Hey folks! Today Ill be talking about auras. When we first introduced auras, they had a very simple visual representation that simply highlighted all tiles under its influence with a transparent tile overlay. When I received requests for making the auras have nicer visuals, I added two separate controllers: one for the center tile and another for each affected tile. At that time, all we could do for auras was plonk a particle emitter to these two controllers, which is what you will have seen when using Hallow or seeing Thorntoad's Miasma. During development after that, we added some extra capabilities for general visuals which include something we call geometric particles. This is a fancy name for saying "a static model with a shader on it that animates over time", but it's shorter and more to the point. One of the issues we saw reported during early access so far was that tiles were too hard to see when there were multiple auras in play. Examples are Hallow and Miasma and maybe Rolands Horn auras at the same time in the same area.
image by brubie from our Discord It is impossible to see anything under those tiles because the auras are using per tile particle emitters which are drowning the tiles in too many particles. It was also impossible to see the edges of cast or effect areas when using Abilities in the tiles covered by auras. One of my ideas (that I never really had time to implement) was to add a hotkey that either hides the particles while pressed or makes the waypoint lines and area outlines visible through the particles. Thankfully, Robert proposed a much nicer solution. We're removing particle emitters from all auras and replacing them with geometric particles. This should neatly solve the visibility issues, which makes auras that much less of a pain to look at. It also makes it clear where the auras are originating from.
new Hallow Abominations will have their own separate aura visuals, and there are separate visuals for buffs (like the gif) and debuffs for human auras. Mechanically, auras are in a bit of a weird spot. The way they work is by calculating the tiles they affect, then find all units inside those tiles, then filter out units that they cannot affect. The remaining units get a status effect that is controlled by that aura. One issue we had at launch was that the status effect creation didn't properly account for existing status effects which weren't aura controlled. This could result in the aura "creating" a status effect that was actually merged with an existing status effect on that unit which wasn't aura controlled (due to i.e. content reuse). This didn't update the state of that status effect to being aura controlled, which caused the effect to potentially decay and expire, leaving the aura with an invalid status effect reference. This issue was found soon after release and fixed the following week. The other issue (which makes me say they're in a weird spot) was created only recently when we made auras have power that can scale the stack count of applied status effects. When a unit uses a skill that creates an aura that the unit already has, the second aura gets merged into the first one (otherwise, you'd have two auras of the same type). This means it's possible for the second aura invocation to increase/decrease its power, depending on how the unit attributes affect the power of the aura. Unfortunately, we don't update the status effects applied by the existing aura. If a unit leaves the aura influence and comes back, it would get a new status effect that is updated for the new aura power. I plan to change this in the future so that auras don't actually create unique status effects on each unit in the area, but rather link the unit to being affected by the aura directly. The aura would be a single source of information about what it is doing. This also prevents any possible cases of an accidental merging of status effects from different auras or merging status effect with mismatched "aura controlled" state. This will essentially remove the snapshotting aspect of auras (use this information as you will until I fix it) and prevent issues like the first one ever happening. The visual updates to auras will go out in the patch today. The mechanical fixes will be done as soon as I get to it. Thanks for reading, and join our Discord server if you wanna chat with us. MarkoP