Patch Note:0.24.0.22

From PotBS Wiki

Differences between 0.23.3.22 and 0.24.0.22

The most important change to this build is that our PvP testing zone in Tortuga now lets you fight without losing durability points. Try out PvP and, most importantly, explore that ugly, temporary environment so you can tell us what you think of the layout and scale. We’ll be making changes based on your feedback and then we’ll make it look pretty. Don’t file bugs on it - just tell us in the forums what you think. Please take the largest groups you can in there and pound on each other ASAP and let us know what you think.

Other changes include improvements to the ship combat AI - we fixed the bug where they stop firing at you and also improved their ability to close distance by tacking. We’ve added some reliability to the Economy Tutorial so players are less likely to get trapped there. We’ve also fixed the porch of the House of Marque in Barilla. We may have fixed other instances of players getting trapped, but I’m not sure. We’ve made several fixes to doing missions while grouped so that they behave more reliably. There’s some economy tuning and some ship tuning in this build. There’s also some new avatar bits - please don’t log bugs against these yet. More details on all of the above below.

Known Issues:

• We’re wiping your preferences again in this build.
• You will most likely have to throw away your old purchased user content items and repurchase them using the User Content Shop for them to show up correctly. This is because we moved their location to 'My Documents\Pirates of the Burning Sea\userContent'. If you have user content in your inventory, it will show green arrows for those items and they will have to be purchased again from the User Content shop.
• Internally, we experienced a problem where Aurelia wasn’t handing out Welcome to Town missions to new players. We weren’t able to repro reliably. Let us know if you see this.
• Society Message of the Day doesn't work. Society chat works and System MOTD works.
• Sometimes you don't get a HUD when you win a battle, finish a mission, etc.

Differences between 0.23.3.22 and 0.24.0.22 include but are not limited to:

Tutorial:

• Fixed the arrow pointing at the battery at the wrong time
• Added mini-map/map indicator
• Tweaked/clarified wording.
• Changed Tutorial to add the swing attack to your toolbar.
• Modified Camera Physics and moved some of the cliff walls in the tutorial room so you don’t run aground so often.
• The tutorial now awards free skills to go with your fighting style.

More changes to come...

Economy Tutorial:

• Fixed the warehouse door to be clickable.
• In the "Building the Woodcutter’s Camp" part of the Economy Tutorial, the arrow now does a better job of pointing at stored labor.
• Fixed the mission giver so they will continue/restart talking even if you leave the room and reenter it, or if the zone drops.
• Delivering the Logs mission text made more explicit, mentioning, yet again, move your goods from the warehouse to your ship hold like the previous missions have also mentioned.
• We now briefly mention where structure deeds come from in Structure Overview mission.
• Tried to reword the segue to the next part of Structure Overview mission text.
• Removed arrow pointing to Skills and Recipes and explicitly mention the need to select the Harvest Wood recipe from the Economy window.
• Locked down the usage of the Woodcutter's Camp deed and Basic Quarry (Gravel Pit) deed to the instanced room in the Building the Woodcutter's Camp mission and the instanced room in the Building the Gravel Pit mission. Also made these non-tradable, non-destroyable deeds.
• Swapped out the 10,000 doubloon reward for the Economy Tutorial and replaced it with no-trade versions of structure deeds players can choose from. Also give players some granite and a couple iron ingots to help them get started.

