1.0.3 Prepatch is now LIVE!

Hi everyone!

The latest update is now LIVE, introducing text formatting to the game together with many other GUI and quality-of-life improvements!

Graphical User Interface

The GUI has received a massive overhaul and the most substantial upgrade since the game's initial release. The purpose has been to give the game a more mature and distinct identity, where many generic icons and symbols have been replaced with custom ones, such as the new buffer icon that resembles the moon phase cycle.

Menu tabs have been made more compact and now take up much less of the screen with a slightly translucent black backdrop that allows more of the game behind to be seen. Similarly, the vignette has been removed to show more of the background and the private messages tab that used to take up the whole screen now takes up much less of it. The private messages tab also no longer closes other menu tabs and is instead displayed on top of other menus. You are now also able to open other menus while browsing private messages, which will cause it to appear on top of the menu, and you can click between menus to bring the one you use to the front.

The loot container has also been made a lot more compact and is now small enough that it can fit between menus on the left and right, allowing you to see your inventory, equipment, and an item you can pick up at the same time For now, the only GUI element that resembles the old design is the calendar in the top-left, which will be replaced with the PvE overhaul. For now, we still need it for the turn-timer that will be removed with the PvE overhaul.

The GUI overhaul also comes with many quality-of-life improvements and general improvements to the functionality of GUI elements.

Sort Inventory

It is now possible to sort items in your inventory. By default, items are sorted left-to-right, but sorting items multiple times will swap between sorting the items left-to-right, and top-to-bottom, allowing you to choose whichever works best for you.

The sorting algorithm considers the size, type, and name to try and find the most optimal order of items, and will automatically combine stackable items.

Items placed in your heirloom container; the one with the yellow border at the bottom of the inventory tab will be ignored during the sort, which makes it ideal for placing items you don't want to be sorted.

You can also sort items in your stash tabs, and I have added an option to lock a tab, which prevents it from being accidentally sorted.

Search Inventory

It is now possible to search items in your inventory and stash by their name, type, color, magical properties, and more. You can even search for an inanimate player by its name.

Deposit Items

A button for quickly depositing items from your inventory into your stash has been added to the inventory tab.

Stackable items will be combined and placed into any existing stack where possible, and in the future, you will also be able to assign specific stash tabs for certain types of items, like talismans or dyes.

Items placed in your heirloom container won't be deposited, which makes it ideal for placing items you want to keep with you at all times.

Open Market

A button for opening the market has been added to stash tabs, to make it more convenient to access the market from your stash.

Equipment

Items can now be equipped and unequipped using Ctrl-click, similar to moving items between containers.

Spell List

Added icons for spells. These icons are usually related to any status effect the spell can apply, and not all spells have icons yet.

Improved spell tooltips and added spell icon, damage, and cost to spell tooltips.

The list no longer scrolls to the top when the details setting is changed, and will instead attempt to display the same entries after the layout has changed.

Notifications

Notifications have had their appearance updated and been changed from a frame-based system to a time-based system.

This means notifications that are triggered while the game isn't being rendered won't appear all at once when you return to the game.

Invitation notifications have also been improved, and will now stay around for the full duration the invitation is valid, which has been increased to 20 seconds (up from 10 seconds).

Notifications will also no longer move around when other notifications appear, making it less dicey to attempt and click a notification while another notification might appear.

Private Messages

Inbox messages are now cached by the server for each player, which means results will be kept for some time or until changes are made to your inbox, usually by receiving or deleting a message.

The result is a much faster inbox after the initial load-time, allowing players with many ongoing chats to navigate their messages much faster since they won't have to wait for their inbox to load each time they return to it.

Save Character Notes

Players are now able to save notes to recent characters. The previous recent tab in the social menu has been replaced with a characters tab, which has a list of recently met characters and saved notes.

Previously, you could only add notes to friends, and being able to add notes to characters will make it easier for players to track roleplay progress without being friends.

When you add a note to a character, it will be bookmarked to the saved notes list. Removing the note will remove the character from the list, but you can set an empty note for a character without losing the bookmark.

Players can have a maximum of 1000 saved characters.

