20,137
edits
Changes
Added comments from 2020.
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==== Chat Logging for VIP? ====
: The option to enable chat logging has *always* been clearly marked as being eventually VIP-only in the special settings documentation. Same with book-save-to-file. So we haven't changed anything about our plans, we're just finally getting ready to launch VIP and giving these features proper UI toggles.
:: 3/25/2020
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2807-Update-Discussion-March-25-2021&p=20033#post20033
==== Can I have more than six abilities? ====
:We've discussed this one many times and this is definitely not going to happen, sorry! You're limited to six abilities from a skill for balance reasons. I want the choice of which abilities you use to be agonizingly hard, not trivial. And of course if you could use all the abilities at once I would have to rebalance them quite differently, because they're balanced around you not having them all.
:: 2/28/2021
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2787-Suggestion-More-flexible-combat-ability-bars&p=19893#post19893
==== Augmentation Changes ====
:Yeah, we can definitely improve augmentation. It shouldn't work differently for NPCs versus players, so we need to choose whether NPCs attune items, or whether players don't attune items... but there are pros and cons for each direction. The knee-jerk is to just remove the attunement, but I *am* worried about hand-me-down uber weapons. It's not a problem yet, but that's only because we don't have max-level gear yet. We will have max-level gear eventually, and I'm sure hand-me-downs will be a problem, because it has always been a problem in every other MMO with unattuned gear (unless the game has item decay, which we don't).
:So I'm not sure what approach to take -- I don't really like either of those options, so I've been punting the problem until there's new inspiration. I'm sorry it's been confusing and surprising! We'll get a more coherent solution in place soon. Maybe by giving augmented items an "attune-on-next-equip" flag or something like that.
:As for shamanic infusion, that's one where I reserve the right to sometimes make weird skills. Leveling this skill is basically an alternative to using augments, but they're only for shamanic infusers. Infusions make the equipment arcane and unwieldy (that's what happens when you glue a dozen enchanted lizard tails into your helmet!), and only people with the right training can use it. That's just how the skill works...I see no need to turn it into yet another "everybody can use this" crafting skill.
:: 2/28/2021
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2786-Suggestion-Make-equipment-enhancement-more-streamlined-and-accessible&p=19891#post19891
==== Controller Support ====
:We had some game-controller support early on for movement and cameras, but maintaining it involved a lot of "moving targets" in terms of supporting individual controllers well, and at some point it broke and we didn't get around to fixing it back up. Now that we're more deeply integrated with Steam, I'm tentatively hoping to expose a lot of the game's functionality to the Steam Input System, which will let people set up custom Steam Input profiles and share them with each other. That's not on my immediate radar, however... we're bogged down in other stuff at the moment. But I do think basic controller support is important and will eventually happen.
:(Probably never going to get to "full" controller support for all the many UI windows in the game, though, meaning that you'll probably always need to use a mouse-cursor to select items in your inventory, etc. But Steam input will at least let you move the mouse-cursor with a controller, albeit awkwardly.)
:: 1/31/2021
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?1276-Anyone-play-with-a-controller&p=19790#post19790
==== Sounds & Volume ====
:Looks like srand is doing some volume tweaks based on this thread, so if there's a really loud sound you hate, please let us know here now! (The more specific you can be, the better.)
:Background info: the master volume DOES affect every sound. But there are still lots of mixing problems because the raw wavefiles of each sound can have any volume, and some are naturally louder than others. We've coded a way to fix that by manually lowering the volume on specific sound effects... but it requires us to manually tweak each sound individually.
:It's also possible that some sounds are being played as "2D" sounds instead of as "3D" sounds, which means the sound has the same maximal volume no matter how far away the source is. That's another thing we can fix, but we have to manually set the appropriate setting for the sound.
:Volume is also a fairly subjective and complicated thing -- headphones versus speakers, ambient noise vs. music, etc. So I doubt we'll ever have a perfect volume, but hopefully your reports will help us fix the really jarringly loud ones.
:(Also, I did make the boss warning screens intentionally loud and terrifying... but I think Sandra's veto'ed that, so it'll be softer next update.)
:: 1/3/2021
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2708-Warning-Danger-ahead!&p=19675#post19675
==== Animation System, Pets, Wipe Target ====
:The animation system probably won't have any direct impact on your pets. But getting to the underlying concern, yes, we will be replacing the visual appearances of most pets in the future, but no, that won't cause them to be wiped. Your pets will just suddenly look different.
:As for resetting during wipe, I don't know for sure; we haven't made any decisions there, but I hadn't anticipated wiping them.
:(Edit to add: the "wipe" being referred to is an item-wipe to help make the game's economy work better with an influx of new players. This is planned to happen when the game leaves Early Access. The soonest we could realistically leave Early Access would be December 2021, and that's if we hit all our milestones this year. Last year was not a great year for us, both for understandable business reasons (our contractors didn't make all their art deliverables) and personal "holy shit this year sucks" reasons, so leaving Early Access in 2021 will require this year to not suck as badly. Long story short... I wouldn't count the days until the economy wipe, because it's a long ways away.)
