Version 0.16.28.37 – Beta
2010-06-07

Patch Size: ~250 MB

------ ADDITIONS & CHANGES ------


General:
- Your total equipment weight will now affect the amount of stamina that gets drained, your movement speed and your jump height. With this change we hope to see a larger variation in what armor types are worn by players. In short, there is now a reason to wear lighter armor.
- A resurrection timer has been added. Players must now wait at least ten (10) seconds after dieing to resurrect.
- Most of the stamina-drains have been reduced.


AI & Mounts:
- Stats optimized for every creature in Myrland.
- A blue priest has been added in Fabernum City.


Art & Sound:
- Clouds will now move across Myrland.
- A new Risar dungeon has been added. Don't venture in alone!

Guilds & Housing:
- Housing is now re-enabled (Including Bridges and Palisades). Also the amount of materials needed for construction and costs for plans etc have been heavily reduced to help speed up the testing process.
- Guilds are now re-enabled (Please note that the Guild War system is not active). Cost of Guild Stone Deeds reduced to make it easier to form Guilds.


Skills & Attributes:
- Locking and Decreasing of skills and attributes is now re-enabled.
- Alchemical Minerology has been moved up one level and is now a child of Petrology.
- The amount of jumping height gained from the Jumping skill has been reduced.
- The lowest height you can jump out of combat mode has been increased.
- Catalysts used in Extraction will now get consumed.




------ BUG FIXES ------


General:
- Fixed a bug that allowed dual-wielding two-handed weapons.
- Fixed a bug that allowed Red flagged players to resurrect at Blue priests.
- You will no longer be able to use/swing weapons while in "mouse-mode" (and players playing in windowed mode came together to celebrate this joyous occasion and all was well!).
- Added some missing client-messages.
- Guard zones removed outside city borders.


Art & Sound:
- The rain should no longer stop falling when you mount.
- Bow Graphics have been fixed.
- All NPCs should now correctly play animations.
- All animals should now have the correct textures.
- Weather has been removed from caves and dungeons.
- Music removed from all spider caves and mines.
- Fixed some collision errors in Morin Khur that caused players to fall through the ground and get stuck.
- Fixed collision errors in Houses that caused players to fall through the floor and get stuck.
- Fixed the graphical issues in Toxai that caused the water foliage to float in the air.
- The broken torch effects have been fixed.


AI & Mounts:
- Creatures should now react faster in combat. The rotation issues have been polished (though not perfected) and the attacks are more accurate.
- Mounts will no longer clone themselves.
- You should no longer be stuck on your mount after crossing a node line.
- Stabled creatures won't re-spawn by your side after a server crash.


Magic:
- Fixed a bug that caused Magic damage/healing messages to not get displayed in the chat window.
- Fixed a bug that caused creatures that were killed by Magic to not drop loot.


Skills & Attributes:
- Refining will no longer create a stack of one material when the actual result gained was zero materials.
- The attribute cap listed in character creation no longer differs from the actual in-game cap.
- You should no longer deal more damage when you do not have a melee skill when using a weapon assigned to that skill.
- You should no longer gain skill experience from beating on defenseless NPCs.
- Fixed certain exploitable issues with Extraction.


UI:
- The backgrounds in Character Creation are now corrected (Recruits are Recruits and so on).
- Stacks in your inventory window will now update correctly when diminishing (For example: Consuming a potion).
- When splitting stacks in the inventory window the stacks should no longer auto stack themselves.
- Weapons now have their correct icons (This fix won't show for weapons created prior to this patch).
- All UI windows should now correctly close when you move away from things you interact with.
- Icons can now be removed from the actionbar by right-clicking them.


------ KNOWN ISSUES ------
Issues not listed here can be found in previous patch notes and on the Bug Tracker under the 'confirmed' status.


- If you delete a character without leaving a guild and then recreate the character with the exact same name, that character will be in “guild limbo”. It can't get invited to a guild again and it can't get kicked from the former characters guild.
- Issuing an 'attack' command to your pet followed by a 'follow me' command will not make the pet follow you. Between 'attack' and 'follow' issue a 'stay' command and it should then work.




