News Archive

Version 1.2.1 and Emoticons!

By ZaneDubya on Jun 19, 2023

Greetings, valiant wanderers of MedievaLands! I come bearing tidings of version 1.2.1. Without further ado, let us draw back the curtain and reveal the treasures that lie within this update!

In the golden era of 1993, before emojis donned their modern charm, we had emoticons! Now this game supports many more ways to express yourself with these little sparkles of joy. As you journey through the dungeons, you can summon these ancient runes by holding the 'Ctrl' key and pressing the number and ampersand keys.

Let me share some other gems in this update, which have been polished with the aid of fellow adventurers:

• Your character sheet will now immediately reflect stat updates gained from fountains. My thanks to Stormborg and ValkornWiz for bearing the torch that illuminated this issue.
• You now have the ability to save your password. Sir Tawmis, thank you for suggesting this addition.
• Hover your mouse over the stats on your character sheet to reveal their secrets. A bow of respect to Trent for suggesting this improvement.
• Lastly, with the swing of my developer's hammer, the Achievements Window, broken in the last update, has been restored to its full glory.

In conclusion, my friends, let us raise our goblets to the fellowship we share in this game. Your feedback is the sharpening stone that hones the blade of this game.

Until next time, take care, and keep in touch.

Zane

Version 1.1, Update 618

By ZaneDubya on Jul 25, 2022

In a testament to the stability of the MedievaLands server process, today's update is the first in 212 days, and includes only two small bug fixes:

First, the MedievaLands client will no longer crash (very occasionally) when logging out and then immediately logging back in again.

Second, the MedievaLands client will no longer crash if it cannot find an audio device on your computer.

Until next time, take care, and keep in touch. :)

Zane

Behind the Scenes!

By ZaneDubya on Jan 9, 2022

This update to MedievaLands includes many behind the scenes changes, and one very small change to the Soldiers Quarters in Yserbius. The quick summary is that I have changed a number of systems but this should not change how the game works or looks - so if you see any oddness as you play this version, please let me know so I can fix any bugs I have introduced.

Here are the five changes I have made in the past two weeks:

First, I have spent ten hours moving all the style and color code into a single place in the source code. My idea here is that if I ever want to change the color scheme of the game - for example, to make it more uniform throughout - it will be much easier to make that happen. (However, I have not made any changes to the actual colors or styles yet - so if you see some strange looking fonts or a bizarrely colored window, let me know and I will return it to how it used to look.)

Second, I have spent another ten hours moving several hundred text strings out of the source code and into a localization database. My goal with this change is to make it easier to edit the text in the game. I estimate that I have another several hundred text strings left to go, so this is very much in progress. (However, I have not made any changes yet to the text strings. If you see some bizarre out of place text - or if you see a "LOC_ERR" message, meaning that a localization string is missing, please let me know.)

Third, I have combined the point-of-view renderers for Yserbius and Twinion to a single generic renderer. Less code is always better, and as a side benefit Yserbius could now potentially use all the graphical resources from Twinion - and vice versa. (However, I have not made any changes to the textures in either game. If you see some incorrect walls, doors, or out of place objects, please let me know and I will fix those!)

Fourth, I have rewritten the compression and decompression code. In general, resources should be packed more tightly and the game will no longer allocate a byte buffer for every call to the decompression routine. This should be unnoticeable to players - but you can rest assured that the MedievaLands engine is in the best shape ever.

Finally, I have created a new map data format, and translated all the maps currently in the game to the new format. The new format is more explicit in how it invokes map script events, which is very exciting from a scripting perspective. Just as exciting from the designer perspective, I can now edit the map geometry and create my own maps. But I have not done any of that yet - except for one small change to the Soldiers Quarters map on level one of the dungeon of Yserbius: I have removed the lock pick requirement from the back door in that map. This change is meant to improve the player experience for new players: it has always struck me as odd that the requirement to open the shortcut door in the Soldiers Quarters was the same as the door at the very end of the level which leads to the same space. From my perspective, you should be rewarded for traversing the entire level - not frustrated with a locked door after a punishing trip. The shortcut remains locked - you'll continue to need a lockpick or the lockpicking skill to open that door.

