Hey, Feudalists!

As you’ve noticed - we have implemented a new system of gathering resources, pretty similar to the system used to search for herbs. This is working for the following groups:

1. Plants
2. Materials
3. Edible resources
4. Herbs

For each group, you will need to use a special ability to find these items nearby - “Search for …”. After using this ability, instanced items will appear on random tiles within 10x10 area. The quantity depends on the player’s actual skill level (which means that the influence of stats matter). The quality depends on both the actual player skill level and quality of the tile, where the items appear.

Most of the item types you gather gives one item per gathering action, but there are a few that give a random amount. These are:

1. Sling ammo (1-15)
2. Plant fiber (1-5)
3. Flint stone (1-2)

Also, the gathering of edible resources and plants has a 10% chance to decrease the soil quality of the tile.

With the new system, leveling up the gathering skill has become faster; it now gives you nearly x2 the experience compared to the previous rate. On top of this, the resources are now gathered manually, as opposed to ‘afk resource farming’! We really hope you find this a little bit more immersive and interesting.

We have had a number of questions and concerns regarding how the animal breeding system works, so we put together a short article explaining the system in more detail. You can find that here.
Keep in mind that we do understand that this system is a bit complicated as it is, so we are working on an overhaul. We’re hoping to add the updated animal care system soon™ .

Stay tuned for more news!

– The team

• All objects, barter and trade cart container windows should close when a player starts to move

• Fixed a cascading chain reaction of server crashes related to the dreaded horse cart crossing server border bug
  
• Fixed a very persistent client crash (Mutex Deadlock) that appeared on certain hardware specs
  
• Removed ability to create guilds on Newbie Islands via the console command. No guilds are possible on the Newbie Islands by design!
  
• Server nodes should start/restart much faster now due to numerous on load optimizations
  
• Fixed yet another trade cart duping bug undiscovered by players

— The team

• Gathering plant fiber now grants a random amount of fiber per gathering action (1 to 5)
  
• Sling ammo gathering now grants a random amount of ammo per gathering action (1 to 15)
  
• Changed stair module collision mesh, which should address some exploits with stacking stairs on top of each other
  
• Luck effects from different types of sources (jewelry, blessings and 5 ingredient foods) now have separate effect slots and stack separately

• Fixed a recently discovered item dupe with trade carts and their inventories - this should fix server crashes related to this dupe
  
• Fixed a texture streaming client crash
  
• Fixed automatic unequip of broken tools and weapons
  
• Corrected some textures and materials
  
• Added more useful data to the client logs related to material and texture errors

— The team

Hey, Feudalists!

As you might have read in patch notes, we’ve improved our hit detection system to an even better level than it was before. In this devblog, we’d like to share more about how melee hit detection worked before and how it works now.

Each weapon in the game has special nodes on them that represent different parts of the weapon and deal different types and amounts of damage. Each server tick we cast a ray (draw a line) between the current position of the node and its position in the past (previous tick). If a line crosses the hitbox of another player, horse, house, etc. - that means the weapon has scored a hit. During the weapon swing animation, a couple of simulation ticks happen so, we get the following information about that swing.


(Red nodes - are the sword blade’s primary damage nodes, Orange nodes - are the hilt of the sword and arm of the player)

During our last animation pass, we tweaked the tick duration that inadvertently affected the weapon’s node impact simulation too. Thus, the precision of the resulting trajectory of the weapon nodes in some cases suffered from the animation improvements.



The solution to this problem was rather simple in theory but was much harder to implement in practice. We had to simulate weapon swinging animation ticks multiple times while leaving the global tick intact. But the good news is, it worked, and as you can see, the trajectories are much more accurate now.



We also wanted to share with you that the dust is starting to settle from the early access rush. This means that we can focus with more precision on bug fixes and optimizations while maintaining forward progress from a gameplay perspective. You can expect some major updates
soon™.

Stay tuned for more news!


– The team

The recent optimization of our servers’ performance unfortunately created a nasty side effect - melee weapon hit detection precision was lowered drastically. In order to fix this, we had to implement an additional interpolation mechanism that not only returned the precision of the hit detection to the prior optimization level, but improved it even more!

For a while we have wanted to make basic gathering abilities a bit more fun and more involving for players, removing the possibility of mindless macroing a single cell until the quality drops to zero.
Thus, we’ve created three gathering abilities that work in a similar way to the original - activating this ability will reveal hidden plants and materials around you, so make sure to walk around to spot and collect these resources now.

