HammerHelm News

Tonight's update includes a bunch of fixes, tweaks, and a quest.

A while back I turned off a quest called "Where's the Beer?" as it had a bug that wasn't easy to track down. Well, I figured it out, so the quest is back! The Orcs took all of the town's beer and are hiding it in their nearby fort!



This update also turns off the Halloween event. Note as stated before, the Scarecrow quest is still in the game, however the Lich Staff reward will no longer drop unless you did the quest during the event. This also applies to any new characters you make as the event marker is global for all characters. The Lich and Scarecrow head trophies are still dropped as rewards. The Scarecrow quest is also set to appear a bit later than it did during the event.

And a bunch of fixes:

• Fixed an issue that caused monsters to run in place.
  
• Fixed a bug that sometimes caused the game to not unlock the next ore type.
  
• Fixed some typos.
  
• Your character will no longer slide forward if you press and hold the right mouse button while jumping.
  
• Fixed a couple of floating trees near Shaydee's Shop (I blame Shaydee for these, never trust a goblin!!!)
  
• Fixed a bug that caused the incorrect icon to appear in the townspeople UI when swapping jobs or assigning a job.
  
• The buttons for Swapping Jobs and for Changing an NPC's Goal now always correctly turn off when you are assigning a job to an NPC or after pressing a Swap Job button. Accidentally clicking these while in either of those two modes would cause all kinds of trouble.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused building doors to get stuck in the open position when entering and leaving build mode.

I also have one of the new story quests completed but I want to test it more before releasing it. Have two more I want to build as well.

Thank you again everyone for the feedback and bug reports!

-Jonathan "Calandryll" Hanna
[email protected]

• My Twitter: https://twitter.com/SuperSixStudios
  
• Discord Channel: discord.gg/8326Jef

Tonight's build includes the second round of combat tweaks.


Clicking the left mouse button will now initiate an attack. Continuously clicking will continue the regular attack combo. You can also hold down the button to keep attacking. The main difference between this and the old system is that a single click will create an attack rather than letting go of the mouse button causing the character to immediate stop attacking.

If you stop clicking or let go of the left-mouse button, your character will finish the attack animation before going back to the idle animation.

In addition, the regular attack combo has been reduced from four attacks to three, with the third attack doing more damage than the first two. The four attack combo was too long and this new version flows a lot better.


Blocking no longer has a timer associated with it. You can hold a block as long as you want, however blocking an attack does use stamina. You can interrupt an attack at any time by blocking or dodging.

I feel like these changes give you a lot more control during combat while also feeling a lot better overall. I would love to hear what you think as well!

Tonight's build has a couple of fixes in it.

The first is a fix for a bug that sometimes caused imbued weapons to fail to function. Meaning you couldn't attack with them. The bug was related to the system removing and adding the particle effects to the weapons when weapons were equipped and un-equpped. Sometimes the system would remove the weapon trail instead. With the trail missing, the combat checks would fail when they tried to turn the trail on once you clicked to attack. The fix makes sure only the particle effect is remove and never the weapon trail.

The other fix resolves an animation issue with sleeping. The character will now correctly align with the bed.

Today's update includes a big performance optimization for build mode. After these optimizations I saw a 40% increase in FPS! I hope you notice the improvement as well!

This build also includes a fix for a bug that caused the camera to be angled slightly in the X axis. Moving the mouse would automatically correct the angle, but it was a bit jarring when that happened the first time you start or load a game so I fixed it.

Still working on the stamina and clicking aspects of combat. Should have the stamina changes done this weekend, then will tackle the click-to-attack changes.

Beta 4.3 includes a rather large update to the way monsters choose to attack. The net result is that monsters will attack a bit more often, especially when they are the only monster left. While I don't want to make combat super difficult, the old AI would often fail to attack at all before you killed it or only attack once.

This update also fixes a bug that sometimes caused the monster to play their attack sound, but not attack if you moved away at the right moment. This was because the monster was getting two commands in that case, one to attack and the other to run in. The run animation took priority so the attack was delayed. Monsters will now always attack once they play their attack sound, even you dodge or move away.

This is the first of three updates I want to make to combat. Next up will be removing the block timer and the special attack cooldown and tying everything to stamina. This will simplify the system while still requiring some thought as to when to use special attacks, blocks, and dodges.

The last change will be related to the normal attack. Allowing a single click to create an attack rather than forcing you to hold the mouse button down. I actually did this first last night, but didn't like the way it looked so I reverted it and worked on the monsters this evening instead.