Some Big Updates

[Arslajin]

Big things going on lately! Over the past few days, Dusk has seen big changes:

• new copyover system (aka hot reboots) to apply updates without disconnecting players
• a career mastery system, described in more detail below
• codified the manual stats-setting system, see Mother Aldys at the town square
• implemented the apoc r4 kinetic blast ability and completed the gladiator r4 agile armor ability
• UX improvements for targeting foes in combat
• ...and more! Helpfile cleanup and updates, MSSP integration to support listing sites, some admin utility commands

Career Mastery

Characters that have achieved rank 4 in a career, maxed-out all of the career's skills, and gained an ability from all four ranks will be presented with two mastery abilities. The overall intent of these abilities is to stretch the gameplay for a career in a unique way that is otherwise unattainable -- for example, the exemplar abilities for berserker allow a character's strength to exceed the otherwise 60 strength cap, or to have complete control over rage/calm. The spirit of mastery abilities is to add fun, flavor, and endish-game type goals, not to break gameplay with overpowered enhancements.

As of now, berserker is the only career with mastery abilities, but more will be rolling out over the next few weeks.

[Arslajin]

More updates:

• all of the player logged typos have been addressed
• weapon force damage during combat has been updated to factor in weapon weight (see below)

Weapon Force Damage

Previously, the sole factor in determining a weapon's force damage in combat was just that -- its force value. With this update, weapon force damage is a calculation of the weapon's weight along with the force value. Put simply, if two weapons have the same force value and different weights, the heavier weapon will have the potential to produce more force damage.

[Arslajin]

And more:

• added an account experience bank (ebank), details below
• patched various memory-related leaks/bugs
• patched (potential) bugs with how items are saved
• patched a few gameplay exploits
• beastmaster pet bonds are now cleared if the pet is killed while the character isn't playing
• fixed a long-broken "quest" (yes, that one)

Account Experience Bank

Accounts can now share experience between characters, for a cost. Characters can deposit 10k experience at a time, which is taxed at 30% (deposit 10k, taxed 3k, 7k is added to the account pool). Any character on the account can withdraw experience from the pool and there's no fee for withdrawals.

Read help ebank in-game.

[Arslajin]

This is a good news/bad news update:

The Good News!

• added a soldier mastery ability, Armored Tortoise
• added +1 to absorbs while turtle mode is active
• fixed some typos and inaccuracies in the aggro/turtle helpfiles

The Bad News...

• while adding the ability, I discovered that skill roll penalties for turtle and aggro weren't being applied to the cooldown windows, which is now fixed

[Arslajin]

• added a "Numerals" config to display grouped item counts as a number vs words (i.e. "6 swords" vs "six swords")
• fixed a game-crashing bug related to excessive money counts in a playerfile

[Arslajin]

• blocked a beastmaster seeking revenge on themselves with they kill their pet -- but wait, there's more! If a beastmaster kills their pet, that pet won't follow the beastmaster for a period of RL time; the higher the rank/skill, the longer they'll shun you
• squashed some more crash-level bugs
• also fixed several player-reported bugs
• fixed player reported non-code things, such as missing helpfiles, missing item keywords, and incorrect wear locations

[Arslajin]

A quick update on some larger things in-progress, targeted to land by end of month:

• A new combat career!
• An OLC (online creation) system, for creating/editing zones/rooms/npcs/items from within the game
• A shift from file-based persistence for world things to a database -- some things are already stored in the database, most things aren't -- starting with world objects, the goal is to move saving/loading of all the things there

[Arslajin]

• the stealth surprise attack skill now takes an optional player-specified attack
• fixed a beastmaster bug related to calling pets
• fixed several typos

[Arslajin]

• the stealth concealment ability was replaced by a new ability, obscure

[Arslajin]

• updated the stealth r4 terrorize ability to additionally reduce the target's absorbs on a surprise attack