Sep 29, 2022

Explore ESO’s New Chapter at Up to 50% Off During the Heroes of High Isle Sale!

The Elder Scrolls® Online - ZOS_SamL

Begin your journey into the Systres Archipelago with up to 50% off The Elder Scrolls Online: High Isle.

The Heroes of High Isle Sale is now live on all platforms, including Xbox (Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S), PlayStation (PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5), and PC/Mac (Elder Scrolls Online Store, and Steam). During the sale period, you can save up to 50% on The Elder Scrolls Online: High Isle and up to 70% on The Elder Scrolls Online: Standard Edition. Note that on Xbox and PlayStation consoles, this discount is available only for High Isle Collector’s Editions, not the High Isle: Standard Edition.

To make the most out of these deals, visit our Buy Now page and select your edition. Unsure which edition is right for you? If you’re a new player, the High Isle Collection (both Standard and Collector’s Edition) includes the ESO base game, High Isle Chapter, and ALL previous Chapters. However, if you’re an existing player ready to explore the Systres, the High Isle Upgrade (both Standard and Collector’s Edition) will get you instant access to the new zone, Tales of Tribute card game, and storyline.

Explore the home of the Breton elite

Note that these sale prices are available for a limited time only and may end on different dates depending on your platform and territory. Check your preferred retailer to confirm.

Elder Scrolls Online Store

Standard Edition—September 29-October 11
High Isle—September 29-October 11

Steam Store

Standard Edition—September 29-October 11
High Isle—September 29-October 11

Xbox (High Isle Collector’s Editions only)

Standard Edition—September 27-October 11
High Isle Collector’s Editions—September 27-October 11

PlayStation (High Isle Collector’s Editions only)

Standard Edition—September 28-October 12
High Isle Collector’s Editions—September 28-October 12

Heroes of High Isle Event

In addition to the sale, the Heroes of High Isle in-game event is also now live, giving you and your fellow players an opportunity to earn bonus rewards when exploring and questing in the High Isle zone and unlock unique collectible rewards together.

Visit our announcement article for all the details on how you can join in the fun, and be sure to check out the meter on our official event page to see the community’s progress and which in-game rewards have been unlocked!

Work together to unlock in-game rewards

Don’t forget, the only way to participate in the Heroes of High Isle event and claim its rewards is to own the High Isle Chapter—so get ready to sail the Abecean Sea and explore the home of the Breton elite.

Save big on the new Chapter AND unlock event-specific rewards by venturing into the new zone—there’s never been a better time to pick up The Elder Scrolls Online: High Isle and discover the beauty and mysteries of the Systres Archipelago. Your Legacy of the Bretons adventure is about to begin!

Sep 29, 2022

Dev Update #12 - The Last Stretch

9 Years of Shadows - keking26

Hello everyone! We hope you are starting this fall just as thrilled as we are. September marks the official beginning of Q4 of this year and the official launch for 9 Years of Shadows as well. The team has worked tirelessly to polish the remaining elements and ensure we are ready to welcome all of you into Talos Castle.

A month ago, we entered the QA phase, which is when we take care of details and perform the finishing touches before launch day. We noticed that the area we liked to focus our efforts on is the improvement of the experience of the game, which is the final leg of the race.

Because of this, we reconvened with our publisher and together decided that the best course of action to release the game the way we intend to, would be to reschedule our launch date to November 14th, 2022. We understand that this is not the ideal news for our community, and we apologize for the inconvenience it may represent to you.

Everyone on the team is eager to share this project with you and has been working relentlessly. We are confident that these additional few weeks will make a difference in the performance and ultimately represent a better experience for you.

We know the community is excited about the release, so we want to give you something to look forward to. We will be featured in Steam Next Fest, which takes place between October 3rd and 10th, so make sure you don’t miss out.

As always, we appreciate your enormous support and love, and we are convinced that when 9 Years of Shadows is released in a few weeks, everything will be worth this extra effort.

- The Halberd Team

Sep 29, 2022

Upstairs Downstairs

Project Zomboid - nasKo

Now then, survivors. Let’s do the thing.

This week we released version 41.77 into our Unstable beta. This is primarily aimed at fixing the Linux crashes that have been plaguing server hosts, and so far seems to be a mission success in that regard.

It also improves client to server connections by preferring a direct connection to the server. Servers now have two ports for clients to connect to, configurable through the server options. The game port (UDP 16261 by default) is used to handle Steam queries. The additional port (UDP 16262 by default) is used to handle the direct connection.

We’ve had a successful wider test of 41.77 with more than 30 people on a server without any crashes, and we’ve tested a modded setup afterwards as well.

Upon release there were servers running mods with 41.77 just fine, but unfortunately it seemed that some mod setup constellations caused conflicts that resulted in black screens for some servers.

We have just pushed a hotfix we believe will resolve this.

If, however, you run a 41.77 server and you are still experiencing players unable to log on (only seeing a black screen) then please send us: the list of ModIDs (specifically the “Mods=” line from their server.ini, the workshop= line, and your server logs.

Posting these in the forum release thread or in our Discord techsupport channel would probably be best.

Likewise, any reports of ongoing server instability or general misbehaviour – please let us know ASAP.

THEN

We’re still adding tweaks and polish to our final B41 patch that we’ll put out once the current network improvements are fully tested, released and stable.

This is the current changelist, with notable additions in the past few weeks on show here if you already read up on what was incoming in our last blog.

OOH, 42

Build 42 will be a very big update, and it will appear a sizable amount of time after Build 41 is fully wrapped. We’ve announced most of the things that we currently have brewing for it, but there’s one thing we’ve only hinted at so far – and which is very likely to feature.

