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What's New in Aether Story: Alpha Patch 0.3.51

Categories: Aether Story Patch Notes
Written by thephantom on Apr 23 2020


Fan Art made by iClaimThisName, described "It's my character and [pet] Chick Chick."
 

What's New in Aether Story

Beyond adding our first holiday event, the Easter Event, I have been super busy fixing bugs and improving the game.  The stream of bugs just kept pouring in, and at times it felt like they would never stop.  But I was able to fix most of the bugs and as a result the game is more stable than ever!

Between working on bugs I continued to work on the battle system. The key features being developed is the rendering and animation systems.  These are almost complete, and the next step will be to work on server-side data structures.

One major setback occurred this month, and that is the development server had its CPU fan go out.  This indirectly resulted in the operating system to become corrupt, and I had to not only replace the CPU fan, but I also had to reinstall and reconfigure the OS.  No data was lost, and the server hardware appears fine otherwise.

Laguna has been hard at work reworking the main story and writing the story scripts for the new main story we will be introducing in the next major patch.

Overall, things are moving in the right direction, sometimes slower than we would like, but some progress is better than no progress!  Be sure to catch me in the live dev twitch stream to watch new features being developed, tested and sometimes even art being drawn.
 
 

Patch Notes:

The following patch notes contain all changes since 0.3.29.  Many of the patch increments between then and now were small bug fixes that we will go over below.

  • Features:
    • Global Entities - new tech has been developed that will allow us to place global entities in the game. These allow all players in the instance to share the same entity state. Allowing us to make items you can take before another player is able to reach it, having entities walk in the same path for all players, or even having objects in the world change by one player's action. The possibilities are endless.
       
    • Respawning Entities - another new tech has also been developed that allows us to have global entities respawn. This allows us to have easter eggs respawn on a random timer after one player loots it.  But will enable us to make additional systems like profession nodes and other mechanics.
       
    • Server Side Logging - when players conduct themselves in game breaking ways, these activities are now logged. Such as abusing the chat command which is reserved for breaking free of being stuck, speed hacking, etc.  This paves the way for a future feature which will auto-ban players who trigger too many abusive logs on their account.
       
    • Hold Alt to Freely Turn - you may now stand still and freely rotate your character by holding in the ALT key. This allows you to better role play and get your character into position for screenshots.  The ALT key was chosen over the SHIFT key as the SHIFT key will be used for the Sprint option coming soon.
       
    • Crash Reports - We have identified a method to collect information when the game crashes. This has enabled to start auto logging crashes, and given us the option to ask the user what they were doing when a crash occurs.  You can read more about this feature in its own blog post titled Bug Hunting and Alpha Testing.
       


Crash Report screen - allowing player's to share what they were doing right before the crash.
 

  • Server Side Movement Validation - To help reduce cheating the server will now time your movements and if it detects you are moving faster than you should, it will snap you back to the position it feels you should be.  This does result in some false positives, especially if you have an inconsistent network latency.  As a result you may get snapped back occasionally. We will continue to improve this feature.
     
  • Latency calculation - your latency with the server is now being calculated and used internally. You may query this calculation by using the new /latency or /lag chat commands.  Soon we will add this value to a toggle-able UI display.
     


New water textures and animation frames.

  • Art:
    • New Water Textures - all water textures in the game were recolored and many were redrawn. The reason was the old water had too much contrast, had a extremely bright frame, and was reported to be nauseating.  Water is now much more subdued and subtle.
    • Darker Hair and Darker Eyes - the hair color option "black" has been made darker. Several players reported it was too gray and washed out before, it is now much more vibrant and darker. The same applies to eyes.
       
  • World:
    • The Outpost has had a few landscaping changes between the commander's overlook platform and the stairs leading down to the docks. You should no longer find yourself hitting your head on the overlook platform, and you should also now be able to walk behind the right stair post and a bush.  The landscapers really outdid themselves.
       
  • Login/Character Select:
    • The login screen now has a "forgot password" link added, to better retrieve your password if you forgot it.
    • The login screen has had its copyright year updated.
    • The character selection screen now supports more than 3 character slots. To unlock more consider contacting support directly, until the official in-game cash shop is added.
    • Character names can now be 10 characters in length, up from 8 characters.  If you would like to rename your character without deleting and recreating a new one, please open a support ticket.  We will be allowing everyone in the next 30 days, who created a character before today's date, one free name change as a result of this change.
    • The alpha license check has been removed - since we no longer use alpha keys.
       
