Nov 28, 2023

Mortal Online 2 - FarmerJoe

What’s New?

Engine Upgrade

Mortal Online 2 is now running on Unreal Engine 5. This upgrade brings the real-time global illumination system Lumen to the game for improved lighting in the world. Lumen is enabled for everyone. Temporal Super Resolution (TSR) is added as an alternative to NVIDIA DLSS and is supported by all GPUs.

The team has worked hard to optimize the game so that the performance is as similar as possible to Mortal Online 2 in Unreal Engine 4. UE5 is more demanding on the GPU and we have increased the minimum requirements to a GTX 1060 or equivalent. The CPU performance has gotten improvements in multiple areas. We have managed to stabilize the framerate to have less hitches and even increase the total FPS in some cases. Locations with many characters, such as large battles, is still a challenge and will be a topic for future optimization.

The upgrade to Unreal Engine 5 has not been without its challenges. Multiple areas of the game world got completely broken and we had to repair many parts of it. We're immensely grateful to our community for their patience and support throughout this transition. The future of Mortal Online 2 is bright, and together, we're paving the way for many more thrilling adventures and unforgettable moments in this expansive world. Thank you for being on this journey with us.

Creator Program

Are you a content creator who’s captivated by the world of Mortal Online 2? Head over to our website for more information about our Creator Program.

Notable Changes

With this major patch comes a lot of additions, changes and fixes. The change list is very long, so here follows a summary of notable changes. You can read more about some notes in the full change list.

Murderers now have red names.
Added new Task NPCs with cape rewards for fulfilling tasks. Follow the markers on the compass to find them when you enter a city with Task NPCs.
Added Rewards button in the escape menu for claiming supporter items and streamer drops. Rewards cannot be dropped, traded or banked. You can destroy rewards from the inventory and reclaim them at any time.
Added new camps to points of interest.
Added Tindrem Vocal Theme song to Tindrem.
Added new zones: Guarded Areas and Wilderness. Guarded areas are placed in Tindremic and Khurite locations and guard towers will be present along the roads.
Fighting pit added to Meduli.
Updated the login screen scenery to signify version 2.0.
Added the ability to bring a partner when taking a new bounty.
Improved the buildable placement mode.
You can now gain stamina on a successful parry.
Equipment hits are removed for all equipment types except shields.
Increased minimum damage dealt by clicking to attack.
Clear weather is now more common all over Myrland.
Improved AI respawn times by having each AI have an individual timer for its respawn.
Only guild members and owners may now pay upkeep for houses, strongholds and keeps.
Increased the maximum Field of View to 110. The game now enforces the FOV value so that it cannot be modified outside the settings.
Added six sided dice to equipment vendors that allows you to roll a random value by right clicking it.
Added Sator, Outlaw, Outcast and Risar Commander heads as droppable items.
Updated prepatch Blood Kua fish and Blood Kua meat.
Full nudity is disabled due to issues with several payment providers. We are looking into a solution to this problem.
Terms of Service are updated and must be accepted in the login screen to play.

Changelist

Changes to the Launcher and Game Startup

Both DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 are still supported. DirectX 11 support is likely to be deprecated in the engine in a future engine upgrade.
A splash screen with an EAC progress bar is now shown on startup. The game was previously hidden during this phase.
Changed the game startup sequence. An initial loading sequence is now shown before the intro movie with detailed information if something goes wrong with EOS or EAC. This should reduce troubleshooting times.

Flags and Standing

Players in your assault list (local grey players) are now lootable without turning you into a criminal. This does not apply to duels.
Fixed not seeing icons of alliance members' pets.
Fixed not seeing icons of guilded/enemy/alliance members loot bags.
Fixed a bug where the pets flag did not always update properly.
Fixed a bug where you would get flagged for attempting to take items off a lootbag, even if the item was already taken.