In addition to all these items, I have fixed two rare bugs that could cause the client to disconnect: one where you tried to use a skill when dead, and one where you died while teleporting between maps. These changes firm up the game's stability - MedievaLands is in a really good place now, and continues to improve with every update.

Until next time, take care, and keep in touch.

Zane

Well that was a year

By ZaneDubya on Sept 14, 2021

In all seriousness, it has been almost exactly a year since I have had any meaningful updates to share. I am pleased as Punch to break the dry spell and bring some good news back to you. Today I am going to talk about a brand new way to interact with Yserbius. Then I am going to share the latest bug fixes, and give kudos to our reporting adventurers. As brief preface, this is a 'breaking update' in that it will require people with Clients older than last month's minor update to download the client from the website. I always recommend that you delete all old copies of the client before downloading the new one. With that out of the way ... let's dive into the update!

The big change to report is a complete overhaul of the user interface for exploration and combat within the dungeon. This update addresses one of the major problems I have had in introducing Yserbius to new players: the user interface. The Yserbius UI was amazing for 1992, and it is a joy to return to if you played the game back then. But for new players the dungeon interface doesn't make much sense. It's interesting to compare the first few screens you see when you boot up the game to the interface you are presented with when you enter the dungeon. The gallery and character creation screens all have very clear button, text input, and text display controls. They are early renditions of the exact same controls we see in our modern applications for desktops thirty years on. By comparison, when you enter the dungeon, the user interface design principles shift and what you are doing and what you are interacting with is somewhat obscured.

Of course, it is not fair or worthwhile to judge Yserbius by modern UI standards, and I'm not going to do that. Today we have a shared understanding of the metaphors we use to indicate interactivity. Yserbius simply came about before many of these were explored. For that reason, the UI sometimes doesn't make sense to someone who never played this old game.

You have to admit that it is hard to look at a game we played in the early nineties with fresh eyes. With that in mind, I occasionally bring in friends and family as testers. The first time I ever showed MedievaLands to one of these newbies, they made a character, and figured out that you could click on the volcano... and then they just sat there for 15 seconds before asking what to do next. I asked them to describe what they thought the user interface of the game was trying to convey. They said: "I think this is the next character creation screen. I see what I think is my character, but I don't know what to do with it. I see a bunch of items in my bag but I don't know what to do with them. There's a big black-orange blur and I don't know what that is." That big orange and black blur was the character's point of view. The "bunch of items in my bag" was a description of the icons that open up subviews: the item chest, the quest item bag, the trash can, the map, the spell book, and so on).

This new UI is meant to be more understandable for new players by relying on commonly understood modern user interface principles that advertise to the player how they may explore and interact with the game. Buttons are very clearly buttons. I added health and mana point bars to all party members and enemy monsters. I also chose to prioritize the player action of moving through the dungeon over the action of changing your equipment, since you do much more moving than equipping (particularly in the original cut of the game, without the added random magic item system). Finally, this new user interface increases the amount of text you can see on screen by 50 percent! All told, I think this is a huge update that will make the game easier to play for new players, but which is still familiar enough to returning players. Please let me know if you have any suggestions for further improvements.

Next, I'll note the issues reported by our hardiest denizens of the dungeon, the bug catchers.

