I will stream this evening 22.10.2023 at 18:00 CET on Steam and Twitch.
US Beta servers are ready.
I spent nearly the whole week searching for proper and cheap servers on the US west coast. My first try was with “OneProvider”. It is the cheapest I could find. But sadly, it is cheap for a reason. It took three days to set up my server. When it was ready, I tested the bandwidth and had 10 MBit/s.
That is insultingly low. I switched to “GTHost”. They are slightly more pricey, but you get your server in 10 minutes. The bandwidth is also like the promised, so the game runs smoothly.
To test the US server, select the beta-Branch on Steam and select “Beta server” on the login screen. You can then select the US server.
Pit of Elements fight is more deterministic.
I was cooperating with the German streamer realxuffix and the game tester highsky this week. They tested the new level and weapons and had some constructive remarks. The first version of the fight was too random. An overall raid tactic was missing.
You have two camps now. There is the tank camp and the range camp. The range camp will “bait” the stone pillar to determine its position. The vortex always spawns on the tank that doesn’t have aggro. If you have one tank it will spawn on this tank. The tank with the vortex will now move to the stone pillar to eliminate it. Then, the raid moves in a circle for the next pillar ability.
For the ice and fire phase, the tactic is similar. The FireElemental will spawn and fixate a random non-tank player. This player needs to kite him to an IceBlock. But you can also kill them where they stand.
Pit of Elements and Sludge Madness are more performant.
For Pit of Elements, the solution was pretty simple. I turned on “Skinning on GPU”. Promptly, it runs smoothly.
Sludge Madness was more difficult because there were so many targets in it. I figured out that the target highlighter was causing the problems. I use Ultimate Outlines & Highlights. It is easy to use and looks good. But every time you enable a highlighter, it searches the whole scene to find all the others.
I had to change that and keep track of all highlighters myself.
Siphon and Carnage got a Chain Spell.
One of the beta testers honk mentioned that the new daggers don’t feel quite right. He suggested chain spells like in Guild Wars 2. I looked at it and decided to try it out. It feels more dynamic and rewarding.
I implemented a new component that keeps track of the current chain status on the server. When you cast the chain spell, the server sends a new ability-id. So the client can render different icons and descriptions.
You can see the spell icons changing in the spell bar at the bottom.
WaterStream Flood spell optimized.
During the playtest with realxuffix, he also mentioned that the new weapon WaterStream, has a problem. The spell Flood required four global cooldowns to cast. You need to place 3 Water Totems. Only after that, you can cast it.
I changed it to only require one totem and added an area effect around each totem to the spell.
Next steps: Raid ending screen
I will continue testing Pit of Elements and the US servers. In the meantime, I plan to add a proper raid ending screen.
It should contain your experience gains, loot, and statistical information about the raid.
I want to implement some damage and healing diagrams. There should also be insights about your ability damage and healing distribution.
