Atlas Devlogs 2021

[Iyoforeayo]

Combat Devlog #1

Written by Aestrus

Hello everybody! I’m Aestrus, one of the programmer chads on the development team and today I’ll be going over the changes we’ve made to combat on Atlas. From the philosophy behind the core rework to the general broad overview to what combat on Atlas will be able to offer, we will go through it all.

Initially when considering combat changes, the core philosophy behind it was not going to change as much. Rather, it was going to shift towards the triangle between Melee, Ranged, and Magic. Over time as we implemented mechanics based on this philosophy, it became apparent that focusing primarily on that triangle was not going to be viable for the type of combat gameplay Atlas aims to achieve. We want a versatile and free-flowing system that allows players to have a vast amount of playstyles to develop, whilst also maintaining a strong enough structure that allows the developers to effectively maintain balance between the many combat systems we currently have.

Weight
While weight had already been implemented as a subtle mechanic on Atlas previously, and still is, it has now evolved. Previously, armors slowed your player down by a percentage, and we have retained that mechanic while still slightly altering values and how it worked. We had already begun toying with the idea of implementing a form of our weight mechanic with items like bundles and shulkers to allow Atlas to have those items whilst still avoiding the unappealing hyper-meta that vanilla Minecraft provides. With bundles and shulkers, we have restricted the amount you can have in your inventory by having an exponential speed modifier that slows you down the more you’re holding in bundles/shulkers. But while that mechanic of weight still exists, it is not the primary part of what weight actually is on Atlas.

Alongside having our combat triangle of Melee, Ranged, and Magic, we will also have three separate weight classes for our armors: Light, Medium, and Heavy. We determined which armors were put in which weight classes based on a variety of metrics, one of which primarily being effectiveness. Effectiveness in the context of Armor is based on a few factors, durability and base material being a couple. While we have our own internal ideology for which weight classes suit which types of playstyles, I won’t dive into that since I want you all to explore the system fully and build your own playstyles.

That being said, there are still some unique effects applied to the various weight classes. Lightweight players have heavily-increased damage, Mediumweight players have slightly increased damage and slightly increased resistance/protection, and Heavyweight players have reduced damage but much higher resistance to/protection from damage. This system is entirely restricted to armors, weapons and tools do not apply here nor do the separate weight mechanics of the bundles and shulkers.

In terms of how the weight system for armors works at its core, each armor category (based on base material) is assigned a weight class. Currently, leather-based armor are Light armor, Iron and Gold are Medium armors, and Diamond is Heavy. Within each weight class, there are internal weight values assigned to each different piece. Those weight values are scaled by armor type, so a helmet would be lighter than a chestplate. This means that we can have a flexible system that allows players to potentially equip pieces of armor from other weight classes while still maintaining their desired weight class. 

Attributes
Attributes have always been the bread and butter of choosing your kit, and continue to still be. Back in September, Tyrriel elaborated on a couple new additions to Attributes, Magic Resistance and Magic Vulnerability. Since then, we have completely rewritten how we do our custom attributes and have also modified magic protection into a singular Attribute, Warding. Having the two previously mentioned attributes was inconsistent with how other attributes worked, and a core philosophy for this rework was to remain consistent to make the systems easier for players to understand, and easier for developers to maintain/balance. Therefore, we created Warding, the magic-equivalent to the Armor attribute. Alongside Warding, we have also implemented Evasion, which is the magic-equivalent to Dodge or Deflect. 

Following along with the magical attributes, we had also implemented offensive magical attributes for our magical weapons such as wands. These two attributes are Magic Power and Cast Speed. Magic Power determines how effective your spells will be, the higher the magic power, the more effective your spells are. For Cast Speed, the higher your cast speed, the longer it will take to cast a spell.

For ranged weapons, Projectile Damage and Projectile Speed were configured to be custom in-house attributes. This means that we now apply flat damage values to our projectiles just like with magic and melee, and the speed attribute simply defines how fast and how far the projectile will go. 

For melee weapons, Critical Chance and Critical Multiplier were added. Atlas has not had vanilla critical hits for a long time now, but we believed that we should still implement a form of critical hits. Melee weapons will now have a percentage chance to trigger a critical hit on a full swing of a weapon. This will then increase the outgoing damage by the critical multiplier, having the potential to dish out a large amount of damage on a single hit.

Finally, all old attribute values were scrapped and completely rewritten for all of our alloys and hides. This means that while you may potentially see some resemblance of the old attributes, most alloys and hides will have a new identity to them. The current values are still subject to change, as we have not done any in-depth testing with the new attributes and the potential kits that could come from them.

Smeltery and Tannery
Smeltery and Tannery are some of the most important systems to Atlas, and are a large part of what makes Atlas unique. These systems have now been rewritten and improved, with one of those improvements being the incorporation of magic-based weapons. The two magic weapons that have been officially added are the Wand, which most of you are already aware of, and the Staff. The wand is meant to be a quicker-casting but weaker option than the staff, while the staff is more powerful but has longer cast times. Both of these weapons will also be affected by the new attribute rework, and will have alloy-equivalent versions with their own unique attributes.



