Release Notes 2020-03-22: tlopo-pyp-v1.0.0

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The Crew

TLOPO Staff
2020-03-22: tlopo-pyp-v1.0.0

Announcements

  • This update has been two years in the making. Under the hood from a technological perspective, the game that we all knew as of yesterday is not in any way remotely the same game that you are logging into today.
    • Virtually every aspect of the game has been edited in some way by us. This is a massive update with literally tens of thousands of changes have been made.
    • Every single feature in the game, no matter how big or how small, has been edited by us in some fashion.
    • We honestly feel like we're in some kind of survival movie "it's been 2 long years..."
  • Our central focus in this update was to address the performance issues in the game. We have updated the game to the newest version of the Panda3D game engine, and are continuing to work on adding further support for some absolutely incredible engine features. Stay tuned!
  • The best way we can describe this release is that we’ve basically rewritten literally everything behind the scenes.
    • And it's very noticeable in-game, those who have the capable hardware will feel the frames they deserve to be getting; and further, this will breathe new life into older hardware - making the game run smoother on legacy computers.
    • We have taken extra care to try and improve performance on lower-end computers especially. There are tons of changes we've made which will specifically help older hardware.
Highlights

  • This is the first part of The Legend of Pirates Online's multi-staged release of Pypperoni & the Capture the Chest expansion. Because of how much has changed, we are releasing the updates gradually.
    • Part 1: Pypperoni (This Update)
    • Part 2: CTC Part 1: Lobbies system (Upcoming)
    • Part 3: CTC Part 2: Capture the Chest game mode (Upcoming)
  • This update adds a massive performance improvement to the game: Higher FPS, faster load times.
  • The graphics in the game have been significantly improved -- to just call them amazing is an understatement, go check them out for yourself!
Features

  • Seagulls are back and functional! Check one out next to the Governor's Mansion for a test seagull.
    • We will add more down the line once we’ve fine-tuned this feature. But we were so excited that we wanted to place a single one in the game now for you all to enjoy.
  • “Resistance” skills are now fully functional!
    • These skills reduce damage taken by special attacks such as fire, ice, or poison.
    • Seen on weapons such as the Zombie Doll and the Kelpblade.
  • “Immunity” skills are now fully functional!
    • These skills make it impossible for certain special attacks to affect your pirate!
    • For example, if you have Stun Immunity, you won’t be able to get hit by Brawl or Cursed Ice!
    • Seen on weapons such as The Ruby Curse.
  • The Voodoo Reflect skill is now fully functional!
  • Venom Strike, Venom Shot, and Bane Shot are now fully functional and have their original damage-over-time-effects.
  • The Hex, Wind, and Spirit Guard skills are now fully functional!
  • Pirate name approval/rejection will now automatically update in-game without needing to re-log.
Maintenance

