Official Update Thread

[Cryptite]

Still nailing down crashes and lagspikes, but getting it under control finally! Loka should be behaving quite a bit better these days.

• Foes Slain should super-work now.
• You can now Anvil/Lore Scroll Decorative Heads.
  
• Since a lot of towns have so many chests, item frames, signs, etc; we have adjusted some of the tickrates of these things as they are the collective cause of TPS drops. Mostly you won't notice anything, except that if an item frame should break because the block behind it was broken, it may take up to 15s for it to "pop off", which, mostly should just be hilarious. Pop if off by hand if you don't wish to experience this oddity.
  
• When a town dies, the protection area around a TGen will stay constricted (rather than the full-size protection around wild tgens) for the duration of the cooldown before you can attack that territory (48 hours). This way you can steal from all the chests and whatever else is within that zone.
• Further, inhibitors will not automatically respawn when a town dies (and thus revert the area around it, looking all messed up). Magpie and I will travel to dead towns after their cooldown and manually re-place inhibitors so it doesn't look so poopy.

 

[Cryptite]

Lots of little micro-fixes that should help overall performance. You won't probably notice anything, unless it broke stuff. That said, some fixes/changes/updates as always!

• Religion leaders can now kick members out with /rl kick
• Death Messages are now properly colored. You will see names in death messages colored to your alignment with that player. There may still be a few bugs here though.
• Conquest Death Messages now work. You'll see people dying to lasers, tnt, lava floor, soulsand, etc.
• You can now use line1 to line15 when using /lore now. line10 will no longer ask you to start with line1.
• Blood over obsidian in the Core Room will no longer prevent that block from turning to magma during the lava floor attack.
• Fixed a bug where you could try to make a new town adjacent to two towns (but that weren't themselves adjacent).
• Fixed Buff Territories not showing a skull when under attack.
• If a fight is terminated by an admin, it will no longer be subject to the usual post-fight cooldown timer. You can setup another inhib on it immediately.
• NPCs may act weird for a bit, but they should no longer be missing frequently. What you'll notice immediately is that they only turn their heads to look at you every half-second. This may look hilarious but the underlying task that the Citizens plugin runs to do this and other things is not very performant. We lowered the rate that Citizens "tick at" in order to save server cycles; but in turn, now they're gonna look at you funny...

 

[Cryptite]

• You can leave towns now I guess, whatever.
• Yuletide Armistice is in effect from Dec 24th - 26th. No Conquest fights (or even town creation fights) will be allowed during this time.
• Fixed a variety of issues with town job NPCs. You should be able to turn in loc-jobs, etc to your town's NPC once again.
• Probably? fixed some more death message issues.

 

[Cryptite]

Many fixes!

• FIXED: The Fishing Tournament :3
• FIXED: /c train bugs (hopefully)
• FIXED: Death Messages (hopefully, round 4)
• FIXED: Town Jobs (specifically, the gathering type) weren't saving out, and thus town owners couldn't retrieve completed jobs from escrow.
• And other stuff

 

[Cryptite]

The Decay of Religions

• The Religion "Leader" is now the "Founder" and this will never change.
• Religions now have Leaders and these are defined by the followers with the top 3 Faith in the religion.
• Leaders are who can kick, edit description, etc.
• Leaders cannot be handed out, transferred, etc. Only the faithful can "control a religion".
• Religions can no longer be deleted. They shall fade away into the mist of their own accord.
  
• When creating a new Religion, all starting members are granted 20 faith by default.
• Religions can now Decay and auto-delete with the following rules:
  • In order for a Religion to stay "active", one member must /pray every 24 hours.
  • For every 24 hours a Religion has not been prayed for, the Religion will lose 1+ faith up to a maximum of 10.
  • In other words, if your Religion has not had any prayers in 5 days, it will lose 5 faith every day. If it's been 20 days, only 10 faith will be lost daily.
  • If your Religion hits 0 faith, it will automatically delete.

