Good progress this week on:
New 150-200 Alien Dungeon.
Further Tweaking of Daily Missions.
Aimed Shot/Sneak Attack Concealment issues.
Painful export conversion of old playfields to "new" playfield types for the new engine.
The work on the Conceal/AS/SA work was especially interesting to dig into as there were "surprises" as to how it was actually functioning. Many players have mentioned since the changes to conceal have gone live that there is now a "wait" when concealing near a monster that was not there before. As this check is now performed on the server instead of the client there of course is the added network time to this check...but there was also a "sneaky" check being done to verify that the NPC was not "aware of your presence". The fix for this little wait is going to be to trigger the check on the AS/SA to perform the conceal/perception check rather than simply waiting for your name to drop off the monsters "vicinity list". The vicinity list was refreshing itself every 4-5 seconds..so at the worst of times this was adding a multi-second wait to being able to execute your attack on even very low level targets ie:220 Agent trying to AS a level 1 leet.
Current plan is to get this version to TestLive as soon as possible with the intention of seeing it hit the live servers next week. This version should see further tweaks to daily missions (rewards at multiple stages of multiple step missions, no longer having to return to the agency after deleting a mission), Conceal checks and more.
As for the "WTF" of the week that award goes to the missing loot items. Some items, most notably Burden, msyteriously vanished in the latest version. It doesn't make any sense...but nevertheless it is current reality. These missing items will be returning to drop tables in next week's version. Thank you to everyone who brought this to our attention.
Issue we would like help with:
We have had reports of players becoming "stuck" in sneak-mode and having to manually cancel this state to exit it. We have managed to reproduce this...but at a rate that is incredibly rare and not nearly predictable enough for us to be able to fix it. If this happens to you on a regular basis it would be great if you could try and let us know exactly what the circumstances are...as this would be incredibly helpful in our efforts to remove the issue.
Have a great weekend everyone!