Missions:

• Fixed a ton of text bugs in a ton of missions. Shouldn’t matter for game play but the safest thing is to cancel all your missions and re-take them.
• Fixed a mission reward exploit.
• Increased mission cap to 20 (from 10).
• Respect - ships that made it to port were not despawning. Now they do.
• Relic Quarry - fixed the arrangement of the player and your allies when you zone into the mission.
• Spy in the Ointment mission was missing, blocking completion of a chain of missions. This mission is now in-game.
• Modified "A Killer Smile" to take place entirely within noobtown1.
• In some cases, when grouping and doing missions, players who weren’t the mission owner couldn’t enter the mission. Fixed that.
• Fixed a bug where grouping caused missions to be given and accomplished out of sequence.
• Persistent mission doors the group leader owns are now exposed to group members in the multi-exit UI and are suffixed with "[Leader]". So for example if a group member clicks on a door that goes to both their instance of a mission "Foo" as well as their leader’s copy, the multi-exit list will contain "Foo" and "Foo [Leader]".
• Also fixed some assorted issues with mission locking and POI icons in the radar.
• We may also have fixed some problems where people get trapped in mission encounters and can’t leave. What we fixed doesn’t fit the description given by most parties as to how they landed where they were so I’m unsure how much improvement you’ll see.
• Fixed several other bugs with grouping and missions - I’m not sure how many of these you were experiencing (they were found after 0.23.3.22, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t exist in that build) but please try grouping and doing missions together and let us know how it works.  :)
• We had some encounters where the AIs would spawn in the middle of the room and then teleport to their appropriate starting locations. Now they start in their appropriate starting locations.

Economy:

• Increased the global auction house listing limit from 75 to 500, to accommodate the larger listing limits in the regional auction houses.
• Adjusted tax rates to make them more significant for foreign merchants.
• Fixed Auction House in Belle Isle.
• Changed "Junk Buyer" to "Junk Merchant"
• Adjusted provision recipe; it now requires less wine and more rum.
• Fixed the recipes and books so Brass Fittings appear in game.
• Put Spyglasses 1-4 onto the forge as well.
• Adjusted wheat, flour, and bread recipes. It takes two plantations to supply a mill, two mills to supply a bakery, and all recipes take 6 hours to execute.
• Increased the bread requirement in provisions from 1 to 5, in hopes of making bread-baking as fun as crushing.
• Removed fine wine from the more efficient merchant version of bundle provisions.
• Cleaned up the ship recipes. They are overall cheaper to produce, with a few exceptions. The cannons in the recipe now match the cannons actually on the ship (we'll see how long that lasts). Armored ships are no longer ridiculously overpriced.
• Changed 'large cannon' description to include 24lb cannons, and changed 'medium cannon' description to only include up to 18lb cannons.
• Generally reduced Civilian ship costs, but the costs get much higher at level 30+.
• Added recipes for the Capri Destroyer, Trader's Large Galleon, and the Pirate Destroyer refit.

Ships:

• Removed the defense bonus for tiny ships. They will now behave like small ships (0% accuracy mod). Taelorn don't want these ships to be too hard to hit when you encounter an NPC sailing one.
• Removed the defense bonus on the bow and the stern. Technically, it should be easier to hit the bow or the stern.
• Significantly increased the sail integrity of all scout ships. It was too easy to damage the sails of scout ships and negate their maneuverability and speed advantage. Scout ships now have more sail strength than warships.
• Scout ship variants now have more sail integrity than the original ship.
• Added new negative cargo capacity modifiers to civilian merchant ships (Bark and greater).
• Completely changed the progression of Default ships (the ones you get when you lose your last ship). Default and Civilian ships are now separate.
• Completely revamped the Civilian ships available at the deed trader. Created lots of new Civilian ships. ships now have a higher level req than player-crafted ships.
• Removed accuracy penalty from Civilian ships - this penalty was too harsh in the new system.
• Sped up the Halifax Schooner, your starting ship. Slight increase in max speed, slight increase in turning speed. Improved relative speed for wind angles Broad Reach and Running. It's running speed was at 65%, and that's bad for the first ship players sail.
• Slightly increased the armor of the Cerberus Frigate.
• Added cannons to the Mastercraft East Indiaman. Removed damage bonus.
• Fixed a bug with the Stralsund's cannons
• Fixed a bug with the Defiant's capacity
• Added a new ship - Trader's Large Galleon
• Added capture deeds for the Capricieux Destroyer, La Belle, Wenden, and Prince.
• Nerfed NPC ships a bit temporarily to compensate for the lack of AI surrender in missions and a few upcoming combat changes.
• Derelicts now take much longer to sink. (~21 minutes max from ~4 minutes)

