Update #144 unleashes the trained and military eye of the Star Trader captain when staring down an enemy ship in the void -- granting both new comparative details between your ship and the enemies as well as highly detailed specs on your own dice pools. In addition, we've enhanced all 3 of the Interdictor defensive launch plans to include a buff as the craft come out of the launch bays, added 4 new wing specialist gear to the Salvage mini-game, rebalanced Ion and Radiation Storm Talents and fixed a whole host of reported issues.

It's Update #144 and its a big one! Let's go!


With Update #144, whenever you encounter a ship in the void you now have easy access to a comparison of your ship versus the enemy. Check the "Ship Report" tab (as shown at the top) to see the run down comparison between the two ships on accuracy, defense, range change, chance to escape, boarding as well as Speed and Agility. A veteran of the void who has seen a thousand ships, even a peaceful Star Trader can gain this quick comparison between two ships with a careful read of the arc scanners.

In addition, this comparison is available mid-battle by hovering over the enemy ship. It updates constantly with the trade of ship weaponry fire and perhaps swings most dramatically with the application of buffs, debuffs and crippling effects.


Above and beyond the comparison with the enemy ship, we've also made the exact dice pools for every ship operation -- attack, defense, range change, escape attempt and boarding -- clearly visible with their totals, broken out stats and Skills that contribute to those totals as well as all applicable bonuses percentages. Hover over your own ship for a wealth of information which also updates with every shot, buff or debuff mid combat!


With this release, we've addressed a gap in the Interdictor support. Their defensive flight plans now include a Buff for either your capital ship or for any launched craft. Each plan's buff is fired as they launch so therefore affects the Interdictor itself if it is a craft buff. With 3 new options now available, you can improve your ship's defense or your launched crafts' offense or defense. Launch more than one defensive Interdictor and watch the buffs stack! Like their cousins the bombers, Interdictors provide another path to use more Talents a turn than you can without craft.

If you are salvaging at orbitals, you may discover one of the 4 new high level gear pieces designed for wing specialist pilots. These new gear can only be retrieved from the orbital operations mini-game, so go hunting!

We've adjust all Contacts who give military missions to do less passenger and diplomatic missions and focus more on kill, capture, destroy. We've rebalanced how Contact Traits affect Faction Reputation weighting and ensured that they stack properly. We've improved the value of all Ion and Radiation Storm Talents -- they can even further mitigate damage.

We've shorted the cooldown for Explorer's "Tag the Beast" by 50%.

A number of craft-related Talents -- Knock from the Void, Ransom Escort -- have been fixed. Also, craft bonus logging was broken and all bonuses from Buffs were not appearing in the logs. They are now!

It's a big one, so check the rest of the release notes for other details!

- Rebuilt tooltips for capital ships in ship combat to include wealth of additional valuable information
- Hovering over your own ship now displays all important ship dice pools (accuracy, defense, range change, escape, boarding)
- Hovering over the enemy ship now provides a comparison between all important dice pools as to whether or not the enemy outclasses you
- During a ship encounter, check the "Ship Report" for your preliminary comparison between your ship and the enemy's
- Interdictor defensive launch plans "Aegis Pattern", "Screening Swarm" and "Tip of the Spear" correctly apply buffs to ship and friendly craft at launch
- Added 4 new Relic Gear types to Orbital Salvage operations for wing specialists
- Adjusted balance for all Contacts who give Military Missions, will be more patrol, blockade, violence and less passengers
- Improved Contact Traits that change weight of Faction Rep in Effective Rep -- now stack correctly (Well Connected +10% and Warhawk +50% = +60%)
- Resolved bugs with Zunden Techno Trade Concord dialog not appearing in some games
- Craft accrued Maintenance Points are now displayed alongside damage (+1 MP)
- Improved effectiveness of Talents that mitigate damage from Radiation and Ion Storms
- Fixed bug where bombers and interdictors were not applying Crippling Effects when attacking
- Fixed bug where "Knock from the Void" was used by the AI but did not ground a craft
- Fixed Wing Leader "Long Patrol" Talent and "Ransom Escort"
- Fixed issues with Craft bonuses not being included in ship combat logging
- Reduced cooldown of Explorer's "Tag the Beast" to 9 weeks from 18 weeks
- Fixed level inconsistencies when recruiting some Jobs from Contacts with bonuses

What’s up guys! In this update, we thought we’d give you a look at what we’ve been working on over the past month as we head toward release of the full game. While we are not releasing any new playable features, we would like to share some of the more interesting things we’ve been working on.


Photogrammetry scans

In preparation for implementing character customization, last week we scanned multiple clothing and accessory items at a studio in Los Angeles. This process involves taking shots of items on a rig of over 100 DSLR cameras which are then processed into 3 dimensional digital objects for use in the game which will fit and bend with the character as it animates.