Other Thingies:

• /me will now send to Chat Zones (Library, for example, or your own town's chat zones) rather than always being global.
• Player Color (alignment) on death messages should now properly adjust inside battle zones. In a fight, you should see all friendly/enemy names in death messages as red/blue rather than your original town-alignment's color.
• Yet more death message fixes.
• Battle Zones now show the score of players in tab (your kills).
  
• And other silliness.

 

[Cryptite]

• FIXED: A bug in which vulnerability windows that centered roughly around midnight wouldn't work past midnight, leaving the town's vuln window shorter than it should've been (covenant...).
• FIXED: Being able to drop soulbound items when viewing any chests; this could seemingly, at times, delete your soulbound item entirely.
• FIXED: Stat Tracked Fishing Rods now remember your biggest fish caught, really!
  
• Teams of "nearly" the same color in Conquest battles (blue vs aqua, green vs dark green, purple vs light purple) will now revert to Red vs Blue if they fight each other.
• Caught Fish now append who the fish was caught by as well as its location.
  
• Maybe Discord Town/Alliance chats work more?
• You can no longer spam Summer Firework explosion... sorry guys

 

[Cryptite]

January Conquest Changes - All two of em!

• When in an Alliance, only the Alliance Leader's adjacent territories grant a 6 minute defense timer in Conquest battles.
  
• When you have the Fire Resistance potion effect, you will no longer burn. The only change here is that when you set on fire via damage, we stop the burning. Normally, you just run around on fire without taking damage, which is frankly stupid. So now you won't stay on fire if you have FR. Rejoice!

The only other major thing:

• /g discord and /g a discord have been removed. ALL Towns and Alliances automatically have Discord channels. This was a bit dumb, confusing, and so everybody just gets 'em now.

 

[Cryptite]

Various bugfixes this morning:

• Yuletide Spawn has packed up! Back to normal life on the ocean island of Aladra.
• FIXED: A rather BIG (but mostly convenient) bug in which a majority of town perks were applying to towns starting at level 1. This includes:
  • Faster Regen, No Hunger, Lesser Mob Damage, Haste 1, Roads, and No Fall
  • You will now gain these at the appropriate levels.
• FIXED: A variety of Regen issues that popped up after doing some of the performance/optimization fixes we did in mid-december.
• Updated the Battle Zone Occasional Message to include a bit about Leather Armor.

 

[Cryptite]

Various bugfixes over the past few days:

• Beginning to rework/rewrite how we sync data around the various servers. The best example of this is that:
• In Proving Grounds, players now show colored Leather Armor akin to battle zones that represent their town's color.
• FIXED: Beacons warping people to the wrong fight if two different destinations were chosen by various players on the same beacon.
• If the server has to be restarted during an active fight, when the server comes back online, any active fight's start will be delayed by 3-4 minutes so that everybody has time to log back in, register to warp, etc. Currently the fight is just "already going" and people have to rush back in.
  
• RE-FIXED: towns being creatable adjacent to docks.
• Inhibs no longer auto-respawn after a town dies and potentially create a huge reverted mess in the middle of a town's ruins. Mag/I will do this after some time (the 3 day town cooldown, and once the town has been properly pillaged) and respawn the inhibs less destructively.
• Adjusted golem spawns a bit, hopefully they'll spawn in the right places and not "underneath" things if there're caves under them, etc.
• Continuing to fix rogue/glitched Inhibs.
• When a new player joins your town, we now message the whole town, rather than just the town owners.

 

[Cryptite]

• Bunches of backend Discord rewrites/optimizations. Hopefully, though not guaranteed, the source of many random Discord <-> Loka disconnects will have been remedied.
• NEW! - Towns and Alliances now have their own Voice Channel on Discord that shares the same permissions as their text channel counterparts. Apparently you can only have 50 channels in a category, however, so some towns/alliances may not have theirs yet. We'll likely do another pass on this, with organization of towns/alliances into categories, but that'll come a bit later.
• The Tab List in Loka now shows total players online on the Loka Network, rather than just Loka itself. It will also sometimes show number of people in the PvP server.
• Likewise, the PvP server will now start to show its own Tab List stuff, rather than just being an unchanging snapshot of Loka's tab list (which is what the hub also does).
• And a bunch of other fixes/etc.