------ DISABLED SYSTEMS ------
- Thievery




Patch notes are not final and are subject to change.

Click Image to watch Trailer

 

Release

We are very happy to announce that Mortal Online will launch in March 2010. As most of you know, we implemented the features planned for release and even managed to get in a few more that were initially planned for post-release. We are currently focussing solely on bugfixing and polish.


The main focus lies of course on the desync problems which both the SV programmers and the coders from EPIC are working hard on to fix. The largest part of problems in the game right now is directly related to the desync between client and server.
We are confident that with the next patch on Monday most, if not all of those problems will be solved.
It has been a rough ride for both the followers of the game as well as everybody here at Star Vault. MMOGs are never finished and we will, of course, not slow down with the constant improvement and development of the game after release. Mortal Online will release with the core features that we promised but will of course grow and mature with every patch.
There are still a lot of brilliant features round the corner and Nave has just started to grow.
This is a very important time for both Mortal Online and you, the supporters, followers and players of the game. We will continue to make the game that all of you and we ourselves want to see.

New Game Trailer

Together with this newsletter a new game trailer for Mortal Online has been made available for the public.
We think it captures the game's soul and spirit and also gives interested people a valid impression of the game.

In other words: It's truly awsome! Check it out!

Version 0.14.21.27 – Beta
2010-03-08

------ FEATURES ------
- Libraries added in Meduli, Kranesh, Fabernum and Morin Khur. Librarians sell all the skill books that are available in Nave. The “old” Book Vendors are still available in the above named cities because the library system is still a work in progress.

- The Húergar of the Oghmir clade (race family) is now available for play.

- Stables have now been introduced to Nave. Either stable your pet at the stables outside various cities or build a stable at your house and stable you pet there. When you stable a pet, you will get a receipt that you later use to retrieve your pet again. The receipt can also be traded/sold to other players.
- One Equerry (Stable Master) added in every city. They are usually found on the outskirts of the cities.

Please not the following: You can only retrieve the pet from the same stable you stabled it in. At a player house stable, only the house owner can stable pets, but anyone with a valid receipt can retrieve a pet. If the house is a guild house, any guild member can stable or retrieve pets from the stable. The person retrieving the pet from the stable MUST have the Taming skill. If the players skill is to low to handle that type of pet, the pet will be lost when attempting to retrieve it. Also, the charge for stabling a pet is ten (10) silver (Both at normal and player house stables. The charge on player house stables will be removed further on).


------ ADDITIONS & CHANGES ------

General:
- Optimized melee-combat code on the server.
- Optimized code for client-objects on the server.
- Optimized non-client objects on the server.
- Optimized how the server keeps track of and handles skills.
- Optimized the in-game chat.
- You will no longer appear on another players screen until you have finished loading into the game.
- Added support for a much greater amount of textures on small mobs.
- Guild-wars are being rebuilt and is disabled for the moment.
- Holding tab will now show a tool-tip just above the crosshair with name and flag color of the target.
- You now need to release tab while holding the crosshair over a target to add it to your target list.
- Removed the one second timer before the tab crosshair appears.

Art & Sound:
- More propping done in the south west region.
- More creature spawners added outside starter towns.
- All mobs have got extended impact sounds.
- Priests added in the south west area of Myrland.
- Lowered the volume on the new magic sounds.
- Altered lightning magic spell sound.
- Generic Night ambiance added.
- Day/night ambiances synced with day/night cycle (Known issue until next unreal engine update: Day/night ambiance sounds will now play in Gaul'kor and won't have a smooth transition when moving in and out of caves).
- Known issue until next patch: Forest/jungle ambiances at night will be turned off, only the generic night ambiance will be played in all areas).
- Moved Bakti storage outside for easier interaction.
- Removed collision in Bakti for small fireplaces and emberplaces to reduce player stuck tickets for GMs.
- Added some props in Bakti.
- Morin Khur has been completely revamped and optimized.
- Four new emotes added; Rock, Paper, Scissors and Wink.
- One new NPC idle animation added.
- The sun now moves behind the moon, but it is still bright during that period.
- The day/night cycle is now longer. (We won't say how long it is now!)
- Moon movement and moonlight have been added.
- Different day/night ratio depending on what part of the year it is.
- Added lighting at points of interest during the night.
- You can enable the light from other players torches. To enable this do the following:
Open the NowOptions.ini in Notepad, located at:
"StarVault\MortalOnline\mortalonline\UnrealEngine3\NowGame\Config\NowOptions.ini"
Change the following line from False to True: bOtherTorchesLight=True
This option is disabled by default because due to the expense of performance on slower systems.

