Monthly Treeverse Update #33

The thirty-third edition of monthly Treeverse updates. Read more for game development insights.

An update on Treeverse. A look at our development and art team progress. We will be posting monthly for you to follow along the development of Treeverse, so make sure you subscribe!

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As usual, you can never estimate game deadlines, a certainty in game development aha! We wanted to launch our Open Alpha in August but now moving into September we are aiming for this month. Not much to say here, we have bugs, we fix bugs, more bugs come, and we keep fixing! The plan stays the same. Once we have a build we are happy with we move to a stress test, from there if everything is fine, we launch the Open Alpha for 2 weeks - 1 month.

If you know much about game development, when QA testing the same thing hundreds of times, you get kinda bored of it — but the team is having fun as it’s improving with each play test.

Art Update

we have many dozens of animations every month^ (these arent usually included in the update unless it’s with the vfx)

Engineering And Design

We've continued working on getting our alpha release out. We've faced various bugs and issues, and have since worked on setting up the pipelines to make catching and fixing these easier. This has unfortunately led to some delays in our mass stress tests and getting this build out for users to play, test and enjoy, but we're making some really good progress.

New Features

• Teleporters : Introduce teleporting functionality throughout the map as a QOL measure.

• Crash Handling: Introduce automated LLDB backtrace functionality to log native crashes on the server.

• Combat

  • Added flat healing bonuses

  • Introduce summoning feature.

  • Introduce abilities that allow ignoring collisions with players. Useful for things like dashes/charged based abilities

• Thin Clients Updates: Improve efficiency of thin clients so we can run simulations on server.

• Max Players on Screen: Update networking to prevent networking bandwidth explosion

• Networking : Introduced input pipeline to allow sending large amounts of data between servers.

• Loading and Saving : Properly load and save appearance.

• Settings Page : Introduce ability to adjust various graphical qualities

• Hot Bar: Introduce Hot bar for switching equipment quickly

Improvements

• Dungeons: Show all types of dungeon rewards, not just the items.

• Networking: Improve ghost acknowledgement system

• UI: Remove enum based window type code structure.

• Server Selection : Simplified server selection mechanism.

• Spreadsheet tooling: Introduce spread sheet to scriptable object tool for levelling experience data

Bug Fixes

• Culling : Fix character frustum culling when still in view

• Character Appearance : Skin Colour and Eye colour fixes

• Foliage Shader Fixes

• Player Animation Fixes: Fixed animations switching to idle when fps was too high on client

• AI updates

  • Improved how creatures look towards players.

  • Improved monsters reaction distance so you can't safely kite from a distance

  • Fix rotation freakout when monsters return to home

  • Fix wander range exceeding limits.

• Networking

  • Fixed bugs with serialisation

• Dynamic Lighting: Fixed issues with lighting resolving at camera level instead of player level.

• Chat : Fix issue with chat messages being sent twice

• Quest Saving: Fixed issues with quests not saving

• Active dungeon saving: No longer save active dungeons due to issues in saving

• Notifications Fix: Fix issue with barrage of notifications on initial login.

• Quest Fixes: Fixed various quests that became broken due to quest changes previously.

• Item inspection: Can now inspect items in all sorts of panels now

• Projectile Transform Logic: Fixed issue with calculating projectiles, so they travel properly now

• Inputs : Fix inputs triggering shortcuts for panels whilst typing

• Reviving feature

  • Fix issue with revivable object not being destroyed.

• Login Fixes

  • Fix early return issue when we have multiple login attempts in the same frame

  • Fix issue when you try to re-login with the same connection

• Disconnection Fixes: Fix destruction of entities when a player disconnects.

• Materials: Fix issues with null renderer effectors.

• UI : Fix issue with opening and closing panels.

• Memory Leak: Fix a very severe memory leak on our game servers.

Going Forward

We plan to introduce even more tooling and ways of figuring out where bugs are occurring and fixing them much faster. After this we should be able to run some stress tests on the servers, and hopefully start rolling out some larger user testing.

All of the current issues we are facing does really help prepare us for our eventual live-ops of this MMORPG. Once most of the critical bugs and issues have been resolved, we are eager to allow our community and other users to start playing the game and earning rewards.

We thank you for your continued patience, and look forward to getting the build into a playable state for you all to enjoy.

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Disclaimer: Please note that anything written in this document should not be taken as financial advice. Endless Clouds is dedicated to producing a fun, enjoyable game that integrates NFTs. NFTs are a new and highly experimental technology and should not be bought for investment purposes.