We have been busy this week getting things prepared for our next update to the Public Test Realm. Here’s what has been happening this week behind the scenes:
Design and Narrative
Finalizing NPC population work in Detihauna.
Continuing NPC population work in Kosa Minor.
Filling out NPC population in parts of the Sea Dragon Hatchery.
Adding more sharks and other sea life to the waters around Badia de Cara.
Finished updating mastery options for Paladin and Dire Lord.
Polishing work on the Mastery UI for Cleric, Shaman, and Druid.
Began implementing new Wizard abilities and mastery options.
Working on the designs for Rogue and Ranger mastery options.
Additional tuning and itemization work for levels 1-40.
Building out NPC roster and potential quest hooks for Faerthale.
Squashing bugs and making tuning adjustments to class abilities based on bug reports, feedback, and observation data from the Public Test Realm.
Worldbuilding and Environment Art
Atmospheric and visual effects for various areas in Badia de Cara.
Additional set dressing in some areas of Badia de Cara that were feeling a little sparse.
Detailed set dressing for Detihauna.
Optimizing object collision across all of Badia de Cara and the Port of Rulun.
Tweaks to lighting behavior for underwater environments.
Continued concepting for modular Elven dwelling kit for Faerthale City and outlying areas.
Character Art and Animation
Wrap-up work on Badia de Cara NPC models, and picking up a few final things for the zone that have been requested by the design team.
Updated player swimming animations, including making death by drowning more dramatic.
Setting up for test run on universal armor meshes to make sure everything works properly in-game.
Continuing detailed concepts and building blockouts for Lucent, Ashen, and Ember elf customization options.
Programming
Several fixes for problems that were impacting NPC pathfinding, especially where water was involved.
Tackling bugs and requested changes from the design team, one at a time.
Chewing through some back-end data optimization to help reduce performance overhead on the server.
Preparing for revisions to core server processes to help improve scalability and performance (this is a large effort and will likely take several months to complete, but is required to enable several important gameplay-related features).
Continuing work on market system UI (browsing/search window, listing management) and prep for data connections.