Fletchery
As spoken about during the previous State of the Server, Fletchery was discontinued and removed from Atlas. Vanilla bow mechanics in Minecraft made it very difficult to achieve with Fletchery what we had achieved with Smeltery and Tannery. 

That being said, we still believed that we needed to add more depth to bows/crossbows and the ranged portion of the combat triangle in general. In order to achieve this, we implemented Quivers. Quivers are custom bundles with 5 slots that can only hold arrows. Quivers will be an off-hand item that when a bow/crossbow is held in the main hand, will turn into the first stack of arrows in the quiver. Players can then left-click to swap through the arrows in the bundle to fire off their desired arrow. This gives the potential to be carrying several different types of arrows for various different situations, and also helps manage space in your inventory for archers. Alongside this change, tipped arrows will be more accessible.



Keep in mind, the quiver has its own individual limit of 3 quivers before exponentially and severely decreasing the player speed.

Potions
In an attempt to move away from the vanilla potion meta in Minecraft, we had previously implemented debuffs to certain potions in order to make them less viable. This is no longer the case, and with the new additions to the other portions of the triangle, potions will work just like vanilla. In fact, there is now a new custom bundle item called the Alchemy Pouch that allows you to carry up to 9 potions at once within it. If you hold this pouch in your hand and right click, it will take the first potion in that bundle and throw it as if you were normally throwing a splash potion, while then applying a slight cooldown to prevent instant-pot-spam. This will allow melee players that don’t want to rely on magic or avoiding damage to immediately heal/buff themselves with potions, or even promote the use of offensive potions and players bringing potions to attack someone else.



Keep in mind, the alchemy pouch has its own individual limit of 3 pouches before exponentially and severely decreasing the player speed.

Enchants
We have also implemented a vast amount of unique enchants. There are now custom enchants for every weapon, armor, and shields that we have. The goal of enchants is to have a vast amount of choices available to players that allow them to expand further into specific playstyles that they desire. An example of this is the enchant, Cleric’s Blessing, an enchant that boosts outgoing buffs from wands/staffs. Players that want to be more support-oriented would be more likely to pick up this enchant.

Cooking
Cooking was recently revamped to allow for the implementation of the system into combat. What this means is that cooking will allow you to create custom foods that provide short-term combat buffs, resulting in more versatility and variability in your kit. Ideally, players would bring several various food items for various different scenarios.

More information on Cooking will come at a later date.

Unique Mobs
For a refresher on how we are going about PvE, please refer to our previous devlog on Mobs.

The largest change that was not mentioned in that devlog was the removal of tick delay with damage received from mobs. Before, if you were damaged by a mob, you would have a slight window of invulnerability to give you time to react to the mob. We have removed this window of invulnerability for PvE, resulting in mobs having the ability to swarm you and overwhelm you. This will increase the difficulty in PvE, and will allow for us to create more interesting PvE content than we previously had.

Tridents
I know this is slightly out of place, but tridents have been so drastically changed that it warrants them having their own section. When trying to piece together the entire combat system from scratch, finding an identity for tridents amongst the very restricted functionality of vanilla combined with our custom systems was proving to be an incredibly difficult challenge. As a result, we decided to change the philosophy behind how tridents will be used. As you may be aware, tridents have the ability to be thrown. We decided to build on this mechanic, and morph tridents into a support-oriented weapon. Tridents will not only be able to deal melee damage, but they will also be able to provide support area-of-effect buffs to allies, or area-of-effect debuffs to enemies, based on their enchants. Certain enchants will have a chance to produce an area-of-effect cloud based on the nature of the enchant at the location the trident lands when thrown. This allows support-oriented players in team fights to provide support to their allies in a way that is not magic nor the standard ranged weapon (bow/crossbow). Tridents will also have a similar effect to loyalty by default without actually having the enchant. This means that when thrown, the trident will automatically return from where it had landed after a brief period of time.

[Iyoforeayo]

Nations Devlog #2

Written by Aestrus

Outposts

What the heck are Outposts?
To reiterate what Outposts are, they are structures placed outside of your towns that provide a soft-claim of land and minimal protections. These outposts will serve as a method of expanding your nation’s borders beyond your town claims, even allowing for you to own a (very) large area of land without actually owning it with a town claim. At its core, outposts are essentially Guard Towers placed outside of towns with added features. When placed, an outpost creates a region of territory surrounding it. This territory, made up of a set area of chunks,  provides minimal protections, as mentioned in a previous devlog. The protections offered are that any blocks that are broken by foreign players within your territory will not drop anything and will regenerate after a set amount of time. Chests, doors, redstone, and anything else will still be accessible. Currently, the only thing that territory does is regenerate broken blocks and prevent item drops from blocks.