Once completed you will be able to mix and match to create different looks for your character. Now that the data has been scanned there are a series of steps to process the photos of the objects and turn them into game ready assets.

Check out the scanning rig we used with our friends Human Engine in West LA:




Here’s an example of what one scan looks like after the first step of processing to turn 100 hi-res images into a surface in 3D space:




Motion Capture Preparation

We’re in the planning stages of another motion capture session, to further improve and refine the gameplay animations to be smoother and more realistic. This process involves setting up a grid of motion-sensing cameras and recording skaters performing tricks so that we can capture parts of the movements for use in the game.

We are again partnering with Sawmill Studios in Vancouver who captured our assets for Early Access.

See some pictures from our original shoot here:


Skaters wear suits covered with the famous mocap "ping pong balls" to track movement:


Our famous Early Access character suiting up:


A challenge with motion capturing skateboarding is that it requires quite a large area and flooring that has the right hardness and amount of grip to pull off clean flat-ground tricks.

Our friends up at Sawmill have scouted a suitable space in Eastside Vancouver and we're looking to lock in a shoot in the coming weeks.

Once we have captured the animations we need we will begin the rebuild of the animation system. Skater XL is the first skating game ever where the board is driven by fine-grain player control and natural movement at all times as opposed to using pre-made animations for each move and trick.

While giving what we feel is responsive and satisfying gameplay, this presents a great challenge in creating our character animation system, as the game doesn't know what the player is going to do ahead of time.

We had to invent a very unique system to animate the character and there were a lot of challenges in building the first version of it. We learned a huge amount going through the process for Early Access and think we can make some significant improvements on this second run, especially now that we can incorporate our learnings into the next round of mocap.


Grabs

We have implemented an initial system for grabs that we have been testing internally. In the spirit of Skater XL our focus has been on giving the player a feeling of control and responsiveness and allowing them to style their moves any way they like.

We feel this early version of grabs achieves this goal and feels amazingly fun. We plan to have a testing round with our group of beta testers soon and hope to release the system in a future update.






Skater XL x The Nine Club Experience Video Part Contest

The contest is now closed for submissions, and the winner will be announced on the May 1st episode of The Nine Club Experience. We got over 100 entries, and we were blown away by the talent, creativity and hard work that everyone put into their parts. Thank you as always to the map makers, modders, and players for making this contest a huge success!

Highlights from the update include:
-A raptor chase simulation level
-Small improvements to the main menu
-Improvements to game clarity and resolution settings

New levels, weapons, animals, dinosaurs and improvements to navigation will be released in the next few updates.

Dear Maplers,

We have just concluded our final improvement update for MapleStory 2's Project New Leaf. Our team's focus has always been to run a true community-driven game service and I am very happy with how we have accomplished this with MapleStory 2. Project New Leaf represents the approach we plan to take with all of our games going forward.

Project New Leaf is just the beginning and, with a new major expansion coming soon, we hope to further improve MapleStory 2 based on feedback from the community. We will soon disclose the exciting content and changes coming with the summer expansion, and we hope to get more feedback from you, the players, so that we can tailor the update and deliver a truly epic experience.

The MapleStory 2 team worked hard to fix some of the major issues we saw after the game's official launch, and we are all excited to see so many players coming back to enjoy the game and all of the improvements that Project New Leaf has delivered. We hope these changes can revive MapleStory 2 and make it feel as packed as it was on day one!

Thank you very much for being part of the MapleStory 2 community and working with us as part of Project New Leaf. Your feedback and dedication have been invaluable throughout this process.We have an exciting road ahead of us with this summer's major expansion, and we hope to see the community grow alongside MapleStory 2. Be sure to share the Project New Leaf improvements with your fellow Maplers to let them know how we have worked to improve the game with the following changes!

• Removed Fairfight from all Adventure Dungeons
• Reduced World Boss HP by ~60%
• Added Trader's Ribbons to allow you to trade top-tier equipment that you don't need to those that could use it
• Added the Fragment inventory tab to help you reduce the clutter of the Misc tab
• Improved Notifications to better protect Legendary Gear with Epic Bonus Stats
• Improved the Available Quest Window
• Increased penalties for illegally buying mesos
• Added the Meso Market to improve the mobility of mesos
• Made Epic Pets much more likely to drop
• Greatly reduced the meso cost for changing Legendary Gear attributes
• Greatly reduced the meso cost of fusing Accessory Fragments
• Made Accessory Socket openings guaranteed and cheaper on average
• Made Upgrading Gemstones guaranteed and much cheaper on average
• Made Extracting Gemstones trivially inexpensive
• Greatly reduced the cost of enchanting via Peachy, creating a competitive guaranteed path towards +15 equipment
• Replaced Daily Missions with a Weekly Prestige Rank system that encourages you to play MapleStory 2 however you want
• And more!