• Kendo found that, as a Guild leader who wanted to quit his Guild, he was in a bit of a "hotel california" problem: you could start a Guild whenever you'd like, but you could never leave. After what must have seemed like an eternity, I gave him and all our other leaders trapped in Dire Straits a way out: leaders can now leave their guild, and can also make use of the /gleave command. This is true even if they were the only remaining Guild leader.
• Svensson noted that some longer forum posts weren't displaying. This was an issue with my sprite batching solution: for each texture, I only draw at most 4000 or so sprites at once. Ideally, were there more than 4000 sprites to draw at any time, I would simply create another draw call. Instead, I was mistakenly throwing away the first 4000 sprites and starting a brand new collection to draw. This would only occur, of course, where there were many instances of a particular texture to draw... like, for example, a long forum post. Oops!
• Reginald, Stormborg, and Kheben all independently discovered that Dissipate, which should only be able to hurt undead enemies, usefully could target any enemy living, dead, or in-between. I've corrected this error, and burned the sacred herbs to the goddess of death in apology.
• Kheben uncovered a bug in the Yserbius combat engine: spells that were meant to effect entire stacks of monsters instead only hit the topmost monster. I've fixed this (and also posted the MedievaLands combat algorithm on the public github repository, if you're interested in peeking further behind the curtain!).
• Kheben also found that after bumping the level of a skill in the keep, any buffs rendered by that skill would reflect the previous skill level. Behind the scenes, the server was correctly counting things, but the client wasn't reflecting those improved stats. I've fixed this, and also fixed Kheben's discovery that Leadership gave a bonus to Dexterity instead of Defense, as in the original game.
• Kheben also pointed out that Controlled monsters did not seem to be acting appropriately, and offered a welcome perspective on how they should instead telegraph their actions. The issue was that even when only 2 monsters in a stack were controlled, any attack messages by that stack indicated that the entire stack was attacking. Kheben - I've taken your advice; thank you!
• MrPRMiller did some early testing of the hi-res user interfaces, and offered some perspective on the perspective of the point-of-view window. Following Miller's suggestions, I adjusted the size of the point of view so that things don't appear squished. Thanks Miller!
• Behind the scenes, I've tidied up the draw code to fix a memory leak; I've adjusted the drawing code to be more efficient, and I've adjusted the way that screens can fade into and out of each other to make them less janky. There's still some jank. But less so!

That's all for now. What a year it has been. My hope is that this coming year has much more MedievaLands work to report!

Until next time, take care, and keep in touch.

Zane

Rescaling critical hits and bug fixes

By ZaneDubya on Sept 15, 2020

Hail friends! I'd like to share a change to the critical hit mechanics, a name change to the Paralyze debuff, and some other bug fixes that have been added to the game in the past week. Let's get into it!

First off, a big change: the critical hit damage mechanic for physical attacks has been rescaled. In the original game, critical hit damage could do up to 800 percent of your base dexterity damage. I had previously reduced this to 500 percent in the release of Yserbius on MedievaLands, and now I am reducing it further. The issue posed by critical hits is that they are incredibly spikey: even at 500 percent, damage done by players and monsters could easily exceed the total hit points of a stack of monsters or a player.

The new critical hit rescale has reduced critical hits to 150% of the maximum base damage. The goal of this change is to make combat depend more on your use of spells and skills, and less on a chance of landing a critical hit in before your enemies do. I've heard of encouraging comments from players who have already been testing the new critical hit function, and I look forward to hearing from you as well!

Second, based on reports from the community, it seemed like some players have "lost" attribute points and therefore not been able to max out their stats. I conducted some in-depth analytics of all the player characters in the game, and I found that fourteen characters had lost attribute points (and some had gained unusable extra attribute points)! These characters have all been corrected, and except in one case where I had to remove one extra point of initiative, no character has lost any points.

Third, I have renamed the "Paralyze" status effect to "Incapacitate". I did this in response to some justifiable confusion from players: the "Petrify" and "Paralyze" status effects had the same name, same effect, and very similar dictionary meaning in English. The new "incapacitate" status effect has the same game effect as Paralyze, but the new name will help differentiate it from Petrify (which has not been changed).

Those are the big changes! Here are some smaller bug fixes I have also recently included:

• The Guild Status screen now correctly saves your "allow membership requests" setting.
• Equipment no longer disappears after you use up its spell charges (scrolls, prisms, and potions will still disappear after they are exhausted).
• You can now repeat the last spell or skill you cast while exploring the dungeon using the 'R' hotkey (or 'Ctrl-R' depending on your movement/chat mode). Check it out!
• On the network backend, I've reduced the amount of data required to transmit item updates from the server to the client by about 55%!

That's everything from this end. I am actively watching and responding to posts in the in-game forums. Let me know what you're thinking - and if you have any suggestions for new features!

Take care, and keep in touch.

Zane

The New Treasure System and Twinion Release

By ZaneDubya on Aug 26, 2020

Hail friends! This month I have added a brand new Treasure System for Yserbius and Twinion, and I am also preparing to officially launch my remake of Twinion on Monday, August 31. I hope you will join us for the launch!

