Live Patch Notes - Tuesday, March 7, 2006
The following fixes, features and optimizations have been made to the client on the live shards on March 7th, 2006:
Fixes:[*]Removed Maximum Placeholder Characters from options window because it doesn't do anything.[*]Changed fog calculation to increase number of object displayed as well as clarity of objects displayed - without impacting performance.[*]Quests that are expanded in the Quest window will remain expanded as they progress.[*]Character generation should no longer lock up when create character is clicked.[*]Crash prevention for closing a window that has a tutorial arrow pointing at it.[*]Allowed for multiple tutorials to be opened at the same time.[*]Fixed an error in the bounds calculation of each Terrain Chunk. Chunks should now occlude more often and improve performance.[*]Fixed default chat windows to correctly subscribe to the correct chat channels. The window on the left is all system and communication feedback. The window on the right is strictly for combat spam.[*]Fix to prevent characters from showing up invisible.[*]Monsters will now occlude.[*]Attacks that do not inflict damage (such as Burn Armor) and target effects that have a percentage chance (such as Primal Vengeance) will properly show up in verbose (non-simple) combat feedback.[*]Characters switch to low resolution models at > 30m and high resolution models at < 20m.[*]Changed min fps for loading visible items to be 5fps.[*]Improved login time for systems with low frame rate.[*]The calculation for plot dimensions on the Plot Survey window will properly take rotation into account.[*]Resources added to the cleanup list that are still referenced will not cause perpetual memory accumulation.[*]The player character will no longer be added to the visibility manager which will prevent unwanted occlusion and or flickering.[*]Occlusion model geometry is created from the highest resolution model.[*]Logout will occur immediately - will resolve a problem for some users logging out and not be able to log back in right away.[*]Removed FM technology from visibility manager.[*]Corrected Locate Additional Battle Orders quest to have a chance to drop all of the intended hides.[*]Corrected a calculation error when a pawnbroker reduces his stocks. They will accept proper amounts for appropriate prices after doing so.[/list]
Features:[*]Added ability to adjust min fog distance and made slider values complimentary.[*]Added a notepad - map a hotkey to open this window for now.[*]Added ability to constrain character model LOD to options window.[/list]
Optimizations:[*]Optimized process of dealing with entities that are set to be invisibile.[*]Removed frame rate smoothing pref.[*]Texture memory updated every 10 seconds instead of 5.[*]Resources are cleaned up gradually, instead of all at once.[*]Resources to be cleaned up are checked every 2 seconds, instead of every frame.[*]Smoothed out resource loading.[*]Cleaned up some distance checks used for determining if a characters bounds are out of date.[*]LOD system now chooses beween the best quality model for close up and the lowest quality for distance, rather than really high for close up, and high for distant.[*]Added optimization to display of characters - should see an increase in frame rate when there are lots of monsters around, or lots ofcharacters / NPC with empty hands.[*]Vastly improved the method to determine what objects to render in a scene. Players should see better frame rate and less hitching when entering towns or areas with large numbers of objects.[*]Memory used to store models reduced. As assets are re-exported, client footprint will shrink and memory usage will be reduced.[/list][/list]
Originally Posted by Amon Gwareth
