Mythos/Patch Notes 2008 Q1

March 9 and 10

 * A weekend's work, and some good stuff came of it. Some much asked for stuff.
 * Keyboard remapping is in and functional. At present you CAN NOT remap your left and right mouse buttons, but you may bind your other mouse buttons and keys, and ctrl/shift/ and alt modify them. So if you hate using CTRL to potion your hireling, or you want one of your 13 mouse buttons to use your active slot # 5, well, now you can do that.
 * Chat and Automap background transparencies are controllable via separate sliders in the options menu
 * There is now a toggleable 'free' camera. By default this can be orbited/tilted with the middle mouse button ( which is remappable ). You can reset the position to default at any time, or toggle back to the standard locked camera. The 'free' camera is not quite as free as Vanity *you can't look 'up' at all.
 * In free camera mode, you can use WSAD to move and Q and E to rotate. This can be used in combination with mouseclicks - so you can run left with W, then let go and click on an enemy and immediately turn around and fireball him. Great for kiting.
 * Achievement, weaponswap, and mail keys have been moved as a result of base WSAD mappings. ( J, X, and N for right now as defaults. Again, remappable )
 * You can elect to keep a 'fixed tilt' free camera that only orbits - this can be a lot less disorienting for some players, and less to manage.
 * Autorun - this is a toggle that only works in free camera mode, and causes your player to walk in the direction the camera is pointing. If he/she can't path forward, or you left or right click, or otherwise do a skill, it toggles off. You can also steer with keys in autorun mode.
 * Ignore Targets - you can now hold a key down when clicking to force yourself to ignore all targets, if you want to get out of a scrape.
 * Cyclops beards in
 * Some fixes for the Cyclops female
 * More tilesets converted for bordertiles
 * More tileset decoration
 * Vanity camera no longer stares at your crotch, or does wierd oscillations as you change pitch. Altogether just smoother and less wiggy.
 * Fixed some issues with some starting gear textures. Pants, underpants and shirts don't look quite as lame either.
 * Lots of new skyboxes that work a lot better
 * Fixed problems with shadows where they cut off in the middle distance in vanity ( and free ) camera modes. Now you can see shadows for everybody. The longer the view, the lower the overall quality of the shadows ( as the texture gets used for more and more real estate ), but it looks much better overall.

March 7

 * Lots of hard work, trying to tie everything together, and polish all this new stuff into a whole
 * Dave Glenn, the background lead down in San Fran found a way for us to get 'border' tiles around our levels. That means you don't see a wierd black gradient at the edge, but instead, there's forest, or plains, or whatever out there. It looks a lot nicer and is something we've wanted to do for ages. Special thanks to Dave for figuring out a way to make this work. We're in the process of converting a lot of tilesets to do this - 3 got done today.
 * Dwarven Wights, Ghoul and Ramalos art finally nailed down - integrating
 * Marsh is working on a very cool boss fight for the last boss in Zone 2. Because man, the old one sucked.
 * Arc'led town finally in art-wise and no longer placeholder
 * Some code for unloading unused item icons which, believe it or not, we didn't have before. Should help keep memory in check on long play sessions
 * even more new map icons
 * some cool new ingredient icons for crafting
 * continued crafting balance
 * Cyclops female is finally in, and animations for the Cyclops race have been refined a lot, and they finally have face and skintone selections
 * Cyclops horn accessories in - hair should be in shortly. Fixed some wierd bugged aniimations
 * Converted 3 more tilesets to be 'open' - looks SOOO much nicer and makes the world feel more complete
 * Added Shadowlands Only mode - at startup, like Hardcore. You can never leave the Shadowlands at all. Will be nice for leaderboards when we have 'em. I plan to play this mode - heh
 * Got Ramalos all rigged up with shotguns
 * Dwarven Wights have cool trapped souls inside their ribcages now. Other neat skills going in for these - they should be pretty nifty when they're done.
 * Optimization to wardrobing for humanoid monsters. Should save lots of memory in any areas with Hollow
 * Decoration on the frozen mines tilesets
 * Got Winter Foothills exported - needs decoration
 * Harvestables now play proper sounds when activated
 * Other stuff.