Combat:
- Took down the sprinting speed a bit for both non-combat and combat-sprints.
- If you have less then 5 stamina you will no longer be able jog until your current stamina is above 20.
- Starting a sprint will now drain a small amount of stamina.

Housing:
- You can now only have one house per account.

Magic:
- Magic Resistance has been added. Depending on how high your Psyche is, the greater chance there is for you to reduce the amount of damage that a spell causes. The amount of damage you can resist is also based on which type of spell that gets cast. The higher Circle (level) the spell is, the less amount of damage you can resist.

Skills & Attributes:
- Raised the amount of XP you get from using skills.
- You no longer gain HP passively without having the Passive Regeneration skill (the amount was really small 1/60s HP).
- You now always gain at least 1 xp/min by reading a book.

UI:
- The library UI has been added.


------ BUG FIXES ------

General:
- Everyone now has the same virtual in game time.
- Fixed an item-exploit.

AI & Mounts:
- Pet companions should now be able to follow you all across Myrland without abandoning you. (They can now cross node borders.)
- Creatures should no longer attack players that are not fully logged in.
- Chickens, rabbits and other critters should now be less prone to attack players.

Art & Sound:
- The day/night cycle will no longer get stuck at perma-night or perma-day.
- Palisade gates are now facing the correct way.
- Fixed lots of graphical issues through out Myrland.
- Fixed issue with the Fabernum Storage that could be interacted with through a wall.
- You will no longer get randomly teleported out of Bakti.
- The devious vanishing scaffolding in the jungle has been removed and replaced with something more solid.
- The missing priest east of Moh-Ki has found his way back to his shrine.

Housing:
- Palisades now have proper collision.

Skills & Attributes:
- Possible, yes possible, fix for the “disappearing skills when reading a book bug”. Please report on the Bug Tracker if it still remains.
- Fixed bug in the offline calculation of books, you should now be awarded with the correct amount of skill when reading while offline.
- Fixed a bug that made it possible to re-log several times to get skill by reading books.
- Fixed the durability issue with crafted bows.
- Pyrite Lore should no longer be invisible in the skills list even though you know the skill.


------ Known Issues ------
Find them Here!

Version 0.13.20.24 – BetaVersion 0.13.20.24 – Beta
2010-02-24

------ FEATURES ------

- When the sun sets and the day comes to an end, don't forget your torches. Night time in Nave is a dangerous place...
(The day/night cycle is for now set at: 3h 12min IRL time)
- The south-west region of Myrland is now accessible.

------ ADDITIONS & CHANGES ------

General:
- Optimized the login/logout system.
- Optimized the petition-system.
- Bandages have had their effect significantly reduced. The effect will now also be decreased if the user takes large portions of damage when applying the bandage as intended.
- Major Health Potions has been removed from the utility vendor.
- Stamina costs for all melee-weapon swings have been reduced.
- Stamina cost for blocking reduced.
- You now lose stamina when you get hit based on the amount of damage you receive.
- Reduced the amount of stamina lost when drowning, it should now be easier to swim back up.
- Stuck command is removed. Petition a GM if you find yourself stuck.
- The 'simple axe' has been renamed to 'Pickaxe' and has had its melee weapon damage reduced.
- You now start with a Worn Shortsword to defend yourself with.
- You can no longer steal starting equipment.
- When a player with the Hidden Criminal flag dies, the loot bag will now be Gray instead of Blue.
- Finally added Durability for armors.
- Due to the implementation of Armor Durability, all armor that was created in the previous patch will break on the first hit. This is done to filter the old armors out of the game. (Instead of wiping all characters )
- Starter rags defense rating has been improved.

