Movement update
Dear community,
during Monday’s update we have applied a big package of fixes for Waypoint Movement.
What does that mean?
Plenty of in game NPCs do have a fixed path in our database, a path which that NPC follows. This way is composed of single coordinates, or Waypoints. An NPC moves in the following way: it reaches a certain waypoint and then continues directly to the following waypoint, until the end of its path is reached, then goes back to the beginning of the path and the whole cycle repeats itself. Our movement system hasn’t been smooth in the past. NPC movement was intermittent. We have decided to rework the whole system because of this and we have applied the so-called Smooth Movement.
As the name reveals, this function allows NPCs to move for the whole length of their entire route without any pathing interruption. This function has been used only sparingly in the past. From this Monday, the Smooth Movement function is applied to every type of waypoint motion, therefore you are able to enjoy it in all of its beauty. This adjustment has affected thousands of NPCs in the open world and also in instances (currently, we have more than 8 753 NPCs with this type of movement and more than 216 280 unique waypoints) and hundreds of quests. Alongside with this function our developers reworked the way how the NPC speed was calculated, which allows us to get even closer to official servers.
Another thing that has been reworked are formations. In many cases, an NPC is not moving alone, but it’s accompanied by others who follow the same path and together make the formation. The system of calculating particular parameters of the formation had its flaws. That lead to inability of some formation members to move at consistent distances and angles relative to the other NPCs.
We have prepared a short video to demonstrate the changes visually. You can see the state of movement before and after the rework of Waypoint Movement and formations. This change is affecting nearly everything in game and even after internal tests and retests on our PTR, we were unable to catch all the bugs. We worked intensively from the start of the week to fix bugs that occured after the Monday’s update (quite a few fixes were already deployed) and we are ready to solve more that can still surface as fast as we can, in order to not disturb your game experience, and improve it overall. That said, we are only able to fix things that are properly reported. Please, submit any bugs you encounter to our Bug Tracker. You can find a guide on how to properly report bugs here.
Hades Team