As regular readers may remember, a while ago we wrote a blog called Techdoid that detailed some of the big engine improvements we have slated for 42.

Amongst them is a new rendering pipeline which allows for entire chunks to be cached with a depth buffer, which will afford us MASSIVE rendering and scene construction improvements and should rid us of all the performance issues we’ve been plagued with due to the isometric draw order over the years.

There’s also a new light propagation system, which allows for light to naturally leak through doors and windows, providing much more atmospheric and believable lighting

We also got rid of the 8 storey limit on chunks: specifically we allowed each chunk to have its own unique defined height up to 32 levels.

Finally, we discussed that we’d fixed the many areas of the codebase that used static casts to round the player’s position to determine what chunk or tile they were on to using Math.floors instead. This method allows for negative coordinates to work where prior the calculations would have failed if the player was stood on a tile with a negative coordinate.

This in theory will allow for us, or modders, to build north or west to the same extents as we currently build to the east and south, effectively quadrupling the maximum size the map could be extended to and open up a great deal of extra land to populate should we need to in future.

Whilst all these features are gamechangers in themselves, they were also done in service of another very specific feature we’ve had planned for a long time, which required each of them to be made feasible in any way.

The current in-game lighting system means that the indoor ambience levels are defined solely by the time of day. If it’s daytime, the ambient light levels inside a building are above zero, giving just sub-daylight levels, even if there are no sources of natural light that should fall on a tile just by virtue of it being day. That wouldn’t work very well if we were wanting to do… a certain other feature.

The previous eight level hard limit and high rendering cost of multiple levels was rather restrictive if we were to… want to do a certain something.

The lack of support for negative coordinates for character positions? Well that was IMMENSELY restrictive if we… were to want to do a certain something.

A few people may have been able to read between the lines of what all these lead toward. Many more will have just watched the video already.

The plan we have for basements and sub-levels is an interesting one, as it will provide a lot more replayability to the game map, which is otherwise completely static at the moment.

Essentially in 42 we, or modders, can list positions on the map (along with staircase orientation) that have the space for a basement and can be allocated the potential to have one. However, no basements are placed within the map itself.

When an area is streamed in for the first time, an appropriate basement ‘building’ created in the building editor and exported as a binary file is selected randomly from the list of all possible basements and will be injected into the map as it is loaded.

We could add tags to make it pick an appropriate category of basement to fit the specific house, though right now the code has it set as completely random. Each basement has stairs leading up from its ‘top’ floor and these stairs will be aligned to the correct position when it is injected into the map.

This means that despite the map being static, any areas with basements will yield surprises in every playthrough. This will also, clearly, cause the least disruption to the existing map development, modded maps and everything else.

Whilst most of the basements will be modest basement rooms, that will have their own unique layout and lootable containers and will change on every new world and be populated with our own collection as well as any collections of mod basements that are subscribed to.

There may be a few, however, which are more extensive, the player could happen upon a super rare and extensive underground complex. We have 32 levels to work with that can be distributed in any way above or below ground per chunk as required, so there’ll be few limits particularly in what modders can do with this.

We can also hardcode some specific basement levels, so we could say provide key buildings within the map with bespoke basement levels that fit that particular building and will always be the same on every map.

Also, with the new light propagation system, you better bring a torch – because unless there are light switches, its gonna be dark even if it’s daytime!

We’re also considering the possibility of other sub-surface structures, such as sewers for locations like Louisville. We’re still researching what would be appropriate and sufficiently realistic for this, however, and it’s not certain what could/would appear in b42 beyond what’s discussed above at this stage.

SPIFFO: BEYOND

If you are a Terraria player then right now you are likely enjoying the amazing Labor of Love update, and maybe you’ve even discovered a certain someone has made the jump into another game – heralding the beginning of some sort of Spiffo Cinematic Universe.

Our endless thanks to everyone at Re-Logic for letting our little dude spread his wings (or spin his tail, I guess) and treating him so well.

This week’s stunning outdoor scene from Citro. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games dev and want to work with us, especially if you’re an Animations Engineer as Christ alive that would be handy? Details here.

Sep 29, 2022

Devblog 27

TasteMaker - Jelle Booij

This week's update is unfortunately not that exciting. I spent a large portion of the week testing the game, and I worked on some features that are not quite ready yet. But my aim is to release an update every week, and I’m excited to share the things I did manage to finish.

Balance change

Due to the changes I've made to the menu system last week, the ability to grow your restaurant's profit has become very important. However, There were some big balancing issues that made this very hard.

The issue was that staff salaries were high, and as your restaurant grew, the salaries would increase very quickly. The effect of this was that the restaurant's income would go up, but the profit would stay the same or decrease.

This update contains some balance changes to fight this issue. I have significantly reduced staff salaries, and reduced the food prices to compensate for this. The profits should now scale a lot better. I also rebalanced the research tree.

Ingredient ordering change

I made a small but important tweak to the ingredient system. You now don’t have to pay for ingredients that don’t fit in storage. I think that the ingredient management system is flawed, and punishing the player for not managing ingredients properly feels a bit unfair. I hope that I can improve the ingredient system in the future, and make it a bit more challenging again.

Small Changes

Reworked the opening intro
Fixed a bug when moving items between floors
Fixed workload message bug
Kitchen equipment that can't be used yet is now greyed out
Fixed warning messages continueing in pause
Decreased delivery from 80 to 63 seconds
Fixed money overlap when deleting table with item on it.
Fixed bug with decor overlay
Fixed floor painting bug