AI & Mounts:
- The Risar (also known as "Orcs") have arrived in Myrland.
- The forest surrounding Fabernum does now contain different, more fitting creatures to it's environment.
- Pathfinding has been introduced to creatures in following areas:
* Fabernum Forest
* Fabernum City
* Risar camps
* Sator camp in jungle
* Tweaked the horses ability to sense danger.
This is only a test to our pathfinding system, but will be expanded continuously further on.
Note that tamed creatures does not at this moment make use of any pathfinding.

Art & Sound:
- The world lighting has been tweaked as part of the day/night-cycle to produce more realistic colors and ambiances.
- A few Risar camps added in the north east part of Myrland.
- Additional propping in several places around Myrland.
- Added sounds for the new spells.
- Additional idle animations for NPCs added.
- Bakti got some new ambiances.
- Added various points of interest at some empty locations in the world.
- Several new NPCs have been added.

Combat:
- Hitting a person who is globally allowed will now reset their globally allowed timer.
- You can now cut off the arms of your opponent when you land the killing blow.
- Calculations for shields and durability changed.
- Calculations for how much damage a shield will absorb now re-made.
- Calculations for how much damage armors can absorb now re-made.
- Rebuilt calculations for ranged-damage vs shields and armors.
- Added a small timer to avoid block-spamming.
- The amount of damage that shields reduce has been increased, but the new amount of damage they can absorb now make them break a lot quicker.
- The amount of stamina you lose while blocking decreased.
- You now sprint a bit faster while in combat mode but it also drains a bit more stamina.
- You now regain twice the amount of stamina you did before when jogging out of combat mode.
- Jogging will now give back and drain stamina based on how hurt your characters is.
- Stamina regain greatly increased.
- Stamina regain just after swinging greatly reduced.
- The amount of stamina you get while walking in combat mode now greatly improved.
- All melee weapons now lose less durability when hitting something.
- Reduced the amount of damage that got deducted when landing hits with a weapon that was low on durability.

Housing:
- Added new a house type, the Keep. Keep Deeds can only be placed by masters of the House Construction trade.
- Added Palisades; players can now construct them around certain keeps.
- Added Palisade Gates; The gates can be locked.
- The amount of materials needed to construct houses has been greatly reduced to make it faster to construct a house. This is for testing purposes only.

Magic:
- Added new spells: Fireball, Flame Strike, Lightning, Magic Reflection and Earthquake.
- Magic now requires you to look much more precisely at your target in order to cast.
- You can no longer cast/precast spells with weapons equipped.
- The magic system has gone through some general balancing. Spells have had their damages, cast times and costs tuned to bring Magic in line with Melee and Ranged Combat.

Skills & Attributes:
- Reduced the global experience you get from using skills.
- Performing Snooping or Stealing will now play an animation.
- Animations have now been added to players when taming creatures.
- When successfully taming a creature, it's native temperament should now also be initially set as their mindset ( Aggressive, Defensive, Passive ).
- Only tamers with the creature control skill should now be able to change a tamed creature's mindset.
- Typing /tame now works as when using taming from the Quickbar.



UI:
- Added the ability to press enter to submit new name for pet.
- The "Stunned Timer Text" has been replaced with a Progress Bar.
- New spell icons added.
- Icons added for Keeps and Palisades.

------ BUG FIXES ------

General:
- Fixed a bug that gave you the wrong stamina regeneration after holding CTRL in mid-air.
- Fixed a couple of node-crashes.

AI & Mounts:
- All vendors should now be fixed throughout Myrland.
- Pets should now be affected by the flag system even if its tamer is offline.
- Tamers should now always get the correct updated flag from it's creature when re-taming a creature.
- Max loyalty should now correctly be set and updated when a tamed creature's health changes.
- when using the loyalty update command ,loyalty should now always update to the latest loyalty values.
- Pets are now affected by the players globally allowed timer. When a tamer goes blue from being gray flagged, so does the pet.
- Creatures should no longer continue to rotate towards it's prey even after it's dead.

