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[Thothie]

Patients, it's still the 1st somewhere.

Technically, if all we wanted was Lodagond and two new items, I guess we'd be good to go, but I hope to get more than that in by the end of tomorrow.

Probably looking at the afternoon/evening of the 1st. I've a bunch of anti-cheat stuff I'd like to apply, but that sort of thing needs more testing on the ultra-beta server first, lest it stop people from playing, and we need a B patch.

 

[J-M v2.5.5]

Technically, if all we wanted was Lodagond and [...], I guess we'd be good to go, but I hope to get more than that in by the end of tomorrow.

I'll have to disagree even on that; Lodagond crashes too often to release it.

 

[Gurluas]

Technically, if all we wanted was Lodagond and [...], I guess we'd be good to go, but I hope to get more than that in by the end of tomorrow.

I'll have to disagree even on that; Lodagond crashes too often to release it.

JM explain your siggy...

 

[J-M v2.5.5]

You can find the explanation here. Let's keep all the information regarding the hacker reaver in one thread

 

[Thothie]

OCT2007a BETA PUBLIC CHANGELOG:



New Stuffs (in game)
• Hoarfrost Shard (req sword 20)
- Fires lances of ice that both freeze and slow opponents (10 mana)
- Creates circles of ice on right click (10 second delay, 30 mana)
- Has a chance of slowing anything it hits
• Kharaztorant Fire Blade (req smallarms 15, 17 to throw)
- Our first throwing knife!
- Magically returns after being thrown; and no, yer buddies can't steel it.
• Thornbow (req 15)
- This magical bow augments any arrow you put in it with magical thorns that add additional damage (+175% of whatever type of arrow is in use.)

New Mapper Toys
• world_spawn properties (In Hammer: Map->Map Properties)
- maptitle: The name of your map that appears via pop-up 10 seconds after player joins (eg. "The Homlet of Edana")
- mapdesc: The description that appears below the title (eg. "This village grew around the temple of Urdual of the southern frontier")
- hpwarn: The minimum recommended HP a player can have before getting the "HP too low, you will get pwned" warning message
- weather: (Untested) Selects random weather from this list every ms-world hour. Entries seperated by semi-colons.
-- example weather types: clear;rain;storm;snow;fog_black;fog_white;fog_thick;fog_blue;fog_green;fog_red;fog_brown
-- (fog_black is a night effect, fog_thick is very thick white fog, fog_brown is thick swamp fog)
• other/idle_lure (untested)
- This is an invulnerable, non-solid, unmovable lure that calls on all idle monsters to move (walk) towards it every 10 seconds
- Monsters who target players will ignore the lure until they "calm down"
- "calming down" FYI, occurs around 10 seconds after not seeing, nor hearing, nor being struck by any player, nor hearing any of their allies in distress. Also just after slaying a player, if the monster sees no other enemies about, it'll usually calm down.
- You can trigger_relay killtarget this to end the effect (hopefully doesn't generate studio frame advance error)

- MAP Updates -
• Daragoth Remake (complete recompile!)
- Less lag, better FPS, quicker battles, and two new transitions (one to lowlands, one open)
• Lowlands
- Transition to Daragoth Underground River
• Edana Sewers
- Transition to Chapel
• Skycastle (Replica Remake)
- Increased time between bear guardian spawns
- Fixed dated .res file
• Helena
- Nerfed bandit raids (multiple bandit_hard's are too difficult for the intended level range)
- Added a hack that *may* make shop keepers return home and offer discounts, as they should, following successful repulsion of bandit/orc raid

BugZ Squashed + Odder stuffz
• Moved Lighting Storm fx clientside
- Has some unintended affects on the aesthetics, but decided to keep
- Will attempt to make look like the old lstorm if enough peeps complain
- There is a 10 mana cost for moving the storm (more to cut down on beams, than to nerf it.)
• Removed null map events during monster spawns
- Should save some CPU during monster and map spawns
• Orc Fire Shamans no longer drop torches
• Script fixes/adjustments for Lodagond-1
- Lots (delayed patch 2 days), mostly anti-crash/anti-wallhack
• (Last second fix) All snowboars being worth 6xp
- No one mentions this? :|
- Unnoticed side effect of the mass S&R a few months ago.

...and the usual 10,000 other changes I'm not bothering to list.