:: 1/3/2021
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2751-Animal-Handling&p=19674#post19674
==== Hide NPC Options ====
:We may do that with Do Favors... we've gone back and forth there. It's tricky to code, because NPCs are driven by code scripts, and some of them handle favors differently. So it's not simply a UI tweak. But it's probably a good idea.
:With Training we probably won't do that, because it's important for players to be able to see what the NPC eventually offers.
:: 12/28/2020
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2748-NPC-UI-Request&p=19655#post19655
==== Butchering Organ, Fat chances ====
: Hmm. I've just looked over the code and data, and it looks okay. There's been no changes in source control, so it's still the same chance it's always been. There could of course be bugs, but I don't see any in the butchering code flow. It's pretty simple, so let me go through how it works. I'll use Barghests here, although Snow Oxen are the same (except slightly easier butchering check, 73 instead of 80). Fae bears and fae panthers are also similar.
:Animal fat *is* an organ, so an organ knife does help. Your chances for an organ are 3% for every 9 points of the relevant anatomy skill, plus any item bonus. So if you have a level 45+ anatomy skill and Amutasa's +7% organ knife, you would have a 22% chance for an organ. Barghests have five different organs (stomach, brain, heart, spleen, tier-4 animal fat) so if you get an organ from one, you have a 1-in-5, or 20%, chance of getting a fat. That amounts to... (0.22*0.2=0.044) a 4.4% chance to get fat from a Barghest.
:I've also double-checked the fae bear and panther, and this is true for them also, except that they drop tier-3 fat. (The bear is a level 80 butcher and the panther level 73.) The butchering difficulty level doesn't always match the product result right now. It will make more sense eventually, when we have lots more high-level monsters to spread the loot out on, but right now it's a bit messy. Also, note that fae panthers are fae anatomy, not cat anatomy. But fae bears are bear anatomy, not fae anatomy.
:It's important to note that if you fail the first butchering skill check ("botch the butchering"), it won't even roll to see if you get an organ, so having Butchering as high as possible is important.
:Anyway, 4% seems about right for a rare crafting resource that's supposed to have some trade value. Randomness is streaky, but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be 4% given a large enough sample size.
:In any case, the way it's coded right now doesn't give me an easy place to tweak the numbers, it just falls out of the organ harvesting system. When the anatomy level caps go up, the organ-harvesting rate would shoot up... but I think this would make organ harvesting too easy, and I'll need to rethink about how all these systems scale. (That's why I haven't raised the anatomy level caps yet.)
:Edit 2: it may be possible to raise some anatomy skills to level 54 with synergy bonuses, and this would give you +3% more chance for organs. The server simply divides your skill by 9, rounds down, and multiplies the result by 3, so your skill level is all that matters. I mention this because anatomy skills don't have labels that go above 50, so there's no "Butchery yields rare meat or organs: +3%" at level 54... but those labels are just to make the system more understandable to players. The server doesn't care.
:: 12/28/2020
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2747-Butchering-result-of-animal-fats&p=19653#post19653
==== Screen Flashing ====
: Hmm, yeah I see it now. And I'm sorry to say I don't have any good ideas here. It looks like the GUI is freaking out, but those are just standard Unity UI elements. I can say it's definitely not directly caused by a game setting. (The "screen flash" referred to by DisableScreenFlash makes the entire screen flash a solid color, and only during combat when you take damage. Internally, it briefly shows a whole-screen UI element.) My best guess is the video card is running out of memory. Does this happen if you reduce the graphics quality to extremely low levels?
:: 12/8/2020
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2737-Graphical-glitches&p=19598#post19598
==== Deer Tricks ====
:Thanks for the feedback! I'm still reviewing it. Wanted to mention, though, there's a couple of "tricks" to the Deer skill which aren't obvious from looking at it. One of them is pretty important, and I'll work to make it more obvious in-game: your pet deer's attacks are internally all considered Deer Kicks. This was specifically done so that the mod that applies from "future Deer Kicks by any deer" works with the pet's attacks -- and in fact the pet's version works much better than the player's for this purpose, since its version of Deer Kick has a much faster reset time than the player version.
:Another "trick" of the deer is that it has two knockback-on-stun mods, which stack. This was intentional, I think -- it was done long ago, and I don't remember. It's not usually very helpful to stack knockbacks. But deer is the only skill that can... so it feels like a nerf to take it out. But I probably will.
:Still working on this skill; compared to Ice Magic, it's very difficult to tweak into a good place.
:: 12/6/2020
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2729-Deer-and-all-things-Doe-related&p=19581#post19581
==== Ice Magic, Deer ====
:Thanks for the feedback! I've finished most of the upcoming changes to Ice Magic, and a surprising number of your suggestions are in-line with the changes I've made -- which tells me I'm probably on the right track. I'm especially fond of the new Cryogenic Freeze: it will be toggleable, and it also has a new scaled-up ice cube graphic to make it really obvious when used. And it's just kind of inherently fun to use now.