Art & Sound:
- Several graphical bugs fixed throughout Myrland.
- Graphical issues in Morin Khur fixed.
- Possible fix for the "won't show animations" bug.
- It's no longer possible to target the NPCs through walls in Fabernum.
- Pickable items now should correctly spawn where intended at all times.

Combat:
- Durability on bows no longer resets when they are dropped and then picked up again.
- Damage bonus is now correctly displayed and used.

Housing:
- Items should no longer disappear and reappear randomly from the House Chest.

Skills & Attributes:
- The House Expansion Construction skill now gains levels as intended.
- "Sprinting" skill now correctly improves your ability to sprint.
- Added book for Iron Wood lore.
- Added book for Incisium lore.
- *Fixed broken Cronite Lore book.
- Added books for Pyrite,Maalite,Greywwod,Ironbone,Brained Leather,Horned ScalesSkadite *

UI:
- Fixed the mouse-over on spell components to display as intended.
- Fixed a bug that allowed copy/pasting of special characters into the character naming.
- Fixed an bug causing the Enter key to not correctly log you in after typing the user name and password.
- Fixed so that if you bind a key that already exists the previous command will get unbound.
- Sorted some broken key binds due to changes in the underlying functions.
- Fixed a bug where you couldn't use the Quickbar buttons for the bottom version of the Quickbar.
- Fixed an issue where it was not possible to select a template in Character creation.
- Fixed an issue where using capital letters for pet names would open UI windows.

Version 0.12.19.22 – Beta
2010-02-16

------ ADDITIONS & CHANGES ------

General:
- Priests near towns will now only resurrect Blue flagged players while priests in the wilderness resurrect all players. The priests have received different looks so players can distinguish what type of priest it is.
- More optimization of art assets. Including max draw distance, texture resolutions and LOD's.
- Added Minor Health Potions. Minor Potions will instantly add 10 hp. Potions have a 10 second cooldown.
- Added Minor Bandage. Minor Bandages will add 20 hp after 10 s. Bandages have a 10 second cooldown.
- Cuprum Coins added and is now the lowest available currency.
- Silver Coin value increased.
- Gold Coin Value increased.
- Pickable objects added in: Caves, The Jungle, at the Jungle Beach and Outside Meduli.

AI & Mounts:
- All creatures should now be less prone to twitch whilst moving.
- All creatures should now more accurately face targets that they attack or look at.
- Creatures that are smaller than the player now have restrictions to where they can land hits when attacking.
- Creatures that once have fled should now never again enter a state of discovering.
- Chickens are now blue flagged creatures in the cities.
- Chickens are now tamable.

Art & Sound:
- The 'players receiving hits' animations have been tweaked.
- The 'run forward' animation has been replaced.
- Emotes: Rally, Shake, Charge, Pass, Clap1, Clap2, Wave1, Wave2, Intimidate1, Intimidate2 and IDK (I don't know) have been added.
- All emotes that require sound effects have now got sound effects.
- The Morin Khur passage to Toxai has been optimized and had a small facelift.
- Blackwood trees added in several places around Myrland.
- All Rocks have been replaced.

Combat:
- Brawling now does less damage to heavy armors and more to leather-type armors.
- Arrows now stack in stacks of 25.
- Added Bodkin Arrows these are cheap but less effective then more expensive arrows.
- Added Broadhead Arrows these are more expensive but also more effective then Bodkin arrows.
- Increased the amount of resources required to make a bow.
- All bows now have an increased minimum draw time, this is to prevent rapid firing of bows.
- Melee combat-traces are now based of the actual animation rather than being a pre-calculated trace.
- Holding tab will show you a tiny crosshair and constantly trace for targets to remove the issue with players who need to spam tab to get a target.
- You will now get visual feedback when you hit a shield or do a handle hit with melee weapons.
- Handle hits are now more accurate.

Housing:
- Houses now require an upkeep fee of five (5) silver. To pay the upkeep fee, place the coins in the House Chest. The upkeep fee will be withdrawn from the house chest at noon (12:00 pm) server time every day. Please refer to the Quick Guide for further information on House Upkeep.

