June 27 Livestream Answers

Friday 27 June, Trick and Scapes answer questions from the community.

Video

Watch live video from TrionWorlds on TwitchTV

Questions

Shrill Grenades dropping

The first couple of EGO codes have gone out with the show. A lot of folks noticed the Shrill Grenades appearing in the world early. We wanted you guys to find them early.

Stability

Working on for stablity, the builds that have been coming out this week and we've been testing on Alpha. We've been tuning how often we send messages.

When people encounter lags it can happen in two places, one is the server has slowed down and is overloaded with messages, which could be from a loop which says when a player is hurt, they apply an effect which hurts themselves, which hurts themselves etc.

Other times its because we send so many messages to each players, the player sorts through each message one after another and the player falls behind.

We're throttling those messages on both sides and we've been addressing cases of messages sent out too many times. Each time we remove these excess messages it does improve the game performance.

Hellbug Pinata in Defiance

We have a couple of open world events with people celebrating, they are be in Rift and Trove. We are thinking about it, but that would need a new mechanic.

Warmaster Disconnects

We understand the Warmaster is creating uncessary friction between players. We are actively looking at the disconnect from Warmaster, we have some leads we are following a lot of those go down the rabbit holes for what causes lag. We should determine the causes for those soon, they happen at two major places one of them is queueing for the instance where you interact with the teleporter and there is a second one that occurs frequently when the Warmaster does his EMP attack where he effects everyone at the same time we expect that is a loop with a poorly written game effect, it's what we expect but might not be. We've got people investigating and looking into that.

To handle the social issue of the Warmaster, we are putting in a fix sometime soon to add a timer to both open the vents and break the locks period, right now we are looking at a 60 second timer for the vents and 3 minute timer for the locks. By putting the timers on there we are looking to have people be prepared before you go in or just to play the event.

Is the timer a fail, or a forced start?

The scoring is working as expected. You can still only get the legendary loot drops by defeating the Warmaster.

New Engineers

We are having two engineers starting next week, we have a bunch of engineering tasks and features coming in. First priority is server stability, and then the season 2 missions, then new stuff.

First enemies of The Grid starts Monday at Noon

New enemies start on Monday at Noon, Modunaut is an old term they are called the Grid. The revenant is the first which will be released.

They have an attack where they burrow their hands into the ground and reach out with bionetic tendrils which are part of a chain attack.

They also have an attack where someone doesn't have a shield or an EGO they can convert them to their faction. Being infected with the revenants give you a health regen. They can't infect Dark Matter or anyone who is pivotal to the completion of an event e.g. Cooper. 

Salvage Matrix Improvements

Making the salvage matrix more attractive in general, that's a pretty big task because it doesn't do a very good job explaining it. You should be able to see a high resolution version of your weapon in the middle and swap out pieces. We also want to add more functionality to it to re-roll specific bonuses, synergies and some of the pre-existing weapons from the shop.

Probably well after the season we will have what is broadly described as crafting, player manufactured goods out there. I don't like long merchant lists with mods, being able to make mods yourself. 

Another thing we really want to do is get personalised guns in there, being able to name your gun and then lock the modifications apart from upgrade rarity. Also we want to be able to downgrade a rarity to allow weapons to be traded and used.

New Landmass

Coming a little over halfway through the season, we're talking about weeks. You'll see demos on the livestream and on Alpha beforehand.

Cloak Fix

Requires a client update, but we have it.

Hide UI

If we turned off the HUD with the current method you wouldn't be able to get to the menus and you'd be trapped. Also detaching the camera in a shooter you could look round corners etc which isn't a good idea on a shooter.

Character Improvement Options

We've got an idea for crafting cybertech benefits to multiple characters on an account.

Loadout changing time

3 seconds

New weaponry in season 2

One is called "The Gangbuster", three new types of weapons are weird in comparison, e.g. types of weapons that can lock on that couldn't before.

Loadout swapping in PvP

Can be done instantly, we'll have to look at it.

Starter Clans for new players

Once they are in a clan there is no reason to leave a starter clan, we'd have to nerf it so that clan never fully functions. At that point it is just a hinderance to joining other clans. There is no benefit to having this for our players.

What is the current base health amount for players

1263 and raising to a maximum of 17303 (without the perk to increase)

Will there be more playable races in the future?

Yes, can almost guarentee it will indogene first, as they are human sized.

Suprised it wouldn't be cyborg related

Destructable Environment

No, we have a huge persistant world, we'd not only have to allow you to break things but we'd have to allow you it to grow back. For an awful lot of processing power it wouldn't benefit us as much.

Silicon Valley

As far the game is concerned, this portion of Silicon Valley spans from the San Bruno area all the way down to Redwood City. The preview image is actually Trion's offices name of the POI is "The Rift". The landmass is approximately the same square footage of Marin.

Upgraded rarity bonus rolls not at legendary values

We want natural rolled legendaries to still have a higher value than upgraded.

Encouring player hosted events

We will be helping promote and support player hosted events in the game run by Kiwibird.

DD also has a concept for this, so will see what Trion do.

Weather conditions and environment effects

At the moment it rains in Silicon Valley, if that works across platforms we will have rain as a thing that happens.

Go to Clan Member

There is a task for it, we have new engineers coming on, it should be easy and is probably the first thing they work on.

Clan Leaderboard or Directory

We don't have any plan to do that, leaderboards aren't that important for a co-operative shooter.

Clan finding tool might have been worth it though. I'd still like a one-off report for a snapshot.

APS Outfit

I need to find out why it isn't usable right now, did something stop this, did the postal service say no, did it have a tear, did the backpack not work. We'd probably put it on the store. We might have had it as a possible profession as a courier, which isn't what we plan now.

Holster Animation

There are a lot of optimisations done before that. Even with no equipment you need to pull out a gun. There are no animations for the player walking around without a gun in their hand. We would need to address more of the memory problems at the moment before they add idle animations to the mix.

Defiance on Steam

We are working with Steam to address this, we don't have an ETA.

Alcatraz and other places

We've built Alcatraz in the game twice, we were going to have a big level there. We want to take our time doing it. That and Palace of Fine Arts which is Fort Defiance. Candlestick Park is another place we want to make.

Raid grouping and more raids

After season 2 (after September probably), we want to do the Raid Invite or Private Match. So the teleporter gives choice to continue to Public Match or spent Arkforge and make it Invite Only clan / friends etc. Probably with a 24 hour cooldown.