- Birthday Mystery Eggs are hatching now! And… there’s a BIG surprise inside!
- A new beta Necessity Pack (v5.1) is available on Krafties Island with a HUGE set of improvements and additions! These include aaun attachment and animation system rework, spell system memory expansions, fullbright creatures, and more!
‘m1-Blocket’ Initializing… Activating Giftwrap rendering mode… System ready!
The Awakening – Birthday Mystery Eggs Are Hatching Now!
INSTRUCTIONS: To hatch your eggs, simply equip them to your active creature. The eggs should hatch within a few minutes! NOTE: You MUST be using the new v5.1 Necessity Pack or m1-Blocket pets will not render correctly!
It’s time… Mystery Eggs are finally hatching, and there are… droids inside??? Giftwrap coated m1-Blocket pets with Adaptive elemental affinities to be exact!
That’s right! Krafties proudly presents the m1-Blocket, a state of the art revolution in companion technology. These new models come alive when bonded to elemental souls, much like existing unbonded creatures, but they possess a set of cutting-edge new technologies that are poised to bring about a paradigm shift in the world of Krafties.
The first of many droid-type creatures contains brand new battle code which fundamentally changes the way battles are conducted. While these new battle changes are currently only available for droids, the new system will eventually be unlocked for ALL battle pets in the world of Krafties. The proud owners of these new pets have exclusive access to test driving our new battle mechanics for a limited time! Let’s dive into the important parts.
Auto Aggression (Auto Aggro)
When handling a pet that has “auto aggro” enabled, players are able to simply walk into a group of creatures and wait 5-10 seconds. The player’s pet will begin automatically attacking the closest creature within a 5 meter range that is less than or equal to the overall level of the player’s pet. And… that’s it! It’s that simple to jump into battles with this new system. BUT, what ever will you do with all of those extra clicks you’re saving…?
Castable Spells Rework
Now that players are freed from the cumbersome monotony of repeatedly clicking on wild creatures they’d like to attack, they can do other things! While admittedly JUST the auto aggression system alone is a huge boon to things like new player experience, social activities, and participating in other areas of the game like fishing and mining while still gaining battle xp, we wanted to make it better. When players are *actively* battling, we’d like them to feel like they’re actively battling. And boy did we find a way! Remember all of those weak spells you’ve leveled out of? With this new battling system, EVERY spell that was formerly able to be set as an “active spell” can now be manually cast! This means that while actively battling, creatures can output more damage, and kill more wilds, if handled correctly. There’s also a new “cantrip” being played with, which may evolve into a series of what we’re calling “fidget spells” created with the purpose of making battles more engaging for players of all levels.
Some Caveats
There are a few things to keep in mind with the new system. The first thing you’ll notice is that captcha times are MUCH more frequent. We’re talking in the 10-15 minute range. This is intentional, and with the changes we believe that the tradeoff is very worthwhile, but as always feedback will be monitored and adjustments will be made. This is an important change not only to (hopefully) improve the quality of life for EVERY Krafties player, but also make it much, much more difficult for players to gain any unfair advantages using any auto battling systems *not* condoned by Krafties. Were evening the playing field for all players, while enabling our systems to combat botting in new ways that wouldn’t be viable without this change.
New Necessity Pack v5.1
This new pack is absolutely crammed full of upgrades. We’ll touch on it briefly here, but dive into the dev notes below if you want more thorough explanations!
Fullbright
By default creatures are now fullbright. This move to a slightly more cartoony aesthetic will allow us to increase the visual fidelity of what Krafties outputs in a huge way. For those of you who need time to get used to the new look, there are new Fullbright On/Off settings in the creature menus.
Attachment and Animation System Rework
This was promised when we sold our first outfits, and is now being delivered on. Attachments should be 100% synced with creature movements! Along with that, the entire animation system was gutted and put back together. While this will be a subtle improvement, a more measurable outcome is that the creatures should be about 4x more optimized in terms of script time usage!
Spell System Memory Expansion
This change should help prevent stack heap issues related to spells, while increasing the the number of spells we can have in one creature by up to 20x!
More
Read the dev notes below to find out more!
The Future
As stated above, the m1-Blocket is the first pet that we’re classifying as a droid, but most certainly not the last! This change, along with some of the changes in the Necessity Pack, set Krafties up to diversify our content while (importantly) increasing the visual fidelity and overall quality of the products we’re outputting. Introducing new classes of pets gives us room to play with new types of items, new unlockables, and new customization options that wouldn’t be possible with the current class of pets. Our animation system, while difficult to map to organic movements, plays perfectly into robotic ones! Additionally, these droids also play handily into the story arc that is being slowly laid out. You’ll see a lot of new things, a lot of experimentation, and a lot of fun as we move forward into the future!
Have fun!
A Note From The Developer
Hey guys, Kris here. There’s a LOT that’s been packed into this, but most of that is “behind the scenes” changes, optimizations, etc. However, there are a couple of VERY big things that will affect player experience in a huge way. Maybe the biggest change to a fundamental aspect of the game since it launched!
