • AdHoc Invisibility was getting stripped too soon after you sail away from an encounter. Extended the range so that it lasts longer.
  • We removed some rooms from the list of available ad hoc encounters because they weren’t much fun when used for that purpose—mostly they’re just too small for good PvP. We enlarged some of the remaining rooms and added time of day variants.
  • Ad Hoc combats can now have weather effects. This includes Heat, Night, and Storm. If you end up in one of these encounters, you get an effect applied to your ship with various mods, and a HUD/chat alert about the weather conditions you’ve entered. This isn’t a full on weather system but it adds some variety to ad hocs.
  • Fixed some bugs that were preventing NPCs from attacking.
  • Improved the math that calculates when an AI should surrender to tighten up an exploit.
  • You can no longer surrender to NPCs. Surrender is now called PvP Surrender to help make this clear.
  • When you got flagged for PvP by attacking a PvP-flagged player, it was supposed to time out after 5 minutes but it wasn’t. Fixed that.
  • If you had dropped down the ammo picker in the Combat UI and you entered boarding combat, you would crash. Fixed that.
  • If you clicked on the ship you were grappling before the boarding encounter loaded, you could crash. We think we fixed the crash.
  • Fixed a crash that could occur if you got sunk during boarding.
  • Added an icon to the FledBoarding effect that explains you can’t move.
  • Closed an exploit with the Dereliction effect. You no longer get that effect if your ship doesn’t have a capture deed.
  • There was a bug that caused several skills to show up as doing 0% damage to yourself. That was confusing and wrong so we fixed it.
  • Invincible skill now has a 30-second duration.
  • Adjusted many ship combat skills. In general, speed modifiers were reduced, and other modifiers were increased.
  • Added a Crew Debuff Immunity effect. This effect is applied by several skills that have a direct crew reduction effect (such as Terrorize and Plague Ship). It prevents other direct crew-reduction effects from being applied for 60 seconds.
  • Added a new ship speed modification category, ‘Bonus Ship Speed’. Bonus speed is applied after all other speed skills and calculations are applied, and can exceed the hard speed cap.
  • Terrorize: Added Crew Debuff Immunity as a requirement
  • Break Formation: Reduced cooldown from 30 minutes to 8 minutes.
  • Aggression: Removed energy cost of skill.
  • Burst of Speed: Changed skill to use Bonus Ship Speed. Reduced speed increase from 50% to 25%.
  • Evade Aggression: Increased duration from 30s to 3 minutes.
  • Tack Upwind: Reduced speed increase in all directions from 10% to 7%. Reduced defense penalty from -5 to -2.
  • All or Nothing Shot 1: Reduced reload debuff from 25% to 20%.
  • All or Nothing Shot 2: Reduced reload debuff from 20% to 18%.
  • Unpredictability Speed: Reduced speed increase from 25% to 15%. Reduced defense penalty from -2 to -1. Reduced turn rate penalty from 5% to 2.5%.
  • Battle Preparations Offense: Increased damage bonus from 2% to 5%.
  • Signals: Increased defense debuff from -1 to -5.
  • Fury: Removed energy cost of skill.
  • Rake: Added Crew Debuff Immunity as a requirement
  • Plague Ship: Added Crew Debuff Immunity as a requirement
  • Evade Aggression: Increased duration from 30s to 3 minutes.
  • Tack Upwind: Reduced speed increase in all directions from 10% to 7%. Reduced defense penalty from -5 to -2.
  • Cripple Enemy: Increased acceleration debuff from 5% to 10%.
  • All or Nothing Shot: Reduced reload debuff from 25% to 20%.
  • Death’s Embrace: Increased target protection debuff from -6% to -10%.
  • Bosun’s Whip: Increased duration from 60s to 3 minutes.
  • Repel Grapples 1: Increased defense bonus from 15 to 30
  • Repel Grapples 2: Increased defense bonus from 30 to 45
  • Dump Guns: Reduced speed bonus from 25% to 15%.
  • Before the Wind 1: Reduced speed bonuses in all directions from 10% to 5%.
  • Before the Wind 2: Reduced speed bonuses in all directions from 20% to 10%.
  • Sacrifice for Speed: Reduced speed bonus from 15% to 10%.
  • Devil Take the Hindmost: Increased defense debuff from -1 to -5.
  • Run Them Down: Decreased speed debuff in battle from 25% to 15%.
  • Drink and the Devil: Removed grappling attack bonus. Added +10% speed and +10% damage. Reduced acceleration bonus from 50% to 25%.
  • Precision Fire: Increased cooldown from 60s to 3 minutes. Increased accuracy modifier of shot from +5 to +20
  • Thundering Broadside: Added a +10% damage modifier to the shot
  • Rake: Added Crew Debuff Immunity as a requirement
  • Gunnery Drills: Added +5% max cannon range
  • Warning Shot: Increased damage bonus from 4% to 5%
  • Focused Fire: Increased armor reduction from -10% to -50%.
  • Perfect Discipline: Increased duration from 60s to 3 minutes.
  • For God and Country 1: Increased crew protection from 30% to 60%. Changed stacking category so the effect stacks with all other crew protection effects.
  • For God and Country 2: Increased crew protection from 50% to 90%. Changed stacking category so the effect stacks with all other crew protection effects.
  • Show of Force: Increased reload rate debuff from -10% to -20%.
  • Crippling Broadside: Added -20% acceleration to the debuff effects.
  • Battle Doctrine: Added 2% max cannon range.
  • Strategic Position: Changed effect to allow movement at -80% speed.
  • Freetrader Repel Grapples 1: Increased defense bonus from 15 to 30
  • Freetrader Repel Grapples 2: Increased defense bonus from 30 to 45
  • Freetrader Dump Guns: Reduced speed bonus from 25% to 15%.
  • Freetrader Ranging Shot: Increased accuracy bonus from 3 to 4.
  • Freetrader Reinforcement: Increased hull protection value from 2% to 4%.
  • Freetrader Before the Wind 1: Reduced speed bonuses in all directions from 10% to 6%.
  • Freetrader Before the Wind 2: Reduced speed bonuses in all directions from 20% to 12%.
  • Freetrader Expert Captain: Reduced speed bonus from 15% to 10%.
  • Crew Focus Sailing: Reduced speed bonus from 10% to 6%. Reduced turn rate debuff from 5% to 2.5%. Reduced accuracy debuff from -3 to -2. Reduced reload debuff from -5% to -3%. Reduced defense penalty from -3 to -2.
  • Advanced Crew Focus Sailing: Reduced speed bonus from 12% to 8%. All debuffs are as Crew Focus Sailing 1.
  • Expert Carpenter: Removed mast repair effects from the consumable. They’ve been removed from the FT skill version of this for a while.

