This week in Erendorn: We made some serious progress on one of the Merchant's carts. We began bringing our Mammoth to life with animations, and started texturing our heavy armour set. As always, join us on Twitter, Instagram, or Reddit for daily updates on Depths of Erendorn – now let’s get into it!
3D Modelling
Although there isn't much to say on our new heavy armour set, a big milestone was reached! We finished up the retopology and unwrapping, and began texturing everything. We're into the final stretch of this piece and can't wait to see how it turns out!
Environment Design
We began work on our Merchant's cart set piece this week, beginning development from the initial concept art. Work still needs to be done on some of the materials, along with adding more decoration surrounding the cart. We also worked on the materials for the Obsidian Portal and Mysterious Idol (two pieces we've shared recently). Along with more development on ensuring the Obsidian Portal is suitably visible in low light.
Programming
It's been a productive week for the Golang team, with the two new servers now running fully virtualised remotely, as opposed to on their own machines. With the new items now generated, we've stored them for long term safekeeping on our SQL database, and then downloaded the relevant tables into a storage file that the servers keep for themselves. This means we no longer need to ask the SQL database for an item when loot is rolled, and turns a 1+ second request into a millisecond fast function. Loot has never been given out so quickly before! Additionally, all entities in the game now have their new defensive stats defined, and loot reward items now calculate their bonus stats appropriate to the player's level plus some appropriate randomness.
We also made progress on several other aspects:
- Fixed a potential server crash when a player wasn’t in a Game Session and sent a session command.
- Removed old Authentication command from the commands map.
- Added a hashing command to the client - using this the client can send messages and calculate its hash, so that the server can verify it’s receiving the correct message.
- Rewrote the client-side inventory. We can test this next week once we have fixed client/server communication. The client has been prepared to use the new inventory standard by the new server, upgrades include the ability to have more than one stack of any item. Previously this wasn't possible as all items of the same type were stacked together. Every stack now stores a unique Inventory ID.
- Items have been adjusted in how they are stored/created in the client to reflect changes on the server.
This week has also been about further updating how the DoE Client connects to the new Golang Server, with a focus on updating the command structure for messages being sent, while correctly formatting incoming and outgoing messages.
- Commands - Commands are the name given to a set of message types the Client can request of the Game Server, this might be to retrieve a list of account characters, equip an item or to perform an attack in combat. As a result of the Server overhaul and the changes in some of their usages, the format for most of these commands have been updated in the Client to match.
- Message Structures - Messages sent to the Server require a number of different criteria in order to validate, authenticate and encrypt their content. Changes have been made to how this data is constructed before being sent mirroring the methods used Server-side.
- Split Messages - Messages sent between both the Client and the Server can get large, so a special method for splitting up, batching and recombining these messages has been added.
Animation
This week our animation team began work on the Mammoth animation set. This included cleaning up the movement and exporting it to the engine. We then looked at creating more character blueprints, rigged and skinned the Vampire Bat model and began planning the next animations to be worked on.
https://depthsoferendorn.blob.core.windows.net/assets/Mamoothanimset-1-1.m4v
Mammoth Animations
That’s it for this week’s devlog, but have you seen our monthly roundup of August yet?!
