Asheron's Call, Update Notes

Update Notes – March 2000 – Darkness Ascendant

By Ellen Ripley, March 1, 2000

On a bluff overlooking Khayyaban, Jenavere and Hendac stood with the old woman, silhouetted by the setting sun, which had been dwindling over the last three months and now glowed a feeble red. Sulfur-tinted clouds had been racing across the land all day. A storm was brewing. Soon, the looming dark of the Demon would be seen on the northern horizon. It appeared more frequently of late — little wonder the three Master Smiths had hastened to finish the design of their new gemstone armor.

The moons hung low in the east — swollen, filling more of the sky every day. Some whispered they were falling. Hendac had called it a Hunter’s Moon, and Jena had shivered. She held a sputtering torch close to the ground. Just beyond them in a large circle, the sand had changed to a fine, ash-gray powder. “What do you think, Mistress Najmima?” she said. “Is it like the others?”
The old archmage walked to the center of the ash. She stretched out her palms, closed her eyes, and flinched as if struck. “Pain, child,” Najmima whispered. “A voice beneath here screams in agony. No . . . many voices, shrieking as one. Voices twisted together by black arts. Life rent and reformed to serve another’s needs. It . . . they . . . have slept for ages, but are now bidden to wake and serve again. The magic coursing through the land . . . It twists around a black void. There is . . . a parasite beneath us.” Jena and Hendac exchanged a knowing look.

For months, floating Crystals and Shadow creatures have held stations in the wilderness, arranged like pieces in a game. Now they have mobilized. Rumored to have emerged from the earth, strange, twisted citadels hover over the land near several towns, and a vast, bat-winged figure is now regularly seen flickering like dark lightning amid the storm clouds. Have Dereth’s heroes forced the leaders of the Shadows into some sort of desperate stand, or are these merely the opening moves in some larger and darker conflict?

The festive spring atmosphere of flowers, bees, and marriage ceremonies was disturbed by a series of earthquakes that preceded the eruption of bizarre Shadow Spires across the face of Dereth. These enormous constructions burst from the ground near the towns of Khayyaban, Tufa, Sawato, Tou-Tou, Cragstone, and Eastham. Travelers reported seeing Spires in the deep wilderness as well. Sages claimed they were somehow alive, but little could be proven, for no way could be found to enter them. Though brooding and malevolent-looking, the Spires floated harmlessly over the land for many days. Then came the abductions.

Many adventurers reported being magically pulled into the Spires, and subjected to a battery of questions by three invisible presences, each distinguished by the tone of its questions. Some of these questions were quite unfathomable, referring to people and events not yet familiar to humanity in Dereth. Most shocking, however, was the final question: Which of the six towns visited by the Spires should be destroyed? Some of the abducted answered with a random town, in fear of the power shown by the unseen presence; others chose a specific town out of spite. A few refused to choose. All were returned uninjured.

As the month progressed, disturbing changes were wrought in the heavens. The sun shrank, turning a dim, bloody red. The dark clouds faded to a sulfurous tint during storms. The moons of Alb’arel and Rez’arel swelled to grotesque size, and some feared they were falling. Through it all, the form of a demon lurked along the northern horizon, visible only during the most violent tempests.

In the face of what seemed to be an impending catastrophe, the people of Dereth worked feverishly to prepare their defenses. Many sought the ancient weapons of Atlan that had been recovered the previous month. Studying the Atlan weapons and referencing clues in ancient texts, the Master Smiths Jibril ibn Rashid, Koga Hideki, and Alean the Steel Forger managed to create suits of Shadowhunter Armor from the gems and shards taken from Shadows and Crystal Fragments. Those who brought them these hard-to-recover trophies could have them fashioned into this exquisite mail.

At the end of the month, an expectant silence hung over Dereth, broken only by the howl of the Spires and the frantic hammering of the Master Smiths. Ground tremors struck the island, as if something within the earth was stirring . . .