Near Future
This laid the groundwork for a lot of anti-cheat stuff (may have actually undone some cheats even VAC fails to detect). Needs more thorough testing before we make the dicey bits public, so more of that will be integrated next month.

Helena2 will also, hopefully, be ready by next month. It will have a mid-level dungeon integrated into it, in addition to more sophisticated orc raids, and the portal to old_helena.

Been working on the AMX some, in hopes to get us an official, verifiable, AMXmodX package. I'm thinking we MAY be able to move a lot of the AMX functions to the game itself, but I'm still uncertain. BTW since we have single-touch map voting now, I'm strongly considering axing the adjacent map voting altogether.

I also intend at least two new items for Lodagond-1 chests, pending soon. (Nevermind those I need for the upcoming Lodagond-2)

I was going to add a new mega-hammah this month, but Little-G says Bludgeonland is nearly complete, so I kinda wanted to save the new huge bludgeon-bludgeon for that. (If it is not complete next month, however, we’ll add it to one of the Lodagonds.)

Also STILL need to add new, level dependant monsters, to all maps. This is time consuming, and something I can't do away from home. (Blarg, time for new laptop me thinks)

And yes, I realize the betapack is TOO EFFING HUGE (42mb), and we really, really need a new installer. I think we may wind up seperating some of the maps into a map pack to expidite this. It's just that the new installer should include a recompile of several vanilla maps, which means there'll be one last REALLY HUGE betapackage, and then we'll back to <5MB betapackages.

Expecting Lodagond-1 final to be out this week (it may actually already be ready, I've not checked).

Expecting an Ara recompile some time this month.

 

[Dark_Force9999]

are the weapons really out?

 

[Thothie]

If they ain't out, I don't list em.

 

[Jelly]

Thanks, again, for releasing a super awesome beta package! It's really appreciated. *downloads*

 

[Belmont]

How powerful is the new dagger and sword compared to;

PFCK
&
Nova blade?

Awesome patch for a "small one", can't wait to get all these new weapons, they look interesting.

 

[Picadilly]

FTW?! LS

Lightning Storm = 6" Nerf padding v2.0

 

[The Man In Black]

Yes - excellent looking patch. Can't wait for Helena2 ;-)

Also:

- Magically returns after being thrown; and no, yer buddies can't steel it.

Can our friends steal it, though?

 

[Sabre]

Hrm...I noticed that crest there...I presume it's not ingame, but at least I know you got the files I sent you

 

[J]

Expecting an Ara recompile some time this month.

What do you mean expecting?

 

[J-M v2.5.5]

Hoarfrost Shard

That model looks awesome
Who made it?

Oh, and: in before villager's "it looks like the novablade so it looks like a tree" bull****

New Mapper Toys
• world_spawn properties (In Hammer: Map->Map Properties)
- maptitle: The name of your map that appears via pop-up 10 seconds after player joins (eg. "The Homlet of Edana")
- mapdesc: The description that appears below the title (eg. "This village grew around the temple of Urdual of the southern frontier")
- hpwarn: The minimum recommended HP a player can have before getting the "HP too low, you will get pwned" warning message
- weather: (Untested) Selects random weather from this list every ms-world hour. Entries seperated by semi-colons.
-- example weather types: clear;rain;storm;snow;fog_black;fog_white;fog_thick;fog_blue;fog_green;fog_red;fog_brown
-- (fog_black is a night effect, fog_thick is very thick white fog, fog_brown is thick swamp fog)

Thanks

Increased time between bear guardian spawns

\o/

• Script fixes/adjustments for Lodagond-1
- Lots (delayed patch 2 days), mostly anti-crash/anti-wallhack

Thanks

 

[Slaytanic_pb]

God damn nerfing

Why is it that I dread the next patch coming?

Oh, I remember... something is always getting nerfed.

Now it's Lightning Storm, a spell that drains mana even if you aren't shooting out the "beams". It's damage is less than Fire Ball and it's area effect damage is less than fire ball, but you can shoot out the beams faster than Fire Ball, so it's gotta be nerfed.

Just a hunch, but I bet next month that new throwable knife gonna get a good nerfing.

Any takers??

 

[Thothie]

It ALWAYS drained mana when you weren't shooting beams. (Or rather, it has for the past four months, after we switched from one-shot to the sustained model.)