Murderers now have red names

Increased the number of murdercounts required to be considered a murderer from 5 to 10.
Murderers will now have red names. If you have more than 10 murder counts, your name will change from blue to red.
With a red name, other players will be able to attack you without turning criminal themselves, however the guards will not attack you on sight as a murderer. This means you are free to attempt to enter a Guarded Town you have positive Standing with, however the guards will not defend you if the players living in that town decide to attack you.
This means murderers are no longer favored by the flagging system, as you will instantly know if someone is a murderer or not when encountering them outside of a town.
This will allow more people to make better informed decisions about what they should do when encountering other players, while making the gameplay as a murderer feel more like your actions have had a tangible effect on your reputation within the world, along with bringing more action toward you.

Zones and Territory

The world map is now split into two different kinds of zones, Guarded Areas and Wilderness. An overlay has been added to the ingame map to show the new zones.
You will be notified by an ingame message when entering or leaving these zones.
The exact locations of these zone boundaries may change
Wilderness is a new type of area where players can not be reported for murder or lose Nation Standing. Certain areas on Myrland will become Wilderness, such as the Gaul’Kor area, the jungle, and some dungeons which contain bosses.
If you die while inside the Wilderness you will not be able to report your killer for murder, so come prepared, at your own risk, and with the knowledge that you will be in significant danger with no recourse from the NPC Nations.
Changed murder reporting so that you now always lose Standing with the Nation owning the zone you were in when you died. This means if you kill someone outside Tindrem, you can only lose Standing with the Tindremic Provinces for that murder.
Fixed Territories on the Map UI being shown half as big as they actually are.
Fixed an issue that allowed Keep Territories to grow into each other instead of stopping when overlapping.

Bounty Hunting

Added the ability to name a partner when taking a new bounty. If your partner accepts, both players will receive the same bounty contract and can both use Seeker Corakis to locate them.
Added a distance limit when taking a new bounty. A random murderer within 5,000m of you will be selected, if there are none within that range it will expand the search until you find one, up to a distance of 10000m.
Added bounty tiers, which impact your rewards. These tiers unlock as you gain more bounty hunter renown.

Audio

Fixed issue with footstep ground traces causing sounds to sometimes not play. This was most noticeable on horses.

Guilds and Territory Control

Guild members may not upgrade others houses, only the Owner of a house can upgrade it.
A Claiming stone can now only be placed in a building with full health.
Guild tiers now increase the max supply the guild can hold.
Guild related tabs in the Social window no longer appear if you are not in a guild.
Guilds with no leader now get a new leader when the server restarts, GMs also now have the tools to set members to leaders.
Guild Buildings that belong to a guild that have been removed now lose health.
Guild Buildings should no longer duplicate NPCs.
Price for production goods from Steward decreased from 5 to 3 Gold.
Guild defence gained from buildings no longer gives an instant 1% on placement or claiming.
Time it takes to gain 1% guild defence increased from 900 seconds to 1800 seconds.
Rank Settler and above are now allowed to withdraw production goods.
Increased the "tax" the owning guild earns from TC vendor transactions from 5% to 10%
Improved territory logs for guild taxes.These are the logs shown in the territory tab.
When putting a claiming stone in a house it will now take time before it benefits from the new guilds defence bonus.
Structures which are not "Under Construction" now have their repair effectiveness reduced to 50%.
Exchanging currency at the guild vendors will no longer drain supplies from the guild.
Guild defence is now only applied to a building that has been owned by the guild for at least 30 minutes.
Fixed an issue causing supply to not be drained when buying goods from Guild Vendors.
Fixed a rare login issue that made it so that guild related commands would not work.
Fixed an issue that caused keep connected buildings to be able to be claimed by other guilds if destroyed.
Fixed issue where a user could disband a guild, create a new guild, and then automatically reclaim all the structures from the previous guild.
You can no longer use a Gate Expansion Plan to rebuild a previously existing but destroyed gate expansion to take ownership over it.
Fixed an issue causing taxes from vendors to not apply correctly.