 

[Cryptite]

• NEW: To Infinity and Beyond! - Level 24 town perk is now available and grants infinite use of rockets while in town.
• FIXED: When eating a Chorus Fruit, both from and to destinations are checked and if you don't have perms to teleport in either, it will be cancelled.
  
• FIXED: /suicide was doing a double 25% hit on your equipped gear.
• FIXED: Some vota/PvP server issues and bugs.
• And various other bugs fixed and added

 

[Cryptite]

• Being "above 255Y" no longer considers you to be out of that region. Now, most zones are from bedrock to "infinity". This in turn fixes losing rockets above 255 if you have the town perk, among other things.
• Being a Subscriber now grants you Infinite Rocket use in Spawn!
• Many fixes/updates to Religions:
  • Fixed editing member titles requiring you to be the leader. Now you just need to be a leader (top 3 faith).
    
  • You can no longer edit your Religion's Description or Deity without coming to me or Mag.
    
  • You can no longer kick people from you Religion. You can, however, now /rl mute them so that they are unable to speak in /ch rl. This is, again, only available to Leaders.
  • And hopefully fixed many of the issues of not "really" being out of a religion when you leave it, etc.

 

[Cryptite]

• You can now toggle on/off Foes Slain on your Stat Tracked weapons if you don't want to see it anymore. It's the first stat in the list when toggling stats.
  • Due to current tech limitations, doing this will not continue to track foes slain. So if you turn it back on, it will start back at 1.
• FIXED: Fishing from your Off-Hand wasn't tracking any Fishing Rod stats.
• When using /m, /r now replies to that person. /r will still update to the last person that messaged you, but if you /m somebody and nobody else talks to you, /r will also message that same person. This may take some getting used to?
• When in a Battle Zone, players not in the fight are now displayed as Gray in the Tab-List instead of Yellow.

 

[Jammin_Mas]

I appears this last update has broken the kills on each sword. I lost 93 kills on mine and others have reported losing their kills aswell

 

[Cryptite]

Variety of fixes this morning:

• Market Item Updates:
  • Chests that sell over 9 items now automatically become "Shapeless" (used to be manually set)
  • The items a chest can sell (the tooltip) are now listed in alphabetical order.
  • Saplings and Dead Shrubs can now be sold in Greenery
    
  • Arrows can now be sold in Weapons
  • Rabbit Feet have been moved to Brewing Materials
  • Lapis Blocks can now be sold in Ore Blocks
  • Rotten Flesh can now be sold in General Materials
  • Concrete, Concrete Powder, and all stained clay and terracotta blocks can now be sold in Colored Blocks.
• Alliance Actions:
  • Since you people don't seem to enjoy living on the edge...
  • /g a leave, /g vulnerable, and /g a vulnerable now all have confirmation messages.
  • /g a dues now actually waits until you confirm the change to set the new dues, rather than setting them twice, basically.

 

[Cryptite]

We have employed an updated, automatic Combat Logging System

• We will shortly amend the /rules page in order to clarify that Admins will no longer judge Combat Logging, and that all combat logging is now handled by the system. In short, you either find/get to that player after they log or you don't. If you fail to find/kill them, regardless of situation, then too bad.
  
• It's important to always try to remove things where admins have to judge things which can be seen as very subjective. This is one of those things. The mechanics of the new system are below:
  
• Please visit the new Wiki Article on the topic: http://loka.wikia.com/wiki/Combat_Logging
• This is likely subject to small changes in the future as we feel this out, but these aggressive new timers are meant to combat (lol) combat logging and reduce fight evasion/some town-raiding cheese.