:Now that you've done an easy skill, try something tougher: a similar write-up on the Deer skill!
:(Edit: that's mostly a joke at Deer's expense -- I've already made a bunch of changes to the skill for the next update. But I would definitely love to know what, if anything, Deer players love about their skill, to make sure I'm not accidentally destroying it!)
:: 11/24/2020
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2728-Ice-magic-related-thoughts-and-suggestions&p=19542#post19542
==== Player Stalls ====
:We just don't have enough room for every player to have a permanent stall. Right now we're at a relatively low population ebb (player population has raised and lowered over the course of development many times... mostly unpredictably), but even at this relatively quiet point in time, we have over 1000 active players each week... and something like 200 vendor stalls. So that just doesn't scale. The fees are intended to force you to give up your stall for a while each month, or else pay a huge fee. I want people to be able to rent a stall for at least a week each month, even when populations go back up.
:I'm open to other suggestions here, but I don't think the fee structure is the problem; it's a solution to a different problem, so to speak.
:: 11/17/2020
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2725-Player-vendor-stalls&p=19511#post19511
==== "Regrow the City" Systems ====
:We talked about doing this for Halloween, actually. But it was cut due to art time.
:My experience with permanent "regrow the city" systems in AC2 was pretty informative. It took a lot of art time to make all the different visual tiers of workstations -- two artists spent several full months on just those. And then they were mostly irrelevant after a couple months: players cranked the cities up to the highest tiers, and kept the workstations up pretty well, so most of that art was never seen again. That's fine for a game with a multi-million dollar art budget like AC2, but it seems wasteful to me here.
:So I think the way we'll end up doing "grow the thing" mechanics is as a weekend-long live event, not as a longer-term installations. That way the "low-quality" versions will eventually get used again, and the art expectations for brief live events is a little lower anyway but there's a gotcha there: during beta, it's hard to predict how many people will be online in a given month, let alone a given weekend. If we set the bar too high, the live event will be frustrating. If we set it too low, it'll be trivial. So we'll have to do some experiments there, but I'm guessing we won't see a ton of this type of content until after the game leaves beta.
:: 11/16/2020
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2709-Rebuild-quests&p=19499#post19499
==== Broken Mods, Rabbit Ability Themes ====
:Thanks for the feedback! I noticed your comment about broken mods in the other thread, and I'm sad that I missed a broken mod. I didn't see it in the database. As a general rule I try to fix treasure mods pretty quickly (because they're mostly just data errors), so if something remains broken for several months, please feel free to re-report it. We get a lot of bug reports in-game and most are invalid (which is pretty normal -- for instance, many new players report the broken golem in the newbie-island dungeon as being bugged, because its running against the wall... but that's intentional). So unfortunately we can miss bug reports sometimes, especially if its interspersed with balance feedback -- feedback goes into a separate channel, so it's easiest for us if bug-reports and feedback-reports are sent separately. I'm not sure what happened in this particular case, but anyway, thank you for the bug report!
:I wanted to ask you for ideas about new ability themes you'd like to see. In this case, I mean the "fiction" of the ability. I'm frankly out of ideas for Rabbit-themed abilities, which is why some of them are kind of blah. So if you have some, please share! Rabbit is partly a solo-survival skill, and partly a DPS skill. (And Rabbit's Foot is its sole group buff.) So I guess we'd be looking for either survival or attack abilities.
:: 11/16/2020
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2723-Rabbit-related-thoughts-and-issues&p=19498#post19498
==== Percentage Mitigation, Flat Mitigation, Scaling ====
:Great feedback so far! I'll try to answer some questions here. Instead of specifically replying, though, I'm going to paraphrase your questions into my answers. That way people don't need to read the entire thread to follow what I'm saying.
:Percentage Mitigation, Flat Mitigation, Scaling
Percentage mitigation is insanely powerful, which makes it great as a baseline for tanking. But it scales too well -- there's no room to grow. If your ability gives you 26% mitigation at level 75, where do we go for an encore? In the case of Bulwark Mode, we're looking at 27% mitigation at level 100... is it exciting to level up 25 times in order to gain +1% damage mitigation? I don't think so, but that's the best I can do there. But then we have to look at treasure. None of Bulwark Mode's treasure can boost that percentage at all: it would be too powerful, allowing lower-level players to tank much higher-level creatures than they should. Instead, the treasure has to boost mitigation by a flat amount. This way, you need to keep finding better treasure as you level up.
:Flat mitigation on players makes a lot of sense because monster damage scales almost linearly. (This is very different from player damage, which has multiplicative elements, so mitigation on monsters is much less powerful.) For instance, a level 75 "Carnivine" has +97 damage boost. If it was a level 70 monster, the damage would be +89 instead. If it was level 100 it'd be +143. This monster is a wuss, but you get the point -- these are smallish numbers that increase at a relatively modest pace.
