Project: Gorgon News

This is a quick touch-up to last week's update.

• Inventory window: did not show the special overlays shown on top of quest items and broken hardcore items.
  
• Practical Summoning: manually typing a number did not always correctly change the number summoned.
  
• Recipe Sorting: the "Sort by Times Used" option did not work in some situations
  
• Inventory window: showed incorrect status messages in the chat history when locking/unlocking a folder.
  
• Fixed the level requirement on about two dozen work orders. These work orders' rewards are unchanged, only the level requirement was incorrect.
  
• Fixed physics bug that could cause oversized monsters to fall through the world
  
• Miscellaneous very minor data tweaks.
  

Discuss this update on our forum!

Today's update contains a huge array of new features, bugfixes, and quality of life improvements.

Practical Summoning: You can now learn "Practical Summoning", an advanced teleportation technique that allows you to teleport recipe ingredients from nearby storage vaults into your inventory while you are crafting.

When you learn Practical Summoning, it adds a special feature to the Crafting UI. If you don't have an ingredient on hand, the Crafting UI will display a "Summon" button. Pressing this button will attempt the teleport. You can also right-click a recipe ingredient and choose Summon Ingredient.

To learn this technique you will need Teleportation level 12. For now, Irkima in the Red Wing Casino teaches this to his Friends for a price of 10,000 councils. (It will likely be moved in the future when more practical summoning techniques are added.)

Auto-Repeat & Recipe Delay: We've tweaked auto-repeat crafting: the "repeating recipe" progress bar, which is displayed to give players a few seconds to cancel the recipe, will no longer be shown if the recipe already has a suitable built-in delay. For instance, carding cotton at a cotton gin takes 3 seconds, so the "repeating recipe" progress bar isn't needed -- there's already time for you to abort the auto-repeat.

We've also removed the inherent recipe delay from many intermediate recipes, including most tool-creation recipes and all textile-creation recipes except for carding cotton. In addition, the inherent recipe delay of in-the-field decomposition recipes changed from 5 seconds to 3.

Other:

• You can now sort your recipe list in three ways: alphabetically, by recipe level, or by most-used recipes. There is no button for this UI feature yet; to access it, just right-click the name of a recipe in the list in the Crafting UI.
  
• You can now mark recipes as Favorites by right-clicking the recipe name in the list. There is a new drop-down option at the top of the list to show only favorite recipes.
  
• When crafting an enchanted item, the crafting window now shows info about the base item (the unenchanted version of the resulting item).
  

Vendor Lock: If you've unlocked at least 1 extra inventory folder, you can now right-click the folder and choose "Vendor Lock" to keep the contents of that folder hidden from the vendor sales screen. Items from vendor-locked folders simply won't be shown in the sales list at all, just as items used in a Loadout are not shown.

Inventory Hints: The inventory panel now offers you hints about items that are useful for your current situation. For example, when you are giving a gift to an NPC, the UI will highlight appropriate gifts in the inventory window with an animated overlay.

Similarly, when you are viewing a storage vault that can only store certain types of items, items you are allowed to store in that vault are highlighted. Likewise with consignment: the items you are allowed to consign with that vendor are highlighted.

Sorting Tweaks: We've refined the Inventory Sort button to automatically recognize new categories of items. The goal is for similar types of items to clump together when sorted. For example: mushrooms now sort next to each other, different stages of cotton sort together, silk sorts together, skinning knives appear near other tools, throwing knives sort together, and many more.

Other:

• Added an "Update this Loadout" button to loadout window; this button just replaces the contents of the loadout with the currently-active abilities and gear.
  
• Added a spot on the inventory window that you can drag items onto to get More Info. This is the same as right-clicking the item and choosing More Info.
  
• Fixed several subtle mouse-click bugs with the inventory window. Most notably, you couldn't drag items around in inventory while you were "in combat".
  
• Cleaned up confusing error messages and sometimes-buggy behavior with the Split Stack window. (BTW, did you know you can quickly split a stack of items by clicking the inventory item while holding down the SHIFT key?)
  

Drag Lock: If you want to prevent accidentally messing up your ability bars, there's a new option for you in the Settings window under the GUI tab. Just disable the option "Allow dragging things off of ability bars". You'll still be able to drag icons from the Abilities window ONTO your bars; you just won't be able to drag them OFF of the bars.