March 3

 * We published a small patch today to fix a skill bug that was being used to gain an unfair advantage over others.
 * Urns and vases now break due to Razor Aura.

March 1

 * Added a bunch of new map icon styles, and cleaned up a lot of old poorly assigned ones ( new icons for Hives, desert temples, lots of snowy locations, churches, etc. as well as the Shadowlands portal)
 * Made Karmic rating visible to others - as well as a graded visual effect for how 'bad' your Karma is. Also, changed Karma to Anarchy - that way it can have a positive value ( 10 Anarchy ), isntead of -10 Karma, which is sort of counterintuitive
 * Made the bottom HUD in the shadowlands different from the one in regular, to help keep them distinct
 * Fixed a lot of little code and content bugs, primarily from newly added stuff.

February 29

 * Just a small update with a few odds and ends.
 * Support for lots of loading screens now and new ones. I know, I know, it's sort of silly and cosmetic, but man, I like me some new loading screens, and the ability to add new ones and tie them to conditionals
 * Instance Switching is about done! Thanks to Chris down in San Fran for setting up the backend stuff for this. I'll test all my client stuff tomorrow when I have a server to do so on, but you should be able to Guild-Wars style switch between town instances now. Whee! Need to look at the possibility of having a delay on doing this in the Shadow World so you can't flip out of combat in town and game it.
 * PVP finally works in town properly with all the exceptions for skills that normally can't be used in town.
 * Marsh got a set of the crafting quests for Masterworks in, which we really needed to get done
 * Continued crafting system work. Do I sound like a broken record?
 * Recompressed UI textures so that they take up much less VRAM. Should improve performance on some machines getting VRAM limited.
 * Removed MIPS from all UI textures, which makes them crisper and cleaner looking overall. Also saves memory. Whee!

February 26

 * Still here, still working like crazy. Still working on crafting! But....
 * I took some time tonight to do a bit of extra work on skill balance and fixing, because there's always plenty to do, and the QA crew gave me a nice condensed list to plow through. Here's a sampling
 * Hemorrhage – damage radius doubled
 * Raze, Adrenaline Rush upgrade – damage increased
 * Blade Shards, Deep Wounds upgrade – was never proccing explosion. - Fixed
 * Adept of Edges, Blade Specialist upgrade – was never proccing bleed. - Fixed
 * Blood Boil – Doubled damage, spread out between tier nodes
 * Blood Command – Tripled damage, spread out between tier nodes
 * Fiery Weapon – damage smoothed over ranks
 * Flamewielder, Fiery Weapon upgrade – explosion was not damaging on proc - Fixed
 * Burning Sweep, Blazing Blade upgrade – Ignite chance improved
 * Thermal Damage, Thermal Shield upgrade – No damage was reflecting. - Fixed
 * Cinderwall – Mana cost reduced and smoothed
 * Improved Latchbomb – Mana cost increase halved. Various latchbomb properties improved - detonation now happens properly, range of detonation improved, generally not as crummy overall. Also looks a bit nicer.
 * Improved Noxius Grenade – Poison Damage bonus increased, poison chance decreased
 * Seeking Shot – Cooldown removed
 * Deafening Explosion – Damage increased by 150%
 * Marksman’s Refire, Rapid Refire upgrade – Damage increased by 100% at max and smoothed along that tier node
 * Galvanic Widget – Tripled movement speed

Other stuff

 * Travel via skyship is currently gated by level, although this will possibly change to quest-based
 * you can elect to hide headgear ( stolen from Hellgate! )
 * A new race. A secret one. That you haven't heard about yet.
 * Can't use anchorstones in the Priory and thust get stuck in a looping anim
 * Some mail fixes
 * continued crafting work - working on the Heraldry mods and changing how they function under the hood, getting the art hooked up properly for them
 * new heraldry recipes
 * lots of new ingredient icons
 * some cleanup and simplification in crafting UI
 * we also fixed that skill point exploit a couple days ago and are trying to get a build out with that ( and that alone ) in it ASAP.