:That's true for both solo monsters and Elite monsters -- Elites obviously hit harder, but their damage scales slowly with level. So with some number-massaging, I should be able to make flat mitigation the main form of mitigation.
:Giving out tons of flat mitigation does create new problems. I'm especially worried about granting literal invincibility against lower-level monsters. You can see that already with Staff: if you go back and fight newbie monsters, they simply can never hurt you. I don't like this design and will need to fix it with new mechanics.
:One mechanic I'm considering to fight over-mitigation is something from Asheron's Call 2 I called "armor chipping". Here's how it worked: if an attack would be mitigated to below 25% of its original value, then a random amount of the damage (between 1% and 25%, rolled randomly for each attack) would "bleed through". So no matter how good your armor was, you would still take an average of 12% of the damage from the attack (plus or minus 12%). So you could still be "chipped" to death by lots of smaller creatures.
:This did help prevent overmitigation in AC2 (which is especially problematic in a PvP game), although it wasn't terribly popular with player tanks, who really like seeing "no damage" floating above their heads. But anyway, even if we don't use this particular system, we'll definitely need a few new mechanics to help with balance problems.
:Long story short: I've always been pretty hesitant to give out meaningful amounts of mitigation because of the abusability of it for farming lowbie monsters. But I think flat mitigation -- in large amounts! -- is going to be necessary to make high-level group combat work. So... we'll just have to make it work! That probably means changing monster damage, and adding new systems to prevent abusability, and who knows what else.
:Not all Bosses/Elites are Useful Data Points for Tanking
It's dangerous to do too much theorycrafting against the most powerful monsters in the game. Zukelmux is probably the best example -- he was made specifically to stump players. He's harder than anything I thought players could handle with level 70 equipment alone, and I expected players to need all sorts of special items and tricks to survive it.
:Having this fight in the game was a very useful data point for me, but it's not one I'm trying to maintain forever. In fact, Zuke is destined to get a pretty hard nerf eventually. (I kind of tipped my hand about that when he was included in a daily Aurest quest.) He'll still be really hard to kill, but he probably won't deal as much damage as he does now.
:It's also important to realize that monsters can serve different roles, and you aren't supposed to be able to tank them all! The "Multipurpose Utility Elementals" in the newest dungeon are a good example. They have an opening move that sprays acid which will shred armor in seconds. But that's their opening move, and then they can't use it again for 30 seconds. And it does no health damage... so... one simple solution is: don't tank that! Let an off-tank pull it and get hit by the acid, then let a tank take over.
:In that case, I tried to make the acid powerful enough to force players to think creatively. Maybe it needs to be more potent, I dunno. But the point is that there are lots of Elite and Bosses with gimmicks, and they need to have different solutions besides "take the damage in the face and laugh because I have insane mitigation". I mean, sometimes that's what's needed, sometimes not.
:(And I realize many of the current monster gimmicks just don't work, because the numbers aren't quite right, or something about it just didn't end up mattering to players. In those cases, I'll try to fix the numbers to make their gimmick work. That will help make combat more interesting.)
:Other Stuff
:"If a piece of gear is eligible for discounted Transmutation, all the mods on the item should be eligible, not just the particular skills that have changed." I like this idea and I think it makes sense. Probably can't implement that overnight, but will at some point in the future.
:"What about abuse by kiting mobs or AoE burst-killing them?" I think a good first step in fixing these problems is to make the monsters live longer so they have more opportunities to react. So that's the step I'm focused on. After that, if something is still too cheesy... well, we'll have to fix it one way or another, depending on the exact details.
:"Kitchen Sink" reminder: I mentioned this in the last update thread, too. I'm throwing the kitchen sink at the problem, meaning I'm going to try out a few different game systems and see what's fun. That's what Bulwark Mode is. It was actually slated as a special tool just for dwarves. The Dwarven Stalwarts are referenced in the game a few times -- Bulwark Mode was originally going to be "Stalwart Mode." But dwarves are a long way off, and this system seems too useful to be limited to one race. Maybe. We'll see how it all pans out.
Numbers will change! I was working on the numbers for this update right up until the evening before we launched it, never quite happy with them. I'm pretty sure I overdid it with Staff flat mitigation, and maybe in other places, too. None of those numbers are locked in. I'm just trying to quickly shift overall tanking balance in the right direction, which will mean some skills are overpowered for a bit. Please remind players that this isn't permanent; I don't want players to get the wrong idea and and make a Staff build specifically because it's overpowered right now, and then be disappointed when it's nerfed a month later. So if you see people talking about it, please help remind players of the eventual plans.
:I had more to say about specific details, but we're really getting into the weeds, so I'll stop for now. Please keep the feedback coming!