Effect Wiggle: Beneficial effects that last more than 5 minutes will now "wiggle" when the effect is nearly over. This is intended to alert you that important buffs (such as Food) are wearing off, and that you had probably better do something about that.

Other:

• Added a new setting to let you turn off the player stats bar that's usually in the top-left corner. This is for players who would prefer to just use the stats globes to track their health/armor/etc.
  
• The sidebar now has a right-click menu item to bring up the Special Abilities list, similar to the option already available on the bottom bars.
  
• Fixed bugs with the sidebar's contents getting changed or lost when using potions and effects that increased the number of sidebar slots (such as Gur-Horta)
  
• Fixed bug where changing the horizontal/vertical layout of the ability bars was not always saved in the settings for the next time the game started.
  
• On the character selection screen, if the character is not Hanging Out with someone, it instead shows the area the character is in.
  

Steam Family Sharing: We no longer support Steam's Family Sharing feature, which lets other family members "borrow" your games while you aren't playing them. This was being used by a few people to create extra "mule" characters for free.

Very few players are affected by this change, but if you are affected and you need help sorting things out, just drop us an e-mail at [email protected]. (And remember that if you want to let someone try out the game, you just can point them at the free demo!)

BookSaveToFile: Remember the old save-reports-to-file feature that was lost when we replaced the UI? No? Well, we've re-implemented it. If you add BookSaveToFile to your special settings, the "book" UI window will have a button that saves the contents to a file on your hard drive. This feature is intended to let players save reports such as the results from '/isearch' or '/guild who' so they can reference this information outside of the game. (Please note that this convenience feature may eventually be restricted to people who have the VIP subscriber plan.)

Other:

• At the Guild Management Sign, the Roster option can now be sorted by rank/name (the default, as before) or by Last Time Online.
  
• When using the Eject Guild Members option, that popup list is sorted by Last Time Online. (We assume that if you're making room in the roster, you probably want to eject people who haven't been online recently.)
  
• Fixed a bug with Dwarven Fixer: It did not correctly block the bright-lights screen effect of Delerium Tremens (the nastiest withdrawal state of an alcoholic). If you have Dwarven Fixer in your system already, you may need to drink another dose to get the fixed effect.
  
• Dwarven Fixer now lasts 3 hours instead of 1.
  
• Fixed several scripted scenarios where the game said you were lit on fire, but you weren't actually lit on fire (such as when trying to break into Ivyn's chest or when giving the wrong answer to the creepy crystal).
  
• Fixed various scripting bugs that caused players to receive items with impossibly-high stack sizes instead of receiving multiple stacks of the item.
  
• Fixed bugs when using the /leave command to leave a chat room that was in use in more than one chat channel.
  
• Improved the heuristics for closing chat tabs automatically.
  
• Fixed bug that caused the Group window to sometimes lose track of a party member (showing blank health/armor/power bars for them).
  
• Miscellaneous performance optimizations related to the user interface.
  
• Added new icons for resource items that are commonly confused with other resource items.
  
• Added missing titles from player packages. If your account still doesn't have a title and it should, please e-mail [email protected] ASAP so we can get you sorted out.
  

I wanted to give you an update on our plans for near-future game updates. But first, let's talk about the demo!


We're happy to announce that the "demo" version of Project: Gorgon is available. This has taken a while, but we knew it was important for this game. Project: Gorgon is pretty unusual, and you can't really tell if it's going to be your thing until you try it. So now you can! (You can download it from our Steam store page here -- just click "Download Demo" on the sidebar.)

I wanted to make sure the demo encompassed more than just the tutorial area, to really give demo users a feel for how the game plays. So the demo lets players explore Anagoge (the newbie island), Serbule, and Serbule Hills, as well as most of the dungeons in those areas. Demo characters can unlock new skills as usual, and they can raise any of their skills up to level 15. This gives demo'ers a broad sampling of the game's content to explore. Once they buy the actual game, demo characters automatically become "real" characters without any restrictions, so it's quick and painless to transition from the demo to the regular game.

We also worked hard to prevent "demo abuse". Since players could theoretically create as many demo characters as they want (limited only by the number of Steam accounts they want to create), there are a lot of potential abuse scenarios, such as harassment, market-manipulation, muling, even power-leveling. (Power-leveling? Really?! Yes... at least, in limited forms. Imagine someone using in a bunch of demo characters to play music for their main character's garden -- that's technically power-leveling, since music makes plants grow faster!)