  • Colored lighting! Many lights, including the sun and moon, will now cast colored light in both hardware and software modes.
  • All-new Drudge models. Beautiful!
  • All-new Golem models. Gorgeous! Kill a golem today!
  • Wedding Hall added, plus fun wedding favors.
  • Festival Grounds have been added near the Festival Stones named Wintersebb (near Qalaba’r), Leafcull (near Yanshi), and Leafdawning (near Rithwic). These are great places to hold contests of skill, since they have dummy targets of various difficulty — the Leafdawning one also has a racetrack!. Scribes sell directions to all Festival Stones. Whack an oaken Drudge today!
  • Hand-to-hand combat is easier versus moving targets. You will “stick” to your target more.
  • Weapons that use the dagger skill have never used coordination to determine their “damage modifier”; they used strength. They now use coordination, like they’re supposed to according to the documentation. The higher your coordination, the more damage you will do. This was done by popular demand and hopefully will please more dagger-users than it will annoy. Since dagger-users have always needed coordination and not strength to improve their dagger skill, this change should help them focus their attribute-building. This affects the following classes of weapons: dagger, jambiya, khanjar, and knife.
  • Mages got proficiency-point gains for casting a spell on a creature, whether or not it resisted! This was broken compared to the way PP works for all other skills. Now, you don’t gain PP by casting a spell unless the spell is NOT resisted by the target. This was a great way to gain PP, but it was unfair and broken, and it now is fixed.
  • You can no longer equip bows with crossbow bolts and crossbows with arrows. There was a clever loophole making this possible. It was never intended to be this way. Fixed.
  • Fixed bug where you couldn’t strafe while walking or running in Thrown Combat mode.
  • Now if you cannot put a new craft object into your inventory (due to its being full or your being too encumbered), then you will get an error message and not complete the act. (You actually get a success then an error message; we will fix that later.) Still, it’s a bad idea to have your main inventory be full, or to be at maximum encumbrance.
  • When shopping with maxed-out encumbrance, you’ll find transactions are a bit easier. Still not a good idea, though.
  • Artifex Vault has a fix to a locked door that was confounding.
  • Lure Blade 1 updated. Was using wrong component. Lure Blade and Turn Blade spells had problems since they both shared the same formula.
  • When appraising lockable items, if you have the lockpick skill, they now display their lockpick difficulty appropriately.
  • True Value can now be cast on orbs, wands, and scrolls.
  • Olthoi Noble and Queen can fit through smaller spaces . . . beware.
  • Wells and Fountains in towns should be usable by players to get water. The solution here is pretty cool. Flasks can be used from a player’s inventory on a well to get water! Shopkeepers sell flasks.
  • No matter what your Alchemy skill, as long as it is trained, you will use the Smelting Pot successfully.
  • Spell icons for Blade Bane/Lure, Bludgeon Bane/Lure, Acid Bane/Lure, Frost Bane/Lure, and Fire Bane/Lure updated with proper colors.
  • Life magic spells no longer work against characters in the purple-bubble stage before they materialize from a teleport.
  • A clever exploit made it possible to hold a chest open and leave the area. Not anymore.
  • You get a confirmation dialog when using uncharged mana stones on items that would be destroyed.
  • Errant “Tool was destroyed” messages fixed.
  • New creature emotes allow more flexible creative effects.
  • New technology introduced that sets the stage for more complex questing.
  • You can now use extended/accented characters in chat.
  • The dart (or whatever) throwing animations pushed a character back each throw — back, back, back . . . Fixed.
  • Lugian Boulder launch needed a sound. Well I did better. I provided a sound for the Lugian boulder launch AND collision. And the landing now sounds NICE and LOUD!!!
  • Texture memory warning should only appear once after startup and after settings are changed.
  • Various infusions and oils now look like they should, with colored bottles as they appear on the ground matching the icons in inventory.
  • Female chest used to sink when putting on certain armors, allowing her head to float above her body slightly. No more.
  • Scrolled examine panel will now stay at the scroll point when its data is refreshed. Makes it easier to examine something when its mana is dropping.
  • After you inscribe an item, shortcut keys 1-9 could stop working. Fixed.
  • Golem stomp attacks no longer sound like sword-swishes, instead they sound like large stomps!
  • Projectile spells were colliding with floors of liquid hot magma! Fixed.
  • Overrode Mountain Rat level to 20 and added 346 CP. Rats are no harder; their level and CP are now more in line with their toughness.
  • Aluvian shopkeepers that sell bundles of arrowheads now buy them back. Others are being fixed later.
  • Icon for Iron Ore should look like a lump of rock, not an ingot. Fixed.
  • Slag item should look more like slag. Fixed.
  • Silencia’s Golem emoted when handed an item, and it sounded like cows eating grass, according to the bug. OK, so it sounded like SCRATCHING, which all creatures do, but we agree that it was a bit too small a sound, and replaced it with grinding rock.
  • Empyrean lighthouse final degrade happens much farther back now.
  • Lightning Elementals bleed better!
  • Some male robes looked crummy at the back, many people claimed to look like a hunchback. Wanted me to either fix it or provide them chapel bell towers. I opted to fix it.
  • Skeletons never “bled” with particles from their top half. Fixed.
  • Add sound, degrade to the beeswarm.
  • Brittlemain and Impenetrability spells were using the wrong visual effect. Fixed.
  • Inscriptions and parchment/book text should be less prone to getting wiped out under odd circumstances.
  • The lightning dart particle effect is now positioned correctly.
  • Attempting to cast a spell whilst running caused character to stop but didn’t cast spell. Fixed.
  • Creatures have a level-up effect now. Level up a bunny today!
  • The melee and missile defense of a running target (while in combat or magic mode) used to drop to 60% of normal, resulting in a much higher chance for an attacker to hit, and a much higher chance for critical (double damage) hits. This has been changed to 90%, making your defense against an attack while running hardly any worse than your defense while standing. Similarly, a running target in peace mode used to have 40% of normal missile and melee defense; now it is 80%. However, this change only applies to humans, not monsters: running monsters still have a defense that is 60% of normal. Note that Player-Killers unavoidably are affected by this: human targets, while on the run, will be better defended. This helps even those without melee defense as a trained skill. Note also that the attributes Quickness and Coordination improve your melee and missile defense, even if it is not trained. See below for more details on “sticky melee.”
  • There was a bug introduced on March 7: if you tried to cast a spell while turning to cast a previous spell, both spells could be cancelled. This has been fixed.
  • The Ash Gromnie was unusual: while attacking, it had a “charge speed” that exceeded its run speed. This has been reduced so that it cannot exceed its maximum run speed, even while attacking. This makes it like all other monsters.
  • The Wedding Key now can be given to others.
  • The proper vendors in Fort Tethana and Stonehold buy jewels and gems again — this was accidentally broken in the last update.
  • The landscape and sky are changed, as the newly risen spires widen their sinister influence.
  • Please note that in order to fix the magic-casting bug described above, it was necessary to download a new game client to you as part of this update.