February 18
Anyway, we continue to be very deep in the trenches.
 * I know the updates are getting a little fewer and farther between - but that's not for lack of things happening. Pretty much quite the opposite!
 * We remain heavily in crafting work. Hundreds of recipes ( we'll probably crack a thousand including refinement recipes ), hundreds of ingredients, their refinements, all the skills, icons for all of those, and all the fiddly bits of the crafting interface. Risk sliders, item previews, ingredient lists, Recipe trainers, ingredient merchants, harvestable nodes, drops for monsters, rare recipes, crafting skill balancing, eesh. Just a ton of moving parts, and an enormous amount of work. In a lot of ways our crafting system is sort of unique. Except in the fact that it's a lot of work.
 * Oh, got the first pass of the male Cyclops in and working. Looking good! Still tweaking left to do, but a good step in getting that race kicked out the door
 * I did this a few days ago, but it'll probably make some folks happy - investment in the skill tiers now gives you core stat bonuses with different breakdowns based on your class. I know you guys hate putting stuff in that Tier bar and not getting anything immediately out of it.
 * We tied up our backstory and all finally agreed on it. We're bashing out the VO text and hoping to get some time in a nearby studio to get some stuff recorded, in between all the other craziness.
 * Oh, got the Boom Zippers zeroed in much better now.
 * Fixed the freebie identify exploit ( which I've already fixed once before, grrr, somebody re-broke it )

February 12

 * Continuing crafting work! Always lots to do here
 * Lots of the ingredient icons completed - about 70 left to go though! We hope to be done with all of those by end-of-week
 * Crafting is now basically 'functional' - you can learn recipes, create them, and adjust the properties of the item based upon your crafting skill investment, with the tree basically laid out.
 * Your backpack has 2 panes, one for your normal stuff, and a new one for all crafting ingredients. You can break items down into sub-components
 * Karmic ratings are in, based upon killing lower level players. You drop more items in PVP world based upon your karmic rating. You can see it in your character sheet, but I need to make it visible to everybody today. Also need some sort of visual effect that you don't have to mouseover to see. Karma returns to normal by killing monsters in PVP world (lots of monsters).
 * You are now 'safe' when zoning in PVP world for 10 seconds I believe. No-one can attack you, and you have a blue glow. This safety is removed as soon as YOU attack anything. Helps prevent entrance camping.
 * Basic email front-end is now in place, to go along with the backend work that Ping-0 has done to make email functional. Will be hopefully testing this today. You can attach items and cash to a mail.
 * Cyclops male geometry and textures completed - needs binding. Female in-progress.
 * Our Art contractors are back from Chinese New Year vacation! Hooray! New art should be coming in again now.
 * Gold-drop balance - monsters were dropping way too much copper in the midgame. WAY too much. It has been scaled down. We are testing balance.
 * Boom Zippers were horribly underpowered - not doing anything like the damage they report. Of course, now that they're fixed, they do too MUCH damage. Tuning.
 * Adrenaline Rush had a horrible return for skill investment. Now increases to 7 seconds of duration, with better bonuses on the last point for AR, etc.
 * A bunch of other junk.

February 6

 * Somehow I'm still jetlagged.
 * I've jimmied things around so that now all patching is upfront, before you get to character selection. It stinks to wait around for friends while they load assets to zone in, or have stutters as assets complete download and are then pumped across to the video card, or into the package. So, you might have to go grab a cup of coffee after a big patch, but once you're in and playing, it should all be much smoother.
 * Marsh got the 'crafting-specific' mod slots working
 * A lot of bugfixing on specific warping conditions in PVP zones
 * Fixed a lot of quest boss respawn issues in shared areas
 * Blood Mist cooldown reduced by 1 second
 * John got a lot of Zone3 quest stuff done
 * Hive entrances artwork added
 * Continued tileset work on Zone3 tilesets
 * Greg made automap zoom settings persist after restart of the game
 * Didn't mention this earlier, but last week Chris Lambert got a lot of the rendering code grafted over to be in line with Hellgate's, which gives us opportunities for performance improvements there we otherwise wouldn't have had
 * A lot of tedious bugfixing
 * Colds have really been going around the office, so a lot of us are getting laid low at various times. Yuck!