DROIDS
It’s hard for me to decide if I’m most excited about the new droid class that’s being introduced with this release, or the battle system overhaul… Both are pretty awesome! While these newcomers look incredibly simple, a ton of work has gone into designing them in a way that opens the door for future expansions and customizations while still working with our existing system. In a recent writeup I mentioned that the v5 release was almost released as a completely new game, or potentially as “Krafties 2”. As you see more and more of the content in-store, you’ll most likely begin to see why!
A fun note: In the near future starter creatures will be swapped out, and instead of Rexies and Aviaas players will start with droid class pets. If this sparks any of your creative juices, please let us know what you’d like to see from Krafties droids in our official chat!
BATTLE SYSTEM REDESIGN
With this new pack equipped and a droid active (during this testing phase), when you’re standing near a group of wild creatures your pet should auto attack any creatures that are less than or equal to its overall level within a 5 meter range. But, that’s just the tip of the iceburg here. We’ve also made it so EVERY spell that was formerly able to be set as an “active spell” can now be manually cast. This means that while actively battling, creatures can output more damage, and kill more wilds, if handled correctly now that the extra 2-3 low level spells the creatures had “leveled out of” are now in-play all at the same time. We’ve also added a spell that EVERY creature has, able to be cast every 10 seconds, called “Force Blast”. This is intended to give level 1 players a more engaging battle experience so they can get used to a game with more emphasis on manual spell casting, and will most likely evolve into some sort of “cantrip” system with multiple weak spells players choose from. BUT, here’s a big catch: as a trade off with the auto aggression, the captcha times have been drastically shortened. They are currently ~10 minutes.
As a small note, I’d like to talk about botting here. It’s a constant battle of attrition that Krafties has fought from the moment we released, and will most likely continue to fight… forever. As our systems get more clever, players looking to stretch the integrity of the game get more clever as well. So, I welcome you to the latest installment of Krafties Cleverly Combatting Computer Clicks. I personally put a TON of effort into not only designing this auto aggro change to help combat some of the existing botting, but spent time analyzing the data of players who, up until this moment, thought they were getting away with taking advantage of our systems undetected. This has led to a slew of amazing tools that are being employed to help combat botting in new ways, and I’d like to give a thank you to some of the more brazen culprits who made this easier on me. Goodbye!
FULLBRIGHT CREATURES
By default creatures are now fullbright. This setting means that the Second Life shading models do not interact with the creatures at all, giving them a more cartoony look in a lot of cases. Why was this changed? Due to SL limitations, we have to use sculpties for our models in order to have a system that allows us to dynamically load an infinite number of models from the same objects. But, in a lot of cases sculpties can show very noticable seams and wrinkles due to how things are constructed and how the lighting system plays with the sculpted parts. With fullbright, most of these seams and wrinkles are eliminated! This move to a slightly more cartoony aesthetic will allow us to increase the visual fidelity of what Krafties outputs in a huge way, which I think is important as we move forward into a competitive landscape with some of the newer tech that SL has introduced since Krafties initially launched. Still, I know people can be change-averse. With that in mind, there are new Fullbright On/Off settings in the creature menus.
ATTACHMENT SYSTEM REWORK
This was promised when we sold our first outfits, and is now being delivered on. Attachments should be 100% synced with creature movements! We’ve taken the two scripts that separately handled creature animations and attachment animations, and then used a few new LSL functions to share a memory pool between the scripts. Then, made it so a single scripts handles all visual state changes from a single source. That’s getting a little technical, and really all that matters is that the number of jarring moments when creature body parts or attachments get out of sync should be drastically reduced/eliminated. As we output more species and outfits, the visual side of Krafties can shine across SL with a much cleaner look.
ANIMATION SYSTEM AND BEHAVIOR SYSTEMS REWORK
As the attachment system restructuring was taking place, I couldn’t help but see some glaring performance improvements that would be *really* simple to implement! I thought… Unfortunately, I forgot how complicated LSL’s stack/heap setup makes changing virtually anything in their scripts. Still, even though it took a good chunk of extra time, coming out the other end of it I can honestly say that it was 100% worth it. I think this will be a more subtle improvement that may not be noticeable right off the bat, and moreso reduces some of the “wtf” moments creatures have when they get out of sync with their avatars movements or their body parts move slightly out of sync. Another thing that I’m sure no one will notice as well is that the creatures should be about 4x more optimized in terms of script time usage. Nothing flashy or fancy, but it is a change that I think will be important in keeping Krafties competitive as not just an MMO, but also as cute collectible companions.
SPELL SYSTEM MEMORY EXPANSION
The spell system internals have been changed to use a new memory source, which should prevent stack heap issues related to spells while increasing the the number of spells we can have in one creature by… 5-20x. Pretty cool!
FUTURE CREATURE MENU OPTIONS
When you click your creature, you’ll notice a “More” option. This option queries our servers and is able to be dynamically populated, SO some new functions can be added to creature without new packs being needed!*This is as much a quality of life improvement for players as it is for myself, and there’s so much that can be done with it!
That’s it for now, I sincerely hope you all enjoy!