Houses and Territory Control Structures

Only guild members and owners may now pay upkeep for houses, strongholds and keeps. The building needs to be guild claimed for it to be paid by guild members.
Supply Storehouses now only add defence to structures which are within 100m of them.
Removed the limit of only being able to build 1 Supply Storehouse.
Supply Storehouses now have a placement check, which will not allow placement if you are trying to place one too close to another Supply Storehouse.
Removed the Guild Guard from Priest Shrine Tier 3.
Priest Shrines can no longer be placed too close to another Priest Shrine.
TC Guards now leashes back to their spawn position when lured too far away.
Supply Storage now needs to be inside guild territory, if it is not it will lose health just like all other guild structures.
Changed stronghold windows so that players no longer can walk through them. Players can still shoot and aim through them.
You can no longer add resources to destroyed houses.
Large decorations like wall segments and bookshelves should no longer be hidden when far away from a building. Other decorations will still be distance culled for performance reasons.
Build stages on guard towers have been temporarily removed. Will show as fully built for now.
Fixed bug where house decorations would be regenerated on the client each time a building was damaged. This caused performance issues during sieges.
Fixed a mismatched wall piece in keep walls.
Fixed crash that could happen while trying to place decorations in a house.
Fixed a few meshes where the foundation of buildings were floating because the mesh did not match the full foundation depth.
Fixed missing LODs on player houses.

Placement of Buildings

Remade buildable placement mode to make it more robust and fix multiple issues.
Minor nonblocking foliage is now ignored during placement to reduce obstruction issues in places like the jungle. It also helps with placing siege tents and siege machines.
Updated multiple obstruction messages to clarify the reason why a building cannot be placed.
All tiers of a building are now shown at the same time. Future upgrades have a weaker form.
Placement will now show in red if the base tier or a future upgrade is blocked.
You can now adjust a building after a placement has been set using left click drag. Does not work yet when using the mouse cursor.
The placement UI is now centered under the crosshair instead of the top right corner. It cannot be moved but will be changed in a future update.
Buildables now display their floor level as a bright line to assist with height adjustment.
Made it easier to place stationary siege machines on stronghold roofs.
Outdoor stairs no longer block placement when going into high ground.
Buildings can now be placed on uneven or rocky ground as long as the foundation is connected with the ground and the environment is not sticking through the floor.
Added ctrl+scroll input to slow down the rotation for building placement. Keybinds added in the options menu.
Fixed issue with some TC buildings having too shallow foundations making them hard to place.
Fixed issue where upgrading a building would sometimes not be allowed.
Fixed issue where some placement obstruction messages would not show up.
Fixed issue where some TC NPCs and building decorations would block an upgrade.
Fixed issue where water would block placement even when it was detected under ground.
Fixed issue where etherworld characters could block placement.

Skills

Engineering skills now gain experience when building.
Greatly increased skill gain on basic movement skills and basic gathering skills.

Siege Machines

Fixed an issue where a ballista bolt would get stuck playing an impact sound repeatedly when hitting ground.

Magic

Icebarrier updated to 5.5s cast time, 30 mana cost and 7 second duration.
Ignition no longer damages the caster when hitting a very close target.
Fixed issue where the Spiritism Kau beam could be heard from the living world.
Fixed issue with both magic projectiles and siege machine projectiles sometimes instantly exploding/impacting on release despite hitting nothing.
Fixed issue where Crawling Hands gave a buff named “DEFAULT”.
Fixed players receiving more than one instance of "Glory" even if they have been healing.
Fixed players healing other players' pets would not give them a share of the glory.
Fixed healing calc where tamed/dom/ritual/zombies with full hp was counting as contributing, when you were actually healing for 0.
Fixed calc where players would sometimes be credited more Glory than intended due to not properly checking Current Max Health.

