Good day, Traveler!

Chronicles of Vaeltaja’s first update for this year is finally here. Even though this is mostly an engine update, it's still a major milestone that brings some interesting changes and enhancements, not to mention several bug fixes.

The most visible change is the enhanced forest textures of Twin Falls areas with new treetops and better tree trunks. But it doesn’t end there: Tree and bush sprites are also renewed. There’s been some colour adjustment done to the Twin Falls’ grass textures and all the cloud sprites, so the ground looks more vibrant and clouds appear brighter. And finally the first main dungeon ‘Well of the Ancients’ looks and feels more menacing with new enhanced wall, floor and ceiling textures.

The biggest change in terms of gameplay, is the improved ‘stealing from the shop’ mechanic. So far it’s been easy to exploit the stealing mechanic, because it was missing some features that has been planned for a long time. From now on there’s a slight chance to fail completely when stealing, no matter how high the skill is. Also, if you get caught, it will be a little bit harder to steal from the same shop again. Get caught twice and it will be even harder. Getting caught three times bans from the store until a fine is paid. Paying the fine also lowers the difficulty of stealing back to normal.

There’s also some differences between shops: It is a little bit easier to steal from an item shop than from magic or weapon stores. Also, the better the inventory, the harder it is to steal – for this reason stealing from Pramean shops is slightly harder than stealing from the Castle Town’s shops.

Development wise the biggest change is the upgrade to the latest version of the MZ3D plugin. Because of some conflicts between certain plugins, it has been impossible to update the plugin until now. I’ve tried it in the past many times, but always ended up with game breaking bugs I wasn’t able to fix. The reason for this sudden success is that the plugin causing the biggest conflict became obsolete and I was able to remove it completely.

It took some time to fix the remaining bugs brought by the plugin upgrade and this has caused some delay to the next content update. I apologize for that, but it was necessary. There were two bigger issues that the plugin developer was kind enough to fix for me, which I’m very grateful for. Turned out that in the end they were quite easily fixed, I was just looking the solution from several wrong places. Nevertheless, there are lots of new features and improvements in the plugin, which should help the development and eventually improve the game even more. I won’t mention these bugs separately in the patch notes because they have never appeared in the Early Access version of the game.

The most exciting thing about this plugin upgrade is that the developer of MZ3D is rewriting the plugin to greatly improve it’s performance, so it just might possible to move on to that version once it’s released in the future. The rewritten version will have a cpu multithreading and, if I understood correctly, it should be lighter on the cpu overall.

Talking about cpus... I know the cpu requirements in the Store page are a bit high, but I’ve just wanted to be on the safe side. The game will probably run on weaker cpus with less cores, as long as it’s not a mobile processor. MZ3D is very heavy on the mobile cpus and therefore laptops are not recommended, unless they have at least a decent gpu, such as GTX 970 or GTX 1060.

Also, many of the VisuStella plugins this game relies heavily on have been updated too. Some of those upgrades optimize their performance, while others add some new features to help the development.

There has been one particular bug that has been bothering me for a long time: Skybox briefly flashing and filling the entire screen when day turns to dusk. It’s a very quick flash, but noticeable nevertheless. It’s a very weird bug – I know what causes it, but I have never understood how or why, and therefore it has been impossible to fix. I have now managed to find one way to fix it. Unfortunately it makes the transition from day to dusk a little less smoother than other daytime transitions, but I think this is much better than the short flash that filled the entire screen with the skybox for a few frames. Who knows, perhaps someday I’ll figure it out and find a better solution, but until then this will have to do.

Finally, there where two bugs in the Wizard’s Tower’s 6th floor that caused some situations where the 

'mirror puzzle' couldn’t be solved. If you have encountered these bugs, it would be best to load a save game from before entering the 6th floor, if possible. I wasn’t able to recreate those bugs with my save games, so I don’t know if the fix works with save games that have these bugs. But I can confirm that the puzzle now works as intended with new games and save games from before entering the 6th floor for the first time. Other bug fixes can be found in the patch notes below.

Last, but not least: In celebration of this update the game will be 30% off for 10 days starting at Saturday February 15th 12:00 am EET / 2:00 pm PST.

PATCH NOTES:

Visual Changes

    • Enhanced forest and leaf ceiling textures for Twin Falls areas and wall textures for the Hedge Maze

    • Enhanced wall, floor and ceiling textures and door sprites for Well of the Ancients

    • New tree and bush sprites to Twin Falls

    • Colour adjustments for Twin Falls’ grass textures, all the road sign and the cloud sprites

    • New smaller mouse cursor

    • Added piles of bones in Well of the Ancients

    • Added holes on the ceiling and floor for ladders in Well of the Ancients

    • Adjusted player’s torch and lantern lights to be brighter

    • Darker skyboxes for dusk and night

Game Mechanics

    • Improved stealing from the shops

Engine Changes

    • MZ3D plugin upgraded from version 0.8.2.2 to version 0.9.2.8

    • Several VisuStella plugins upgraded

Fixes

    • Mud Dwellers now drop Clay, which can be sold in the House of Adventurers

    • Changed the description of the premium Healing Kit, because there wasn’t any mention of it to be able to heal the ‘Cripple’ status effect

    • Corrected some spelling errors in npc dialog

    • Fixed couple of npc walking animation issues

    • Fixed skybox flashing when day turns to dusk

    • Fixed a bug that caused Nelana in Pramea to give the player multiple Tomes after the town is saved

    • Food supplies side-quest can now be completed also after Pramea is saved

    • Fixed a bug that prevented a certain lock in the hidden dungeon of the Southern Great Forest to be picked

    • Fixed a bug that prevented the Evertree side-quest to update properly when talking to the Evertree in the ‘Islands of the Prophets’

    • Changes to The Cat and the Knight quest: From now on the cat and the knight appear in the alley in the Castle Town at night as originally intented and this should prevent the situation where the quest couldn’t be completed properly

    • Fixed the bugs that prevented the Wizard’s Tower’s 6th floor main puzzle to be properly solved in certain situations

    • Fixed a bug that in some cases showed a wrong name in dialog boxes when stealing with Shadow

    • Fixed several issues caused by plugin upgrades

Known Issues

    • Some places, such as Twin Falls areas, Well of the Ancients and Lake Road still have old battle scene backgrounds, but I will make new ones in the future

That’s about it for now, I guess. I hope you enjoy these changes, improvements and fixes, while I start to shift my focus on the next content update.

Thanks for the support and see you in Twin Falls!

Happy Valentine's Day!

Jani/Witchgrove Games