Latest and Greatest: Mirandus Updates Q1 2024

by Gala Games | Feb 14, 2024 | Mirandus

Fantastic Progress

Building a massive open world of exploration and adventure is no walk in the park. The team has been hard at work squashing bugs, shipping updates and polishing the game’s unique look and feel, making Mirandus a truly magical place.

You’ll find a more in-depth list of recent tech stat updates at the bottom of this article!

Mirandus Offsite

The team just finished an awesome offsite meetup with the Mirandus Directors and key community members in Austin, TX February 8-10. The offsite was vital for discussing decisions in the game design that affect all vectors of Mirandus. We now have consensus about major game features like looting, combat contribution, MTRM connections with GalaChain, Exemplar data and more. 

Greetings from the Mirandus team and community at the Austin offsite meeting!

We can’t emphasize how important it is to collect and embrace community feedback and input through this process. We have brilliant minds in the community that love Mirandus as much as the team and it’s amazing to see how we all want to make the greatest game ever.

In a Fireside Chat with the team sometime next week, we’ll offload all the decisions and share our latest updates on the tech stack. We’ll let you know in Discord what the date and time will be for that Fireside Chat soon.

Hinting at things coming in the future

A new era of Mirandus is coming. The next tech test will prove vital for monitoring the tech stack and running diagnostics on issues in real time, as well as flushing out the most elusive problems.

During the upcoming tech test servers may be taken down whenever major problems arise, and remain down until the problem is solved. We thank you in advance for your patience while those problems are dealt with.. Additionally, certain features and parts of the game may be selectively disabled during the test so we can troubleshoot those areas. 

Check out the tech test screenshots below!

Specific Tech Stack Updates

• Reworked the few remaining ModRequests into the new fully server-authoritative format, mainly surrounding Equip/Unequip/Draw/Sheathe.

• Delivered the cemetery/purgatory system and we now have a full death loop stood up.  By putting players somewhere, we can more easily try out different options for how we handle death, and it dramatically simplifies the code in the event someone logs out dead and comes back later.

• Built an automated unit test for all the item manipulations, so we know if/when we break something instantly.

• Fixed some bugs with spawning and also made dead creatures spawn a dynamic tag for “Carnivore Food” so creatures that want meat can find it. We kind of had that working before, but it was a bit hacky, so we got to remove that code we don’t want to support moving forward. 

• Improved the concept of our NPC AI “making progress” so they can figure out they are outmatched during combat, one way or another, which allows them to be smarter about target selection or choosing when to flee. 

• Dug into the asset bundle rebuild issues and uncovered two important details that we solved to make our workflow faster.

• Improved our environment art team tools to quickly switch prefabs to atlased-material versions so we can A/B check that things look right with final high performance materials.

• Built the initial version of the Mint Manager, which also handles the movement of MTRM into and out of player records from GalaChain. The first version is just a mock DB system that lets us test without needing access to the chain, but the real version will be built soon. 

• Worked on phased vocoder for the voice modulator, focusing on this early as it’s one of the hardest, riskiest parts of the voice system left.
  
• Made big strides toward solving some dependency issues with the asset bundle system. This will improve our build download size drastically.

• Tech Art is putting some extra effort into helping the character team get the new human and female Exemplar models in as we discovered some issues with the skeletons. This will get us really close to final character assets for Q1.
  
• Fixed a bug issue with environment atlasing and the sampler states not working properly, which had to do with poorly documented lightmapping behavior when building static geo.
  
• Created an admin control page design that will allow QA/CS to help players even without logging into the game (sometimes critical when things are truly broken).

• Wrapping up the navmesh exploit detection and look-at data for NPCs so they can pay attention to things while doing something else.

• Migrated code over to the new ModRequest system, pulling the PlayerMove out of that system since it’s the one thing the server doesn’t need to respond about. If you cheat, it’ll do something worse than roll you back…
  
• Upgraded the spawning system data to properly use material tags for determining where things can spawn in the environment, and if something is required but missing, avoid spawning at all. Also, popping small things in is ok, but trees grow into place slowly now.

As the most ambitious and extensive gaming project in the Gala ecosystem, Mirandus is gearing up to really show the world what GalaChain can do. Get ready to experience a fantasy world that’s more immersive and imaginative than you ever thought possible.
Learn more about what makes Mirandus so special at Mirandus.game.