Let's go over the CANs and CANNOTs of the demo. Demo users:

• CANNOT join a guild
  
• CANNOT trade with other players
  
• CANNOT send or receive money via /tip
  
• CANNOT pick up items dropped on the ground (except items they themselves dropped)
  
• CANNOT milk other players (or be milked, if they become a cow)
  
• CANNOT listen to poetry orations or recite poetry
  
• CAN unlock and use regular storage
  
• CAN sell items at vendors, but CANNOT buy other players' used items
  
• CANNOT buy consignment items or place their own consignments
  
• CANNOT purchase from player stores or open their own stores
  
• CANNOT play any instrument, but CAN listen to performances
  
• CANNOT place or complete player-work-orders
  
• CANNOT use deployed gadgeteering items such as vending machines and rafflers
  
• CAN add friends (it prompts the other player to confirm, as normal)
  
• CAN join hunting groups (and can chat in hunting group chat)
  
• CAN speak in Local chat, and in Group chat (when they're in a group)
  
• CAN speak in a new chat room called Demo
  
• CAN listen, but CANNOT speak, in all other chat rooms (including Global, Trade, and Help)
  
• CANNOT send private messages (PMs) unless both the sender and recipient are in the Demo chat room (see below)
  

We want to let our amazing community help Demo players if they get stuck or have questions, but it has to be easy to opt in and out. That's why we've tied private messages to the new Demo chat room. If you want to help Demo players, simply join this chat room. (Right-click a chat tab, choose Edit Chat Tab, and add "Demo" to the tab's channels. Or you can type /join Demo to quickly create a new chat tab for it.) While you're in the Demo chat room, you'll also be able to communicate via PMs with demo users. If you leave the Demo room (by closing the Demo chat tab), demo users will be unable to PM you further (and vice versa).

Demo users are still bound by the same code of conduct as regular players, and demo users that are abusive will be gagged or banned as usual. And you can always use /ignore to ignore obnoxious users. But since it's so easy to create new demo characters, we wanted this extra layer of abuse-protection for our community. To sum up: If you're happy to help demo users, join the Demo chat room. If it becomes too distracting, just leave that chat room.

No design is ever perfect on the first try, so I'm sure we'll need to tweak these rules after we see what problems demo users run into. But I think this is a good first version.


We've talked before about the next big engineering task, which is rewriting the animation code to use Unity's newer 'Mecanim' system instead of our current home-brewed system. This coding work has been outsourced to our partners, who are developing it in a separate code branch. Unfortunately, it's taking longer than anticipated, and I'm not yet sure when the new animation system will be ready to integrate into the game. That also means horses are delayed, because the mounts need Mecanim.

In the mean time, we're working on other parts of the game: improving the UI, fixing bugs, adding missing content, and revising game systems. Plus adding a few more new game systems to keep it interesting.


The next update has some iterative improvements to the UI. For instance, it seems that a lot of players never find the "More Info" feature for items. (You currently find it by right-clicking an item and choosing 'More Info', and it can tell you things like who to gift the item to... no note-taking necessary!) I'll be adding an alternative way to get to that info so that it's easier to discover.

More substantively, there's a new little feature called Practical Summoning. This is designed to make it a little easier to manage crafting ingredients. I can't count the number of times I've been trying to craft something and realized I forgot an ingredient and have to run and get it from storage.

Once your character masters Practical Summoning, there's a new button in the crafting window to summon missing ingredients. (As shown by the "Summon..." link in this in-development screenshot.) Clicking that button lets you summon items from nearby storage areas -- all the storage in the current town you're in, more or less.


There are a few caveats -- namely, it only works on fixed ingredients, not ingredients that you drag and drop into recipe slots. And it can't help you put stuff away after you're finished crafting. But I'm enjoying it and I think it'll be a nice little quality-of-life improvement. You'll be able to learn this trick from a mantis in the casino -- it costs a few thousand Councils and requires Teleportation level 12.

The next update also fixes a bunch of annoying UI bugs, and there are some other new UI features that I don't want to talk about yet (because they may not work out... they're still being prototyped as I write this). And there are, of course, many more UI improvements to come in the future, too.


Over the next few months we'll be taking a look at the higher-level areas: Kur, Ilmari, Rahu, and Gazluk. These areas all need more points of interest, more things to discover, most stuff to do! There are also a bunch of unfinished NPCs in these areas, and even entire storylines that just haven't made it into the game yet, plus some missing dungeons (a few larger ones, but mostly smaller soloable ones).

