Skill trees, fishing and Servers 2.0

This blog post reveals what I've been working on behind the scenes!

Progression System Rework

A big new feature I've been secretly working on is Skill Tree. Each player has their own skill tree, and by playing the game and gathering XP, you can unlock new skills. Skills are split into different branches, each activity having its own branch. You can choose your path in the skill tree and buy the skills that feel the most important to you.

This system also affects the current farming system, as farming has its own branch in the skill tree as well. Some of the current benefits like big stack size, cycling riches, bonus coins, etc. are nerfed and must be acquired again / upgraded via the skill tree. I decided to do it that way so players have a new sense of progression in the game. Don't worry, all old players will have their current XP converted into the skill tree system, so you will not have to start over with downgraded experience.

Gathering XP finally has a true purpose, because skills are unlocked via XP gained. However, each branch of the skill tree requires XP gained from that specific activity, so you cannot progress in the fishing branch of the skill tree by farming blocks, and you cannot progress in the farming branch by fishing. You get the point.

FISHING: What does the update contain?

Fishing is a brand new activity coming to Grid Empire. You can equip rods, place a bait on water and wait for a strike. Once you have a strike, you must tap on the screen (or press space on PC) to reel the fish. This launches a minigame where the fish goes from left to right and you must try to keep it in a specific area to progress. Once your progression meter is filled, you can pull the fish and finish the minigame. If your progress-meter goes low enough, you will lose the bait and not catch a fish.

Each fish has its own size. The sizes are split into the following: tiny, small, medium, large, huge. The minigame gets easier or harder depending on what size fish you're trying to catch. Each fish also has a size in lbs, but it currently does nothing. However, I do plan to add leaderboards for fish sizes in the future. It's just out of the scope of the fishing update for now.

Once you have caught the fish, you are granted two options: either you can keep the fish and place it into your inventory, or you can sell it right away for fish tokens. Note: you can also sell it later to the fishmonger NPC, but it is not as beneficial as selling it right away (I will return to this point later).

There are in total over a hundred different fishes to catch, and they are split into their own depths and environments. The update launches with six environments: regular, lava, nuclear, winter, rainbow, sky. The environment is decided depending on what background you place behind the water. Fishes also live in different depths. The more depth an area has, the higher chance there is for a larger fish. You cannot fish in all environments right away: you must unlock them via the skill tree. Each environment has its own sub-path inside the skill tree.

Quest window has a new section: Fishing Quests. Each environment's activity changes daily: on some days some environment will have bigger fishes and fewer ingredients, and on some days the other way around. Each environment's activity-level can be viewed from the fishing quests menu. Other than that, there is a rotating quest requiring you to deliver a specific fish. This quest gives you more tokens than just selling the fish to the fishmonger, so for the quickest fish token progression, you should constantly keep an eye out for the current best environment and the fishes that give you bonus tokens.

Fish Diary is a brand new section inside the recipe book. Each undiscovered fish you catch gets updated to your fish diary. The more diary you fill, the more rewards you unlock. Filling the fish diary is a lot of work, and only the most dedicated fishers can achieve it! The fish diary is split into environments and each environment can grant you a total of three rewards (at 33%, 66% and 100% filled).

Rods: How do they work? Rods are NOT upgradeable. The fishing system progression comes purely from the quests, items crafted and of course the skill tree itself, but once you unlock a rod, it will be as powerful as it can be. You don't need to upgrade it later. Each rod has a specifically designed purpose, and they are not just copies of each other. I will not reveal what rods the update contains yet. Rods are not purchased via the shop. They are crafted with new item recipes. An exception to this is the first rod unlocked, which you buy from the shop with coins.

Baits: How do they work? The first bait you need is a worm bait. You simply get it by breaking dirt. The rest of the baits are unlocked via tackle boxes, available from the shop. Each bait has its own benefit and environment where it's best at. You wouldn't want to fish with a bait designed for the winter environment inside the lava environment. Tackle Boxes are a new producer. They drop exactly one random bait every 24 hours. Some baits are rarer drops than others from the tackle box.

A new shop section is added with the fishing update, and you guessed it, you must use fish tokens to purchase items from there. This means that all fishing related shop items are locked behind actually fishing: you cannot farm coins and then buy fishing related items, just like you cannot fish and then buy farming related items. Don't worry, you can still acquire farming related shop items with fishing by simply trading with other players.

