Hordes.io

Survive faction battles and build your clan. Browser-based MMORPG.

[dek @shatterspine]

ID168 aegis aura

[dek @shatterspine]

Now that Update 0.5 has been out for ~2 months theres good data on the new leveling logs. Heres a visualization which i largely use to identify potential hotspots, problematic areas bad experiences (red dot = retention drops / achieving max level)

made with js / svelte

[dek @shatterspine]

Open world party farm (searching for a rare pet) yesterday. One of the goals of the "Hellspawn" system was to make high end group farming challenging. While there are some problems for soloing as a consequence, in general I think its creating a lot of good olschool MMO dynamics

[dek @shatterspine]

Hordes 0.50 is finally ready to play - js based MMO, playable in the browser! Heres a little trailer, check it out!

[dek @shatterspine]

Update 0.5 is planned to go live on 13th December (Wednesday)🧙‍♀️

[dek @shatterspine]

A little bossfight we had in the reworked zone (PTR) yesterday. 80 Players in a Raid, in a Browsergame.

[dek @shatterspine]

PTR is UP! can still sign up, i am unlocking people every few minutes!

[dek @shatterspine]

Hordes (Browser MMORPG) PTR Test with new changes tomorrow! Link is in my profile - can still get unlocked :)

[dek @shatterspine]

ruin skelly

(new gs terrain + foliage set)

[dek @shatterspine]

Micro Devlog Time

PTR Test will run on Nov 4th, sign up if you wanna join :)

Mainly spent time on the spell engine, most of these bugs related to obscure rules for parsing order of spell interactions (e.g. buff queued entity while alive, dies in same frame, buffs added after death flag).

In order to do decently comprehensive testing on massive combat engine changes, i'll generally just generate 500 bots that all fight each other + monsters in the same spot, with action priority lists that include every spell and buff in the game. Ultimately though the best testing suite would be a fully implemented APL system that acts deterministically.

While testing I also found some decently easy to implement perf improvements, which resulted in some massive speed ups on the server. Expecting to roughly 1.5x the amount of connected players we can handle.

Also added a login queue.. 2 days went into that unfortunately, that stuff was overly complex for side cases such as players reconnecting during the queue or how to handle players that log out for a short time (dont wanna force an actively playing player to re-queue, ever).

Character creation limit lifted, its now a moving window that limits you from creating too many characters in 10 minutes, 1 day, and 1 month.

Remaining task for the next PTR test are mostly non-critical. I'll do some visual i terations on guardstone so there will be more pretty vids and pics.

Have a good weekend!

[dek @shatterspine]

Gloomfury Ruins

[dek @shatterspine]

Faivel Moonlake Biome

[dek @shatterspine]

Finished custom Foliage & additional lighting pass for one Faivel biome. All Krita!

Sorry for just posting pics of the ground. I work in phases batching lots of stuff together. Some months in the future will all be character model improvements, or items, or UI. Atm its Biomes.

[dek @shatterspine]

javascript engine👌
faivel east coast progress. still wip but already my fav zone i think.

[dek @shatterspine]

Open World Editing Trick - Modulate heightmap based on texture values, rather than painting textures based on heightmap.

1. Paint Macro Heightmap features like Mountains
2. Do a texturing pass
3. Modulate heightmap based on texture
(Advantages of writing custom editors)

Reason i think this is better:
Its easy to reason about large scale features like mountans and little hills at low vertex counts, but when it comes to detailing like this, doing it "blindly" without any texture values is difficult to intuit. when you only see the mesh, you'd never modify the heightmap like that because it just seems arbitrary. The height map is a lower detail density thing that supports your much higher detail texture information by giving it a good silhouette.

IMO its these kind of details that end up creating a lot of depth and make things more believable. I only discovered this approach for myself today - incredibly satisfying to apply to everything.

[dek @shatterspine]

just realized that we pretty much will have pride rock from the lion king in the new map update 🦁 rare path?

[dek @shatterspine]

underwater biome + rendering + depth based light improvements

[dek @shatterspine]

Bone Desert - Colors, Foliage & Lighting preview

[dek @shatterspine]

oasis biome

starting to look very promising, transitions into sand look smooth, overall color palette with the mobs is sweet. also put some shells onto the ground for variation. light & fog still wip, probably gonna rework the palm trees first🌴

[dek @shatterspine]

headless steppes colors + daycycle