  • We are now compiling the game using the new Pypperoni Python Compiler.
  • The game engine and TLOPO application are now compiled in 64-bit.
  • Updated the Panda3D game engine to 1.11.
    • This brings massive performance improvements, improved graphics, crisper text, and so much more.
  • The client has been completely rewritten to support Panda3D 1.11 and Python 3.
    • This has been a full blown team effort for the past 2 years.
    • Various parts of the game had to be completely reengineered due to how old the code was.
    • Hard to believe that this stuff was all state-of-the-art in 2004; that’s now 16 years ago already! Boy time flies.
  • Textures are now written in a way that minimizes the number of seeks during reading operations. This results in significantly improved texture read speeds.
  • Optimized our encryption model to increase performance.
  • JPG and OGG resources are no longer compressed.
  • Increased the visibility distance of distributed objects on both land and sea.
    • Land visibility should now be exactly as it was on POTCO.
    • Go level up some grenades on Kingshead; you can finally see the crowd of navy soldiers from the fence again!
    • Sea visibility has been increased to a slightly larger range than it was on POTCO.
  • Major cleanup of the code responsible for loading and constructing character clothing and tattoos.
    • Most of our staff members are loading from the launcher to the Avatar Chooser in 10 seconds or less.
    • Computers with mechanical hard drives will see the most significant improvement. One TLOPO staff member's loading time went from 2+ minutes to just a tad over 30 seconds.
  • The way our resources are compiled has been completely refactor to pre-optimize load operations inside multifiles.
    • This is a very complex feature to explain, but it’s so darn cool so we want to talk about it for a second. This design change will breathe a whole new life of performance into older computers with mechanical hard drives and will result in an additional further boost performance on computers with modern SSDs! So, let’s explain what this feature is:
    • Mechanical hard drives work by having a physical arm move around on a spinning disk to read data off the drive. The process of the physical arm moving around to locate a section on the disk is called “seek”. This seek time results in massive frame-rate drops and other load delays in-game when you load different models and textures.
    • We developed an algorithm that will process the models in the resources folder, and intelligently place the textures that a model expects to load and place on itself immediately next to the physical location of the model on disk. In some instances, this can give SSD-like performance on a hard drive because we’re eliminating a large chunk of the bottleneck.
  • Nametags have been completely rewritten in C++.
  • Renamed several internal files for clarity.
  • Tunnels to access seasonal areas like Hollowed Woods will now spit you back out the tunnel entrance, instead of having you freeze on the area’s loading screen.
  • Rudimentary pathing for NPCs has been implemented. You may notice Crazy Ned walking around Raven’s Cove.
  • Crew matching from the crew tab of your Friends window has been removed, as matchmaking will be imminently moved to Lobbies.
    • Crew matching in the Crew HUD below your health bar has also been removed.
  • Modified dozens of world files to maintain Disney props that don't function within the TLOPO level editor export script.
  • Ships will no longer broadcast position updates across the server if no player ship is interested.
    • This is what caused the horrific pings the past few days. In a period of 15 seconds, there were over 500,000 position updates on the server. That’s open 2,000,000 updates every minute!
    • If a NPC ship fires a cannon on the high seas, but no player is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
  • Tweaked the health of Jolly Roger and wave enemies in invasions.
  • Removed vestigial tunnels from Pillager's Pass and Molten Cavern. They will no longer show up on the compass or have any tracked quests generate the ray of light while in PvP.
  • Added tons of new barriers in Molten Cavern to prevent shooting through rocks.
  • Adjusted the spawn points in Molten Cavern such that players no longer spawn up above the stairs.
Bugfixes