:: 11/10/2020
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2715-Update-Discussion-November-6-2020&p=19462#post19462
==== Longer Lasting Combat ====
:Thanks for everyone's ideas! I am taking some notes and I hope people feel free to continue to talk about this topic. It's a very valuable discussion here.
:I think my next step will be to do another round of "make combat last longer" changes. This includes both group and solo combat. I've been extremely cautious about doing this in the past, because it will most heavily impact players with weak gear sets. (If you have tremendous burst DPS, you'd still probably be able to burst-kill solo creatures even if they had twice as much health/armor as they do now.) In the short term, that's awkward, because it reinforces the "rich get richer" problem with DPS. But I think I need to make those broader combat-duration changes first, before I start hacking on mods and skill systems.
:My plan will be to make players generally more tanky, and to offer new mechanisms to increase survivability. I have a handful of ideas, from mods to new game mechanics... and I'll probably throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. We'll iterate quickly and do weekly updates to try to massage everything.
:After that, we can come back to the "too many DPS mods" problem with a different vantage point.
:: 10/22/2020
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2694-Update-Discussion-October-15-2020&p=19361#post19361
==== High Level Balance ====
:I've talked about this before, but to catch people up, here's some background on where we are with high level balance.
:I'm moving small pieces of the balance equation around to try to make the game work better, like tweaking Power curves to help reinforce ability roles. Ultimately, though, the elephant in the room is that players can have way, WAY too many offensive treasure mods at once. Until I fix that problem, these other fixes will seem weird, because they aren't fixing the core problem.
:The core problem from a player's POV can be summed up as "I don't need to defend myself if I can finish combat in 4.1 seconds". This playstyle means you are more than willing to drop defense in order to hit the magic DPS level where everything is trivial. And if something is higher, you just die.
:This is very poor game design that gets worse and worse at high level, and I have to fix it, but I don't know the precise way to fix it. That's why I'm fixing small parts of the equation, seeing how it affects things, and trying to figure out the best approach. Ultimately the change will be a severe nerf, and I would like to get it right the first time.
:My knee-jerk idea was to just reduce the total number of treasure mods you can have on at once. But now I'm thinking maybe a new mechanic that forces players to take a certain % of defensive mods. (Say 40%.) I don't have a mechanic for that in mind, but one easy approach would be to make all the mods on certain slots (say chest, legs, necklace) be defense/survival. That's awkward for pure DPS skills, though, because their defense/survival mods would be crappy. But maybe that's fine. Actually that's probably for the best.
:Anyway, I realize nobody likes being nerfed, but I really don't have the ability to present fun and exciting battles to high-level players right now. I can present fun and exciting battles to the top 5% of players, sure. But everybody else will get wrecked, because the top few percent of players can deal, what, maybe 500% more damage than the average player with crap mods? That's really fun for advancement as a player because you can slowly see yourself getting MUCH more powerful. But it's just too big of a power differential for us to create content for, and you will quickly find the game un-fun because nothing is challenging. (Or else it would be un-fun up until the end, because everything would be balanced to be too hard until you finished your 70-mod treasure set.)
:It's my fault for letting the balance problem get out of hand, but I do have to fix it, and I will. Expect to see more small nerfs as I work things out, as well as at least one major nerf as I restructure the game to allow it to be balanceable and fun.
:There will be more info about that nerf before it comes, so you won't be blindsided by it. I'm not sure when it will happen because I don't know what it is. So far I haven't found an approach that makes me go "aha, that's it!" The closest solution I have is forcing certain slots to be defense/support mods, but that will be very weird for some combat skills. I'm still hopeful that there's a cleverer solution.
:(And, of course, rebalancing players means rebalancing monsters. Monster rebalancing is much, much easier than player rebalancing, though -- since monsters don't use mods! Monster balance can be changed around as much as needed to fit where player DPS ultimately ends up.)
:: 10/18/2020
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2694-Update-Discussion-October-15-2020&p=19320#post19320
==== "Your Inventory is Full" message ====
: thank you for the feedback. The "your inventory is full" message is probably caused by an item with a max-allowance. In other words, it's "your inventory is full [of the special item this chest drops]". So you don't need whatever plot token is in that chest since you already had one. The messaging for plot-items can obviously be improved, and I'll try to do that next time I'm working on the inventory system.
:: 10/12/2020
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2653-Update-Discussion-September-10-2020&p=19284#post19284
==== API? Character Sheet? ====
:We do have plans for an API, but the "character dump" type functionality is probably not going to happen until post-launch. There's a lot of other "API-esque" stuff that has higher priority, like integrating with 3rd-party apps (such as Discord). But I expect it will eventually happen.
:I like the idea of a "character sheet" in-game option, though. That seems interesting and (probably) relatively easy.
