*NOW LIVE (6/21/2019)!
https://giphy.com/gifs/throneoflies-daOTHwsmVrCJ8KT9Ru
v2.3a
https://forum.imperium42.com/t/2-3a-patch-notes/77235
v2.3
*Discuss the new changes on Discord @ https://discord.gg/tol
Notable Bug Fixes
- Fixed text exploits (except in private notes - go wild).
- Pretender’s “Guards?” ability was fixed (you couldn’t click on it).
- Fixed Marshal’s Snoop ability (was showing the right page to shift 1/2 way off the screen).
Balance : Changes
General
- You can no longer whisper until the first 10 seconds have passed each day (upped from test realm’s 5, since the scene actually starts a bit earlier before a fade-in: it’ll feel like 5s).
Mystic
- Private Matters ability removed. Poof!
Starting Blue Dragon (Good) King
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Allies ability has been replaced with new ability -
Safeguard: Give target player death immunity for the night. Cannot target the same player 2x in a row. Cannot target self. 4 charges. - Guards! ability charges reduced from 3 to 2.
Elected Blue Dragon (Good) King
- Just to clarify: BD elected king has not been changed (no Safeguard).
Starting Unseen/Cult (Evil) Kings
- Guards! ability has been replaced with new ability - Improved Safeguard: Same as Safeguard, except you can optionally target yourself. 3 charges.
- Allies* ability has been replaced with new ability - *Close Allies: Discover target player class if they are a member of your faction. 3 charges.
Elected Unseen/Cult (Evil) Kings
- Guards! ability has been replaced with Improved Safeguard. 2 charges.
Knight
- Defend ability feedback reworded to: “You protected {player}.” - this will also affect Gossip feedback because this used to be the same feedback as another class, so you couldn’t tell which was which until now.
Paladin
- Smite ability feedback reworded to: “You watched over {player} with your holy sword.” - this will also affect Gossip feedback because this used to be the same feedback as another class, so you couldn’t tell which was which until now.
(Scroll down for the “why”)
Class Card Revamp
- Vastly improved inconsistencies, redundancies, bad grammar, shoddy/confusing wording of abilities/class descriptions and similar text-related fixes. Literally every, individual class description and ability was inspected. These changes will reflect in-game hovers abilities later.
- Made pretty much everything auto-generated, depending on the “class card” and “ability card”: This makes things easier to change later with more accuracy, where 1 change ripples to other places to change automagically. This will be implemented to in-game logic later for easier balance fixes/changes to insta-sync everywhere.
- You may now hover over portrait flag icons (such as “occupy immune”) to get a tooltip of what the icon is.
- Made abilities less confusing to read what they do (thanks, Discord contributors!).
- Made the class cards better-formatted, added hover effects on the class list, and overall more pleasing to the eye.
- Fixed a couple classes not in alphabetical order.
- Added localization “keys” to each text item for future use (and current use for Chinese alpha UI localizations).
- If you do not have English as your default language, a toggle button will appear between English and Chinese.
- HD portrait borders (The old ones were crispy).
- Gave room screenshot a soft, vignette mask to look less blocky copy+paste looking.
- Redirect block no longer says “or were empowered by the CW” (for now, as it isn’t true). This will reflect in-game text later.
- Empower no longer hints redirect immunity from Support classes (for now, as it isn’t true). This will reflect in-game text later. The gross looking wording was also revamped.
- Fixed the bug where changing class cards on anything but the full description would still show a different category, but wouldn’t display as if full description was showing.
- Added some flavor to full descriptions that were really short. More later.
- Increased performance and load times, where the class cards were previously thousands of stacked/hidden objects that would load/remain in memory.
- Ensured all classes have a color tag attached to them for easier identification of their faction. This was always here, but only about 25% implemented.
- All glossary keywords now get underlined – however, they are not yet clickable (perhaps next patch – the scope of this patch was getting too big).
Guide (Book) Revamp
- Fixed a ton of inconsistencies, bad grammar, shoddy/confusing wording of abilities, and similar fixes.
- Eliminated redundancies and made text “more to the point” and friendlier to read.
- Greatly improved performance of the Guide book.
- Added localization “keys” to each text item for future use (and current use for Chinese alpha UI localizations).
Tutorial
- Refreshed the UI to the modern look (and semi-sync’d with the main game for easier feature/UI porting later), including Sheriff art and updated class cards. Will make King #1 later.