Ships / Outfitting[]

Swashbuckling / Skills[]

  • In the boarding combat UI, the Call Reinforcements button now looks like a button so it’s easier to figure out what to do the first time.
  • Nerfed the ‘Sacrificial Daggers’ found as loot in some level 16-30 missions; they were crazy powerful.
  • ‘Offhand’ daggers no longer require Florentine skill; that makes Florentine way too powerful.
  • The Roar skill works now.
  • First Aid Swashbuckling skills were showing incorrect durations. Fixed that. Also clarified requirements.
  • Removed duplicates from ‘National Swashbuckling Skills’ Help index
  • Improved animations for avatars killed by ranged attacks. Rusty raved about this change. We hope you like it too.
  • Spring Attack Swashbuckling skill caused you to jump through the other character. That’s silly enough but then the other character’s response was delayed. Improved that somewhat.
  • Avatar NPCs now disregard range as a factor in calculating hate.
  • As part of our ongoing work to improve swashbuckling, commanding your NPC crewmen in missions is moving towards core gameplay so you feel more like a captain than a sword for hire. The first round of those changes are in this build as follows:
    • You now get three free NPC crewmen command skills at level 1: Attack Target, Follow Me, and Hold Position, whose functionality should be obvious.
    • At level 5 you get two more free ones: Push and Hold the Line, which work like the ship Crew Focus skills. Lots of group-related skills that used to be on the General Trainer are now listed in the normal swashbuckling skill shops so they’re easy to find.
    • Still to come: adding NPC crewmen to many more missions where it makes sense for them to come along. But they already exist in quite a few missions so you can start trying this feature.
  • The Attack Target skill works better now. You select an enemy NPC and use the skill, and any commandable crew NPC allies with you are more likely to attack that target. It’s not guaranteed that they will do so (the heat of battle being what it is) but you should see them respond to your order whenever they can. You can use these command skills in boarding combat. They may actually be too powerful for boarding combat—try them and see what you think!