MapleStory 2 is a passion project for the team, and we will continue to serve the community with our best efforts.

Happy Mapling!

Sincerely,



Jungsoo Lee
CEO of Nexon America

Changes

• Changed the fonts on the illustration screen to be set to Chinese when using the Chinese UI.

Bugfixes

• Fixed the issue that DLC may not be installed automatically.
  
• Fixed crash when export an EGD file in some cases.
  
• Fixed issues on the item list in the asset creation mode.

Winter is leaving our lands and with the Sun rising higher every day, the Wyld’s Dawn is here! Young pups across Armello are being presented with the Wyld’s Dawn Dice that are created by skilled laboured paws for this special holiday.

During this holiday, you will have a small chance of receiving a Wyld’s Dawn Dice after completing Public Multiplayer games. These are rare dice, so you’re not guaranteed a drop.

To celebrate, there will be DOUBLE drops activated, meaning DOUBLE the regular loot!

Start: April 29th, 10:00 am Pacific Time

End: May 6th, 10:00 am Pacific Time

Game mode: Steam; Public and Private Multiplayer



<3

Lisy

Hello everyone! Just a quick announcement to let you all know:

- I have a new game coming out this Summer that I'm really excited about. It's called Dicey Dungeons, and I think it's the best game I've ever worked on. Consider wishlisting if you'd like to get a reminder when it's out!

- I finally added trading cards to Super Hexagon. Hope you like them! (I've also added some for my other game, VVVVVV).

- Both Super Hexagon and VVVVVV are currently in a 50% off week-long sale!

Thanks for reading <3

- Terry

Hello everyone! Just a quick announcement to let you all know:

- I have a new game coming out this Summer that I'm really excited about. It's called Dicey Dungeons, and I think it's the best game I've ever worked on. Consider wishlisting if you'd like to get a reminder when it's out!

- I finally added trading cards to VVVVVV. Hope you like them! (I've also added some for my other game, Super Hexagon).

- Both Super Hexagon and VVVVVV are currently in a 50% off week-long sale!

Thanks for reading <3

- Terry

We are glad to welcome all our players!
Thank you for your support, you help our further development!
Enjoy the game and thank you for your feedback!
Regards, Hippopo Entertainment

Hi Everyone!

Today's patch contains 2 more Pally skills, which brings the pally up to the same number as the other classes, some balancing of ultimates, and it also includes some quality of life stuff while dealing with the guild house window and alert messages.


Patch Notes:

- New Paladin Ultimate: Divine Blow, Stuns the target for 1 turn and does heavy Holy damage which is then spread as healing over the entire party.
- New Paladin Talented Skill: Crusader's Fury, The Paladin lashes out with Holy power and strikes 3 random enemies within a small range for moderate damage. This skill counts as a spell, but takes into account both melee and spell power.
- Tank and Spank has had its damage coefficient increased to 1.75 from 1.0.
- Tank and Spank has had its damage coefficient increased to 2.25 from 2.05.
- Holy Nova has had its damage coefficient increased to 1.25 from 1.15.
- Slice and Dice has had its damage coefficient increased to 1.85 from 1.75.
- Prismatic Bolt has had its base cost reduced to 3.0 down from 4.5.
- Tank and Spank has had its base cost reduced to 3.0 down from 4.0.
- Holy Nova has had its base cost reduced to 3.0 down from 5.0.
- Slice and Dice has had its base cost reduced to 3.0 down from 4.0.
- AI parties are a bit less predictable.
- You can now drag and drop from the guild house into your party creation.
- You can now drag and drop from the unit cards in the guild house onto guild items, and also onto the party creation screen.
- Fixed a hover through issues on the Party creation screen.
- Clicking units in the guild screen will no longer automatically have them enter a drag state, you now have to start dragging them in order for them to enter the drag state.
- Fixed the crazy hovers on the units in beds...
- Alert Messages can be canceled by Press ESC.
- Alert Messages can be confirmed by pressing Enter (this is very helpful for dropping items).
- ESC will now close windows.
- Started setting up "Story Quests". Right now the only one is the first quest in the game. Story quests will appear with a green "!". AI parties/guilds will not take these quests.


Whats next?

Well I am still waiting on art for Vandamir, so I decided to start working on Story quests (you can see in the patch notes that they will have a green quest marker).

the story quests will come with pretty decent rewards, and will also open up new features all while guiding you through different parts of each town and adding a bit to the lore.

In Drom this will mean finding the blacksmiths hammer and anvil prior to him being able to reforge your items.

In Galic this will mean getting some tasks done for Keys.

In Vandamir (still to come) it will involve doing quests for the enchanter prior to her being able to enchant your gear.

I know its changing up the order a bit but I think this is for the best while I wait on art...

Lastly,

If you are enjoying the game, please consider taking a minute to review the game. The game could really use the boost at this point, and I would really appreciate it.