Text Formatting

Formatting support has been added for character bios, private messages, scenario details, and local chat! You can read about the supported syntax from the formatting guide at https://battlemageroyal.com/formatting.php

The guide itself is written using text formatting similar to that of a character bio, and you can click on the pencil icon to see and alter the text used for the guide.

Not all syntaxes are allowed for everyone, and except for local chat, which has very limited formatting support, each place you can use text formatting has a link to a guide listing the specific syntax it supports.

While writing text, any valid formatting syntax will also cause the text to change so you can preview its effects. This will also let you know if a particular syntax is supported in a given place, as the text will appear as normal if it isn't supported.

As an example, embedded images are only allowed in bios, while links are only allowed in bios and private messages. Syntax such as \\ and () are allowed everywhere, and there's even a new "", which allows you to style text in the color of your character's nature, similar to **, and when used in a private message, the text inside the quotes will be formatted similar to spoken text in the local say channel.

In addition, undo support has also been improved for these input fields.

Increased Character Limits

With the introduction of text formatting, the character limit for bios has also been increased so players can style and organize their bios using formatting without it cutting into their previous word limit!

The character limit for bios has been increased to 8000 (up from 3000), and the character limit for roleplay scenario details has received a similar increase to 8000 characters (up from 1000).

Mindless

The concept of 'Mindless' has been introduced to the game, which describes a character who either has zero mind or or max lust.

Some spells and effects, such as the innate 50% resistance to mental changes, will now use the mindless terminology, instead of the previous more wordy description.

Mindless is also explained in the stat description for mind under a character's stats. 

Speech Improvements

With the addition of text formatting and the ability for speech impediments to affect text in private messages, I thought now was a good time to give the speech impediments extra love!

All speech impediments have had their pipeline improved

Bimbo

Bimbos will no longer sound inherently stupid, but when they are, they are more likely to conflate names and mundane words with similar-sounding words of a sexual variety.

Bimbos will now add "totally" and discourse markers such as "um" and "like" more logically; they are so smart now!

Bimbos will now use more contractions and be forced to giggle on occasion.

Bimbos will now give themselves nicknames, which will replace their name whenever they speak it. A nickname is often a diminutive or feminine variant. If the bimbo is male, they must have sissification enabled for them to give themselves a feminine-sounding nickname. If the bimbo is stupid, they are more likely to give themselves a slutty nickname.

Animal sounds

Animal sounds will now be inserted a lot less randomly and instead be placed between phrases and sentences to be less disruptive to the sentence structure (it also sounds more cute that way!)

Dogs and cats are more likely to make an inquisitive animal sound at the end of a question.

Full animal voices have also been improved to make them better reflect the original sentence.

The nekomimi cat variant is now much better at recognizing potential words to change the sound of and now ignores words that could end up sounding worryingly close to the N-word.

Struggle Free

Inanimate characters with a permanent form that isn't sealed are now able to struggle free from their owner!

When your inanimate form becomes permanent, the option to give in is replaced with an option to escape your owner, but you won't be able to do so until your owner has been inactive for a week, and being sealed will also prevent your character from escaping.

When an inanimate character escapes their owner, they will leave behind a Sealed Enchantment with any accessory decoration, color, and magical properties, similar to if they turned back, but they will keep their inanimate base appearance and be returned to the global item pool.

This feature has limited uses for now, but I'm sure at least a few players out there will be happy to continue their inanimate adventure on a character that is currently stuck on an inactive owner.

In the future, there will also be a means to gain immunity from being sealed, which will allow players to give in with a smaller risk of getting stuck, forever.

Advanced Item Tooltips

Items now have advanced tooltips that show additional details about an item and its magical properties, including the min and maximum range of enchantments, their tier, and the explicit type(s) of an item.

Advanced tooltips can be displayed by holding down the Ctrl key, but can also be enabled by default from the game's settings.

Search results on the market and profiles also support advanced item tooltips.

Compression

The WebSocket connection between the client and server now supports compression using binary data transfer of huge data packages that substantially reduces data usage and transfer time.

Technical explanation

I've attempted to implement efficient compression in the past but wasn't able to crack it until now, and the benefit is tremendous!

The data used to transfer all the necessary data on login, or loading numerous messages, has been reduced to less than 20%, sometimes 10%, of the original data!

Previously, all messages between the client and server were sent as UTF-8 strings through the WebSocket text transfer protocol.