Ship Combat:

• Fixed a problem with ship combat where damage was minimal at close range and maximal at long range. Now it works as you'd expect.
• Added Attack to the toolbar for the Open Sea. Shoulda been there all along.
• The Final Battle test room off Tortuga now respawns dead players in their respective ready rooms. Please go test this room and let us know what you think!
• You now always get negative faction from a kill. There had been some instances where that wasn’t true in ad hoc battles.
• Reduced the weight of all ship consumables to 1. We decided the trade-off between "can I have shot" and "can I get loot" wasn’t very fun.
• Tuned some buff skills: Made navy group buffs last longer and be more effective, made all defense debuffs last longer, made all disabling-type debuffs last longer, increased effectiveness of all 'desperation' skills, increased effectiveness of Vital Shot and All or Nothing Shot, made Reload Discipline skills toggles instead of timed buffs. Overall, this change makes the Navy a bit scarier. Tuning on other career skills is underway.
• Grappling success is now partially stepped. If the chance to grapple is less than 25%, the grappling button is disabled; the actual chance to grapple is 0% and the player may not make the attempt. If the chance to grapple is between 25% and 75%, the grappling button is yellow, and the actual chance to grapple is equal to the calculated percentage chance. If the chance to grapple is greater than 75%, the grappling button is green, and the actual chance to grapple is 100%. The player will always succeed at grappling when the button is green.
• Changed all skills which were group toggles (which don't work) to group timed buffs (which do).
• Changed the kind of silly Hide Crew skill to give crew protection instead of trying to do some tricky shenanigans with max crew.
• Made swivels extremely accurate. They should almost never miss (since you have to be so close to use them).
• Accuracy-related movement penalties are not calculated for ships within 25 yards. Previously, this value was 5 yards.
• Heavy Round Shot is supposed to do 5%-7.5% crew damage. It had an extra 0 in the values, so it was doing 0.5%-0.75%. Fixed.
• Tweaked the stats for the round shot NPCs use.
• We’ve made some changes to improve AI skill use. Let us know, though, where you still see wonkiness.
• Surrendered loot items now display the "Claim" and "Discard" buttons as they should.
• NPCs weren’t always firing when they should. They should be better now.
• If you were in a one on one battle with an AI and were upwind and out of range of that AI, the AI would sail straight at you and you could blast him for a long time before he turned to fire at you. If, once he started to turn to fire, you moved a little further away, he would turn back towards you and fire only once, if at all. Fixed that. We hope.
• Revamped NPC ship spawn tables. Introduced several previously unused ships to the tables. Removed the low level plague of Skudas, so now they should be more rare.

Swashbuckling:

• The color of the balance meter now ranges from a healthy blue to an angry purple and it surrounds your character.
• Made it so that swashbuckling skills won't have combat pool cost skills with a min value of 0 anymore. It was just silly to see that requirement in the tooltip.
• Fixed a bug that caused health not to be increased by effects properly. This would cause some NPCs to show health 20/30 when they hadn’t been damaged yet, for example.
• Changed the XP value of players to 0, so you can't get XP from killing other players in swashbuckling for now.
• Added an initiative indicator (balance bar) to health bars in avatar combat.
• If you died in avatar combat while disconnected from your server, when you logged back in you didn’t have the option to respawn, only exit the mission. Fixed that.
• Changed default AI aggro radius from 5 to 12. Because of this, DrewC removed one spawn of grunts from the avatar combat demo encounter.
• Avatar combat NPCs now animate when they're waiting around for a fight
• Changed all combat avatar motion so that it feels much more fluid and less "floaty." Quote the Paul "Once again, realism is a lie."