The Treasure System is a revamp of the items in Yserbius and Twinion. The original games each had a total of 252 items. The new Treasure System adds seven million new items while keeping almost all of the items from the original games. Most of the new items are weapons, pieces of armor, rings, and amulets which have never been seen before in MedievaLands. These items are slightly to somewhat more powerful than the old Yserbius items. And you will still find all the old quest items and the very best drops from the original game exactly where you would expect to find them: the Flex Sword, Barbarian Axe, Infinite Armor, and other favorites mentioned in FAQ from the early '90s can still be found in their old locations.

As you venture deeper into the dungeon, you will find items with new modifiers that will allow you to create a unique play style. For example, if you intend to take on King Cleowyn's palace, where spirits, skeletons, and ghosts linger, you will want to equip items that do more damage specifically to the undead. Wizards will enjoy items that make spells more damaging. Clerics may want to search for items that improve healing power. Rangers and rogues will want items that make monsters less likely to attack them. This is only scratching the surface: there are over twenty 20 new modifier types and a total of 80 new modifiers in all.

I want to recognize Reginald in this update, as he was a force of design behind the new Treasure System. Readers of the MedievaLands forums will recognize Reginald's name from his posts in the RolePlay and Game Mechanics boards. Those posts include the base items that underpin the new Treasure System. Reginald also worked with me to balance power levels of the new item modifiers, and also wrote descriptions for the quest items in Yserbius. I am proud to have worked with him on this upgrade to the original games.

The new Treasure System is automatically enabled for all players. You will see a few new items for sale in the Keep (you will also see a new Bank in the keep, which will expand your character's inventory by 50 percent). But you will find even better loot in the dungeon. As you fight monsters, they will drop more items you have never seen before. you will start to see Magic quality items, and the truly lucky among us will find some of the 64 super-powerful Unique quality items. Players who have helped test the new Treasure have enjoyed the variety. I want to extend my thanks in particular to Bobi and Jeff, who have worked to put the system through its paces in the past weeks.

Aside from the new Treasure System, I have been hard at work finishing up Twinion and polishing the game experience. From July 20 to August 26, I closed 61 issues (each issue is a fixed bug, new feature, or added polish) and changed or added 7,209 lines of code. My tempo was about 190 lines of code and 1.6 issues per day. That is a very respectable pace. Some of the biggest features I have added include:

• A brand new Item Bank, which your characters will find in the Keep. This inventory expansion adds 10 new slots for your favorite drops. you will no longer need to throw away items to clear away space for more potions.
• The item tooltip has been improved and expanded. Tooltips for equipment now show the type and quality. Quest items have descriptions.
• Added a new chat switching icon, that will make it easier to switch between chat modes - you no longer need to memorize switch commands.
• Spells can now critical hit (thanks 8ByteGaming!)
• In Yserbius, I clarified where tiles can damage characters.
• Fixed various issues with patching the game files.
• The website now shows uptime stats and historical player count.
• You can now more quickly switch between menus in the dungeon (thanks Azameth!)
• The dungeon modal setting is now saved (thanks Xyr'bella!)
• New party leaders immediately show up on the mini-map (thanks Jeff!)
• Stats gained from the Great Corridor have been corrected. Nine characters were adjusted, most got an increase! (Thanks Bobi!)

Soon I will sit down and write out how the new Treasure System works, what principles guided me as I designed it, and what I hoped to achieve by adding it to the game. In the meantime, please give it a go and let me know what you think.

I look forward to hearing from you. Take care and keep in touch!

Fixed bugs and added forums to the website!

By ZaneDubya on Jul 19, 2020

Hail friends! A few more changes to report.

You can now view the in-game forums on the website at MedievaLands.com. Posting to the forums is only available when you are logged into the in-game client.

I now show your character's individual achievement score on its portrait, instead of the total score for your account. Your account still has its separate total score, even though this is not visible. I will come up with a way to display this as well.

You can now see monster buffs and debuffs in combat. Thanks for requesting this, Azameth - it's been a long time coming!

Fixed a bug where Twinion achievements would not ever show up. All characters have been retroactively awarded any Twinion achievements they would have previously been granted. Thanks for reporting this bug, Teiken!