  • Mac players rejoice! The double backspace bug in chat has been fixed!
  • Bloodfire was not applying, and did not respect ranks.
    • Now adds upwards of 50% damage to a weapons base damage at max charge, and charges faster with higher ranks.
  • Bloodfire was not clearing when swapping to other swords, allowing players to apply its damage bonus to any sword type weapon.
    • Not like this mattered anyway, since it didn't actually boost damage until now.
  • Cleaned up battle code removing duplicate methods.
  • Fixed a bug which caused audio to take an extremely long amount of time to load from disk.
    • This is what caused the audio stuttering and frame-rate drops when changing audio tracks in-game.
    • This was also the reason why combat lagged so badly when engaging and disengaging - it was the audio swap!
  • Powerful was not applying the correct damage boost.
    • Now adds a 1.5% damage per rank to a weapons base damage, applied before any other bonuses or modifiers.
  • Skills were not accounting for ranks 2+ when calculating damage.
    • They now deal 10% increased damage per rank.
    • Don’t worry, we made sure to tweak weapons as much as possible such that they maintained a semblance of their old playability while still remaining balanced.
  • Various skills were lowering their damage due to an incorrect calculation for abilities without a skill rank.
    • They now just gain 0 bonus, rather than a negative bonus.
  • Implemented a temporary fix for the invisible water around Raven’s Cove and Padres del Fuego.
    • What we’ve done is rotated the actual islands such that they perfectly cover the “holes” in the sea that made the water look invisible. As such, Raven’s Cove and Padres are no longer in their original POTCO-accurate positions. This is temporary.
    • There is a particularly tricky bug that is preventing us from rotating the “sea patch” to fit how it did back in POTCO. We have every intention of getting there, but until then, we’ve put this band-aid fix on so it doesn’t break immersion in the game.
  • Fixed a crash related to the distributed object generation of battle characters.
  • NPCs which behave differently depending on the time of day now work properly:
    • Get back into your box, Crazy Ned.
    • Mr. Rage Ghost, you are not supposed to be here during the day time.
  • Fixed a client crash caused by the servers not fully preparing the land enemy NPC AI prior to object generation.
  • Fixed a bug in NPC battle movement AI which caused NPCs to not attack back.
  • Fixed an issue which caused NPCs to randomly walk around.
  • Fixed a bug in PvP causing all attacks to miss while Muertos Moon is active.
  • Fixed a crash when logging in on the Avatar Chooser with low graphics enabled.
  • Fixed French/Spanish Undead enemies attacking from large ranges.
  • Fixed monkey panic not healing the player.
  • Fixed dagger and sword combos not applying their slow in PvP.
  • Fixed a bug where enemies would be frozen still and wouldn't animate unless attacked and then disengaged.
  • Fixed a bug where enemies that used a special prop, such as a shovel, would not stow away their weapons after disengaging, and would instead try to shovel with a... sword.
  • Fixed a bug which caused Crew Days to run on incorrect days.
  • Fixed a bug which caused the FPS meter to appear stretched out.
  • Fixed a bug where guild chat would not clean up after using the Log Out button.
  • Fixed a bug which caused trees to be really fat and have incorrect LODs on islands.
  • Fixed a nasty bug which caused NPC enemies to corkscrew under the map when chasing in combat.
  • Fixed a bug where Life Drain Immunity specifically wouldn’t work.
  • Fixed a bug where Take Aim and Long Volley wouldn’t function in PvP.
  • Fixed a bug in Cannon Defense which caused ships to not send updates for their position.
  • Fixed a bug which caused cull distance to break after using /stuck.
    • In English: Sometimes, using /stuck would make a ton of fog appear in front of your player and it wouldn’t go away until you relogged.
  • Fixed a bug which caused gold being bid in Blackjack and Poker to show with a decimal.
  • Fixed an issue with shaders where the horizon line would turn lime green.
    • Sunrise sets… a flash of green!
  • Fixed an issue with shaders where the game couldn’t decide what lighting effects should be used on your pirate. This caused some freaky situations where an arm was bright red, while others were super pale.
  • Fixed an issue with shaders were some texture palettes would randomly generate on the floor in front of you.
  • Fixed an issue with the game engine where scroll bars in your friends list and elsewhere would be accidentally shifted off to the left.
  • Fixed an issue with the game engine where extra white horizontal scroll bars appeared in sea loot results and your quest journal.
  • Fixed a bug which caused pirate names to permanently show incorrectly in Guilds after having their name approved.
    • Thank you for your patience as we solved this issue.
  • Fixed a crash with Freeze Sweep and Silver Freeze that would occur if multiple enemies were hit at once.
Skill Balancing