- Made a few things more intuitive, but nothing crazy – expect a tutorial buff later (not this patch).
- Ability sfx were introduced and should sync for future updates.
- Using the newer faction color scheme.
- Fixed support for resolutions beyond 16:9.
- Added fades to the tutorial text (ooh, ahh).
Performance/Stability
- Optimized particlefx on the Chronomancer room to improve FPS
- Optimized particlefx on the login screen to improve FPS
- Optimized tons of textures (missed them earlier!) – this should reduce static memory consumption and improve loading times.
- Optimized lobby by removing 100’s of redundant images, tiling them instead of duplicating with dynamic scaling.
- Class cards should stop consuming bloaty resources.
- Loading the game should be faster, as should switching between scenes (after implementing better async scene management).
- Optimized the loading of in-game and to end scene >> back to lobby, as well! Should be faster and smoother. I can refine this better later.
- Login screen should now first detect an internet connection to help deduct issues (without this, step 1 is Steam rather than an internet connection).
- Exiting to lobby from in-game is now buttery smooth and reactive to clicking the exit button (instead of just freezing, unsure if it worked or didn’t).
- Greatly optimized chat performance.
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New compression algorithm.This killed incremental updates: We don’t want 550mb patches each time, so bye bye! Probably better for mobile games.
Quality of Life
- Added a popup/toast queue system: There will be some cooldown in between consecutive ones that arrive at the same time. Popups cooldown slightly longer than toasts.
- Lobby music wasn’t randomized to be unique except for the last track – made it unique so you hear the ENTIRE, unique soundtrack before hearing the same one again.
- New, additional lobby music track.
- The player panel will now reveal YOUR own class, since it’s known.
- The King in the player panel, when color is unknown, is now gold instead of white (to not confuse the white color with Neutral).
- In the lobby, use “TAB” to toggle class cards and ESC to close 1 class card window layer (eg, the list will close the list instead of the whole thing and go back to the main info).
- In the lobby, the “Tutorial” button now confirms that you want to actually do the tutorial and it’s not a misclick – and definitely didn’t implement this after accidentally doing this many times, myself O_o
- Improved the Timesnatcher portrait (gave her some hair conditioner).
- Improved the Sheriff portrait (painted his tunic a bit).
- At some point in time, the neutral “N” faction icon was swapped out to a shield: It’s now back to the iconic “N”.
- The login screen now fades in. There’s also now a sexy fading transition between login and lobby.
- The login screen music no longer ends abruptly, now fading out, when changing scenes.
- Added the settings icon back to the top-right corner, in-game (don’t forget that you can press ESC to access this, too).
- Music between scenes is now better-transitioned instead of suddenly cutting off.
- Started to add more consistency with King names (Cult and Neutral kings came later - we originally just had “good” and “evil”). More later.
- Added memo to in-game menu “(ESC)” to hint you can press ESC to toggle this menu. When the old settings button was removed, no one knew about this! Oops
- Made the Apostle’s “Telepathy” ability icon a red version to better-fit theme.
- Sorted through the loading screen tips to have a more-consistent formatting to satisfy our OCD players
- Some popups now have “masks” (black backgrounds) like they intended to have – and some darker for readability.
- Relaxed the name filter a bit.
- Whisper box submit button will only allow submit when there’s at least 1 char.
- Pre-game private room chat in the lobby will now bold the host’s name.
- Pre/Post game chat will now show developer names in yellow.
- Registration now lets you skip email (it was always optional since it’s double opt-in and doesn’t verify emails: You won’t hear from us if you didn’t confirm your opt-in email).
- Added a new newsletter optional opt-in from the ‘Account’ section: One day, we’ll giveaway exclusive codes and promos to those signed up!
- In-game patch notes replaced with links to forum to show the latest n greatest, to allow editing/comments, and to save performance from a growing number of LARGE patch notes hidden in the background.
- Known faction of elected Kings will now show the known color.
- Pre-game moderation warning will now rotate between a few different ones, focusing on gamethrowing, toxicity, and aggressive report threatening.
Misc Bug FIxes
- Fixed the registration bug that’d freeze the submit button until you restart the game.
- Fixed the stacking king + (Unseen/Cult) icon when a known faction member becomes King.
- Fixed “intense italics” text, where it would often cause italics to lean into another word, as if we were missing a space.