How does Outpost placement work?
Outposts will go hand-in-hand with Diplomacy and Sieges. What this means is that in order to place outposts down, you will be required to have vulnerability windows set. Alongside this, you will be required to maintain those windows. If you remove those windows, all your outposts will go into a “decay” state that will be elaborated on shortly in this devlog.

When coming up with measures to prevent abuse of the system, we experimented a lot with how players would end up placing territory. This led us to a few decisions:

• Territory could not overlap with town claims
  
• Territory could not overlap with foreign claims
  
• Outposts were required to have a minimum distance (of chunks) between each other
  
• Outposts must be “supported” by either a town claim or 2+ other outposts
  
• Corner chunks do not count towards measuring whether an outpost is “connected” to another for support
  

Now, I may have used a couple terms there that you aren’t fully aware of. For starters, what the heck does “support” mean? Are outposts making AA support groups for each other or something? Well… sort of. To prevent random chain claims and the such (as shown in Figure 1), we implemented a “support” mechanic that essentially requires players to have two outposts “supporting” an outpost in order for it to be viable as an outpost. This means that the territory of both of those outposts lines up with or overlaps with the territory of the outpost in question. The only case in which this is not required is when an outpost is “supported” by a town. This means that the outpost directly borders a town claim (excluding corners). This philosophy effectively gives us the following claim pattern, instead. (Figure 2)

(Figure 1 (Gold = Center, each block = a chunk, emerald = town, diamond = territory))


(Figure 2 (Gold = center, each block = a chunk, emerald = town, diamond = territory))


What is the “decay” state?
Simply put, the decay state is a state that an outpost is put into when it does not meet the conditions to remain functioning. An example of this would be that an outpost must be supported in order to remain functioning, if it is not supported it goes into a decay state.

When decaying, an outpost will not provide any protections nor benefits that will be mentioned in the next section. Other players will be able to claim over your decaying outpost, effectively barring you from that area. You will not be able to place another outpost down in that area, you will be required to amend whatever is causing the decaying functionality to your outposts. There are exceptions to this that will be elaborated in a further section.

What do outposts do for me?
Alongside the previously mentioned territory regeneration mechanic, Outposts will offer passive resource generation. Every day, your outposts will generate a certain amount of resources if they’re still actively supported. This will allow for you to gain potentially valuable resources while you sit on your couch binge watching anime, simply for the small cost of an upkeep fee! Be careful though, if you forget to pay your bills or accidentally blow your life savings at one of those casinos players will be building, your outposts will begin decaying and eventually collapse alongside that previously mentioned ego born from the size of you and your nation’s collective dong.

What if I want to get rid of foreign outposts?
If a foreign nation is placing outposts in your way, or if you just want to get rid of them simply because why not, there’s an easy (not-so-easy) way to get rid of them! All you have to do is declare war on the opposing nation, and proceed to take out these Outposts one by one in Outpost Battles. Outposts battles can only happen during a war, and during the defending nation’s siege vulnerability window. 

What the flippity floppity is an Outpost Battle?
Well folks, simply put, an Outpost Battle is a small Team Deathmatch-esque fight between a select group of your nation members and the opposing side’s nation members. All you have to do is slap a camp down next to an attackable Outpost, right click on the spawner at the center of your camp, and declare a battle on the specific Outpost you want to attack! 

How do Outpost Battles work?
When you initially declare an attack, the Outpost battle will go into a “declared” state. This is a prelude to the actual fight, and lasts a short period of time. It will alert both sides of the attack when initiated, and both sides will be able to register for the battle at their Barracks landmark. The player declaring the fight is automatically registered to the battle, and all players in the battle zone when the battle begins will be added to the list of participants if it’s not full. Otherwise, all non-participating players will be teleported out of the battle zone when the battle begins and will not be let back in until the battle completes.

During the “Declared” state, the plots in the battle zone will not act differently, all that will be different will be a timer at the top of your screen depicting how long it is until the battle begins.

Once the battle begins, as stated previously, only the participating players will be left in the zone. This state is called the “Active” state. For any players still not in the zone when the battle starts, they will be able to teleport to the fight via the Barracks landmark in their towns.

Note: Once in the battle zone, you will not be able to get back out until the battle is over. Anything you bring into the battle when you enter the zone during the “Active” phase of the battle will be all that you have during the battle.

During the fight, players will have a set amount of lives. The first side to 0 lives will lose. If both sides still have lives by the end, both sides will lose. When a player dies in a battle, they will be set into a “spectator” state and will be able to freely fly around the battle-zone. After a set amount of time, they will respawn back at their base within the zone (the outpost or the warcamp).

Diplomacy will not be implemented for the LTS happening soon, so any mechanics with that will not be present currently.