Movement and Combat

Equipment hits are removed for all equipment types except shields.
You will now gain up to 10 stamina on a successful parry. The amount gained is modified by both your stamina regain modifier and your current weapon skill level. Stamina will only be gained once per block instigation.
Fixed an issue with minimum attack charge damage. Hitting for zero when attacking should now happen less frequently.
Weakspot calculation on daggers has been adjusted so that heavier daggers weakspot much less often.
Enabled cast shadows on the player torch in first person view. Torches from other players do not cast shadows yet for performance reasons.
Changed outofworld recovery so that it can't be abused as an elevator to get out of caves. Players will now return to their last known location.
Fixed issue where players could be pushed through walls by mounts and creatures.
Fixed issue with "aim with arrow tip" option which caused players to shoot straight down. It got broken after we stopped players from being able to shoot through walls.
Fixed issue with the counterattack, sometimes playing too slowly after parrying an attack.
Fixed bug where outofworld recovery would try to recover at a preteleport location (teleport to priest or by GM).
Fixed bug where outofworld recovery would not handle an infinite falling state when a teleport failed.
Fixed issue where the loading screen during teleport closed too early causing players to fall through the ground. It happened frequently when being teleported by GMs, sometimes when teleporting to priests.
Fixed issue where the loading screen closed too early during level streaming causing players to fall through the ground. It happened frequently when being teleported by GMs, sometimes when teleporting to a priest.
Fixed an issue causing melee attacks after a feint to sometimes do incorrect damage.
Fixed an issue where you could not push or shield bash if you had a counter attack ready.
Fixed bug causing you to block until you did another block, if you were blocking while gathering.

Server and Networking

Rebuilt part of the login process for a smoother experience. Logins should now be slightly faster and more reliable with less waiting.
Fixed issue where players would load in on other clients but it would take a few seconds before they started moving because of missing movement updates. This made it look like other players would teleport/rubberband when first loading in. It was very apparent when loading in mounted players riding at full speed.
Multiple updates and fixes to player and AI movement updates to reduce desync issues where characters sometimes end up in outdated positions. This sometimes happened to pets that were following their owner and appeared in a previous location to other players.
Improved package handling on the server side.
Fixed several server memory leaks that were causing instability.
Reduced network overhead on the server side related to player movement updates.
Improved how the server handles player updates. This should lead to the server being able to handle more packages and more players.

Mounts and Pets

AI will now prefer to attack the rider of a mount over the mount itself.
Fixed issue with passengers not being able to mount ritual pets.
Fixed eye material that was a bit too shiny for some creatures (for example brown bear).
Fixed issue where you get multiple messages saying you gained 1 Glory when using pets in combat.
Fixed wrong hurt sound on Risen Molvas to not sound like Springboks.
Fixed issue where the mount head would turn and twitch momentarily when a player mounted or dismounted it.

Characters, AI and NPCs

Adjusted ranged bandits so they run backwards at a slower, more reasonable speed.
Made outcasts/outlaws slightly weaker and slower.
Reduced the aggro range for wolves from 50 m to 20 m.
Spawners now keep track of individual respawn timers. This means that two AI killed at the same time will also respawn at the same time, improving the rate that a spawner is refilled.
Closed doors in player buildings now block AI pathing again. AI was temporarily allowed to leave through closed doors due to a bug a few patches back where pets would randomly run into other player houses and get stuck there.
Removed the loud spawn sounds for Game Masters when they chose to appear.
Improved the issue where character parts are not completely synchronized in the animation.
Updated physics on all capes and hairstyles due to the physics engine upgrade to Chaos.
Fixed issue where Game Masters would not appear in the etherworld but still be targetable. Game Masters will now appear in both the living world and the etherworld when they choose to show themselves without being targetable.
Fixed issue with broken animation keyframe that caused the snout and eyelid on bears and taurdogs to show flip artifacts during idles.
Fixed issue with broken walk animation on chickens.
Fixed issue where etherworld spirits sometimes spawned the etherworld effect for players.
Fixed issue with missing animation joints in some player LODs.
Fixed several issues with the Ultimeki boss fight.
Fixed an issue where Coralis Crabs attack range was too short.
Fixed issue in navmesh queries where AI would take shortcuts through the air when going up or down steep slopes.
Fixed bug where the equip and unequip armor sounds were not playing on other players.
Fixed issue where the Blainn fur was slightly emissive during the night, not becoming perfectly dark.
Fixed serverside issues caused by spirits in the etherworld that moved too far away from their spawn position.