:: 10/12/2020
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2686-Is-there-an-open-API-Project-Gorgon-API&p=19283#post19283
==== Walking Through Textures ====
:I've been thinking about this one, and I don't really have much insight to offer... it seems like it's basically broken Unity's rendering. The most likely culprit really would be a driver (or other software on your machine, like BIOS-based performance enhancers or some kind of "graphics accelerator" software that's not tuned right for this game). But since you've mostly ruled that stuff out, my next guess is a bad collection of game settings. Perhaps if your camera clipping point was flung forward and the low-res terrain was enabled on otherwise-high-res settings... well, the results wouldn't really match what you're seeing... but would give you something kind of similar. So I would try deleting your game settings to see if it helps. It's a file in your user account's public file area, you may need to enable the Explorer option to see hidden directories to see your "AppData" folder. It's here:
:C:\Users\(accountname)\AppData\LocalLow\Elder Game\Project Gorgon\GorgonSettings.txt
:Just delete or rename that file and the game will create a new one next time you run. Next time you start the game, turn off the "Auto-Adjust Quality Level" option in the graphics settings, and just set the game on Good graphics with no overrides... let's see if that fixes the problem!
:: 9/29/2020
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2673-Walking-through-ground-textures-(hills-trees-mountains)&p=19164#post19164
==== Crafting Caravan Item Upgrade Test ====
:Changed the wording to prevent people worrying about being banned over it. Obviously it's a less-than-ideal situation where the tech doesn't match up with our needs yet. But that happens sometimes during development. So we're asking people who barter for higher-tier versions of old items to not sell or trade them. Please gift them to an NPC or destroy them for materials if you don't want them.
:: 9/24/2020
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2671-Discussion-Crafting-Caravan-September-25-2020&p=19138#post19138
==== Fat Drops ====
:@user - that's an interesting take. I admit I haven't really considered leaving it as-is, because it makes it impossible for me to do specialty encounters -- "you MUST do this" type thing. I don't want to do that all the time, but with a boss like (the ghostly one) in this update, I don't really want him to be affected by, say, blood loss. But eh, maybe it's fine. Magic is magical.
:@user - fat drops are based on the monster's level and their anatomy type. Herbivorous animals (such as Ungulates) have the best of all of the resources: skins, meat, organs. Carnivores have the worst. And omnivores are somewhere in between. But that said, it does look like the specialty monsters in the Fae Realm (which amounts to nearly all the monsters in the Fae Realm) are missing parts of their butchering profile. Will take a look at that now.
:: 9/16/2020
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2653-Update-Discussion-September-10-2020&p=19086#post19086
==== Game update feedback ====
:Thanks for the feedback, please keep it coming! A couple bits of info to add:
:- RE: new framerate problems in low-density areas: I'm not really sure where that would be coming from. We didn't have graphics changes in the last update, at least, not intentionally. We'll be looking for a culprit.
:- RE: debuffing monsters' vulnerability: the way it works now is just a limitation of the implementation and will eventually be a true multiplicative. In other words, if you make a monster take 20% more Fire damage, and they normally take 0% fire damage, 0%+20%=0%. Doesn't work that way yet (in all cases), but it will.
:- RE: new bosses: they ARE actually easier than the final boss of Gazluk Keep. I was worried I set the bar too high there in terms of how much damage I expect a group of 6 people to be able to generate. And really, it's just hard to figure out where the difficulty point should be, so this time around I decided to err on the easier end. But if most people think they're pushovers, I'll probably bump them up a notch in the next update.
:Also, the captain encounter is supposed to be a forced-multi-pull encounter: if you aggro any of those three elites, you should always get all of them. New tech, and obviously not working out well enough yet, but I'll do some more work to fix that also.
:: 9/14/2020
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2653-Update-Discussion-September-10-2020&p=19072#post19072
==== Event feedback, performance ====
:Look, guys, I really appreciate feedback, and it's part of the reason we do those events, so thanks! Just please keep things in perspective: this isn't the first boss invasion, and it won't be the last. Each time we try to improve the experience. Then we iterate. Over and over and over.
:I know that performance problems seem so easy to fix from the outside. But I'm working on hundreds of thousands of lines of code, built atop an ever-changing graphics engine, and trying to support 3 operating systems and an infinite number of hardware configurations. So it's hard work, is what I'm saying. But performance IS getting better, and the proof is in the pudding: my 5-year-old test card now gets 60fps in Serbule Hills, when a year ago, it struggled to get into the 30s.
:Performance is getting better for most people. If it's not getting better for you, I'm sorry. It's not for lack of trying.
:So what happens next? Before the next boss battle event we'll have more changes to the particle system to try to improve perf there. Then we'll try again, and again. And again.
:And I totally get it if that plan doesn't work for you! But this is the only real path forward for me. So if you've had enough, I hope you'll come back some time soon when you have newer PC hardware, and I'm sorry it didn't work out.