Missions[]

  • Removed duplicate Q&A’s from some Town Criers.
  • NPC allies in missions who were supposed to escort you (such as NPCs you are supposed to protect/lead) were doing a poor job and sometimes not doing their job at all. They should be somewhat better now about not running off and attacking everything in sight.
  • Fixed some bugs that caused clicking on crates to generate infinite or no enemies.
  • Commendation turn-in missions can no longer be cancelled nor done in groups.
  • Fixed an exploit with conquest rewards.
  • We think we finally fixed the bug where enemies that sunk while you were in boarding combat didn’t count. This one eluded us way too long.
  • Closed an exploit that was available if you died during missions with timers before the timer was up.
  • Added text clarifying clothing rewards. When you get a clothing reward from a mission, you need to visit the tailorshop to use it.
  • Improved highlight for mission rewards.
  • Analyzed survey data of our missions and made changes to the ones folks hated most. We think you’ll like them better now. Keep that survey data coming!
  • There were several missions such as “Outfox the Henhouse” where the NPCs would show up as the wrong nationality. Fixed that globally, we think. Let us know if you find any more of these.
  • Role Playing Story Arc: Finally, it’s in and available for you to play. This is an epic storyline of 70 missions that start in the very first town you arrive in as a new character. Remember that mysterious map you got in the tutorial? It’s time to find out where it leads . . . note that you should really play this starting at level 1 with a new character, since if you go back and do it now you may be way too powerful.
  • Fighting School missions: The masters of each school of swashbuckling have a series of challenges for you, through which you can earn powerful weapons and rewards. These are spread across the entire game world.
  • Port St. Joe missions: There are a bunch of missions in the French town of Port St. Joe that have never been available before. Now they are!
  • We added some missions to honor a few special people. Shhh they’re a secret!
  • Supernatural missions: These are now available. Where are they? That’s for you to discover. Some are sprinkled into 1-15 and 16-30 level towns, but the main ones are level 48 and up and introduce new kinds of swashbuckling gameplay.
  • Seven Deadly Sins missions: This is a new set of storylines in the 28-40 level range, where we didn’t previously have enough content. These take place in Havana, Trinidad, Puerte de Plata, Irish Point, La Isabela, Iguana, Gibara, and San Juan.
  • European Trader missions are level 1 now, not dynamic level. As they should be. Similarly for Prisoner Turn-In missions.
  • Fixed the text in “Gold Rushed” so that you say your thing and the miners say theirs instead of the other way around.
  • Rearranged “Bribes and Misdemeanors” so that it’s less confusing.
  • Corrected name of NPC in “Sea of Souls.”
  • If you have to go upstairs to escape in “Eviction Notice,” you can no longer trigger it from downstairs.
  • NPC in “Pleased to Meat You” no longer refers to his nonexistent coat. He’s rather proud of his eye patch, though.
  • In “Find the Findings,” Sonia’s crew are now the correct nationality and you can no longer kill her in boarding combat.
  • Tweaked “Bring Him Back Alive” mission to make more sense.
  • Corrected some Speedy Delivery missions that were sending you to the wrong place, didn’t give you sufficient info to complete them, or the like.
  • In “Black Heart, Black Powder,” if you were injured in Boarding combat, that carried over into the Swashbucklng sub-encounter. Now you heal at the end of combat as usual.
  • Moved some NPCs in “Tender Negotiations” so that they will attack you.
  • British enemies in “Incoming!” are no longer French.
  • Fixed the NPC in “The Noose Tightens”. He wasn’t supposed to remain friendly.
  • The area to click to talk to the young priest in “Get Thee Behind Me, Satan” was behind him. Fixed that.
  • If you failed “Behind Enemy Lines,” you were told you hadn’t finished it. Fixed that.
  • Ismael Ludlam now joins you in “United We Sail”.
  • You can now leave the captain’s quarters in “Redeemed and Condemned” through the door.
  • The NPC in “By Popular Demand” now fights back during boarding combat.
  • Your allies in “Escape from the Island of the Monkeys” should actually be of some use now.
  • In “Tricky Treatment,” the same door took you to two different rooms. Fixed that.
  • Groupmates were blocked from a door in “Tricky Treatment.” Fixed that.
  • Fixed the tavern in “Going Out With a Bang”
  • If you died during “Sonia Cabrero’s Presentation,” you couldn’t leave the encounter. Fixed that.
  • Fixed a bug that prevented NPCs from firing at the fort in missions like “In Defense of One’s Home”
  • Corrected an exploit with “Final Justice”.
  • Fixed a bug that was preventing NPCs from trying to reach the fort in missions like “On His Most Catholic Majesty’s Secret Service”

Economy[]