In terms of Diplomacy, when losing a battle you will lose an amount of war points proportional to the amount of lives you consumed in the battle. When winning a battle, the amount of war points you gain will be skewed by the amount of lives you consumed to win said battle. The reason behind this is to promote the ideology of surviving but still fighting to win the battle, overall making it much more fun and engaging (ideally).

If the defenders (the owners of the Outpost) lose the battle, their outpost will go into a decaying state. When fought, an Outpost will not be able to be interacted with for a set amount of time following the battle. This means that the Outpost cannot be attacked again, removed, or modified at all (outside of repairs) until that timer is up. During that time, if the outpost was defeated and put into a “decaying” state, any foreign nation to that outpost would be able to overwrite that outpost’s claim by placing their own outposts (if viable) into that general area. If an outpost A is decaying within a foreign nation’s outpost B’s territory, outpost A will not be able to be restored and will decay until it is destroyed.

When attempting to restore a decaying outpost during a war, nations will have to pay a “convenience” fee of sorts that scales down with the amount of time it has been since the outpost began decaying until it’s at the normal rate post-wartime. This effectively means that if nations want to protect their territory claims after being defeated, not only do they have to wait out the post-battle timer to interact with their outpost, they have to pay a heavily marked-up fee in order to restore their defeated outpost.

Once a battle ends, it goes into the “Completed” state. In this state, anybody can enter the battle zone. When the battle goes into this state, a portal will spawn at both spawners (the outpost and the warcamp). When entering this portal, you will be instantly teleported to your nearest town.

[Iyoforeayo]

Balancing Devlog #1

Written by Tyrriel

Balancing a multiplayer game is a monumental task, that in most game companies usually is carried out by a team of professionals assigned solely to this task. So you may be wondering, how a team of “novices” on a volunteer based team would approach this daunting task. To answer that question, we have to take a page out of other game companies’ books; analytics!

Gathering Data
Part 1 of analytics is actually gathering useful data. In this latest LTS we launched v1 of our analytics system focused on gathering data from various combat events. We collected roughly 2 GB worth of data in about 2 weeks. To help put that into perspective, that’s about 200,000 rows of data in a table (for those that are familiar with databases).

Collecting or gathering data is a relatively straightforward process; “listen” to a few events and serialize the complex objects into an easy to break down data structure. For reference a few of the events that we listened to:

• player-damage-player-wilds
  
• player-damage-player-battle
  
• player-kill-player-wilds
  
• player-kill-player-wilds
  
• player-damage-entity-wilds
  
• entity-damage-player-wilds
  
• magic-cast
  
• entity-hit-by-magic
  

From there, it’s simply a matter of serializing various pieces of data into a JSON object which can then be stored in a database.

Data Visualization
Part 2 of analytics is visualizing the data that we have gathered. This is one of the most complex things to do, so much so there are people that get paid a lot of money to figure this out (Data Science \o/). And while no one on the team is a Data Scientist by any means we have been able to establish some preliminary relationships between data points. These relationships will get better and more complex as time goes on.

Here are a few examples of the preliminary relationships we have been able to form:

These graphs show the armor types in all 4 armor slots that players were wearing when they took PvP damage.

These graphs show the armor types in all 4 armor slots that players were wearing when they dealt PvP damage.



This graph shows what items players had in their main hand when dealing PvP damage.


This graph shows what items players had in their off hand when dealing PvP damage.


This graph shows some information on what enchants were more prevalent on armors.

Data-driven Decisions
Part 3 of analytics is actually making balancing changes (action or in-action) based on the data that we have gathered and visualized. This is one of the key things that is going to be different about this upcoming release of Atlas. All balancing will, to the best of our ability, be done backed by data.

And finally some fun player analytics!

Raw and Mitigated Damage Dealt by Players:



Raw and Mitigated Damage Dealt To Players:

[Iyoforeayo]

New Nauru Devlog #3

Written by Iyoforeayo

Since the beginning of the year, a lot of work has been done on the new combat system and Territories/Outposts (which you hopefully got a chance to check out during the latest LTS.) But there’s also been a lot of progress in other areas during this time - not the least of which has been on the new spawn city of New Nauru! We’ve mentioned before that this city is easily the most ambitious build project the team has undertaken in Atlas’ history - not just in size and scale, but in detail and content. We truly wanted New Nauru to feel like a living, breathing city - from the build, to the NPCs, to the quests - and as we approach the completion of this new spawn city, we wanted to take a moment to show you some of the places and characters you’ll find there…

The Biggest City on Atlas
As many will remember, Old Nauru (size-wise) was more comparable to NPC capitals like Port Qi’Shen or Eastwind. New Nauru will dwarf every other NPC Town on Atlas - and with good reason! From a lore perspective, the new metropolis was initially built to house the unending flow of Obelisk refugees into the city (which has only kicked the can down the road, as the player will discover in the New Nauru campaign…) But from a gameplay perspective, we wanted our spawn city to feel like a whole world within itself - and while players will now have the option to breeze through an Abridged Tutorial that expedites how quickly they can get to Athera to start their own Nation, they also have the option to partake in dozens of hours of content within New Nauru before even setting foot on Athera! There’s plenty of gems to be made throughout the city, as well as unique gear, titles, unlockable daily quests, crafting materials, and more!

