[2022] Fixing and Improving Packing Even More

A lil somethin somethin: You can find the details for this event on the announcement page here.

Okay, so it wasn’t the last Packing update
There was a bug related to unpacking and we decided to tackle that and finish out the last “Anti-Griefing” mechanic for unpacking. That’s the patch for today. In addition, we’ll be disabling base decaying while packed until we’re sure you can unpack in all cases. After that, we'll also start burning some of the tiles to condense the World Map for the current population.

We added what we’re calling the Clearance Phase. For the first 30s of unpacking, the structure checks to see if the area is valid. After 30s, all collisions are enabled at once and packing won’t be canceled by attempting to make the area invalid afterwards. This means that on a PvE map, after 30s a player cannot disable/pause your unpacking simply by standing in the area.

Changelog this time is not so big, as most of the changes we're working on are for the unreleased maps and updates, but they should have a pretty big impact nonetheless (at least the first two):

• Added Clearance Phase to Unpacking, which prevents most griefing with unpacking.
  
• Fixed a bug, which prevented unpacking bases in some cases.
  
• Fixed collisions on the Rupu Throne buildable structure.

As we stated in the last post, each week we’ll do updates on the state of our various lines of effort. Since we’re just starting now, this isn’t a list of everything that’s been done, but, rather, a selection of the most important and needed things we’ve worked on this week.

It's a new format we're trying out to keep you in the loop on everything important that's happening. Therefore, treat it more as a progress report than a full devblog for each part of the post and expect a larger post sometime soon.


Sleeping Giants Improvement Plan
One of the major efforts here has been working on a system that will allow us to more easily edit rigs. Editing existing rigs can currently cause a lot of issues, and there are quite a few problems with the existing rigs on some walkers, so this is, unfortunately, one of those “transparent” things which is happening in the background for us to work easier, rather than a change you'll immediately see. What it will allow, though, is an easy way to update any rig on any walker for us to put in an update.

Next week, we’ll also introduce some more quest changes - adding back some of the old quests that have been redesigned and rebalancing the existing ones to fit the current economy better.


Quality of Life Update
The promised Quality of Life update is coming along.

Right now, we're actively working on fixing the issue with clan permissions not persisting (i.e. they get reset during server restarts, updates, etc), which is a more complex issue than might seem, since it requires both the work on our game code, the backend, and the database.

It's been a common complaint for some time now, so the fix should be coming in one of the next patches, instead of waiting for the full QoL Update to bring it in.


PvP Update
PvP Update is also on its way.

We finalized the detailed design for the "King of the Hill" feature and Schematic Learning/Crafting that we've discussed in one of the previous devblogs. They should provide a balanced experience, encourage active PvP for map control, and make Schematics more of a tool that requires less attention the more you progress, similar to Water or Torque.

We also concepted the KoTH POI model, which will be the main arena for those PvP battles, so it will take a few iterations to get to a good gameplay feeling. Our goal with it is to make it a mixed melee/walker fight. Meaning, that you will be able to impact the success using walkers, but to actually capture the point you’ll need people with their feet on the ground, so while it will be possible to capture solo if the competition is not too strong, but larger clans should be able to have proper fights for control and bonuses that it provides on the map.


Ancient City
The next map is one of our main priorities at the moment, so there's quite a bit about it.

As expected, tons of work here, but we don’t want to spoil the surprise too much, so this will probably be more vague than you’d want.

We've finished the overhaul of the map design, which will be entirely different from what it was before, except the main part that it's still an Ancient City, so you can expect completely new gameplay, new features introduced with the map, and much more.

When it comes to details, we've finished creating new Rupu variants, finished setting all of their weapons and projectiles. all of the Rupu camp encounters are set, including bosses that weren't present in the game at all before, finished all of the loot tables, and much more boring details.

Now, we're starting work on creating Rupu melee behavior variations, so that each new Rupu type feels unique when fighting, especially putting the focus on the new bosses.

One of the new features - Relic Hunter Reputation, which we won't spoil yet, has also been finalized, including a detailed design, all the models, and so on. That's what will make Ancient City an event map that won't stop being relevant as it was before and will provide almost limitless gameplay in that regard.