This Week In Veloren 121

This week, we see lots of design changes to many systems. We hear about how this what is going on with the crafting and loot systems, as well as planned improvements in the combat fields.

- AngelOnFira, TWiV Editor

Contributor Work

Thanks to this week's contributors, @Slipped, @juliancoffee, @xMAC94x, @Sam, @James, @sudoreboot, @aweinstock, @Pfau, @XVar, @hqurve, @imbris, and @Sharp!

You can take a look at this week's meeting notes here.

@Sam removed the 2 old weapon loadout slots and added 4 new ones in their place. With the new weapon slots, you can have up to 4 hands worth of weapons, so you can run either 2 2h weapons, 1 2h and 2 1h weapons, or 4 1h weapons.

The loot log removes the loot messages from the chat and puts them above it. It's scrollable and will only show recently looted items when not being interacted with (with the older ones fading out). @aweinstock has been working on addressing reviews on the farming and voxel minimap MRs. He's also made a camera zoom effect for ChargedRanged:

@Snowram has been learning the basics of the new site procgen by trying to make a cemetery. The tombstone models are by @sStellar, and there is still work to go before the final version.

Bow changes by @Sam

This week, I started on a bow rework, with all abilities have being replaced. The new M1 is very similar to the old M2, in that you charge it for greater effect, and it fires when you release. The main changes here in functionality are that it no longer drains energy, and it now will reward energy on shots that hit. The new M2 is called repeater like the old S1, however, it now has new functionality. Instead of the leap and the simultaneous fire of a few arrows, it instead will continually fire arrows with an increasing rate of fire over time (each arrow costs energy to fire). The new S1 is a shotgun-like ability, which fires multiple arrows with some degree of spread. With this rework come very slightly different skills, and a reset to the bow skill tree.

Improvements by @James

For the past few days I've been working on moving all body attributes to RON files. These are body and species-specific stats like mass, height, base health, etc. I have each attribute loading from a RON file into one compound asset (eg. the mass.ron and base_health.ron get loaded together as one BodyAttributes asset). The server loads the RON files and sends the body data to the client on initial sync. This means that server owners could adjust values and not require a modified client. To help with debugging and development, I'm planning to add an admin command to resync body data (since the assets already hot-reload) after the initial sync.

I also fixed a bug where NPCs would ignore you if you hit them with a projectile from too far away. While I initially thought this was simply because they were being attacked from outside of a set range, I discovered I had accidentally reduced the response time for NPCs for damage from 3.1 seconds to 0.1 seconds about a month ago. This meant that when an NPC received damage, it had 0.1 seconds to respond. If it didn't see the target in those 0.1 seconds it would return to idling. I returned the damage memory duration to 3.1 seconds as well as provided a way for NPCs to path toward positions outside of the maximum allowed pathing radius by choosing an intermediate point a set distance away. A* pathfinding gets more and more expensive the longer your path is so hopefully we will see some performance improvement in the agent system.

Dungeon balancing by @juliancoffee

I've been working on a lite dungeon rebalance by updating minibosses at lower tiers and adjusting loot tables at higher tiers. Now there is Deadwood in T0 dungeons instead of Bonerattler, and Rats in T1 dungeons instead of Bonerattler pack. For making dungeon looting a bit more enjoyable I removed low tier gear from cultist loot table and added average enemy loot to beast masters so they don't drop cultist gear only to have small wow effect when they do. Also each dungeon now has unique loot from chests. Also for purpose of modification and future reworks I added placeholder armor and loot table for each boss. For dungeon enemies and village inhabitants I've added RON files to specify their loadout.

Glider and physics changes @sudoreboot

I implemented auto-glide by making auto-walk work properly while gliding. While enabled, it will assume pitch control to take you as far as possible in the direction you're looking. With free-look enabled you can now spend your time looking around at the scenery while gliding. This is a step in the direction of making the glider more accessible to use. There will likely be a setting added in the future to automatically toggle it while gliding.

This feature is not meant to make manual piloting obsolete, so if you find yourself using the functionality even when you would have preferred not to, please provide feedback to help us make it more balanced.

I've specified some more appropriate masses for some species and increased the (logical, not visual) size of some objects (which makes them a little less... aerodynamic).

I also scaled down the resulting knockback on entities of a mass under 40 kg, which hopefully removes the involuntary bird-golf minigame from hammer combat. It, together with increasing the max possible drag applied to an entity per tick (which is a necessary safeguard against very bad bugs), should prevent loot drops from sometimes flying off into the distance when a mob dies immediately from an attack with knockback.

Meat and crafting by @Slipped

I'm finishing up a rather big MR that adds a lot of the core of Veloren's armor progression system. It's sort of grown into a bit of a behemoth but I'm ok with it in this case because I think doing this all at once is very helpful towards building a single, cohesive system.

The goal of the MR is to get three things to work synchronously: loot, crafting, and gear. The MR started with loot, as a simple meat MR designed to give different animals different meat drops that you can cook in towns to help with combat. This gave a cheaper, non-potion option to healing, and made sure there's always something to be gained from simple combat in the wild.

Once animals dropped appropriate meats we wanted to flesh out their loot tables to a more finalized state, and we knew we wanted them to drop hides. So animals now drop specific hides (animal hide/tough hide/scale/carapace/plate/dragon scale) depending on their type and overall difficulty.

From here we get into crafting, since we obviously needed something to do with these materials. So we started re-imagining the crafting system. From the hides you can now craft leathers, and use them in different recipes, so the system goes much deeper than simple leather scraps like before.

Making hides into leather doesn't get you much without a final, usable product though, so after that we started bringing in Gemu's armor sets to finalize progression of the 'hide' armor track.

Next, covering only hide seemed a little lame so we expanded to the mail and cloth armor tracks. These armors are craftable mainly from ingots (which can be smelted in the new forges) and cloths (which can be spun in the new spinning wheel, and crafted into armor in new loom stations). Next, these ores weren't actually accessible yet so we've started on a minor cave overhaul to add distinct difficulty levels to caves, so you can fight your way through tougher enemies to reach deeper levels with better ores for the best armor.

Adding new plants for cloth armors is also on the progress list. The different armor tracks need to actually do something unique, since in Veloren right now, armors just give you armor. After a lot of back and forth, we sorted an initial implementation:

- Mail: highest armor
- Stun resistance hide: high critical hit damage
- Stealth cloth: higher energy total, higher energy rewards

Stats have been graciously added by @Sam. Each of the tracks has six "core" armors associated with it, along with possible spinoff armors later. The tracks are considered equal (for armors of the same vertical level) but benefit different playstyles. The game is transitioning to more of a crafting-based gear system instead of findable gear, with the player needing to find the materials for each set, which might require you to explore multiple areas.