  • The Town Crier now points out the Economy Tutorial if you don’t already have it.
  • Economy Tutorial no longer references local and regional auctioneers, who are obsolete.
  • The Auctioneer in Tampico has been locked in the Shop where he belongs.
  • Added the Auctioneer to Oranjestad.
  • Centered text in the dropdowns in the Auction UI
  • Improved Auction UI display of long names and the column layout for Pending Pickups.
  • Increased the commendations required for a 1st Rate from 70 to 80, since they were too close to 2nd Rate costs.
  • Pirate Careening Camp: See this post for a devlog explaining the concept. This is a very big change to pirate career gameplay and you need to learn how it works. http://www.burningsea.com/forums/showthread.php?t=35867
  • Lowered the DP on the Mordaunt to 2. Increased the production run on the 'Mordaunt' Fourth Rate recipe to 3. Reduced the Mordaunt commendation turn in from 100 Royals to 20 Royals.
  • Broke the Advanced General Outfitting 1 book into two books to avoid an error you could get reading it.
  • The merchant sell price of bandages was too low, so that it was rarely a good idea to craft them. Adjusted it up to 30 doubloons, so that crafters have more of a profit margin to work in.
  • Writs are no longer required in any ship recipe. Ship recipes that used to use writs now do not produce a combatant deed. Instead they produce an ‘Uncertified Deed’. This deed, plus the writ, will be turned in to an NPC in the national capital to receive the actual ship deed. That means anyone can make Uncertified Deeds and sell them on the open market, where players can buy them and combine them with a writ to get their ship. This should simplify the process so you don’t have to find someone to make the ship for you who might rip you off anyway.
  • Reduced the rate at which consumables drop during Scavenge.
  • Reduced the rate of money drops from ship kills; this had been accidentally set to nearly double its intended value. * Flattened the curve of money drops across levels. Instead of ranging from 20d to 800d, it now ranges from 100 to 200 doubloons.
  • The Freetrader repair skill was too expensive. Reduced the cost from 5 Oak and 5 Canvas to 1 of each. Cargo space is more valuable than doubloons.
  • Closed an infinite money exploit in the price of bronze round shot. Isildur says Whoops!
  • Note that the 'Pommern' Frigate replaces the old Capricieux Destroyer as the superheavy high-end frigate for both privateers and pirates. Writs for the Mastercraft and Pirate Pommern are available in exchange for commendations. Sleek and Heavy Pommern writs will be in a forthcoming patch. The Pirate Pommern recipe uses Pommern capture deeds, which can be produced by the Careening Camp.
  • Adjusted the Raa recipe; it was slightly too cheap for its power level.

Contention / Landmark Battles[]

  • Doubled the unrest/contention gains for PvP.
  • If a Landmark Battle was cancelled, you kept your contention points when you shouldn’t have. Proper behavior, which we think we have now, is basically: Your points are removed if you gain entrance to the battle or would have if it hadn’t been forfeit; some of your points are transferred to a general pool if you don’t make it into the battle; none of your points are lost if a GM cancels the battle.
  • Added a timer to the Ready Room to let you know how much longer you have to leave before you’re going to get kicked out.
  • Leaving the Ready Room in a Landmark Battle, it wasn’t clear what you needed to do next. Added a popup with instructions.
  • Fixed camera physics in the southwest corner of the final battle room.
  • Renamed the gun emplacements in Landmark Battles to clarify which does what.
  • There was a bug that prevented returning to the ship battle part of a Landmark Battle after the AvCom part if you were an attacker. Fixed that.
  • Made changes to Landmark Battles so that your goals are less ambiguous when you have extra bonuses like forts and such.
  • Added map icons for several Landmark Battle exits that were missing them.
  • There’s now a HUD notification in a port when it changes hands.
  • Players under level 20 no longer receive citations of conquest on a server victory.