  • Menus
    • The Leaderboard is now accessible through a button that links to the website. This button is found on the main menu and is currently labeled "Ranking" and will be renamed soon to just "Rank". In the future this button will change to open a character inspection screen allowing for many interaction options.
    • The In-game Funding Panel has been updated for April 2020, to include "Chick Chick" a special limited edition pet for this month only, and a new community funding goal: Player Trading.
    • A new setting "Chat Height" is now available, allowing you to set how large your chat box is. A great option if there is a lot of conversation you want to keep up with.
       
  • Website
    • The Leaderboards search should now return a result set of 10 characters that match the search criteria, instead of picking the first character that matched the criteria.
       
  • Bug Fixes:
    • Players are now less likely to appear in the wrong spot if you approach their previous position in a map.
    • Camera / Screen Panning has been refactored and should be much smoother, no more jitter on walking around, and the camera should no longer slowly drift out of alignment as you walk across large maps.
    • Typing /roll in the chat will allow you to see the random number rolled again.
    • The Golden Lab pet has been properly named "Lucky" in the Pet's collection menu and on the map.
    • Other player's pets are now less likely to appear still without their owners.
    • The holding down key press trigger for jumping off of hills is now properly twice as long. This should reduce the chances of players jumping off hills by accident.
    • All entities that had z-sorting issues have been fixed. This caused certain chests to appear over player's heads. This was a result of a mistake in the sorting code. This change should fix all affected entities globally.
    • Arrow keys should no longer scroll the chat while using them to also move.
    • Devices that cannot support the game's rendering systems will now be presented with a friendly error message instead of a black screen.
    • Various null checks have been fixed that were auto reported. Changing maps and hanging should no longer occur. But we are auto logging in case it does. Continue playing the game to help gather crash reports.


Main Menu - Alpha Funding Pane updated for April 2020

What's Next:

Coming in the first week of May, Player Trading! You all voted and you all reached the community funding goal, and together you guys unlocked Player Trading! We will be adding that in the first week of May.  This feature will include:

  • Player Trading - trade with any player who is nearby. Each offer items to trade, and once both parties agree with the terms, the trade will be complete.
     
  • Illegible Teleport Scroll Rework - Illegible Scrolls will be converted into 4 new items each with their own unique name. Each will take you to a specific location, instead of a random one.  These new items will be tradable, allowing you to trade with other player's your duplicates.  All existing Illegible Scrolls will be converted into one of the new versions randomly. 
     

Then in the coming months you also have to look forward to Alpha 4! The next major patch! That's what's next, and that's what everyone on the team is focused on. We are working hard on getting this patch out for you.  Just to recap all the features coming in Alpha 4 let's list them out:

  • New Feature: Combat and Battle
  • New Feature: Equipment
  • New Feature: Player Parties
  • New Feature: Player Inspection
  • Main Story: Introducing the first part of the Main Story
  • New Area: Domhan Beach and Lighthouse
  • New Area: Isle of the Chosen
  • New Quests
  • New NPC's
  • Reworking of the Quests to adjust exp gain and give Equipment rewards
  • Reworking of existing areas to include monster spawns
  • Character Wipe - to allow you to experience all the new reworked quests and areas.
    • Level reset to 1
    • Gold and Items removed
    • Quests reset
    • You will get to keep Easter Rewards and Donation Rewarded Pets

Since there is so much content and work involved with the next major patch, we will be rolling out a few of these features early in a limited preview as minor patches in Alpha 3.  For example it would be cool to have the Equipment Menu added sooner than later, so you guys can equip your awesome Easter Costumes.  Stay tuned!
 

Are you ready to join the fun?

You may download the early Alpha access easily through itch.io:

We are really enthusiastic to have you play our game! Being a small indie game
dev company, we depend on your support to keep us going.
Please consider making a small donation to help us fund the continuous
development of Aether Story! It will really help us out.

If you already have Alpha Access, head on over to the Game Downloads page and download the new Launcher Setup Installer!

 

Please join us on the live Twitch dev stream (almost nightly) to share your feedback, and experience the game with several other players. During dev streams are when most people play.  Be sure to follow us to be notified of the next stream:

See you there and thanks for reading!

 

Like 80

Comments

Apr 28 2020 at 04:53 AM

kev says

Sick. Looking forward to the next stream!

Apr 26 2020 at 03:12 PM

ElectricAxel says

That was a very productive month!

Apr 23 2020 at 09:34 AM

delinda13 says

Looking forward to all the new updates! I especially like the alt key rotion option. That will make talking to other characters much easier. Keep up the good work!

Apr 23 2020 at 09:20 AM

Chaosmaster says

Nice work

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