Most of the work for this week’s patch went into bug fixes and back end development. The splash screen is a big front end change however, as now you can log in and create characters from within the game itself. It will remember your username and password for later so you don’t have to type it in every time. If you are logged into the website it should still log you in automatically. Read on for more changes.

The stage is set for music which will probably show up in the next patch, and a new sprite system has been implemented to support large boss sized monsters. We finally finished replacing all the placeholder graphics for items and map tiles so now the NPCs will start switching over in the same manner. You’ll already notice a few of them have changed, and just like the item transition don’t worry if some mobs look out of place for a while.

Added a fun command to play with for now. /costume [sprite number] works for donators and will let you turn into any animal or monster in the game, up to 127 of them are available and most have not been seen in game yet. I know you have always wanted to become a chicken and terrorize the countryside.

I did another round of optimizations on the client, this is probably the biggest one yet. It recycles objects more efficiently and has smoother map updates while walking. The game will run better on slower hardware and hopefully clear up some of the freezing issues a few people reported.

Also cleaned up the walking animations for mobs and did some more networking improvements for movement. Now when the server corrects your position it will be more instant and less rubber bandy in most cases. Fixed a rare bug where you could even walk through mobs sometimes without being corrected. There may be more improvements coming, but this should help with navigating through dangerous rooms for now.

Adjusted the map title and myst counter font to be less intense. Fixed the issue where your character would walk really slow for the first step or two after logging in, and some problems with tribe operations since the logout patch.

I optimized the memory usage on the server and have switched to a new datacenter, still located on the east coast. My tests on the new network have gone well so far, so let’s hope everything continues smoothly when the player counts increase.

Now go prepare for the upcoming bosses, as a squid preferably.