Some areas will also see heavy revision for technical reasons. In particular, the terrain of Rahu will probably need to be remade. It was created via a different method than the other outdoor areas, as an experiment. We'd hoped this new method would work better than it did. (But hey, that's what experiments are for.) We'll be revising it to use the technique we used in other outdoor areas.

I'm not sure what new content will be in the very next update yet (if any!). But I wanted to give you an idea of what we'll be working on for the next couple of updates. (Plus, of course, there's the Christmas event! It will be based on last years' alpha event, but with more stuff.)


This game has a lot of game systems. A LOT of game systems. Many are pretty nicely fleshed-out, but some are basically just prototypes that need a lot of revision. I have a long list of systems that need to be improved. Some of those systems include mushroom farming, "dangerous improvement" recipes, guild features, and several combat skills.

Some of these things just need tweaks and refinement, while others may go back to the drawing board entirely.


I don't want to give the idea that all of this stuff will happen in the very next update, which is only about a week away. The next update is mostly UI stuff. We like to work in short sprints of two or three weeks, so we'll be rolling these changes out piecemeal over several months. This way you get access to the features ASAP, and we get timely feedback.

A big advantage of this work style is that we can pivot to new priorities very quickly. And we often do just that! When the new animation system is ready, it'll probably be higher-priority than a lot of these tasks, so unfinished tasks on this list may go to the back burner. However it goes, I'll keep you posted!

Thanks for supporting us!

- Citan (Eric)

PS - we could really use your help getting word out about the demo. It can be downloaded via the "Download Demo" link on our Steam store page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/342940/Project_Gorgon/

Discuss this blog post on our forum

This is a small bug-fix update. The Halloween event is NOT over yet -- it will run through the middle of the week (Wednesday or Thursday).

• Fixed navigation issues with the boardwalks in Serbule and Anagoge Island
  
• Fixed bugs that prevented the thick green "queued ability" overlay from showing up on a queued ability
  
• Fixed bug where the faces of some male elves were lighter-colored than their bodies
  
• Fixed bug with human and elf female eyelashes (they looked creepy in some light conditions)
  
• Tried to work around weird behavior with Windows 10 firewall: if you log out or disconnect due to being AFK too long, the firewall would sometimes decide the game wasn't allowed to use the internet anymore and constantly break any connections to the server, requiring you to restart the game to log back in. The cause of this is unknown (Microsoft does not document much of anything about how their firewall app works or why), but we've made some changes based on hunches and we'll see if it helps.
  
• Worked around Unity 2017 bug that caused the lowest graphics tiers (Bad, Abysmal, and Retro-Terrible) to be less efficient than they should be
  
• Partially worked around a Unity engine bug involving shadows (where performance gets worse at certain times of day when facing certain directions outdoors). This is a partial fix, meaning the issue persists but is reduced. There is a side-effect, though: interactive elements such as monsters, NPCs, signs, lamps, chairs, etc., are no longer lit by the sun or moon. Usually this is completely unnoticeable, but sometimes it can be really surreal: "why is that lamppost not casting a shadow?!" If it's distressing, you can disable this fix by opening Settings and adding EntityShadows to the special-settings box. (There are better ways to address this problem in bleeding-edge versions of Unity, so we anticipate that this workaround is temporary.)
  
• We'd like players to test out a new experimental graphics feature: spherical culling. To enable it, open the Settings window in-game and add SphereCull to the Special Settings window. Normally the game uses frustum culling, meaning anything that's not right in front of the camera isn't rendered. This is theoretically optimal: why render stuff that's not on the screen? But it has side-effects. One problem is that when you spin around in a circle, a lot of art assets have to be swapped in and out of video memory, which can cause framerate to drop momentarily. Spherical culling means everything in a circle around you is rendered. This may have a lower framerate overall, but it will greatly reduce "turning lag". Please try it out and report your experiences with it (especially bugs, such as missing water or other things being invisible)! And remember: you may need to lower your settings to effectively use this, especially if you've overridden settings like view distance or animation distance!
  

Strange things are going on in Alharth. You'll receive more information as soon as you log in.