- Fixed “smiting” notifications when a user is banned with a chat box present.
- Suspension messages at the login screen now show evidence (instead of just messages + when ban lifts), if any attached - similar to ban messages when received in realtime.
- Disabled “rich text” in editable public log pages.
- Ultrawide: Fixed the stupidly-large journal.
- Ultrawide: Fixed lobby span + credits boxes.
- Ultrawide (or non-16:9 aspects): Fixed popup window mask spanning.
- The ‘Welcome back’ message: “The” {Title} now has the “The” removed for proper grammar @ the login screen. Also fixed the “Reaped” title from being welcomed incorrectly as a Squire.
- Friends list no longer pops out in front of black background masks.
- In private matches, fixed the disabled “start game” button flash; will now show to host owners, but disabled until at least the min. players (8) are met to start.
UI Localization (中文)
- Traditional Chinese UI localization is now alpha testing: If you speak Chinese, try enabling the UI localization via the login screen. Once 1 language works, others will be easier to implement.
- Note that localization is ONLY for the UI, currently: Unicode is completely disabled on public matches to ensure only English is spoken until there’s a region switcher for queues. Until then, please organize in the Chinese Discord and play private games~
- While we’re not done yet, every class card is localize-ready (and should work with traditional Chinese, to start). Some other text entries may also randomly be ready. In-game abilities + notifications are not yet ready. Tutorial is not yet ready because we plan to revamp the wording soon, anyway.
- If a localization is missing, the game will fallback to either English or the “phrase key name” it should be expecting. If you see the phrase key name, please report it to a dev.
Balance : Why?
- First of all, this was sort of a ninja balance patch that wasn’t originally planned for this patch, but through a very small balance panel of Judges and Moderators – we made it happen. Not too bad – took me an extra 5 days, but that also included some code revamps for kings and the way they start for scalability.
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Mystic whispers turn the game into a 1-3 player game. It’s very unfun and a ton of people seem to dislike “Whisper King Meta” (WKM). However, with a very low chance of being able to read into the whispers (Illusionist still has it) and a way lower chance that the person getting the info is evil, it should be more fun.
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The original Allies ability was not very fun, limiting claimspace even more so than any other ability in the game. A vast amount of people even believe that the Princess flirt is unfun, and Allies the same - but worse. Giving the King a guarding ability gives a reason to communicate with the King, while making him unable to guard the same target twice in a row makes it so that the King actually has to plan guards, instead of just blindly guarding the Prince every night.
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The new Improved Safeguard ability can be useful late-game as Cult/Unseen (evil) Kings with the Neutral Killer around, getting in situations where you have to protect the Assassin/Cult Leader.
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The new whisper changes allow the Mastermind to actually place their Birds on someone before people can whisper. Currently, everyone can just whisper the King in the first second of the day with no downside - and without the MM being able to place down birds.
Dev Blog
- There are 2 reasons for some temporary focus on back-end:
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I took over non-scalable code (code that does not follow standard techniques, such as the lacking of comments, irregular naming conventions or non-modular code) that requires an “Xblade revamp” so that fixes/changes/balance take 1 hour per change instead of 1 week per change: Code should be very readable and modular. As I plan to dev Throne of Lies for a long time, what I’m looking at is unacceptable and frustrating to work with: It sucks for everyone. So, apologies for the recent patches that were a bit boring (but necessary)-- I will take responsibility that, as a manager, I should have reviewed this code over time – but it worked, so it was just assumed standard until I dove in and realized, gah…
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I’ve left a trail of hints, but to officially say it: Like promised before, our success goes back into the game for upgrades! That said, we’re revamping our graphics: All of our 3d gfx. Over time, we’ve revamped our UI (I love our current UI! Google some early-launch screenshots and prepare to laugh). We also mini-upgraded our models, which was a decent upgrade, but also very minor. This time, however, we’re going all out. Oh, yes: Thanks to our growing playerbase and recent, successful promos, we were able to expand with a new Technical 3D artist (dev + 3d artist hybrid), “Vini” – hop in Discord and say “hi” to him! We’re making great progress and will let you know when we’re closer. When will you see these new gfx? Perhaps sooner than you think! We’re aiming for the end of the year, but that’s just a wild guess.