 

[Cryptite]

It's Anniversary Weekend on Loka!
Celebrating SEVEN years of The Artifact

Exciting things await this upcoming weekend. For starters, there are some new jobs available south of the Library where the Aladrans are beginning construction on a New Museum that will serve as an official place to chronicle relics of the ages and perhaps something a little more time-lost.

With this update comes a few new things, fixes, etc. You know the drill!

• Jobs by default are considered "Daily", aka you can only do them every 24hr. The change here is that "Daily Jobs" now reset globally for all players after the nightly restart, rather than only being available 24 hours after you last completed it.
• As a result, instead of showing [24h] when editing them, they now say [Daily]. This should just make a lot more sense.
• There are now "Job Sets". These are only usable for Official Jobs atm (admin-made), but in essence, they consist of a set of jobs that could be available from an NPC. Daily, the Job you could get from an NPC is random, so check back with the Builders of the Museum, because they'll be different

Editing Beacons

• You can now officially edit your town's Conquest Beacon. You cannot get block drops when breaking the types of blocks a Beacon is made of. Note this carefully. If you place an Iron Block in your beacon area, you won't get it back as a drop. This'll be better in the future, but for now, you're no longer prevented from breaking those blocks.
• The vital blocks that a beacon needs to work are unbreakable: The Button, Wool Block behind the button, and the Redstone Lamps (glass above and Redstone Blocks below)
• You can't piston them anymore.

Other Thingies

• No longer showing player join/leave messages in alliance discord channels.
• Fixes to Religions, people seeing the wrong channels on Discord, and a few other things.
• We got a date wrong. The Date at which 2nd Generation Players begin is now Dec 3rd, 2011, rather than in September, idk.

Go Forth!
-Crypt

 

[Cryptite]

The beginning of Conquest 3.0 - Phase 1 is here!

• All Territory Control has been reset!
• All towns and alliances have their default starting strength of 100.
• The Territory cap of 30 for Towns and Alliances is now in.
• Home Town Nodes do not count toward your territory control.
• All Territory Modules have been reset/deleted.
• You can no longer install Modules on your Home Town TGen.
• Claiming neutral territories no longer awards you any strength.
• The only way to earn strength on your continent is to attack other towns' Territories.
• There are no more half-strength fights. Whether you attack to claim a territory from another town, or whether you attack "remotely", the strength earned is the same.
• The new cost for Territories is a more simple equation, but the numbers are the following:

  • 1: 52
    2: 58
    3: 68
    4: 82
    5: 100
    6: 122
    7: 148
    8: 178
    9: 212
    10: 250
    11: 292
    12: 338
    13: 388
    14: 442
    15: 500
    16: 562
    17: 628
    18: 698
    19: 772
    20: 850
    21: 932
    22: 1018
    23: 1108
    24: 1202
    25: 1300
    26: 1402
    27: 1508
    28: 1618
    29: 1732
    30: 1850

• TGen Modules have basically overall gotten a little cheaper, but I'll let the fabulous Magpieman break that down in the future.

Meanwhile, as everybody's aware, we're doing lots of tweaks, optimization, and tracking to see what we can do about server performance. Overall, it's better, but all hope is lost at 100+ players in fights. We do have some new server hardware in and we hope to begin migrate Loka over to it within the next couple of days, in time for the beginning of the Land Grab rush Wednesday night.

In the meantime, you all know what to do! Go Forth!