• Reworked three gathering abilities (Search for something Edible, Search for Materials, Search for Herbs). All of these abilities work the same way as the original gathering of alchemy ingredients worked. ‘Targeting’ the tile triggers the visibility of corresponding plants in the area, which you now manually gather
  
• Updated the list of weapons that can be maintained by the Equipment Maintain ability
  
• Added a movable wooden stair module that can be placed freely in your settlement

• Fixed (and even improved!) the hit detection algorithm of melee weapons. After dealing with a previous issue, we realized hit detection deteriorated, but - silver lining - after addressing this, we now expect it to be even better than before!
  
• One of the most frequent dispatcher server crashes is now fixed
  
• Fixed an exploit where players were able to get inside houses while crashing into them on a horse running full speed
  
• Standings and alignment calculations should work properly now when vassals of two kingdoms at war are fighting each other (there should be no alignment loss)
  
• /stuck and disconnect in an enemy town claim now moves you outside of the town claim (into a realm claim) on the SAME side (not on a random side as it was before)
  
• Some internal systems were updated and tweaked for better logging and MMO server operation
  
• Fixed, and updated, collisions of many buildings in the game, including windmills, wall sections and gates
  
• Some Spanish and Polish languages localization fixes

— The team

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1274501896

Hey, Feudalists!

There are a couple of things we wanted to inform you about in today’s blog.
First of all, we’ve received some positive feedback about our recent optimization, which was introduced in the last patch.

Despite there being some bugs still roaming around and affecting performance, we have, so far, received supportive feedback and reassuring reports about the improvements. Rest assured we will carry on working hard to continue to improve the gameplay experience for everyone!

We still have some work in progress that we hope (fingers crossed) will boost client and server side performance 10-20% more. On top of this, we have some optimization that will take considerably more time to implement, but should provide some significant performance boosts in the future.

Optimization will always be an important part of our development efforts!
Lastly, we want to inform you that we will continue to expand player choices for our premium shop items and cosmetics. The artists are busy creating and polishing all types of weapons skins. In the meantime, you can reskin your Falchions to the following look now!

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1274503340

– The team

We’ve made some minor fixes and updates here and there in today’s patch. This is client only, so it does not require server restarts.

• Updated Spanish, French and German language localization
  
• Added Falchion skins

• Implemented a fix for the bug that prevented some players from joining an Instanced Battle if they have used homecoming or other means to teleport across multiple servers in their current gaming session
  
• Fixed a bug in Instanced Battles statistics that lead to some inaccurate figures in the History of Battles
  
• Fixed some issues with German and Spanish localization

— The team

In this patch, we are going to present a pretty bold attempt to significantly optimize the server side calculations to improve performance. And this is all in one package. Included with the optimizations are bug and crash fixes along with some tweaks as well! Hope you’ll like the mix. :)

• 5-ingredient food is boosted now. Eating complex foods like this will grant you an “Inspired work” and “Luck” effect and the duration of the effects depends on the quality of the food.
  
• Quality of water that is used to water herbal gardens now affects the quality of the resulting plant
  
• Herbal gardens now lose durability during usage
  
• Some minor localization updates

• Fixed a serious booster exploit that allowed to stack a booster multiple times. Those who obviously exploited this bug can expect a skill wipe at least or maybe even worse...
  
• Fixed server crash related to the server node border crossing issue while mounted
  
• Slightly optimized client-side performance
  
• You can no longer get a quality 0 result from the Herbal Garden
  
• Added missing Plaster House recipe icon

— The team

We seem to like to stay true to our tradition of providing hotfix patches shortly after the release. Of course we don’t plan to, and we work hard and tirelessly when releasing updates, alas, good or bad, it is already kinda our tradition! :)

This hotfix is mostly dedicated to the removal of a bug that appeared recently and has caused players, who got disconnected in the enemy realm, to appear inside the enemy town claim upon reconnection.

• Removed newcomer spawn points from the northern snow covered territories
  
• Tweaked heraldry textures on tabards
  
• Minor Demolition and Forestry abilities tweaks

• Fixed a bug that has caused players that DCed in an enemy realm claim to appear inside the enemy town claim
  
• Tweaked multithreaded calculation algorithms. Should be slightly more stable and faster now.
  
• Fixed Telmun world description in the Ferryman dialogue
  
• Changed primary stat for Demolition to Willpower

— The team