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About the Guide/Class Cards/Tutorial/etc: Similar to earlier patches, I’m not just revamping the code left to me, I’m also vastly improving upon it. Last major patch, I added sfx as I caught up on the ability system, added some deathnote improvements after catching up on that code, etc – in this case, I’m thinking scalability (future-proofing the game): Currently, every change, I have to manually sync it in 3+ different places, which is why you often see a desync between class cards and actual abilities. It also isn’t very clear how abilities were shifted and made code very difficult to read. Now, it’s literally drag and drop for classes and the abilities they have. If I want a Butler to Assassinate, I simply remove an ability slot and drag in the Assassinate “card” into it. Boom! That easy. The hardest part is done – now I need to sync it in-game with the abilities/notifications for the next patch.
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Localization: I know this isn’t an exciting feature to native English speakers, but remember that our success directly equals higher-budget improvements - In this sense, it is exciting for all! It’s been dragging for over a year, now, when we first started working on localization. I kept running into walls, dynamic strings (text that changes) took ages to implement, and had to add “localization keys” (marriage between a word and text) to over 3000 textboxes… then, the localization, itself (a 30,000 line json file): We finally have enough for an alpha. We’re not done, yet, but at least those foreign to English can learn in their own language (with a nifty toggle between English and their language, when playing in public games where English is required). We’ll later add optional separate queues for their own languages, once we get things in order. Currently, only traditional Chinese is available. Once the template is set, it’ll be easier to support more languages.
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Scene fading: Ooh, ahh… it’s more than just scene fading. That was just an extra bonus and not the main focus, by far (although nice). It’s all about “async/additive” scene loading. Before this, everything was sync (1, wait, 2, wait, 3) instead of async (1 + 2 + 3 at the same time): This means faster, more-efficient loading with scalability. Additive means we can load more than 1 scene at the same time, meaning there’s always a “buffer” scene, meaning buttery smooth loading (sort of like YouTube buffering to ensure smooth playback). This also means we can break scenes, later, into smaller ones and load them in/out async: This is how games with seamless worlds do it! You preload the next area “before” you get there, then load it in async/additively. It seems like there’s no loading times, but it just loads with a buffer in the background. Well, we’re doing that, now, too! We’ll improve upon it later. This will help us later, especially, when the new gfx is added (as it’ll use more juice, so optimization is important).
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More Balance: When? Well, I think it’s almost time to form that balance panel I wanted to form. We’ll be choosing from veteran players with at least 500 hours with minimal warnings/bans, a history of being nice to new players (so their focus is on both new and old players), and a participating member of our Discord community. Some folks that represent the community. We’ll then transparently discuss how to shift the meta of the game in a positive way and implement such changes. I’ll have the power to veto, so it’s ultimately my decision on what goes in/out, but the panel will greatly help represent what the greater community desires. The interest of new players is also important, too, since our plan is to GROW! So with new players, we need to make sure they also benefit from balance changes and meta shifts. Meanwhile, I’ll work on some class fixes and finish “Xbladeifying” the code revamps to ensure things are easier to fix as we talk balance. Also, I still need to fix class bugs (that will indirectly affect balance), as this happens. Please don’t ask to join the balance panel – We’ll find YOU
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Tutorial upgrade: When? Currently, we just scaled it and sync’d it. This patch focused on better wording of abilities/class descriptions in the class cards (that’ll sync to in-game notifications and ability hovers later): To spend minimal time on it (for now), I’m going to just reword things significantly better next patch. I’ll also add something about moderation to ensure all players are treated well.
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Quality over quantity: I’m still revamping tons of code in order to properly scale, now that we’re getting bigger – the game is also significantly larger scope than it was when we launched in 2017. Instead of tons of small patches, the new norm is going to be heavily-tested, high-quality patches. Rushing doesn’t help anyone if we have to revert it 3 times. I’m eventually going to make a status BOT in our Discord to alert when there’s an outage, and the exact cause – our servers aren’t the most stable in the world, but they do its job. Mostly ;D but when they don’t, we’ll be able to know ASAP.
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This area is going to be shorter and higher-level than usual (in future notes) because you can now view ongoing devblogs in Discord’s new #devblog channel (including occasional, live gamedev Twitch streams) @ https://discord.gg/tol
See previous patch notes:
https://forum.imperium42.com/t/2-2a-patch-notes-live/76057/
https://forum.imperium42.com/t/2-2-0b-2-2-0c-mini-patch-notes-live/76129
