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Hi everyone, happy new year!

Today, we have a tech update; largely due to the big performance improvements we achieved last year (and there are a few more in this build, too!), I\'ve been able to turn on a feature that I never thought we\'d be able to afford to do:

Players now avoid walking through large scenery objects! This is most notable around trees and various large structures. Note that we only do this for large, solid-looking objects on the ground. They\'ll still quite happily trample straight through your meticulously placed flower beds (sorry not sorry!)

There\'s a big change list this time, so let\'s dig into it!

Changes

• Several performance boosts for large maps, especially when there are a lot of parties in combat on the main map, and double-especially when on the network view!

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• Monster zones, terrain type boundaries, obstructed ground markers, and other terrain markings are now much less visible in most view modes, which gives you a much cleaner view of what you\'re building!

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• Monster zones now remember their original painted shape. While they still reshape themselves around any obstacles within their boundaries, they now restore themselves to their original painted shape if those obstacles are later removed. (previously, holes in the monster zone were left behind where the obstacles used to be)

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• Fixed a bug which was sometimes allowing players and monsters to walk through walls or other obstructions, most commonly during combat while kiting or being kited by an enemy.

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• If a developer has put a building into maintenance mode to fix a bug, you can now overrule them and manually put the building back online, which will cancel the bugfix. (to allow the bug to be fixed later, either put the building back into maintenance mode or else schedule a fix for it from within the Development report\'s bug list)

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• Added the ability to customize the lighting direction in each region. (you could already set color and brightness; now direction is also customizable!)

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• Natural attribute changes (health and mana recovery, rage decay) now happens smoothly, instead of in periodic \'ticks\'. This makes it much more visually distinct from Heal over Time or Damage over Time effects, to make it easier to see what\'s going on.

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• When placing or moving buildings, the tests for collisions between buildings and other obstructions are now substantially more precise.

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• When placing or moving buildings, we now show the building\'s entrance points, including whether they are obstructed or not.

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• If all of a building\'s entrances are obstructed (say, due to impassable scenery items being placed over them), then it now will go into \"Maintenance\" mode until at least one entrance becomes accessible again.

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Bugfixes

• Social and PVP groups now try to avoid forming inside scenery objects.

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• Better navmesh obstructions around walls which have large end pieces (such as castle walls, arid walls, and others)

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• Untangled the Damage over Time and Heal over Time code to make them work much more immediately and reliably.

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• Fixed pathfinding systems sometimes using offline travel buildings when they shouldn\'t have (which would lead to players going to those buildings and then becoming annoyed that they weren\'t working)

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• Fixed handling of \'Maintenance\' modes when multiple developers were fixing multiple bugs on a single object at the same time.

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• Fixed needs not appearing to decay while a player is in a party (and then that decay being applied all at once in a single hit as soon as they left the party).

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• Fixed a single-frame visual glitch which could happen when starting to move a scenery object.

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• Fixed a once-per-run frame rate stutter when opening a character placement or design tool for the first time.

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• Fixed buildings failing to remove grass underneath themselves.

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• Fixed the character \'stun\' animation to play correctly.

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• Small improvements to grass rendering (which should result in fewer cases of grass appearing to \'float\' above steep slopes)

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• Fixed a rare crash around changing resolution or UI scale while on the desktop interface.

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• Fixed 0% \'Weaken\' ability effects being displayed in the UI as if they were 0% \'Protect\' ability effects.

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• Fixed a few bugs about the handling of regions which contained no walkable ground.

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• Fixed a bug which caused subscriber \'need\' decay to be accumulated when in a party and then be applied all at once upon leaving the party, instead of applying it in real time while still in the party.

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It\'s been a short creativity spike this time, as I\'m eager to get moving on the upcoming major Factions feature -- I\'ll be sharing details about the design and implementation of that new feature soon!

In other news, the community art pack poll over on our Discord server has concluded with \"Eldritch\" being the big winner, so Liam has begun digging into interpreting what that\'d look like in our art style! No immediate announcement about when it\'ll be completed, but it\'s coming! (And I imagine it\'s what Liam\'s going to be focused on while I power away on Factions!)

Anyway, as always I want to send huge thanks to everyone for your feedback, your bug reports, and your support! We\'ll talk again soon.

-T