This update is fairly significant for Meridian, as it contains the first new rooms created in our new 3D room editor. The new editor was completed at the end of June and cuts the time needed to create new rooms down to a fraction of what was required previously, and will allow us to add content updates much more easily. The editor is open source (a port of the Doom editor GZDoomBuilder), and the source code is available on GitHub for anyone interested. A compiled copy of the editor is also available on the GitHub page.
General Changes
- Players can now cast personal enchantments on each other in safe zones.
- Added a ‘Graphics’ submenu under ‘Game’. Contains options to switch on mipmaps (pre-render textures in different sizes) and anti-aliasing. Both of these combine to improve the appearance of the client graphics and remove a lot of the remaining drawing issues (e.g. floors/walls that appear to ripple as you walk towards them). These upgrades are also necessary for adding high-resolution textures to the client in the future.
- The snow particle system now uses a snowflake texture rather than point particles. Makes much nicer snow, and is less taxing on the client.
- Optimized the matrix calculations in the client hardware renderer.
- Lowered the amount of light removed from a room by dusk rats.
- Added a new food type, ‘telo fruit’, native to Ko’catan. Several island NPCs and ornamental items already reference this fruit, and now it can be obtained from avars (all types). Gives 40 vigor and can be eaten at the same rate as Inky-caps. Sells for average 150 shillings.
- Raza is now accessible from the Underworld, via a new portal near the start of the stairs. The main Underworld portal can also select Raza as a destination.
- Fixed wall texture alignment in the Underworld.
- Lowered the amount of armor dropped by mummies, increased the number of reagents dropped. Also increased their movement speed.
- Giant rats, centipedes, baby spiders and bunnies now preferentially target players of opposite karma. They will tend to not attack newbies with the same karma.
- Each school now has a level one spell with no reagent cost, similar to Create Weapon in Kraanan. The reagentless spells are Minor Heal, Light, Darkness, Feign Death and Invigorate.
- Disabled the client logoff timer by default (hotfix 1.5.3).
New Rooms
The Streets of Tos received a slight makeover, and an old storage building has been made accessible once again by order of the Duke. His soldiers have already claimed the contents, but players may find it useful to explore inside.
The citizens of Raza have opened their gates to the rest of the Meridian populace, and travel to the city from the outside is now possible.
Raza is situated south-west of Marion, and can be accessed by heading west, then south from the Forest of Farol. The two new forest rooms (Western Edge of the Forest of Farol and Outskirts of Raza) contain monsters for new players to kill (20-30HP range). The city of Raza and the forest rooms contain faction flagpoles, and capturing the two rooms will also capture Raza for that faction. The portal from the museum no longer exits the city; an informational sign about portals replaces it.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed client rounding error causing incorrect wall texture offsets in some rooms.
- Fixed most of the thin black lines drawn on the top of transparent textures. Some lines still remain, and will be fixed in the next update.
- Fixed some broken German translations (incorrect characters displayed).
- Fixed a broken resource which caused a ‘missing resource’ box to be displayed when a player is killed by a Lupogg King earthquake.
- Players under 50HP and sacred haven players can now attack minions owned by monsters. Sacred haven players are also now able to attack their own NPC faction soldiers with safety on, allowing them to drop faction/shield (not applicable to 105).
- Portals with destinations in the same room as the portal now work correctly.
- Fixed players getting stuck on portals when trying to enter them (hotfix 1.5.1).
- Fixed a rare server crash caused by a kod string handling function (hotfix 1.5.2).
- Fixed client becoming unresponsive if dialog boxes are spawned while the client is minimised (hotfix 1.5.3).
- Prevent players from having reagents returned from spells cast as hit side-effects while morphed (e.g. dement while morphed as a zombie) (hotfix 1.5.4).
Thanks to everyone who provided feedback on these changes, helped work on and test the update and room editor. Special thanks to Tyras for extensively testing the new editor, and for his work creating the new Tos rooms.