Fixed a bug where if the party leader disconnected, the remaining party members would "fly" back to where they entered the map. Thanks for reporting this bug, Bobi!

Finally, I fixed a regression in the Mac patcher which caused the patching program to always download the latest patched client regardless of whether the client was actually out of date.

I am still working on the item revamp. Perhaps I'll have something to report on this front soon. Hope springs eternal.

Take care down there!

July 6 2020 Patch Notes

By ZaneDubya on Jul 6, 2020

Hail Friends! Hope you have all been well. My work on the item system revamp continues behind the scenes. In the meantime, I have pushed a few bug fixes out in the past week, which I'm noting here:

• Achievement points have been reduced by a factor of ten. You will now receive 30 points total for completing everything in Yserbius, and 30 points for completing everything in Twinion.
• Party members who follow their leader into the Pit in the Yserbius Mines no longer take as much damage. Thanks Bobi!
• Teachers in the Thieves' Den will now correctly teach you the skills they have to offer. Thanks Bobi!
• You can no longer lock your client (literally, with the lock icon!) when closing a loot window while carrying an item in your mouse cursor. Thanks DragonEye!
• Traded items now show the correct number of charges. Thanks DragonEye!
• The entrance to the Fun House used to bring down the entire server! I haven't seen one of these bugs since April 2019. This was fixed. Thanks Teiken!
• Occasionally, sound effects in battle would crash the client. This was a race condition between my code and the audio library I use. I've fixed this and submitted an upstream patch to the audio library.

Patch notes for June 22, 2020

By ZaneDubya on Jun 22, 2020

Hail Friends! Hope you have all been well. After a month of rest I am back working on MedievaLands.

Today's patch is small, in that it does not add any new features.

But it is also large, in that it involves thousands of changed lines of code and a huge update to the framework used by the game to show graphics, play sounds, and run on your computer.

This is necessary preparation to keep the game compatible with future versions of Windows and macOS.

If the game crashes on you, please let me know by e-mail to hello(at)medievalands.com.

I hope I will have more new features to share with you soon. Until then, take care!

Patch notes for April 8, 2020

By ZaneDubya on Apr 8, 2020

Hail Friends! Here is a list of what I've been working on in the past week: bugs fixed, other changes to the game engine, and a small change to allow the new elemental items to be sold in the keep. Much of my work this week was in preparation for new features which I'll hopefully be adding to the game soon: new items, achievements in Twinion, and a new higher definition dungeon exploration screen.

Changes in game functionality:

• Elemental items are now sellable in the keep.
• Twinion mana restores and amphoras now increase your mana by the correct (larger) amount.

Changes to the game engine:

• I rewrote the dungeon POV renderer. The new renderer should look exactly like the old renderer, but will allow me to create high definition dungeon exploration screen. I've always felt that the original game's text box and inventory windows were too cluttered, and I admit that my version, with item tool tips and occasionally chattier status messages, exacerbates these issues. Soon I'll be able to let these things spread out and get comfortable!
• I rewrote the server's item initialization methods. In the old version, each item had its own copy of every relevant attribute (strength modifiers, etc). In the new version, these variables are inherent to the item's type. I made this change to make it easier to add new items - hopefully you'll be seeing more of these in the next week or so.
• I took the first step towards adding deeds in Twinion (specifically, the server now shares the list of Twinion dungeon flags with the client).
• I rewrote the game's texture class to allow for texture atlases, which are groups of textures that share a single image. This will reduce memory use and speed up rendering.

Bug fixes:

• Changed the way that possessive verbs are conjugated in combat.
• Fixed a bug where the client's chat box would stop sending messages.
• Fixed a bug where clicking the 'logout' button in the dungeon would disconnect without first sending the server your most up to date automap data.
• Fixed a bug where a player could set their epithet to garbled text.
• Fixed a client crash that happened if a solo player died while fighting a large group of monsters.
• Fixed a bug where a rendered text list (e.g. the dungeon chat window) could throw an exception when it was updated while drawing.
• Fixed a bug where a trade would cause the traded item to disappear into the ether.
• Fixed a bug where a loot item could not be added to a player's inventory and failed silently.
• Fixed a bug where party members would be poisoned up to four times on each step in the dungeon.