UI and Interactions

You can now manipulate items with rightclick while a TC bank container is open.
Your guild name is now visible in the Social window under the Guild tab.
You now see a skull icon under the crosshair if you target a murderer and a sword icon if the person is a criminal.
Updated 'Territory' UI window to show more information and look better.
Added tooltips to the territory tab.
Added a timeout to the loading screen that forces a level streaming flush if the player is stuck for more than 60 seconds while streaming levels. This should fix some players getting stuck on 9899% loading progress.
Fixed a bug where items would turn invisible in your inventory until logout when attempting to drag unbankable items into a bank.
Fixed a bug where title progression only updated once in real time.
Fixed broken grass gathering in a few places in the world.
Fixed bug where players were sometimes forced to restart their client after leaving Haven to be able to enter Nave.
Fixed items in the "items you are buying" section, not displaying all valid information in the vendor.
Fixed the mistake where zones from Myrland were visible in the Haven map.
Fixed a bug preventing you from accessing house chests after already having accessed them, leaving the area and returning to access them again.
Fixed UI tutorial step crash in Haven.
Fixed issue where deleting a character in the character selection screen would sometimes put the game in a permanent loading screen.
Fixed issue where deleting a character and creating a new one would sometimes bug out the game and cause the player to login in a bad state.
Fixed an issue allowing the "/bank" chat command to not respect the access restrictions on guild NPCs.
Fixed crash that sometimes happens when deleting a character.
Fixed ‘Expand territory’ button shutting down the building UI.
Fixed issue where the UI would disappear in the login screen if the user pressed login and cancel too quickly in succession.

Lighting, Weather and Environment

Main menu scenery changed to signify the upgrade to UE5.
Added new camps to points of interest.
Added a fighting pit near the Meduli bank so that players can duel away from the main streets.
World fog is modified due to the engine upgrade to UE5.
Lighting adjustments in some points of interest.
Clear weather is now more common all over Myrland.
Foliage wind behavior should now be more stable when the weather changes.
Fixed grass not being gatherable in certain locations.
Various art fixes across the world based on bug reports.
Various fixes on world textures and meshes.
Fixed multiple “elevator” exploit spots in the world where players intentionally glitched through the world and were teleported to a different location during outofworld recovery.
Fixed issue with some torches on the ground in some Point of Interests not emitting light at low video settings for Effects.
Multiple art fixes in Tindrem, such as missing textures, gaps in the ground, broken meshes, etc.
Fixed rare crash related to weather changes.
Fixed various lighting and shadow issues in Fabernum and Kranesh.
You can now walk on the ropes between buildings in Kranesh again.
Fixed issue where some terrains looked flat and desaturated in the distance due to high specular values.
Updated several environment mesh LODs that were either broken or too low poly.
Fixed incorrect mesh segment in castle wall.
Fixed crash caused by an environment actor during loading screen.
Removed stair steps from a path near Morin Khur that caused players and mounts to get stuck while trying to move up the path.
Fixed missing collision on rocks in necro dungeon that allowed players to safely hide and scout the dungeon.
Various updates to meshes and lighting in the surroundings near the necro dungeon.
Fixed ramps in Risar dungeon where players sometimes got stuck.
Fixed holes in Risar dungeon and Celaeno cave.
Navmesh fix in the Celaeno jungle cave.
Fixed broken water appearance in MK sewers.
Make the stairs of the Minotaur dungeon smoother to walk on.
Rock mesh/texture floating in clothos dungeon.
Updated ground material in the Steppe to be less shiny.
Fixed issue with the world going dark near the tower in Haven due to misplaced dungeon lighting effects.