Preferences: - We’re wiping your prefs in this build

• Moved the target health bar to the top center of the screen as a usability experiment.
• We now check minimum requirements before trying to open the game window: D3D and D3DX are at least the version that we compiled against; Graphics card supports a minimal vertex shader version (>= vs2.0) and pixel shader version (>= ps2.0); Video card memory is large enough (a 128MB card).
• Default prefs now assume 1280x1024. Low-end default prefs remain 1024x768.
• Changed the code that picks "low" quality or "high" quality preferences for you based on your video card. We had been sensing "“low" quality for high end machines.
• Default preferences for low end machines were not quite what we intended. Improved them.
• Setting Texture Resolution to 8 wasn’t giving much performance boost over setting it to 2 but sure did look terrible. So now the setting only goes down to 2.
• Fix preferences to update the resolution settings correctly when you switch resolutions, then Cancel or let the resolution thing time out.
• Fixed a bug where you could set your anisotropic filtering settings and your avatars would disappear.
• Fixed setting of anisotropic texture filtering when textures are loaded.
• Fixed a bug with camera preferences getting overridden by other camera settings.

Art:

• New avatar bits have been added. WIP - no need to log bugs on these yet.
• You can now have no hat and no feather.  :)
• Fixed the porch of the House of Marque in Barilla. You should be able to get your own self off of it now w/o GM intervention.
• Replaced the door that was missing from the Captain’s Quarters.
• Un-livelied some lively towns for performance reasons. We’ll re-lively them in a later build.
• Added flagpoles with flags to more towns.
• We’ve optimized several rooms - hopefully FPS is better and they may even load faster but still look as good if not better. WIP.
• Lots of love to lots of rooms - ArtCo is concentrating mostly of bug fixes and polish in this milestone and they’re off to a running start.
• Fixed some ship combat particle effects.

UI:

• Mouse-over health bars are now semi-transparent to distinguish them from the target health bars.
• When you were in ship space interacting w/ an NPC, we’d show you the wrong avatar portrait. Now we don’t show you a portrait.
• Changed derelict IFF color to black (used to be grey).
• Added some new icons here and there and tweaked UI bits to make them nicer and easier to understand.
• Attempted to standardize all windows to 540 pixels high. Also shrunk the auction house width slightly, as part of an ongoing attempt to make it small enough to use with the inventory open at the same time. Currently, you can fit both at 1280x1024.
• Made the Victory Status UI follow the same rules as other windows.
• Open sea current arrows now show up on the local map (the one you get by pressing M).

Sound:

• More/better sounds in more missions.
• Sounds added to Character Creation Room, and UI sounds added to character creation and game beginning buttons.
• Removed reversed speaking voices from British Town, added some "sim" style garbled voices in its place.
• More sounds added to more rooms.
• Tweaked and finessed several sounds. Jaclyn got a new tool for mucking with sound and couldn’t stop playing with it.  ;)

Misc:

• Adjusted starting conquest values to match the actual number of conquerable ports each side has. This should make "conquering the world" work better.
• Changed the names of the 'warfare' and 'defense' channels to 'Local Defense' and 'Conquest', respectively, and revised the chat UI to accommodate the new names.
• Battle chat is now limited in length as the other chat channels. Battle chat is what your side uses in a Landmark Battle.
• Fixed a memory leak in keybinding.
• Fixed a bug that could cause the game to crash when you were shopping.
• Fix a leak in drop down buttons. This also fixes a combat UI crash that happens when you change graphics options while fighting.
• Fixed like six bugs in screenshots. P should work now for most folks. Still some issues we're working on.
• Going from full screen to windowed caused the client window to always be on top. Fixed that.
• Dev made a bunch of changes, mostly server-side, to improve security and performance. You should see no change except possibly faster loading. But if you get strange disconnects, be sure to include your log file in the bug report - that will help us nail the culprit.  :)