You’ll also find that certain NPCs change their location within the city based on the time of day, in addition to any movement and progression from story quests.

The Districts
New Nauru is split into 5 Districts (all connected by the Central Plaza) - although travel between the city districts will become increasingly faster as the player finds secret routes between them, and unlocks inter-city fast travel points.

The Harbor District
New players first arriving to the city will find themselves here - amidst the swell of other Obelisk refugees that appear to be flooding the shores of New Nauru. The Harbor District contains both of the city’s fast travel routes to Athera (the ship to the faction capitals, and the airship to the neutral towns), as well as easy access to the Market and Government Districts.




The Government District
One of the first areas new players will likely encounter, the Government District contains a handful of useful buildings related to Quests, Nations, and the Atheran Council. Players will complete the tutorial here, learn how to found Nations here, and maybe even come back later in the story to do a little breaking-and-entering…


The Residential District
This dense district houses the majority of New Nauru’s citizens, from the very rich to the very poor. Recently, a horrific fire has burned down the Shen Church that existed on the southeast side of the district, taking several lives including the son of the Argent Coalition’s leader, Olivia Holt.



The Argent Coalition operates out of Holt Manor, which houses the faction’s private headquarters.


The Crafstmans’ District
The industrial center of New Nauru, this district contains a plethora of skill trainers who will introduce players to tutorials, quests, and recipes for Smeltery, Tannery, Magic, and more! You’ll also find the workshop of Wilhelm’s Wheels & Wagons - a fledgling transportation company that has the capacity to make New Nauru a bit more navigable…


The Magisters operate out of their research library near the Arcane Tower in this district - and the inner-reaches of their faction’s headquarters are off-limits to anyone not accepted into their bizarre fold.


The Market District
The city’s commerce center - players will find all manner of shops here, from ore and food merchants, to fine art and instrument sellers! The main tavern of New Nauru is located here as well, so the Market District is a popular destination of most visitors to the city.


The Sons of Drakmar operate out of their headquarters beneath the tavern. Prove your strength in their fighting ring, and they may just let you join their operation…


Fast Travel in New Nauru
With New Nauru being such a massive city, it merited its own inter-city fast travel system. When you first enter the Central Plaza, you’ll run into Wilhelm - who offers a questline to unlock a series of fast travel points throughout the city. Once you’ve gone into business with Wilhelm’s Wheels & Wagons, you’ll have to find your business party at the prospective caravan stops in each district.


The Sewers
Beneath the Central Plaza and the 5 Districts, lies a sprawling sewer system that stretches across New Nauru, and houses much more than just… well, typical sewer contents. Players will find plenty of secrets down here, including the Undertow - a whole other civilization living beneath the city!

[Iyoforeayo]

Quest Devlog #3

Written by Iyoforeayo

In the previous Quest Devlog, I laid out the 5 Story Campaigns that will make up the main questlines of Atlas. These past two months, both the New Nauru and the Vantian Empire campaigns have been fully completed! Our devs can attest that I’ve hijacked our last few Saturday meetings to run full tests of both campaigns - and after an inordinate number of hours of testing and bugfixing, I couldn’t be happier with the results.

This particular devlog won’t be a very long one - partially because we just came off a 4-hour test of the Vantian Empire campaign and I’m exhausted - but also because we don’t want to give too much away! As mentioned before, the main story quests are now tailored more toward character and world progression, and so your individual story progression (and the phasing of those NPCs) will reflect your particular place in the story. A big chunk of time was spent on getting the phasing right for the story - with so many intertwining threads and characters, there was a rat’s-nest of intertwining tags, dialogue branches, progression, and triggers to untangle…

From a back-end perspective, our quests system works in an interesting way. We of course use the third-party plugin BetonQuest, but we also have a handful of in-house plugins and mechanics that have been created to tie into it for Atlas-specific purposes. One such homegrown plugin is Wizardteepot’s AtlasConversations - which allows us to display dialogue and trigger quest progression in a whole new and useful way. Of course there’s also an entire homegrown tie-in for Tyrriel’s SimpleNPCs plugin to work with everything from NPC event interactions to phasing. This is all before diving into BetonQuest itself, which is essentially a toolbox full of parts and gears and wires that can be assembled in an infinite number of ways - and I’ll stop myself before going down the rabbit-hole explanation of how our quests on Atlas utilize these mechanics in our own unique ways, because I could write another 30 pages on it and I really shouldn’t…

As players progress through the main Story Campaigns, they’ll encounter areas of the world they can’t reach anywhere else - from hidden prisons, to secret headquarters, to alternate dimensions, to besieged versions of NPC capitals! And our build team has done some awesome work on all of it, which we can’t wait for you to experience!