February 4

 * I'm back at home - got in late, late Saturday night, and still a bit jetlagged. Keep getting up at 3AM!
 * We have some nice character artwork for all the races/genders that is coming in for promotional/background/loading screen purposes. Looking really nice!
 * Marsh, Greg and I are all hammering on crafting - recipes, UI bits, and so on.
 * We replaced the bottom HUD bar with new one with larger health/mana elements on either end ( they're cylinders now, not half-orbs, and larger )
 * continued work on Zone3 areas and props
 * Working on some accessories for humans lately ( gremlin females coming )

January 30

 * Update from Germany!
 * Just got done doing the GigaTV broadcast from 10-Midnite - it's 1AM now, and I've gotta get up at 5 for a plane to Berlin
 * Giga broadcast seemed to go pretty well, as I didn't drench the whole place in sweat, and didn't stutter my way off the stage. I call that a win anyway.
 * Did several other interviews today, seemed to go pretty well.
 * Off to bed! ( or To The Winchester! )

January 28

 * Update from Merry Olde England!
 * I have a dog and a pony, and we are putting on a show!
 * One more day in London, then it's off to just about every city in Germany, apparently. 23 meetings in 4 day! Madness!
 * See y'all when I get back

January 25

 * How about a BIG update!
 * I'm going to be gone all next week - not sure what my posting schedule will be like - on European Press Tour
 * This week we got Zone3 assembled and working!
 * Mistglade, the mountainous Satyr town is in and looking sweet!
 * We have a full outdoors - a loop of roads and crossroads
 * two new outdoor winter tilesets that look fantastic
 * new snow weather, of various kinds
 * a massive ice-cave dungeon set
 * Integrated loads of monsters! Stagkin, Treekin, Ice Drakes, Frozen Thralls, Darkshere Trolls, Yetis, Mountainous Urax, and more!
 * Zone 3 is now playable, with quests going in
 * Fixed more PVP balance and zoning issues to do with PVP world
 * PVP world now remains shared everywhere, while 'normal' world is only shared on roads
 * Fixed Boss respawns in shared areas
 * we're tired! It was a long ( but very productive ) week

January 18
new table : 1 party member - 100% / 1 2 party members - 263% / 2 3 party members - 425% / 3 4 party members 588% / 4 5 party members 750% / 5
 * Marsh added Particle throttling by framerate code - this should help prevent dips in your FPS when a big wad of particles spams the screen, and should also improve performance further on some low end machines
 * Made unattackable player pets attackable to other players in PVP - beginning balancing health on these
 * red glowy border to go along with heartbeat when health gets low
 * when you die, your Hireling no longer automatically dies, taking any loot you put on them with you. They respawn with you back when you resurrect.
 * Fixed some gadgets not dying when you did
 * Flame turret turns faster
 * several revised sounds
 * in PVP there is no level-relative damage scaling for players anymore
 * Increased party XP scaling.

old table: 1 party member - 100% / 1 2 party members - 200% / 2 3 party members - 300% / 3 4 party members 400% / 4 5 party members 500% / 5

You also get slightly increased loot and cash drops in a party by player count. - Fixed several seeking-skill issues in PVP

January 17

 * Didier and Chris have been up for the past 2 days working with us on doing some under the hood optimization as we try to bring our minspec down-
 * We've had some nice successes! Some large UI optimizations, and significant wins in various areas should help out a lot of our players
 * We've been doing a LOT of PVP fixing and balancing. A lot lot. As in so very very much. I'm really glad we started doing this when we did, because this is just as much work as I was thinking it would probably turn out to be.
 * Starting to get some of our tilesets delivered for Zone 3 and they're looking sweet!
 * More Zone 3 monsters and props and breakables are coming in and being set up - also looking very, very nice.
 * Just got some great reskin concepts on some of the tilesets we use so that we can further boost our number of visually different areas - pretty unrecognizable from the originals, and fantastic looking. We're excited!