:: 9/14/2020
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2658-I-know-it-is-JUST-me&p=19071#post19071
==== "You are already logged in" ====
:It's your route to the server: it's not staying stable. When you get the "you are already logged in" message, it means the server didn't disconnect you, and it was waiting for your client to communicate with it, when your client disappeared abruptly. The TCP stream was severed at some point between the client and the server. I don't have more information about what is disconnecting you, but it's not directly due to the game itself, and there's nothing in the patch that would cause this. It's networking problems. The 'net has been pretty shitty for me in other games this week, so give it a day to get better. I don't really have much else I can do in the short term.
:(BTW, it's supposed to let you log back in immediately, but there's a problem with the Steam integration that prevents it. So after you get the "you were already logged in" message, you have to restart the game again. But you'll be able to log in immediately after that. I'm sorry about that.)
:Edited to add: if you have a VPN service, try playing the game through it. This will give you a different route to our host address, and will often circumvent the problem in your normal route.
:: 9/13/2020
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2656-What-is-going-on-with-the-game-for-me&p=19058#post19058
==== Low-Res mode ====
:That's very weird. I don't know what's happening. Try starting the game in "force low-res" mode by holding down the CTRL key on your keyboard on the character-select screen. (The "Enter World" button will change to "Enter World FORCE LOW-RES".) That will hopefully rule out any graphics-related issues.
:: 9/6/2020
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2648-Strange-issue-can-t-interact-with-world-but-can-see-chat&p=19026#post19026
==== Death Penalty ====
:Hmm, I do remember hearing about a game where after a certain number of deaths, you were dead forever. I don't recall which game that was... but definitely not this one, sorry! Long ago we did discuss various death penalty options on the now-defunct elder game blog, and ultimately settled on the "hardcore" item-break mode.
:These days, we do have some players who like to create their own restrictions for their alts, and I've started adding game tools to help them (use the chat command /behavior to see the optional restrictions we track). So I'm sometimes tempted to add a "true" permadeath mode for those crazy players... but it'd probably be after 1 death, or maybe 10... 1000 seems high to me!
:: 9/1/2020
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2644-Was-there-a-limit-on-number-of-deaths&p=19002#post19002
==== More emotes? ====
:Yeah, we do plan to flesh out the set of emotes in the future! (There are some technical bottlenecks -- I'm trying not to add new humanoid animations until after we make some other technical changes.)
:In the short term, I'll see if I can change the textual messaging of /wave when you have another player selected.
:: 8/31/2020
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2642-More-positive-emotes&p=18997#post18997
==== PC Partner Preference ====
:Yeah, I don't see why it wouldn't be open to other races, will rework the dialog a bit.
:Internally, that question is really just a way for the game to ask you (the player) what gender you'd want your "background romantic NPC" to have, when they eventually show up. If you choose the elf option saying you don't know what sex they'd be, the game just flips a coin for you! So I wasn't really thinking of this as a "what sexual preference does your character have" question, although from a player's point of view it obviously is, so the jokey elf option seems a bit too flippant
:: 8/18/2020
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2626-PC-Partner-Preference&p=18917#post18917
==== P2W VIP? ====
:It really depends on your definition of P2W. The VIP plan will include some extra storage space, probably a little bit of bonus inventory space, maybe extra stable slots, etc. Stuff like that does make the game easier and it could be considered P2W by some people.
:But in the sense of the term that I think you mean, no: the VIP plan won't make you literally more powerful than other players. No special high-end gear or VIP-only mods or anything like that. It's important to me that the VIP plan always feels entirely optional.
:: 7/22/2020
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2606-What-are-the-future-plans-for-monetization&p=18802#post18802
==== Settings file reset ====
:RE: Spirit Fox movement - not intentional. Will be like other small animals (e.g. Rabbit form) after a fix.
:RE: Copying over your settings file -- yes, it's possible. You can rename the old file as the new file, and it will load those settings, they're the same basic format. The danger is that for some players, you'll log in with now-invalid graphics settings, and you'll have a black screen, unplayable resolution (640x480) or other weird problems. But for "most" players I think it would work out fine... so you can try and see! If it turns out to be unplayable, just delete the settings file and let it make a new one.
:Note that some settings, like your chat settings, can't possibly be saved, because the format changed. But manually copying your settings file WILL definitely save your keyboard bindings, because that part hasn't changed between the settings files. That's the part I wish I'd managed to retain, but for logistics reasons, we just couldn't.
:: 7/17/2020
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2599-Update-Discussion-July-16-2020&p=18761#post18761
==== Beast Forms at Release ====
:It's still a ways away, but the general plan is to wipe all Effects on the player, which will undo any animal forms, as well as all other curses, buffs, and debuffs. But you raise an interesting dilemma that will be shared by a few other animal forms. We might be able to squeeze something in for those cases, it'll depend on how the details shake out when we get closer to that point.
:: 7/11/2020
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2590-Beast-forms-and-Game-Release&p=18732#post18732
==== Fletching ====
:I don't want to make changes to fletching that would make it pointless. If I did, I would also need to make archery less versatile and impactful, because the skill's balance takes the difficulty of fletching (and to a lesser extent, having to carry all that ammo) into account. The down side of ammunition is why the skill can be simultaneously super versatile and super damaging.
