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Chris' Daily Work Blog

Discussion in 'Developer Work and Blog posts' started by Chris, Apr 5, 2017.

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  1. Chris

    Chris Tech Lord Moderator Ambassador SOTA Developer

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    07/19/2017

    Spent most of the day home with a sick 3 year old sleeping on me.

    07/20/2017

    Today, wrapping up dread artifacts. Working to fix the Effect Area system so performance won't be so horrible (this is used on many traps and also on artifact instruments).

    Added a new system to allow triggering of abilities through saying things.
     
    Last edited: Jul 20, 2017
  2. Chris

    Chris Tech Lord Moderator Ambassador SOTA Developer

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    07/21/2017 - 07/26/2017
    Working on bugs and polish to ship this release.

    On 07/25/2017
    I will be out to attend my wife's grandmother's 100th birthday
     
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  3. Chris

    Chris Tech Lord Moderator Ambassador SOTA Developer

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    07/25/2017
    Successfully visited Maxine's great grandmother for her 100th birthday party!
    [​IMG]
    07/26/2017
    Today is rapid bug fixing and long term planning meetings!
     
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  4. Chris

    Chris Tech Lord Moderator Ambassador SOTA Developer

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    07/31/2017
    Leads meeting
    Implemented spells including the player chanting words on each cast. (Richard request, I suspect we'll have to make this an option)
    Set words on most spells
    Travian announcement, WOOT!

    08/01/2017
    Just working through huge list of Jiras!
    • Updates light and heavy armor so the lasting buffs have zero value if you swap to different gear
    • Working to find some source resources for Black Sun so they can localize some assets
    • Unity Editor Crashed, happens about 5x a day... :/ Taking this opportunity to upgrade to the newest version of Unity that doesn't crash immediately on our game, 5.6.3. 2017.x crashes on most of our levels...
    • Obsidian golems now come with a null magic field on them but have their own resistances reduced
    • Enjoyed some fan delivered tacos for both breakfast AND lunch! (Thanks to Dereck Visaard for making us fat!)
    • Spent some time arguing with players about RNGs while I waited for new Unity to update!
      https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...dom-number-generator.96824/page-5#post-855113
    • Finished adding words of power for all spells! Quaes-Wast-Ylem-Ignis-Xen!
    • Fixed Evasion and Dodge to not have a hit limit. This was making them end sooner than expected and made it appear to be a bug.
     
    Last edited: Aug 1, 2017
  5. Chris

    Chris Tech Lord Moderator Ambassador SOTA Developer

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    08/02/2017
    • Spending some time on long term planning (including updating our 2 year plan/wish list)
    • Hunting for assets for our starting movie for localization purposes
     
  6. Chris

    Chris Tech Lord Moderator Ambassador SOTA Developer

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    08/03/2017
    • Woot, Seedinvest campaign over it's first milestone: https://www.seedinvest.com/portalarium/series.b
    • Working on some design issues for equivalent of card stacking with the heat system. (Oneandonly doing the implementation)
    • Quick meeting with Travian which resulted in us moving from HipChat to Slack for chat
    • Had to do some recovery work on a local cache serer and perforce box. I left a bit early yesterday and minutes after leaving, the whole building lost power for quite some time.
    • Fixed a bug where a cabalist would keep teleporting even after death.
    • Got a haircut so I look somewhat presentable for the mini-telethon/long post mortem next release.
    • Fixed Rapidfire so hits after the first can be dodged, blocked, AND also generate critical hit damage amounts. Currently it looks like it is criting but generates normal damage.
    • ...
     
    Last edited: Aug 3, 2017
  7. Chris

    Chris Tech Lord Moderator Ambassador SOTA Developer

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    08/04/2017

    After some major continuing head aches from how a bunch of our local machines are setup, I decided to spend much of the day cleaning things up. Ended up moving 4 machines that were on 4 different boxes, virtualizing then and putting them on a single VMware ESXi box. I need to do some more work on it this weekend but I've already been able to remove 3 machines from our cluster which hopefully will help with our ongoing power issues.

    In other words, today I wore my IT hat instead of my coder or designer hat. :)
     
  8. Chris

    Chris Tech Lord Moderator Ambassador SOTA Developer

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    08/07/2017

    Doing some post mortem thing and also automating the backup process for our new internal VM setup.