Skills & Attributes:
- Mining will now yield more ore when mined in caves/mines and less when mined near towns.
- The House Construction Book will now grant more XP.
- Landing Technique Book added to the survival book vendor.
- Handles Book added to weapon crafting book vendor.
- Some creatures should now show mercy to severely wounded players and let them live.
- Tamers without the creature control skill should now be able give its pet commands as long as they are non skill based. i.e. rename, feed, bandage, transfer..
- SetReturn command has been removed. Instead, the position where a pet should return to after battle is now defined by which navigation action it was using before the battle. i.e.; Stay or Follow.
- Unprotect command has been removed. To protect type or click protect on target. To clear same protect target, type or click protect again.
- It is now possible to toggle pet attacking. To attack; type or click attack target. To clear the same attack target, type or click attack again.
- It should no longer be possible to issue the same command to the pet several times in a row.
- There is now a short timer cooldown between each issued pet command.
- The amount of initial loyalty gained when taming a pet has now been slightly decreased.
- Pets will now when tamed, automatically start following its new tamer.
- Pets can no longer attack buildings of any kind.

UI:
- Healing potion icon and Bandage icon added.
- Pet UI added.
- Pet window icon has been added in the Quickbar.
- Minimize function added for the Pet window.
- Made taming a useable skill that you can now place on your Quickbar.
- Remade the spell book.


------ BUG FIXES ------

General:
- The Globally Allowed timer will now countdown even when dead.
- Pickable items may now contain various quantities of the items it holds.

AI & Mounts:
- An issue which prevented creatures to never enter a state of discovery when discovering players has been resolved.

Art & Sound:
- The "move during knock down animation" bug should no longer happen.
- All spawning inside meshes next to priests should now be solved.
- Fixed lots of minor graphical issues in Myrland.

Combat:
- Jumping will now cancel walking as intended.

Housing:
- Guild stones can now be accessed once again.

Skills & Attributes:
- Added book for Iron wool lore.
- Added book for Mental Offence.
- Not having an archery skill will no longer make you do max damage.
- Shields should now be crafted with the correct durability.
- Animal Lore book is now working as intended.
- Reading House Expansion I will no longer give a skill named "Default".
- Pets should now move to the correct target when sent to attack.
- Pets should now correctly return to its last state of navigation (Stay at position, grazing or follow target) after battle.
- A bug caused Pets to not be aggressive towards other creatures when in aggressive state. This should now have been resolved and pets should now also attack other creatures.
- Any action leading to a change in flag system due to an action of a tamers pet does, now immediately affects its tamer and the pet itself.
- Pets should now correctly accumulate murder counts if killing other players.
- The calculations of Loyalty loss when using command was incorrect and resulted in a much higher cost than intended. This has now been resolved.
- Creatures should now quickly react when being attacked from longer distances.
- Pets should no longer be lost due to loyalty straight away when tamed by a player with no creature control skill. Instead, the pet will gain a low amount of loyalty.
- Corrected skill XP values. Lowered creature control skill XP and increased taming skill XP gained for Weasels and Dire wolves.

UI:
- Fixed a bug with the non-moveable Refining window.
- Fixed a bug with the non-moveable Extraction window.
- Fixed a bug preventing the use of the chat window whilst the inventory window was open.
- Fixed a bug where certain skills wouldn’t work as intended when clicked on in the skill book.
- Fixed key binds for the Quickbar it should now work as intended.
- Fixed feedback bug on mining/lumberjacking (Trees are no longer rocks!).
- Fixed Character name bug at the Character Selection Screen where your name wouldn’t show after you opened the options menu.
- Fixed multiple bugs with the Z-levels in the UI.
- Fixed various bugs with the Book Window.
- Fixed a bug that caused the loot bag window to appear off screen.
- Fixed a bug that would prevent people from toggling the Quick Guide (H).
- Fixed a bug that prevented proper closing of the Bank Window.

Please note that the notes are not final and are subject to change.
New additions will be marked with a *