[Iyoforeayo]

Assorted Devlog #2

Written by Iyoforeayo & Tyrriel

There's been a ton of dev progress this month, but it was one of those months with a lot of different projects that didn’t each merit their own full devlog - so we’ve combined a few of them here!

1.18
One of those things that isn’t terribly exciting from a game standpoint, but still necessary - we’ve updated Atlas to MC version 1.18. Due to the high number of plugins we have, these major version updates always take quite a lot of time and effort to implement correctly. But it’s finally done!

The Purelaker Republic Campaign
We mentioned in the previous Quest Devlog that both the New Nauru and Vantian Empire Campaigns had been written and coded - now we can add the Purelaker Republic to that! The third of 5 main story campaigns is now in the testing phase - and with each Atlas campaign now consisting of 3 chapters with 12 quests each, players will have plenty of new quest content to explore!

New Quest Journal
One of our smaller projects we’ve mentioned in the past, is the complete ground-up rework of the Quest Journal. This month, we were finally able to implement and start testing it (just in time to be used with the new quests!) The new journal has a few perks that should make players’ lives easier. Namely:

1.) The journal is now accessed via a button in your inventory menu! No more having to type /journal and dealing with an item randomly popping into an inventory slot.


2.) The “Quest Tracker Menu” that used to be available by pressing L, has been rolled into the new journal. Now, you can track not only your Active Quests, but see all Quests available in the world and where to start them! This will also track which quests you’ve completed.

3.) On-screen quest tracking! Tired of going into the journal to see your current objective? Simply track your quest on the right-hand side of your screen!


Cartography
Another ground-up rework that has recently entered the testing phase - Cartography! And just like the new Quest Journal, the Cartography Compass is now accessed from a button in your inventory menu, rather than a physical item.

Cartography is now also inherently tied in with the aforementioned quest tracking - so if you start tracking a quest, your compass will automatically provide you with the associated waypoint marker on your HUD!

[Iyoforeayo]

Cooking Devlog #1

Written by Desertdweller

The cooking skill is getting massively upgraded from previous iterations! Making it easier to use, while also keeping the fun and interesting aspects that had already existed has been my main priority. As well as finding a way to bring it into the combat meta.

Ease of Use changes

You might remember that cooking had 3 different stations before, each giving a different possible list of textures food items could get, with each giving unique additions to food items. That was a system that felt underwhelming, and just added unnecessary information for players to have to learn. So we combined all 3 into a single station! This also includes the cutting board, which used to be its own thing, but now everything you have to do in cooking takes place in one area.


With everything now being contained in one structure, GUI changes were in place. 



One goal, has been to try to bring Cooking into a similar fold as the other skills such as smelting, and tanning, but we wanted to keep what made it feel unique and fun in the first place, which is the ability to combine any combination of ingredients together, and get a usable food item, unique based on the ingredients used. Which if we brought it under a completely recipe based mechanic like the others, would completely remove that aspect of cooking.

The solution to this is the ability to use premade recipes. Essentially allowing players to pick from a large list of premade recipes, which you can earn through quests, or discovering them by other means. This will lower the barrier of entry for players interested in cooking their own foods, but not willing to figure out the intricacies of creating their own concoctions. 



Of course, if you are a player who likes to min-max, and delve deep into a mechanic to get the most of it, the previous system still exists. Simply just click on “Custom Recipe” and become the chef you’ve always dreamed of! This is where veteran players who experienced old cooking will feel at home. The system is still the same, you need one main ingredient, and up to 3 secondary and 4 spice ingredients. Each changing the flavor and stats of the food you end up with. 

Before each station would give you a different resulting texture. For example, cooking wheat in a cauldron gave you noodles, whereas cooking them in an oven gave you bread. Well now that we removed those extra stations, you might be worried that it is no longer possible to get the textures you want. Well no fear! With the new GUI system, whenever you have chosen your ingredients, a new screen will appear, giving you choices of what you want your ending texture to be, depending on what ingredients you chose.

You can see below that I can choose 3 different textures, normal wheat (because I used wheat as the main ingredient), noodles (another choice because of the wheat), and pumpkin bread (which is there because I used both wheat and pumpkins as ingredients). As you’ll also notice, with the temporary taco texture on the noodles, that some food textures will be custom textures, so you can expect a wide variety to choose from, to bring life to your feasts. 



As you can also see from the clip, an animation now plays for the station when it is actively cooking something, then it places the finished item on top of the barrel to the left. A lot of effort has been going into the cooking skill to make it feel a lot crisper, and cleaner to use. This includes the animation you’ve seen, and also nice feedback sounds when using the new GUI. 