Here is an excerpt from the article “The State of the Code,” which goes into more detail about “sticky melee.”

Attackers are STILL sticking to me like glue!
In the March 16 minor update, we made it a bit easier on those who are being hurt badly by attackers that “stick” to them as they run. A running player now has a substantially better chance of avoiding being hit, and being hit critically, by melee and missile attacks. See the Build Notes, March 16, for more details.

However, this quick fix could only go so far. In our next major update, in early April, we hope to fix the problem further. We hope to make it so that attackers who are slower than their running targets become much less likely to hit them. Due to latency effects, even slower attackers get one or two “free whacks” at a target that runs near them. We hope to make these “free whacks” much less consequential if the attacker is slower than the target.

However, we are unlikely to change some “sticky” things. If an attacker is faster than you, it will remain a serious threat. It will still be able to catch up to you and hit you repeatedly. Likewise, if you are faster than a monster, you still will be able to hit it repeatedly. This is a necessary aspect of game balance.

It’s easy to mistakenly come to the conclusion that you are faster than a monster, when this may not really be the case. There is a “blip effect” that can contribute to this conclusion when a monster attacks; see below.

To figure out if you or the monster is faster, try antagonizing it (coming just within its awareness range, or hitting it with a spell or missile) while it is as far away as possible. Then, immediately run away from it. Watch its dot on your compass while it is still chasing you. Does that dot get any closer to you over time? If so, that monster is genuinely faster than you, and is a serious threat. Note that there is no way to be sure of how fast a monster is just by examining it. A monster has a Run skill as well; Quickness alone does not determine its speed.

We have done extensive testing (with average Internet latency) and determined that in no case did a monster that is genuinely slower than a player land more than one or two hits before falling and staying behind. We made those hits a bit less dangerous with the March 7 update, and we hope to go further with our next major update; see above.

However, we also found that Internet latency can have a strong effect on how successfully you can run from a monster. If your connection through the Internet is slow or spotty, or if you are downloading more data than your connection can handle, it can allow slower monsters to catch up to you. Again, we hope to lessen the consequence of this soon, but meanwhile, please adjust for your connection speed. Also, please realize that when you are standing, and then start to run from a monster, it takes time for that signal to cross the Internet and reach the server. Until the server knows that you have started running, it thinks you are still standing there. Therefore, to avoid attack, you need to start running before the monster can reach you, and the slower your connection, the sooner you should run.

Monsters that attack me while I am running seem to fall back, then blip right on top of me. Can I get some of that magic?
Currently, there is a less-than-ideal visual effect when monsters attack you while you are running. They appear to fall behind you as they stop their running animation, in preparation for their attack animation. Then, when they do their attack animation, they suddenly appear to be right on top of you.

It may appear that you are outrunning a monster, which then suddenly gets a free “teleport” on top of you. You may think that you are faster than a monster and that it is cheating with this “teleport.” In actuality, the opposite is true: the monster has always been right on top of you, but it erroneously appears to stand still for the few moments it readies its attack animation. We hope to fix this soon.