January 14

 * PVP aggression system is in place - at present, when in a PVP world you can CTRL click on any character to become aggressive against them - they ( and their party ) will in turn immediately become aggressive to YOU - that is, there isn't any response or query required to attack somebody. You ( and they ) can do it right away, whether they want you to or not. It's mostly a mechanism to prevent you from accidentally annihilating your friends when you walk by with 12 blood minions.... Anyway, if somebody CTRL clicks you, their name will immediately turn red, and you can immediately attack them, and they can attack you. This state is cleared by leaving the area ( or joining them in a party! ). The cursor is going to change to a flaming sword when you have CTRL held down so that you know what you're up to
 * Karma is next on the list, and the PVP kill drop rules
 * Crafting is proceeding, with all the recipe-learning stuff, a bunch of dummy recipes
 * Greg is working on tool stuff for the recipes too
 * Lots of Zone3 work going on trying to finalize the looks of some tilesets
 * Zone 3 boss concepting work
 * so on and so forth!

January 11

 * What's been up? Well, a lot of meetings!
 * Long, long crafting meetings, hashing out what should go where, how you should advance, what sort of risk is involved, material progression - a load of stuff. We're STILL not quite done with these meetings.
 * We'll discuss what we're going to be doing when we're a bit more nailed down on it.
 * We are testing having the WHOLE WORLD be shared right now, in normal mode. Basically, there's a chance to run across people everywhere. That doesn't mean it's a persistent outdoors - it still fractures into instances as they fill up - but it's a lot more shared. We figured we'd go whole hog to start, bang on it, and see what worked and didn't.
 * PVP testing - tweaking and fiddling with PVP in the dueling arena as we try to shake out some of the obvious imbalances
 * Lots of art meetings as we are further prioritizing all our Zone 3 assets
 * Marketing meetings! We are ramping up on more 'pretty' artwork to show and use for publications, websites, etc.
 * Website - the overhaul is getting closer to completion.
 * I'm going to try to take a pass through the tech questions thread today and clear a few more out

January 8

 * We got the patch out today!
 * And then the music was disabled
 * So we were insane and reckless and got a new build up within something like an hour and a half! Madness! We live on the edge.
 * I started a Tech Questions thread. What have I gotten myself into?
 * Marsh did a ton of work on socketables so that they can have separate properties so that we can stick them in things besides weapons - Whoo!
 * John did a lot of design work on Crafting ingredients
 * Getting early deliveries of some of the Zone 3 town stuff - still needs textures, and there is work to be done, but things are looking cool

January 7

 * we were HOPING to get a new patch out today, but just didn't quite make it. A couple of minor problems reared their heads, and we wanted 'em fixed. So we did. We're testing again now.
 * We continued on our regularly scheduled programming while we were at it though -
 * PVP dueling is in our internal builds and working ala Hellgate ( NOT in the patch )
 * More crafting work ( again NOT in the patch )
 * Fixed some napalm behaviors
 * Fixed Phoenix so it actually works.
 * Some new particle and sound stuff

January 4

 * We've been getting in a few more fixes for our patch. We're hoping to get this out to you EXTREMELY soon, but we try not to release anything on a Friday, because if anything goes wrong, it's a pain for everybody going through the weekend.
 * Meteor memory leak fixed
 * Town portals now only show local portals, so you won't see improperly named portals you can't go to in party situations
 * Colossus and Hirelings are well and truly not going to stand around Whirlwinds dying anymore! Honest!
 * Fixed a weapon-swapping issue based upon item requirements, whereupon you could get a rifle and pistol equipped at the same time
 * Fixed some more missing strings
 * Fixed an issue with boss kills for some quests not registering in certain circumstances
 * Fixed quest tracker removing checkboxes when you zoned
 * Fixed some XP distribution issues with party members in different levels
 * Fixed gems with bad/nonsensical values
 * Pruned the grass on the main menu to hopefully improve performance on some laptop and integrated cards
 * desert gothic tilesets shouldn't appear for random maps in zone 1
 * zone 2 random questgivers who only sent you to hives now have more variety
 * fixed an issue with certain weapons being to 'break out' of the attack and begin running, and then subsequently fire projectiles while in motion
 * fixed Rapid Refire being alternately really, really slow
 * Hirelings sped up a touch
 * Marsh and I spent a good bit of time hammering out some particulars of the crafting system
 * UI can be scaled up twice as large for larger resolutions/monitors
 * Fixed the bug where characters wouldn't properly save after killing 65534 monsters(!)

January 3

 * Happy New Year! We're Back!
 * Working on getting that patch tested and out the door -