Food Effects

Food in combat is one of the most important parts to winning the fight. Which is why I’ve always wanted to bring cooking foods into the combat meta, since before there was never much thought that needed to be had for what foods are brought into fights.. 

This is why now when cooking a food item, depending on its secondary ingredients, it will have unique effects that improve you in some way for a very short period of time. No effect will last longer than a minute, and most won’t even last half a minute. The thought process behind this is that if you want longer form benefits from consumables, you should go to potions. But if you are in the middle of a fight, eating the right item at the right time can tip the scales in your favor, or at least back to neutral. 


You’ll have to discover through trial and error which ingredients have these effects, but here is the current list of effects available through cooking. This information will also be able to be found ingame when affected by each, you’ll be able to open a GUI window, which will explain each effect you have applied to you.

• Exp gain over time: Gives the player exp passively over time. Ideal for mages.
  

• Champion’s Might: Gives the player a minor improvement to all melee damage.
  
• Knight’s Might: Gives the player a medium improvement to all trident damage.
  
• Duelist’s Might: Gives the player a medium improvement to all sword damage.
  
• Barbarian’s Might: Gives the player a medium improvement to all battleaxe damage.
  
• Reaper’s Might: Gives the player a medium improvement to all sickle damage.
  
• Ranger’s Might: Gives the player a medium improvement to all bows.
  
• Guard’s Might: Gives the player a medium improvement to all crossbows.
  
• Offensive Magic Boost: Gives the player improvement to all damaging magic.
  
• Defensive Magic Boost: Gives the player improvement to all healing/defensive magic.
  
• Passive Regen: Gives the player a minor amount of regen, less than that of regen 1, but will also stack with natural regen.
  
• Debuff Removal: Gives a chance every few seconds for a minute to remove a debuff effect on the player.
  
• Target Buff Removal: Gives a minor chance to remove positive buffs from the target for each damage done.
  
• Anti Seeking: Prevents the seeking enchantment on bows from working on the player.
  
• Global Sweeping: All melee weapons have the sweeping effect for the player.
  
• Absorption Regen: Every few seconds, the player receives a certain amount of absorption hearts, but will never go above that amount. Meaning if the player has lost any of the absorption hearts when it procs, it will give them back to the player.
  
• Fragile Applier: Whenever the player damages another, it makes that player more vulnerable to fall damage for a time. 
  
• Degrading Speed: Grants the player a very short burst of high speed.
  
• Deafen Applier: Prevents sounds from playing for a time for anyone this player hits.
  

Obviously many of these will likely change, be removed, and more will be added. But you can get a general idea of the effects you’ll be able to acquire from custom foods now. 

Each effect will be able to have up to 3 different levels of strength, similar to normal potions, increasing the effects when possible, and increasing length of duration (still always under 1 minute) when not. 

There is one final mechanic to mention with this system. Which is Effect Fatigue. Effect fatigue is a 1 minute debuff applied everytime a food effect is applied. It prevents any more effects from being added to the player when consuming a food while it is active. This way players can’t stack effects, or disregard a 20 second duration by just consuming a food item every 20 seconds. Players will have to make conscious choices when they eat what food item in combat.

Finally, I’m really happy with how the cooking skill is coming, and I can’t wait to watch player’s enjoy it as well! Before I end this devlog however, I’d like to ask something of all of you. If you have ideas for a cuisine, or what a specific combination of ingredients can make, make a forum post to let me know! It’s hard to brainstorm every food item ever, so I might not think of a specific food that is really obvious. So having suggestions for things like, “can we make pizza, the random type of bread, or this one obscure cultural dish” for the cooking skill is very nice.

[Iyoforeayo]

Resource Pack Devlog #4

Written by Wizardteepot

A Quick Review

As you might remember with some of our previous resource pack devlogs, we are in the process of creating some new block textures that you can use in your builds. Common blocks will be able to be crafted, meanwhile other blocks will come from other Atlas Content such as Dungeons or Quests.



In addition to blocks, we’ll be changing certain GUIs in game to have more of that Fantasy Adventure RPG feel that we’re striving for:



So What Else do we Got?
Glad you asked! Since this texture pack will help push Atlas further along in our plans towards “polish”, we’ll be using this pack to also create item textures. This will allow us to create textures to better represent crafted or received items in other forms of content that Atlas adds; for example, various armors will be given textures, along with things like fish or even our later released Legendary Items.

However, in achieving polish, we also will be making item textures for Quest Items. When we have items in quests such as letters or crates, Iyo will often do his best to find a fitting minecraft item texture to sit in its place. For example, a letter might end up being a piece of paper. With the suspension of disbelief, that certainly works, but we could always strive to do better.


A Look Behind the Curtain
I wanted to also spend some time in this devlog talking about the actual process we go through in creating some textures. Perhaps it might interest people in some behind the scenes devwork, or might even be a stepping stone into some pixel art and texture design!