:I wouldn't make fletching pointless anyway, because who wins with that? "I'm a fletcher. I make arrows that add +1 damage and nobody cares." If fletching isn't relevant then I don't want it in the game. We'd just do "imagination arrows" like every other MMO, and I'd rebalance accordingly. But before we throw the entire design out, why not help me make it work as intended? Why not order some arrows from people? There's a work order board. Why don't archers use it to order tons of arrows?
:And the weird answer seems to be, in part, because of the sort of person attracted to archery. Because moreso than other skills, archers tend to REFUSE to buy arrows. Sure, there aren't a ton of vendors, but there are more than zero, and if there was a market there would be more sellers. But archers can make them cheaper themselves, and don't want to pay. So... there's no market. How do I fix this? I don't know, but I can tell that "make fletching pointless so there's no need for a market" is not a very good fix.
:But the answer is also definitely NOT "make them so trivial to make that every man, woman, and child is selling arrows." Because, again, you wouldn't buy arrows. You'd just make them yourself because they're trivial. The skill would be pointless.
:It's a hard problem, so if you have ideas on how to fix it, without just killing the problem entirely by nullifying its importance, then I'm all ears!
:: 7/3/2020
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2582-Are-there-plans-to-make-Fletching-less-painful&p=18682#post18682
==== Giant Monster bug ====
:Found the problem with monster scaling! It has to do with how numbers are formatted on your machine -- for instance, if you're in a country that formats the number "1.5" as "1,5" then... it's broken for you. Heh.
:I've got it fixed here, and there will be a new beta build up this evening or early tomorrow. In the short term you can switch your OS to US English before running the game; this will make things work for you. Although you may have to delete your GorgonConfig.txt file again.
:More about the bug: the 2019 version of Unity supports more localization features than the 2017 one did. And they're turned on by default, which our code definitely didn't expect. So the server is sending over numbers like "1.5" which your game client doesn't understand anymore, since it expects "1,5" now. Similarly, your old GorgonConfig.txt file had numbers in the US English format, and so a volume of "0.5" looked invalid -- defaulting to 1, or 100% volume. Window positions were munged similarly.
:And now we have a new problem: in beta builds, the GorgonConfig.txt file is written out in your language-specific format as well. So once you've run the beta, your volume is stored as e.g. "0,5", and after the next beta, that will be wrong again! And you'd have to delete your settings file yet again.
:It's all just confusing and I can foresee it causing some headaches, so I'm going to simplify things by just renaming the settings file. That way you'll be given a fresh set of defaults. The current live build uses GorgonConfig.txt; all future builds (starting with the next beta build and continuing with regular builds after that) will use GorgonSettings.txt instead.
:I think giving everybody a fresh slate may be wise anyway, since a lot of the graphics options don't work exactly the same as before.
:Thank you to everyone that helped us track this one down!
:: 6/30/2020
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2572-BETA-BUGS-(For-the-2019-4-build-currently-in-the-Steam-beta-system)&p=18650#post18650
==== Any pattern to which abilities can go on the sidebar? ====
: Flesh to Fuel is the only side-bar-able survival utility power, as far as I can remember; it's one of the perks of the Fire Magic skill.
:: 6/11/2020
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2560-Question-About-Survival-Utility-and-Sidebar-Placement&p=18529#post18529
==== Sun Vale cave buffs vanished ====
:Those both create non-timed buffs so if you've hidden "permanent" effects, you won't see the icons. As far as I can tell they are working though. (The buffs aren't permanent, especially the Sun Vale ones, but since they don't have a traditional timer they get lumped into permanent in the UI.)
:: 6/5/2020
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2548-Update-Discussion-May-28-2020&p=18465#post18465
==== Connection Trouble ====
: That is definitely indicative of a connection problem, and it's unlikely that any in-game settings will affect it. You need to be able to sustain a socket connection to the server, which can sometimes be difficult on wifi -- you could try using a wired connection to your router, and see if that helps.
:It may not be a problem in your home at all, though; your route -- that is, the different internet machines that you connect to between your home and the server -- may just be unreliable. In that case the best workaround I've found is to use a VPN service. This will give you a different route to our server.
:(And yes, the "retry now" message without actually being able to easily retry is a bug, sorry. The code design changed when we added Steam authentication, and it's not trivial to make that work again. But it's on the list.)
:: 5/8/2020
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2536-Troubleshooting-D-Cs&p=18336#post18336
==== Item Management, Do Everything, Grind ====
:Thanks for the feedback! One thought and one question. (Edit: and another thought after that, plus parentheticals.)
==== Item Management, Do Everything, Grind ====
:Thanks for the feedback! One thought and one question. (Edit: and another thought after that, plus parentheticals.)