    Oh, and for those coming here looking for the feature I mentioned that I was most excited about for PVP for this release, it is a scene flag for a balanced PVP scene. All players will use 80 for their adventurer level while in the scene and all skills will be capped to 100 for calculations. Hoping to sneak this in for R45 and put it on at least one PVP scene.
     
  9. Chris

    Chris Tech Lord Moderator Ambassador SOTA Developer

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    08/08/2017

    Pugilism, done. I even remembered to add it to a trainer this time! :)

    Mostly done with tech so we can set scenes to have a level and/or skill cap. Primary use is aimed at having a capped PVP experience BUT could also be used for other things, like capping power in other PVE or story areas. We would need more work for those or else it could be overly punishing for some. For example, your skills are all capped at 80, which gets you killed and then your decay amount is based at your full skill amount. Ugh.
     
  10. Chris

    Chris Tech Lord Moderator Ambassador SOTA Developer

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    08/09/2017

    • Continuing work on cleaning up the level cap work. The level caps are in place now but as always, that is the easy part. The hard part is conveying what is going on to the player.
    • Also, for clarification, this feature will only be turned on for one or two scenes. I'll likely add a new PVP arena scene that has a cap. I will probably also add a new version of Chillblain's that has a level cap and different creatures.
    • Added some logic so if you die in a capped scene, the amount of decay is proportional to how gimped you were. If you had 25 million xps applied and only got to use 5 million of them in a scene then a decay death will only cost you 20% as much. This also only removes that much from your accumulated decay so you can't clear your decay by going to a capped area, dying a few times. You'll clear some but not all of it.
    • Working with Undone to help sneak Discord integration into the game. Opt in, register for channels, direct it to chat windows or tabs. Oh yeah, we have chat Windows now. You can have more than one! (Shhhh... don't tell Starr)
    • More infrastructure work. (Fancy way of saying I'm cleaning the office. Oh, and virtualizing limited use boxes)
     
    Last edited: Aug 9, 2017
  11. Chris

    Chris Tech Lord Moderator Ambassador SOTA Developer

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    08/11/2017
    Last few days have been zero sleep, 20+hour days recovering an internal server box that failed catastrophically. Only an internal use box BUT a critical process box that makes it painful for people to work if it isn't up. Good times. Combination, wiggly power cord that cut power + plug in the wrong UPS slot + sloppy hard drive failure corrupting some files in a software raid + chron job that failed due to someone changing privileges on some files + CRC in the backup of the compressed versions of the files + our office not having enough power so we don't have replication servers + other factors all came together to kick me nuts. UGH... No joy but all mostly fixed now.

    Also, for clarity, this was not a live service issue. On line we use better RAID systems, automated backup, plus hardware replication for rapid fail over. This was just a local office server thing. Work continues on this now but we're mostly back in business AND hardware ordered so this never happens again.
     
  12. Chris

    Chris Tech Lord Moderator Ambassador SOTA Developer

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    08/15/2017-08/17/2017

    FINALLY have internal replication servers up, just in time for me to leave town!

    08/18/2017

    Cramming a weeks worth of work into a few hours. :O First up is sacrifice to recharge dread weapons!
     
  13. Chris

    Chris Tech Lord Moderator Ambassador SOTA Developer

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    08/28/2017

    Back in the office and taking over for Starr who is out this week for various promotion events for the game.

    Some good news! Latest patch of the Unity 2017.x no longer crashes on our project! Woohoo! Zero chance we would risk upgrading this close to a release but decent chance we'll switch for 46.

    Fixed quad slash only hitting a single target.
    Fixed Body Slam not applying armor durability debuff.
    Working to FINALLY fix some of the worst hitching in the game, caused by multiple copies of shaders in the game being treated as different because they are in multiple bundles.
    Fixed Douse so it will no longer remove all effects, only fire effects.
     
    Last edited: Aug 28, 2017
  14. Chris

    Chris Tech Lord Moderator Ambassador SOTA Developer

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    08/29/2017
    Bugs bugs bugs
    Lots of time spent on trying to understand the "Flood" bug where the terrain drops out. Appears it is only on Windows 10 and a Unity issue, likely relating to asset bundles, which sucks. I just through one more blind dart at it for the first gold candidate and we'll see if I hit the target.
    Performance work on load times. Looking at more interactive optimizations.

    08/30/2017
    Bugs, load times, management!
     