First, we start with the actual texture that is needed. Iyo might create a quest, and say that we need a letter texture:



So we first do some research: we need a pixelated mail or letter icon. What already exists on the internet?



Sometimes this can help out, sometimes not. As you can see, none of these really seem “minecraft like”, but they can give us some good ideas. For example, the image on the top left shows that a letter will have the obvious top flap, but also the two lines coming up from the bottom.

So next, we’ll look for other textures that already exist in minecraft that might be close to the required texture, but just need some tweaking.



For letters, this is fairly easy for us. We’ll just use the minecraft item texture for paper. It just makes sense to use this as a base. And with a little tweaking, and our research from earlier, we get our letter texture:




Now one thing that is important to keep in mind is some of minecraft’s innate design tactics. We want this texture pack to feel relatively “Minecraft-Esque”, and one thing that is minecraft-esque for the newer versions of minecraft is the “soft colored borders”. What do I mean by this? Well, it might seem natural to outline the textures in black colored pixels, as that’s what a lot of other pixelated textures will do. For example, here’s the mushroom texture from the Super Mario Series:


Minecraft on the other hand uses softer versions of their item’s natural colors to create the border, rather than a hard black. Referring back to the paper texture, the main color for the paper is obviously white, but notice how the border is more of a light gray.

Here is another texture that we will be including in a future texture pack, but to emphasize the point of the hard versus soft border texture, note the difference between the image on the left (the actual, soft border texture) of a Melted Vantian Goldblade, versus a harsh black border texture on the right.

[Iyoforeayo]

Skills Devlog #3

Written by Tyrriel

During the latest test period, some of you got to experience the new Smeltery and Tannery armors along with the preliminary balancing. Today we are going to be talking about the flip side of those systems, the crafting element.

As a refresher from the last Skills Devlog here are some pretty pictures of the new multiblock crafting apparatuses.

The Forge:


The Vat:


Using them is fairly simple; right-click on the “primary” interaction block. In the case of the Forge that would be the blast furnace and in the case of the Vat that would be cauldron. Upon interaction you will be greeted with a UI that looks a little something like this:



There is a lot going on in this screenshot so I’ll help by breaking it down just a tad. See the following picture:

• The highlighted blue box is all of the possible alloys/leathers that can be made. 
  
• The white buttons above and below this allow you to scroll to more possible alloys/leathers.
  
• The highlighted green box is the ingredients required to actually make the alloy (no more spreadsheets / memorization!)
  
• As you can probably guess, you can craft more than 1 alloy (up to 8 to be exact) and the ingredients will automatically be recalculated :)
  
• Then, click the green button to start the 25 second animation to craft your alloys!
  

In previous devlogs we have touched on “masterwork” alloys or leathers. And while I don’t have a whole lot to share on how you actually get an alloy to “masterwork” I can share this:


You will notice at the bottom of the item that there is a certain percentage chance for the given item to “masterwork”. This is because only 3 of the 8 ingots to craft this chestplate are masterwork ingots. Naturally the more masterwork ingots that are part of the crafting recipe, the higher percentage chance for the item to be a masterwork.

But what exactly does “masterworking” an item do? In this case, masterwork items have a “masterwork modifier” that either modifies one of the existing attributes or adds a new attribute. This is always a positive action; removing / reducing a negative attribute, adding to an existing attribute, or adding a new positive attribute. See the following masterwork item as an example, the modified attribute has a (*) next to it.

[Iyoforeayo]

Quest Devlog #4

Written by Wizardteepot

In the previous devlogs, Iyo has talked a lot about the different story campaigns that players will be able to expect upon the launch of Atlas. He has also talked about rewards players might receive, along with some more mechanical parts about quest designing, such as players accessing new areas like prisons or caves that relate to the story, helping to broaden our world and the places we have access to.

I wanted to quickly talk about a different part of quest design that we are largely utilizing for these new quests: conversations and cutscenes. Now, everyone is familiar with the standard quest dialogue: go to an NPC, you will get certain prompts given to you, and you can respond to the NPC with one of those prompts to progress the questline.



But we are in the process of adding in Conversations to Atlas Quests as well. A conversation is a full back and forth conversation between NPCs and the player, one that progresses without the need of player input.



These rarely existed in older forms of Atlas, but they were often hard and convoluted to code through the questing plugin we use called BetonQuest. Instead, we decided to pare down this particular system and make something called AtlasConversations. You can now find these forms of dialogue which will help build up our quest dialogues, along with general world dialogues, all around Atlas!

But this isn’t the last of our polish for Atlas Conversations either: the tech exists for us to place players into pseudo-spectator modes, and manipulate their movements in such ways to make it look like a camera panning around a screen. There is also the ability to create player models to stand in for the actual player, so it doesn’t seem strange that the player randomly disappears when a cutscene starts that includes them.

With the introduction of conversations and soon to be cutscenes, our questing system and overall worldbuilding will get pushed to new heights!