UI[]

  • The Login UI now sorts the servers so that the one you logged into most recently is at the top and the rest are sorted by least to most populated, with the inactive ones at the bottom. Also, each server displays its relative population by nation – so you can tell if a given server has more British players or Pirate players or whatever. Of course, in beta we only have one server.
  • Finally fixed a bug in edit box scrolling that’s been in game since at least 2005.
  • We finally have tabbed chat. Each tab can have a name up to 12 characters long. We had to force a preferences reset for this.
  • /showNextTab and /showPrevTab cycle through the tabs. /showChatTab <number> shows the nth tab.
  • Centered the cursor vertically in the text edit for chat.
  • Made changes to word-wrapping to support other languages. Works better in English now too, though. :)
  • Removed the space-wasting border around the Chat UI.
  • There were three keybindings called “Activate Chat” and they did slightly different things. Clarified them.
  • Maps in towns should be better, with new and improved icons.
  • Icons on the minimap were green. Should be yellow-brown now.
  • FMUs were cluttering up the map too much. Cleaned ‘em up a bit.
  • Fixed a feature you may not have known we had. You can once again hover over the name of a port on the minimap to find out who owns the port, its contention state, and its resources.
  • By popular demand, E, W, and S have been added back to the compass.
  • Improved the layout of the Ship Customization UI.
  • Some tooltips were pretty much unreadable. Improved that.
  • Ginormous Preferences overhaul. Removed all of the obsolete preferences from the game and from the default prefs. Reorganized the remaining preferences to be more reasonable. Rewrote many prefs, keybindings, and their tooltips for clarity and consistency. Changed a few default prefs. Made small adjustments to the Prefs UI elements for better alignment and consistency. However, some of our sliders still go “Quality → Performance” while others go “Performance → Quality”. We know it’s stupid and we want to fix it.
  • Changed the order of the Preferences categories.
  • Slightly reorganized Video preferences. Put all the full screen-related stuff at the very top, followed by the rest.
  • Added labels to every single preferences slider except for the volume sliders, since that seems self-evident.
  • Made parts of the Preferences UI prettier.
  • The confirmation dialog for changing screen resolution now pops up over other dialogs.
  • If you sank, then changed your graphics preferences, your ship would unsink (but not for real). Fixed that.
  • Keybindings: Created “Chat” category and grouped chat bindings in there. Added new keybindings for tabbed chat (next/previous tab and show tab 1, show tab 2, show tab 3).
  • Changed keybindings. Local Map is now L and Social UI is now O.
  • Keybindings: Buildings (G) is now called Economy which makes more sense in our game.
  • Fixed keybindings for Target Next Closest and Target Previous Closest.
  • Added new keybinding for Victory Status, which never had one before. Updated the command bar tooltip for Victory Status to show its spanky new keybinding.
  • Add more and better tooltips to the Preferences UI
  • Added a button for Looking for Group in the Social menu.
  • Condensed the height of the Group UI. Some names are sometimes cut off now. Working on that.
  • Took the floaty cloud out of the wind indicator and put it on the graphic under the ship.
  • Cleaned up several floaty names in the Open Sea.
  • Made some improvements to editing multi-line text like in email.
  • If you brought up a context menu and then closed the window, the context menu wouldn’t go away. Fixed that.
  • We widened some buttons and controls for German localization.

Art[]

  • Tortuga is all new and totally cool. Check it out!
  • Improved the navmesh around the stairs at the church in Jenny Bay.
  • Pillory prisoner in Port Royal fits better in the pillory.
  • Fixed the guy trying to saw his leg out of the roof.
  • Taught some more NPCs that you don’t stand on chairs. You sit on chairs or you stand on the ground. Some had to be told more than once.
  • Removed the British soldier from Carlos Harbour. He had no business hanging out in a Pirate town.
  • When nationals raided Ruddy Cove, Pirates were still holding soldiers captive in the middle of town. Fixed that.
  • Fixed several places where the camera could clip through buildings in a few towns.
  • Removed shadow of non-existent item from the night version of the Magistrate’s Office.
  • Fixed many clothing vs. animation interpenetrations.
  • Fixed colorization on many clothing items.
  • Fixed all of the invisible hair problems for female avatars.
  • Improved appearance of several mission patrons.
  • Reduced avatar detection range for non-combat NPCs only. Given our avatar visibility throttle, Rev reduced detection range so that you see more, closer livelytown NPCs. This reduces the radius from 100m to 60m.
  • Heidi fixed a long stall while loading avatars. See if this helps invisible avatar problems.
  • More emotes were added, with some variants for current ones and some from the forums. Check out /noquarter, /egyptian, /demand50, /demand100, /ahoy, /arrr, and others.
  • Avatars now randomize between idles instead of having a unique idle per nation
  • Smoothed and lengthened some idle animations. Should be less popping now.
  • Decreased poly count on the floaty icons.
  • Fixed LODs on chickens so they don’t suddenly pop in out of nowhere.
  • The saga of the Chickens of Sisal comes to a close. Only a select few will remember their quest for glory in the Naval ranks and subsequent traitorous piracy. (They are no longer naval officers nor pirates, simply chickens.)
  • Fixed some buggy birds.
  • Hammerhead shark and manta ray were floating around stiff as boards. They animate more like sea animals now.
  • Added more animals to more rooms – mostly birds, frogs, and insects.
  • Fixed several places in the Open Sea where land or towns and the water didn’t meet correctly.
  • Some of our ships didn’t have low-resolution versions. If we were drawing a bunch of ships on screen, it could destroy your frame rate. We have added low-resolution versions of all ships. Among other things, this should improve your Open Sea performance in places with lots of ships. We still have more work to do in this area but see if it helps.
  • Decreased the number of draw calls needed for the Battle Markers in the Open Sea. You should have fewer performance problems now in areas where lots of battles are going on.
  • Fixed more places in the Open Sea where NPCs were getting stuck.
  • Ship wakes would flicker if the game exceeded your monitor’s frame rate. Fixed that.