It's just that now it drains mana WHEN you shoot beams - the reason for that is cuz too much initiated beam spam from the client tends to nerf the server staying alive. It's 10 mana per storm move (still far cheaper than the original 30 mana just to spawn the storm - and back then it didn't offer as much damage, or the disorienting lesser monster effect.)

If you don't hold the button it works same as it always has.

Throwable knife kinda nerfed itself, being broken and all.

 

[Picadilly]

Just thought I'd comment that the lightning storm is getting a 5 mana cost per cast and 2 mana per second (or half second, whatever the rate is) charge, rather than the 10 cast and 1 drain.
If I'm not mistaken, the old lightning storm also had a much larger dmg area (back when it cost 30 mana) than the new way. I mean, you get what you pay for, right? Anyway, under the revised code, I drain about 90+mana for one single spell duration of lightning storm. That's more than Volcano... Besides this being a lot for a single spell, it's basically putting lightning storm back into its old category, meaning, "a spell that's there but isn't worth using". To use lightning storm effectively under these new circumstances, you'd basically have to trap whatever it is you want to nuke so it can't move and keep it there, since it's now too costly in mana to try to target something moving. I think this kind of defeats the purpose of having magic in the game as a ranged attack. That being said, I think what we're seeing here is mostly a monthly trade-off scheme. Namely, we'll continue to introduce new items into the game while constantly nerfing the old ones you've come to love and keep coming back for. I think it's kind of sad...

 

[ITS'aME'aMARIO!!!!]

Thothie, just balance and update this game as you see fit.

Still think the big axes are way under powered, or at least require 35+ axe handling to be a viable weapon.

 

[J-M v2.5.5]

Thothie, just balance and update this game as you see fit.

What the fuck.

 

[tehrilez]

Thothie, just balance and update this game as you see fit.

What the ****.

Mario, that post was stupid, and you should feel bad.

 

[Shurik3n]

Lightning storm needed a good nerfing. No arguments here.

 

[Thothie]

It wasn't nerfed.

It was 2 mana per second, no charge to cast. Now it costs 10 to move, which shouldn't be a problem, if you don't spam the button (which was causing a lot of server crashes).

It is VASTLY more devastating than the original, and has the exact same radius. It does three times more damage than the stationary version, plus disorients monsters (in addition to players).

The stationary version cost 30 mana to cast and lasted 10 seconds, did 1/3rd the damage, and had no disorienting affects against monster. You can easily sustain this for a full 30 seconds, and get a lot more bang for your buck. It is the defacto mid-level boss-killing spell, where it used to be a server-crashing distraction.

People are on crack. Looks different != nerfed.

 

[J-M v2.5.5]

I'll have to agree with Thothie here that it actually didn't get nerfed.

AND IT'S A GOOD THING THAT IT DIDN'T GET NERFED, DON'T YOU ALL AGREE?

It drains a tad more mana, true, but it's barely noticeable. After seeing this post, this post and this post I figured I had to see it for myself, and yes, as I already stated, it drains a little bit more mana (if you move the storm around) but the damage is still good as ever.

Don't nerf it.

Besides, you don't even have to nerf it, seeing as how all the people who actually believe it got nerfed (and wanted to have it nerfed... MIB, villager & Shuri) are already happy because... well because they believe it got nerfed.

So, ministers of the Ministry of Nerf, please do continue to believe that it actually did get nerfed. I know better and I'm still enjoying the full power, death, destruction and chaos of my LS. Kthx.

 

[HumanSteak]

Great... Using a cold immune potion while wearing helmet of cold resistance, then unequiping the helmet makes you vulnerable to cold again.

 

[Thothie]

Yeah, that'd be a long standing limitation of the elemental resistance system.

I'm trying to come up with a dependable way to make resistant items stack, so that sort of thing won't happen, plus you can stack multiple resistance items for better effects (although that may of course lead to <_< >_> nerfing, of some easily stacked resistances.)

It's a bit tricky to do right... Might be more complicated, but more dependable, to use the D&D system, and let you have a resistance for each slot. (eg. helm, armor, ring, weapon, and potion). That way you couldn't sploit multiple resistance potions for immunity, but you could still say, stack your cold helm and a resistance to cold potion to gain immunity.