WebSockets also have a protocol for sending binary data, but the process of having to convert strings to and from binary undermines its usefulness.

Compressed data, however, is already a binary array buffer that can be passed directly into the binary protocol to be decompressed on the other end of the connection.

UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding that uses 1-2 bytes to represent a 1-byte character, where half the bytes on average will take up twice their size.

So by passing the data through the binary protocol, not only do we save having to encode the data back into UTF-8, but we also transfer 2/3rds of the bytes on average, further reducing the data size!

For an international game that sometimes literally sends data to the other side of the Earth, such a reduction is incredibly significant, and the bigger the distance and package, the greater the benefit!

The more homogeneous the data, the more efficient compression is as well, and this drastically reduces the need to consider and remove redundancy in data packages, clearing up time that I can instead use on developing new features for the game!

As an example, whether an item's id or a user's name appears 1 or 1,000 times in the same package means virtually nothing when compressed, so I don't have to care about stripping redundant or repetitive data in a set.

Other Changes

Implemented a proper random system to reduce bias for rolls.

Improved the icon for latex skin effects, with help from DekoTF

Improved the order in which crowns are taken from the stash when buying items on the market, instead of taking payment from a seemingly random stack.

Clicking the username for the seller of an item on the market will now open the player's profile page.

Searching spells and characters have been improved and only match words starting with the searched query instead of any word containing the query

While at full body health, a character is now unaffected by physical ailments such as the Hucow Disease. They can still attract the disease, but it won't cause triggered effects while the player is at full body health.

When reporting a player, a note will now appear letting the reporter know that they can report a specific private message from the in-game chat to help moderators find the offending message.

The dialog box will no longer appear after closing a stash or vendor tab if it was hidden before the tab was opened.

Sealed enchantments that only hold an accessory and/or color variant can now be applied to otherwise unenchantable items that can be given an accessory and/or color (onaholes cannot be enchanted, but can be colored and accessorized).

Players are now limited to 1000 friends on their friend list, at which point they won't be able to send or receive new friend requests.

Mindless characters are now able to use vocal chat

Improved touch support

Improved encapsulation of server classes to protect against accidental manipulation of sensitive data from outside their system.

Significantly optimized looking-for-roleplay scenario searches. Most searches should finish nearly instantly instead of taking a few seconds to finish.

Optimized numerous server and database operations.

Error Fixes

Fixed an issue with damage scaling being calculated incorrectly.

Fixed an issue with PvP spell hits not causing the character and screen to flash.

Fixed an issue where action tokens could sometimes be displayed as negative. This would usually happen if you were at zero actions and spells, and removed an equipment item that granted those actions.

Fixed an issue where status effect icons would sometimes be positioned incorrectly, causing them to take up the same space as action tokens.

Fixed an issue where the combat log would sometimes clip text incorrectly.

Fixed an issue where the reply and delete buttons would not appear properly for selected private messages while browsing inbox or sent messages.

Fixed an issue with the dialog box reappearing when it shouldn't, causing it to cover up stash or vendor items.

Fixed an issue with the local chat text caret (also called the cursor position) not being visible.

Fixed an issue with the local chat on specific versions of the Firefox browser.

Fixed an issue that made it possible to equip items that should not be equipable.

Fixed an issue where stats would sometimes not be updated properly after changing the magical property of an item equipped in the head slot.

Fixed an issue where re-logging could cause inventory item positions to change back to an earlier but recent layout.

Fixed an issue where transforming an item in your inventory would sometimes cause it to take up space already reserved by another item.

Fixed a rare issue where an item could disappear.

Fixed a super rare issue where changing the magical properties of an item during a server reset could cause only part of the operation to go through.

Fixed an issue with Scroll of Divination not working on some items that could be unidentified.

Fixed an issue where onaholes and statuette dildo bought from Hilda would lose their nature variant.

I'm currently feeling really sick and I could feel it coming on while finishing up the update but I desperately wanted it out so people could enjoy playing the game during the weekend, so I hope you'll have a great time with the update and I will do what I can to fix things whenever I can find the energy for it!

Thank you so much for your support and once I'm no longer feeling under the weather I will share a dev log with you all where I will tell you more about what we've been working on! ❤️

Cheers,

Tinon