  15. Chris

    Chris Tech Lord Moderator Ambassador SOTA Developer

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    09/05/2017-09/08/2017

    A week of meetings! Meeting with Travian visitors most of the week to plan strategies for websites, physical goods deliveries, marketing, QA, CS, and lots of other random stuff!
     
  16. Chris

    Chris Tech Lord Moderator Ambassador SOTA Developer

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    09/08/2017

    Travian meetings wrapped up early so I decided to take a pass on banning botters. More instrumentation was added to catch botters this release and sadly, it works perfect. Just took a quick pass and banned the 20 most egregious offenders. I'm going to be monitoring this more closely in the coming months so please refrain from doing it! BTW, many of these botters were mouse macros that actually moved their mouse cursor. 100% of this round of botters were people who were botting combat and loot gaining situations. Botting is not OK under ANY circumstance but due to a few tedious design elements right now, I'm mostly only going after those who are unattended botting combat in some manner.

    I stopped at the top 20 because my arm was getting tired of swinging the ban hammer so if you are a combat botter and didn't get banned, you just weren't one of the top 20 BUT STOP IT. I don't like banning people. 5 of the accounts banned were devplus accounts as well which really makes me sad.
     
  17. Chris

    Chris Tech Lord Moderator Ambassador SOTA Developer

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    09/13/2017

    Another meeting on load time work for R46. Progress is being made but it is slow going. A big part of the problem is just not being able to see what is going on due to the lack of source code which is super frustrating. I'm hoping to make a change Thursday that will cut the load time of all maps by 2-5 seconds. Wish me luck!

    Most of the day was spent setting up our new infrastructure server, a Dell T620 with 42tb of SAS storage in Raid 6 with a 1TB ssd cache, currently a single 10 core/20 thread 2.8ghz Xeon, and 96GB of RAM. Probably going to upgrade the RAM soon and add a second CPU so we can consolidate most VMs to the box for easy backup.

    BTW, above system was purchased used as we're too cheap to pay the $20k price tag for a new one. :) Total cost was under $3k.
     
    Last edited: Sep 14, 2017
  18. Chris

    Chris Tech Lord Moderator Ambassador SOTA Developer

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    09/14/2017-09/15/2017

    IT and Load times. Setting up the new beefy server is very time consuming. :/

    Testing a change right now to allow for a large chunk of Novia to always be loaded. One of the issues we're running into is that loading takes time BUT unloading also takes lots of time. Once a scene is unloaded, a collection of unused assets starts and consumes several seconds while it checks ref counts and thrashes and compacts memory. Since Novia accounts for 50% of all loads AND unloading it also adds time to the effective load time of other maps, we'll just keep the non-dynamic chunk of Novia around at all times.
     
  19. Chris

    Chris Tech Lord Moderator Ambassador SOTA Developer

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    09/20/2017

    Another busy week of load time work. Good news. FINALLY some break through fixes and some significant measurable improvements in load times. Also, the side effect from a few of the fixes is a smaller memory foot print and a smaller build size. Still some work to go before Novia will load in under 10 seconds but target is within sight! Also, finally giving some platter drive people some love as well. Finally getting assets organized cleanly and doing some preloading of smaller assets.

    Some balance work today as well:
    • Close examination of polearm tree
      • Spinning attack upped to a max of 4 targets
      • Puncture, OMG, only hits 1 target for less damage than Thrust. Bread and butter skill for the tree does less than half what the sword equivalent was doing. :O
      • Leaving Puncture single target and adding a DOT effect as that makes more sense
    • Several creatures made knock down/back/stun proof or resistant, including daemon, dragons, trolls, and some undead.
     
    Last edited: Sep 20, 2017
  20. Chris

    Chris Tech Lord Moderator Ambassador SOTA Developer

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    9/25/2017

    BAM, time to get work done. Friday and over the weekend I did a bunch of IT stuff including setting up a new box for an artist and reconfiguring our storage server to use storage spaces and data deduplication. Fun!

    Today, all about changes.... and leads meeting.
    • Big one. There are 4 Damage Avoidance skills, Dig In, Fortify Defenses, Glancing Blow, and Shield of Ice. For R46, only 2 of these can be active at a time. Casting a third will over write the oldest.
    • Healing Burst and Purify Burst will now correctly show their range
    • Healing Blast now has power words
    • Inner Strength can now be used on the over world.
    • ...
     
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