Game Settings

Added two new video settings: Global Illumination and Reflections. Lumen is enabled for all Global Illumination levels. Screen space reflections are used for Low and Medium settings and the others use Lumen reflections.
Updated NVIDIA DLSS plugin for Unreal Engine 5.3 to 3.5.2b (nvngx_dlss.dll version 3.5.10.0).
Replaced the DLSS setting with a shared Upscale setting. DLSS is in this list when the GPU supports it.
Removed the Resolution Scale slider. Values are now controlled by the Upscale setting. We might restore the slider once some specific values no longer crash the engine.
Added Temporal Super Resolution (TSR) to Upscale setting. It is supported by all GPUs. FSR might be added in the future.
UI Scale slider range increased from (50%, 110%) to (25%, 200%).
Increased the minimum distance for enabling character shadows by 10 m for all quality levels. This ensures that characters cast shadows even on the lowest quality setting.
Tweaked all video setting levels for improved client performance.
Adjusted config settings to exclude small objects in the distance from shadow passes. Lower shadow settings increase objects being removed.
Removed the character distance optimizations setting. It is now always on.
Removed the Use Multithreaded Rendering setting. It is enabled by default in UE5 and is now always on.
Removed Use Recommended Settings from video settings.
Fixed issue where motion blur got turned off when post process quality was set to low.
Fixed issue where lower quality settings broke the appearance of some surfaces in the game due to material quality changes.

Optimizations

Multiple improvements to asynchronous loading of buildings, characters and decorations to reduce stutter.
Improved the game performance drop that would happen during daynight transitions at dusk and dawn.
Adjusted scalability settings to reduce overall VRAM usage.
All cities have received a dedicated art optimization pass to improve performance for UE5.
Updated all player/humanoid component LODs with lower detail and joint count to improve CPU performance (body, hair, beard, armor parts, etc).
Added a new render priority system where characters will be changed to a low detail state when far away. This version of characters is much cheaper. This mainly affects players and humanoids like zombies and guards. We will extend it to creatures in a future update.
The game will now target a max number of high detail characters using the priority system to maintain CPU performance.
Replaced parts of the engine level streaming behavior to eliminate loading stalls due to registration of collision shapes. Large areas of trees and foliage should no longer produce large loading stalls as the collision shapes are now streamed over multiple frames.
Improved buildable placement so that large structures like a stronghold no longer drops FPS to rock bottom.
Improved CPU performance by reducing the number of active components on humanoids.
Improved CPU performance by making some parts of the character static when far away.
Reduced the number of active bones in character skeletons for improved animation performance.
Turned off post process anim instances when anim physics alpha is set to 0.
Made camera wall intersection tests cheaper on the CPU.
Slight CPU optimization by making footstep traces asynchronous.
Tweaked level streaming settings to reduce stuttering.
Updated LODs for all characters with reduced joint counts to improve CPU performance.
Moved fur mesh generation to a background thread to reduce creature loading stutter.
More game assets are added to the preload stage to reduce loading stalls mid game.
Destruction of gameplay actors are now queued over multiple frames to reduce stutter.
Reduced the cost of GPU velocity pass.
Optimized tick of multiple actors to improve CPU performance.
Optimized several world art assets.
Optimized multiple cities.
Improved multiple level streaming lines that caused game freezes.
Reduced landscape grass tick rate.
Fixed issue where spell effects could flush async loading and cause a game stall.
Fixed issue where an AI changing growth level would flush async loading and cause a game stall.
Fixed a level streaming issue where large volumes in sublevels caused a large loading stall, for example Morin Khur had a half second loading stall.
Fixed issue with particle systems in Tindrem Garden causing poor performance.
Fixed issue where the game would start loading levels from position 0,0,0 during loading screen before switching to the spawn location. This caused the game to load unnecessary assets when entering the world.
Fixed issue where player character render bounds were bigger than necessary.

Known issues

The Republic of Nordveld zone around Hyllspeia is missing but will be added in a later patch.