Swarms Of Bird Bots!

This week has been especially busy on the servers – we did a load test to see the performance overhead and potential for more players. Good news: we have a fair bit of room to increase the number of of players per server, so we’ll probably be pushing up those limits. Look at those bird bots swarms!

Quests

  • Polished advanced guidance. When it points at portals, buildings or items it has the correct name, and it automatically points at items for collection quests.
  • Dialogue system: a few small tweaks, including automatic timing that scales for longer messages and languages with higher information density per character.
  • Quests now have tiers, so you can more easily judge the difficulty of a quest
  • Start on dungeon spawning, so we can automatically spawn portals to dungeons that are needed for quests on demand
  • 7 new special quests:
    • “Fire Bomber”: Fight 3 giant flame throwing bomber robot, boss-like
    • “Angels of Death”: Collect mind control devices from Mecha-Angel squadrons
    • “Desert Eye”: Fight groups of snipers. Last sniper evolves into stronger form.
    • “Eradicator”: Strong version of Disinfector with 6 nodes, more aggressive, boss-like
    • “War Horse”: Fight giant “War Horse” trains with extra cannons/hp
    • “Defiant Enemy Crabs”: Hunt down Mini Fisher Crabs and prevent them from rebuilding their mother
    • “Obey Scoop Law”: Kill “Greater Poopers” that are dropping toxic dog waste

Art

  • Hog unwrapped and integrated, with model revisions
  • Shield Maiden modeled, unwrapped, animated, integrated
  • Variant drawings/concepts
  • Quest beacon for Goose escort mission
  • New bird friend for Fire dungeon
  • Bosses now speak to players using the dialogue system with pretty portraits
  • Misc polish and art bugs fixed

Other

  • Testing and adjusting the Ozy character patching logic.
  • Adding some filters to the audit log view so we can filter out store-related events
  • Modularising (is that a word?) the tutorial plane choice menu. Now it pulls data from a list and uses localized strings.
  • Sword strength research and buff
  • Move the anonymous gist uploads to ozy since anonymous gists are gone.