Sound[]

  • Music wasn’t always playing in ad hoc encounters as it should. Improved that. You may still not get music if you’re chain ganked but that should be happening less now too.
  • Jaclyn met with our ship combat sound designer (and Oscar winner for his work on Master & Commander!) Richard King and several changes to ship combat sounds resulted.
  • More sounds added to more rooms, including a guitar performance by one of our own employees.
  • Volumes adjusted on many sounds.
  • We discovered we were refusing to play low priority but loud sounds because of high priority but out of range (and quiet) sounds. Now we suppress sounds of 0 apparent volume. Also changed the priority on some sounds. Should make for a richer experience.
  • Logout wasn’t killing music as it should. Fixed that.

Servers[]

  • When the chat server crashes, you can still chat locally. (That’s a feature of the zone server—it’s cross-zone chat that’s handled by the chat server.) However, local chat wasn’t profanity-filtered when the chat server was down. Fixed that.
  • Local chat and emotes stopped working reliably when we started culling who you could see for graphics perf reasons. Now, whether you can see local chat and the text for emotes depends on your distance from the sender, not whether they’re visible.
  • Fixed a bug that caused you to land in the wrong place on the Open Sea if the Connection Server you were connected through crashed.
  • Fixed a crash that could occur in the Connection Server if it received corrupted packets.

Server-side perf improvement: Decreased the amount of traffic between connection servers and idle zone servers.

  • Made some performance improvements for loading zone servers.
  • Made a performance improvement for zoning out of Open Sea.
  • Fixed a zone server crash that would occur if there were escorting NPCs remaining in a room when the player they were escorting left.
  • Fixed a zone server crash that could occur if AIs didn’t get cleaned up properly after a boarding combat.
  • If you happened to try to log in while the cluster was coming down, it could crash the cache server. Fixed that.
  • Fixed a cache server crash we found during the first Stress Test.
  • Fixed a mission server crash caused by GM commands used to help players with screwed-up missions.

Misc[]

  • Made a bunch of code changes that we hope fix some of the graphics memory leaks. Between that and the new low-res ships, you should see frame rate improvements in the Open Sea and elsewhere. Fingers crossed. Tell us how we did.
  • If you happen to get bumped out of range while the window to enter a port is open, it closes and you can’t get it back open again. Most common cause of this was sailing full speed toward the port and bouncing off. Better now.
  • It looked like you should be able to enter Grand Turk from the Open Sea but you couldn’t. Grand Turk is only accessible through the Roleplaying Story Arc so we removed the tag from the Open Sea.
  • Fixed an infinite loading screen bug: We put in a check when we’re reconnecting a zombie to make sure all the necessary servers are there. (Your character becomes a “zombie” if you disconnect suddenly without logging out.) If they aren’t, then we don’t reconnect you, and your client is like ‘hey, I can’t connect’ and you have to hit login again. Previously you were just stuck on the login screen for the rest of eternity.
  • We think we fixed a bug reported in Beta where using the Harbor Master to zone between ships could result in an infinite Loading screen and then, if you did manage to get back in the game, your ship had moved. We couldn’t repro so let us know if you see it again.
  • Made some other fixes that will help save you from infinite loading screens.
  • Clarified the inscrutable and loathed “error_connecterrorfailed” and a few other errors also.
  • Fixed a bug that could cause you to get stuck on a balcony or some such when trying to zone out of a mission.
  • Fixed a bug that caused players to get into Society limbo. They’d show up as being in the society but unable to see chat and such. Removing them didn’t allow them to be re-added. We were never able to repro this in-house. If you see it happen again, please log a bug report
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