The Weaponry Update

Hi everybody! It’s time for our latest new content drop, which this time is actually kind of a hybrid content/feature drop.

New in this update:

• New weapon models! Our limited old weapon models have been removed, and are now replaced by literally 200 new weapon models, spread across 14 categories, and mapped to increasing quality levels so that higher item-level (ilvl) weapons look cooler and more dangerous than lower ilvl weapons!

• Selectable weapon types per player class! For each player class, you can set none, one, or multiple weapon types for that class to use, so there’s no more mages carrying axes or barbarians with wands (unless that’s what you want!)

• For the first time, you can now also specify weapon types for your monsters and NPC characters to use!

• Since we now have visual differences between high-quality and low-quality weapons, we no longer hide low-quality weapons when their wielder outlevels them! So if you have a level 20 paladin who is still carrying around that flimsy old broomstick that he bought as a practice weapon when he was level 1, you’ll see him carrying it around while you’re looking at him and mocking his life choices.

• New combat animations! We’ve boosted way up from 4 combat animations to 20, across our two stances (“humanoid” and “quadruped”). You can now specify for each combat ability which animation it should use, and whether it should use a bow/crossbow/gun animation when one of those weapons is equipped. So if you want a healer class who fires off their heals using a crossbow when one is available, that’s now possible!

The complete list of weapon categories is now “Axes”, “Bone Weapons”, “Bows”, “Crossbows”, “Curved Swords”, “Daggers”, “Greatswords”, “Guns”, “Hammers”, “Maces”, “Spears”, “Staves”, “Swords”, and “Wands”, each of which contain between 10 and 20 weapon models tied to different ranges of weapon item-level (ilvl).

By default you’ll start with the “swords”, “axes”, and “wands” weapon categories available, and the other categories are available via development projects. (Or if you just want everything all at once, there’s a Custom Rule you can apply to your save for that!)

Note that only humanoids who have a humanoid right arm/hand can be given visible weapons. (Sorry about that, we just never figured out a way to attach a sword to a chicken’s wing without it looking silly!)

Also note that there was a minor issue with the old ‘golem’ costume which caused bow/crossbow/gun animations to play a little weirdly on that specific costume. If you’re in an old save and have issues with a golem and those weapons, you may wish to reapply the new ‘golem’ costume preset to get the fix![/quote]

….and of course, there’s also a whole bunch of bug fixes and other minor improvements that come alongside this update.

In terms of “what’s next”, I’ve actually got another under-the-hood performance patch in testing just behind this one, which reduces VRAM usage and should deliver notable CPU performance improvements for folks with really large games. Expect to see that one within a week or two!

Until then, big thanks to everybody who’s been sending in feedback and bug reports; they’re always huge helps!

-T