 

[Cryptite]

Big Elytra Flight Changes

• Per upcoming Conquest 3.0 changes, the following new Elytra Flight Restrictions are now in:
  • You can no longer toggle your Elytra Flight when in Combat.
  • You can no longer fly in FOREIGN territory. Foreign Territory is classed as any territory not in your Town or Alliance's control.
  • You can still no longer fly in any OTHER town but your own. Including Allies.
  • However, you MAY fly in a town's territory if that town has aligned your town as FRIENDLY. Think of it as granted airspace access to your friends, even if they're not in your Alliance. This is NOT a two-way check. If, for whatever reason, you have that town flagged as an enemy/neutral, so long as THEY have your town flagged as friendly, you can fly in their territory.
• Due to these changes, a few more things are new/different:
  • "Zone Checking", aka the rate at which we check whether you're in a town/zone/territory, etc is far more sensitive and will pick up the zone change much quicker. This also means it's not as easy to make it "1 second into" a town area before you get dropped out of the sky.
  • You'll note that it is now no longer possible to use height to your advantage to "fall forward" into a town so as to have a better chance at making it past their walls. When your Elytra flight is forcibly terminated, you will be given 10s of heavy slow, and locked from lateral movement (aka you're going to fall straight down).
    
  • Due to this new "Column-locking freeze mechanic", as well as the amount of places you can no longer fly, you will no longer take fall damage if you get dropped out of the sky for flying somewhere you shouldn't be able to.

Performance

• Lastly, even though last night's big fight performed overall way better than it has in the past, we were able to lock down a (hopefully) big cause of remaining TPS loss in the form of some of asy's (original owner) more ancient code in our plugin. In fancy terms, the very expensive, and high-frequency PlayerMoveEvent was being used to check whether you were entering a Portal or not. This compounds extraordinarily with both player count AND the number of Portals that could be entered at any time. A big reason why last night's fight wasn't as expensive was actually two-fold:
  1. Every TGen has a portal. Most are off by default, but if you have the Home Networking World Policy, every TGen you control is an additional Portal check we had to see if every player on that world was in. Silverhand, however controls far fewer territories right this moment, and so not many extra TGens had portals to be checked, so it was far less work.
     
  2. With Home Networking, every territory that Silverhand controlled (PLUS all the towns on the continent) would be checked for portal-entry. So we were basically checking if 100 players were going through any of 90+ Portals up to 30-40 times per second per player. You do the math... I don't wanna.
• So TL;DR, we heavily optimized the Portals to just check every .25s, only if the chunk is loaded, which should be like .5% of the checking it used to do. This should mean a lot less of a hit on high-player fights. The only thing you'll probably notice is that entering a portal doesn't result in an instant teleport, but at most it'll be 1/4th of a second later.
  • It should be noted that this is not some failing on asy's part. His portal code was written 6 years ago when there was one portal on the entire server and Loka never even had more than about 20 players peak. Much like Minecraft as an entire game, it's hard to plan 5+ years into the future when developing a game.
• We've also noticed that some towns' chunks aren't being unloaded properly, and another source of performance loss is heavy entity count in the form of things like Armor Stands, Item Frames, Hoppers etc. Silverhand's beautiful main spire is an example of one of these places that remains loaded even when nobody's on. Resolving this should also help with TPS drops in the future.
• So, we're on it!

Go Forth, beautiful Lokans!

 

[Cryptite]

Performance continues to be a huge focus right now. We've really nailed down a lot of the bigger lagspikes. Now we're moving on to lagspikes as little as 100ms or less. These aren't game-breaking, but every little hitch in combat is felt and is unacceptable. There aren't many other notable changes of late, but loads of lagspikes have been identified and fixed:

• Many lagspikes were simply Discord communications, which have been fixed up, but which also broke Discord stuff for awhile, which is still in progress, but should mostly be working for now.
• Fixed many lagspikes caused by various uses of the Market.
• Fixed many lagspikes caused by various scheduled events (job expiration, market expiration, alt detection, etc)
• And lots of other minor ones caused by various poorly-written code, etc.

Otherwise, small things:

• Grandfathered Lore Scrolls should now properly display to those who have any left (weren't being checked properly, but have been fixed).
• Various bugs fixed involving starting new towns
• Starting to remove plugins we simply barely use anymore, because we do just about everything ourselves these days (This is a good thing). This means any lag is ours to fix (this is also good).