If you have noticeably worse framerate after this update, read on:

In this update we disabled one of the experimental optimizations known as "slow boxes". This optimization *does* improve framerate when lots of selectable things are on-screen, but the improvement often isn't worth it: the targeting selection-boxes can move around randomly, which can be deadly in combat situations. We've turned this optimization off while we improve it. If you want to re-enable it (which might be needed on low-end machines in busy areas), open up the settings window in-game, click "Special", and type SlowBoxes into the special settings box. This will reactivate the slow boxes optimization.

(The old special setting NoSlowBoxes no longer does anything, since slow boxes are off anyway.)



We've corrected a problem with how damage is calculated for target-conditional modifiers that increase damage by a percentage. Target-conditional modifiers are things that only apply if the target is a certain way. For instance, "+X% damage to non-Elite targets", "+X% damage to undead", "+X% damage when the target's rage meter is 66% or higher", etc.

Previously, if these modifiers added a percentage of damage to your attack, that percentage wasn't added to your other percent-boosters like other mods; instead it was multiplied separately, very late in the calculation process. These percent-boosters are now included with other regular percent-boosters.

In other words, if you had two mods, "+25% damage all the time" and "+25% damage if the target is Elite", the combination will now result in +50% damage. Previously that combination would result in +56% damage, because they were multiplied together instead of added together.




The three blacksmithing recipes to "dangerously" improve an item have returned. (The "danger" is that the item may shatter and be destroyed.) The chance for the item to be destroyed has increased from 2% to 3%, and the weapon now gains simple damage, not regular damage. Simple damage is not multiplied by any other gear mod benefits, but it is still multiplied by the enemy's vulnerabilities, or lack thereof.

There is now a cap of 300 simple damage that can be added to an item, and to prevent these items from being used as insanely overpowered newbie gear, the weapon must be at least level 30.

Weapons that were dangerously improved with the old recipes have been updated to use simple damage and have a cap of 300.

To sum up, the recipes now read like this:
Add +2 Simple Sword Damage to a sword, up to a maximum of +300. The sword must have enchantments of at least level 30. Simple damage is added to the total damage after all other multipliers. This recipe does not use Enhancement Points, but there is a 3% chance the weapon will shatter and be destroyed. (Must be near a forge.)




Ultra Item Rafflers with timers set to greater than 1 hour could sometimes be garbage-collected by the server before their timer was up (causing a winner to be immediately chosen from the people who had already bought a ticket). Large-Capacity Item Vendors and Fancy Item Vendors that are deployed in busy areas will now last longer before being garbage-collected by the server (and unsold items mailed back to the owner).

A note about how these work: when there are a lot of items in an area, the server deletes old items based on internal priorities. If the server decides to delete a vend-o-matic, the remaining unsold items are mailed to the creator. If a raffler is destroyed before all tickets are sold, a winner is immediately chosen from among the sold tickets. If no tickets were sold, the raffle items are mailed to the creator.

Most gadgeteering items will last about an hour in a busy area, but can last much longer in areas that don't have a lot of items on the ground. The above-mentioned high quality vend-o-matics will typically last 90 minutes in busy areas.

• All pet damage is increased noticeably. This is especially true of necromancers' skeletal pets. The most dramatic example is high-level skeletal mages, whose base damage increased by more than 50%. (The adjustments in this update are a "bulk" formulaic change; further adjustments will be made in the future.)
  
• As of the last update, Elite monsters that are killed with only area-effect attacks are no longer combat-locked. But if a group killed an Elite with ONLY area-effect attacks, the elite would incorrectly act like non-elite for turn-based looting. Non-combat-locked elites now "faux lock" themselves to the group of the main killer when they die so that the group's turns are honored.
  
• Higher tiers of the ability Spade Assault did not correctly have the lower tiers as prerequisites.
  
• Fixed a scenario where you could skin an illusion of a dead werewolf if you were really, really quick.
  
• Fixed weird particles appearing when drake worms burst out of the ground.
  
• Fixed a client display bug that caused some damage attributes to not be updated after equipment was taken off. This was only a tooltip display bug.
  
• Fixed a server-side rounding error with base-damage multipliers that could cause attacks to deal 1 less damage than the client tooltip indicated it should.
  
• Stuffed toy bears can now be deployed for others to be able to hug. (The bear is not destroyed; only one bear can be deployed per 15 minutes per player.)
  
• The map in the casino was shifted over a bit to include the new party room. The fog is reset, and any map pins in the casino will be off by a small amount. Sorry about that!
  
• Added signs to the Red Wing Casino to help guests navigate more easily.
  
• Added a "secret" entrance/exit to Gazluk Keep.