  • General Note: We’ve spent a lot of time working on these skill balance changes, and have extensively tested them with our internal QA team and community members on the test server.
    • The list is so long that we could write a book on the logic for each of the tweaks. Instead of doing that, we’ll provide comments on a select few changes that we believe are especially critical.
    • **We are willing to explain our rationale behind specific skill buffs/nerfs, and further tweak if necessary; but we think we did a good job balancing.***
      • 1. We are planning some extremely major content expansions in upcoming story quests, which would include a full expansion to weapons as a whole. We need to have a base to work from that is well-balanced or else adding anything new later on is just going to be impossible.
      • 2. There are significantly more skill buffs than there are skill nerfs.
    • Buffed the following skills:
      • Backstab
        • The skill, not the general dagger bonus.
        • This skill seemed to have always been intended to be a high-level threatening skill. Considering its long cast time, and the way it’s described in tooltips in-game, we believe that this buff is worthwhile.
      • Bayonet Rush
      • Coup
      • Cursed Fire DoT
      • Cursed Fire
      • Cursed Thunder
      • Dagger Rain
      • Dagger Whirlwind
      • Inferno Sweep
      • Maelstrom Charge
        • Considering Maelstrom Charge is only available on one weapon, and the fact that it’s only available during 1 month a year, we figured a buff was in order. We made sure to increase the amount of health taken from the player as well, as to not make the skill too overpowered. We don’t want folks to be able to wipe out entire groups of enemies over and over again without repercussions.
      • Rapid Fire.
      • Shock Sweep.
      • Skewer.
      • Soul Flay.
      • Wither
      • Desolation
        • Desolation has been redone to be much stronger, closer to the original POTCO design. In addition, we’ve modified the amount of health taken from the player so it isn’t overdone. Also reduced cast time from 12 to 10 seconds.
      • Pestilence
    • Tweaked the following skills for PvP:
      • Increased Adder damage at each rank.
      • Increased Maelstorm Charge damage by 20% and reduced self-damage to 425.
      • Decreased damage of Cursed Thunder by 20%.
      • Reduced recharge rate of Shock Sweep to 30 from 60.
      • Reduced recharge rate of Inferno Sweep to 30 from 60.
      • Reduced recharge rate of Freeze Sweep to 30 from 60.
      • Increased damage of Dagger Whirlwind by 20%.
      • Increased damage of Explosive, Fire Bomb, and Siege Charge.
      • Increased damage of Asp.
      • Decreased damage of Adder.
      • Lowered cooldown of grave shackles to 30 seconds from 1 minute.
      • Increased damage of Wither and Desolation.
      • Decreased damage of Banish.
      • Increased cast time of Wither to 5 from 4.
      • Reduced the cooldown of Scorch to 20 from 25.
      • Reduced the cooldown of Swarm to 8 from 10.
    • Added support for separate PvP skill recharge times and damage values. This allows us to really get detailed with balancing in all aspects of the game and listen to the PvP community’s feedback specifically when it comes to skills and weapons.
    • All sabres now have an innate chance to critically strike based on rarity.
      • We thought that Sabres got the short end of the stick with regards to damage. Without making them too overpowered, this critical strike makes them more relevant and on-par with Cutlasses and Broadswords in terms of unique benefits.
    • Increased damage dealt by Wound, Toxin, and Poison debuffs.
    • Increased damage of Hurricane Slash.
    • Reduced duration of Adder's DoT.
    • Reduced duration of Curse.
    • Slight optimization related to applying and removing skill effects on avatars.
    • Overhauled the freeze skill so it works properly and no longer breaks pirates - yay!
    • Overhauled the Dutchman’s Wrath and Triton’s Vengeance skills to actually function properly.
    • Reduced damage of all broadsword AoE combos and nerfed grenade damage for all unlockable ammo types.
      • We know this will be an unpopular nerf, so we'd like to take a moment to explain our thought process behind it.
      • It's our belief that Area of Effect attacks should be weaker than their single target counterparts. This means that if you were to attack a single target, you should naturally prefer a cutlass or pistol over a broadsword or grenade.
      • To help reflect this change, as well as make weapons such as Grenades easier to work with, we've opted to apply a nerf to both weapon types as a whole.
      • This will allow us to better plan future content as well, without having to worry about weapons such as Grenades being magnitudes stronger than everything else in the game.
    Weapon Balancing
    • Changed Ripsaw Blade's required level from 26 to 23.
    • Buffed Moonstone Grenade
      • We’ve buffed Moonstone a bit in relation to the grenade nerfs. It should still be powerful without being so OP that it’s better than The Storm Sphere.
    • Tweaked the attack values for all weapon upgrade quest rewards, such as the Pirate Blade or the Harrow Staff
      • Considering we tweaked the actual Powerful skill, we have readjusted the values for these weapons such that they are not too OP or too weak given the fact that they’re awarded from quests.
    • Jack Sparrow’s Blade:
      • Removed: Powerful (Rank 3).
      • Added: Captain's Fury (Rank 3).
      • Something important to note here for anyone concerned about this change: Powerful has not been functional this entire time, and is fixed in this patch, so you won't feel its removal. This is important to note, because we don't want this change to feel like a nerf -- it's the opposite! JSB should now feel just a tad stronger than before.
    • Calypso's Radiance:
      • Life Drain Boost boosted to Rank 3 from Rank 2.
      • Added: Curse Boost (Rank 3).
      • Adjusted the resale value to 6,000 from 304.
    • The Soulweaver:
      • Poke Boost boosted to Rank 3 from Rank 2.
Known Issues

  • Any accented letters/characters are not displaying properly. Poor Señor Fantífico… :(
  • Lighting on the character selection screen is off and may make your pirates’ skin tones appear darker than they actually are in-game.
  • Nametags on Wasp enemies are slightly displaced
  • Ship masts may appear grey-blue/discolored from afar. This is a symptom of a larger issue with distance fog that we will fix shortly.
  • There is an occasional white screen bug that occurs when entering a cave and walking around in caves. We are hard at work to fix this.
  • Ocean and coastal water will occasionally turn black.
    • While this issue is cosmetic, we treat it as incredibly serious. This is one of our top priorities.

View this release on the TLOPO website
 
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