1.3 Summary Update
Welcome to the 1.3 update for GWL.I've been adding some things and fixing a few bugs over the last week and this update will be more of a summary of those changes/fixes to coincide with the smaller updates.
These patchnotes are coming a day early as I unfortunately will be very busy the next few days when I usually update.
World and Enemy Spawning
- In a few overlap areas some spawns were coming in at the wrong levels. Thats now fixed.
- Enemies now match the zone they are in. A fault in how spawn points were assigned meant a zone could be filled with a neighbouring zone's monsters at that neighbour's level. Every zone now spawns its own monsters inside the level range shown on the world map.
- Sub-zone variety restored. Each zone has four regions with their own monster sets, but six of the sixty had been getting no ground at all, and some zones ran almost entirely on a single region. All four regions of every zone now get a fair share.
- Alara Outskirts is now actually around Alara. New characters were starting in the Ruins District against Rogue Archers and Orc Scouts, while the gentler pool named for their home town sat on the far side of the zone. This significantly lowers initial the difficulty curve for new players.
- Dungeons are placed in the right zone. This fixed a similar problem to the overlaping spawns bug.
- The subzone name shown in your map header now always matches the actual spawn table.
Quests
- Zone bosses do not respawn, but the guild board would still offer their bounty, leaving an objective that could never be completed. Those bounties are no longer offered once the boss is dead, and if you are already holding one it is credited automatically and can be turned in at any clerk.
Combat and abilities
- Withering Touch and Drain Soul now heal you. Both described absorbing a share of their damage (40% and 50%) and previously were not healing as other drain effects correctly do.
- Failed sneak attempts are now readable. The failed message was being wiped off screen instantly, so it wasnt obvious you even tried to stealth.
World map and interface
- Warning signs are remembered. Acknowledged signs came back every time you loaded the game, and after every death.
- Sign spam removed. Two mountain passes had a warning sign on all 30 of their tiles. One sign per approach now, with every zone crossing still warned.
- Stray prompts under the map. A leftover "Press Enter to continue" could sit beneath the map frame indefinitely.
- Floor boss names. Names like "The the Vault" and "Revenant the Pit" were possible. Existing saves with a broken name are repaired.
Save Compression
As stated last update I have been, very carefully, messing with save files to make them take up less space for yall. Optimization is very important to me in a game designed to be able to run on effectively any Windows OS (and hopefully mac and linux soon as well!).
-This update makes the save states much smaller, and converts previous save states as well. It is a 100% copy and has no room for it to backfire just compressed to take up less space on your end.
-I have made the save process much faster as well.
Overall: A full set of save files went from about 464 MB to 49 MB, loading times went from 2.5s to 0.4s and saving times from 4.6s to 0.5s.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed how talking to a hired follower could crash the game in new saves.
For Existing saves
I have been writing regression tools to help make all these changes correctly implement for old saves. Your pre-existing saves are corrected automatically on load, enemy spawns are repaired without resurrecting anything you already killed, stuck boss bounties are credited, and broken boss names are fixed.
I plan to continue to do this until I come across a feature where its impossible, or the regression tool bloat gets too much. In both cases I will give a sizeable heads up to you all and I will keep a version of the game fully playable availble for old saves always.
Removing all these regression tools will likely be something I do far in the future If I try to further optimize the game or in an attempt to figure out my issues with the current Mac and Linux versions which are still struggling to get to a launch state.
Future PlansMost of my time is still spent pushing through the Mac and Linux versions.Additionally I'm continueing with my review to remove bugs and optimize the game. All of your many reports have helped me alot with this. Thank you all very much for all your help =)Let me know in the comments or in discussions if you have an idea or bug and I'll respond quickly!Have a great weekend!-Lansdolli