Aside from the fishmonger, there is also a 2nd new NPC coming with the fishing update (the one with the magic hat). While I can't go into details about it yet, the magic guy is what I would like to call the endgame of fishing and acts as a large fish token sink, to ensure you never run out of places to use fish tokens in!

Fishing Mastery is just like crafting mastery, but for fishers. This is an extremely long and difficult questline that requires you to catch and deliver a specific amount of every fish in the game. Each step gives you fish tokens, and the questline also contains exclusive items not available any other way.

There are also some other things planned for fishing, but I doubt they will be released in the same update as the other stuff, just so I can get the update out a little bit faster. Sorry about the massive delays!

Music Notes

Music notes are new craftable background items you can place in your world. And you guessed it: they play music. Well, they play notes, and you must build the song yourself. They work very similarly to how it is made in other games of this genre. The system launches with three instruments: piano, bass & drums. Every world is split into horizontal strips, each 15 rows tall, starting from the top left of the world. Each strip is kinda like one line in the song reading left to right.

Notes play different sounds depending on the height you place them inside the strip: higher pitch notes are placed higher and lower pitch notes are placed lower. You can adjust the rhythm of the song by how close the notes are together horizontally. You can also adjust the world's BPM (beats per minute) from the world controller's settings. Setting it to 0 will disable music notes in that world.

New Weather Machines

Two new weather machines are coming with the next update. Both have special functions and aren't just a static background. In the other machine, you can select an item and make it rain in the background. The gravity and background colors can be adjusted. The second machine fills your world's background with a background tile of your choice.

New Player Model

As a part of finalizing the graphics rework, I decided to redraw the player model one last time. All clothes will also be redrawn to fit this player. Especially the hairs look much better than before. Say goodbye to half of the hair items looking ugly!

SERVERS 2.0

I've put a large amount of time into improving the server's performance as much as possible. The changes I've been making are so significant that I like to call this new version 2.0, because it truly revolutionizes the performance! There have been significant performance optimizations all around the server, and the biggest bottlenecks are now fixed, meaning the server is much more performant. While I can't go into the technical details, I can assure you that the servers are now designed to handle thousands of players.

What's really exciting is that the servers now support multi-server architecture. This means that instead of having one big server, it can now be split into multiple individual servers running in parallel. These are massive architectural changes for the server system. While this system is already functional, it still has a lot of work to do. Pretty much all cross-world functionality (like private messages, alerts, etc.) must be reworked to support this system, because all worlds and players are no longer loaded on the same machine. The system will soon-ish support autoscaling, meaning the server cluster upgrades and downgrades itself depending on how high the usage is. For you players this doesn't change much, except for the fact that the servers theoretically should never be overwhelmed with too many players anymore (but hey, that's just a theory... an EMPIRE THEORY).

Previously, our servers were locked at EU, causing latency for Asian players. This might change now that I can add regional servers to different parts of the world. I plan to launch the server 2.0 with our current EU server, alongside a brand new server located in Singapore. Those of you who are currently playing far from EU but close to Singapore will see a significant reduction in ping. I'm talking about 200ms ping going down to 30ms. The Singapore server is purely experimental, and I will most likely script it to be only open from 8AM to 10PM in Singapore's timezone, and if you were to play outside of that time range, you would be redirected to the EU server. While the Singapore server is purely experimental, I will most likely make it a permanent addition at some point, because it would especially reduce latency in Indonesia, where these kinds of games are known to be popular. (That's right, I see you, Indonesian MMO sandbox lovers!)

Funnily enough, other games of this genre aren't known to bother with multi-regional servers. This would put GE in the lead in terms of smooth gameplay (kinda, I will talk about this more later) especially in the Asian parts of the world. How about American servers, do I have plans for that? Maybe, but not yet. American players already are close enough to our current servers that they can play GE well enough (anything under 150ms ping is good enough). Expanding the servers to Middle-Eastern locations is not possible, and even if it were in the future, it would not be worth it unfortunately.

Let's talk about the theoretical downsides this new system would bring. First off, this is an overall loss to the EU players, because they already live close to the EU server. If some worlds and players were to be moved away to Singapore, this means that EU players entering those worlds would cause the exact lag that Asian players have been dealing with forever. Secondly, in some cases world hopping will be much slower than before. Right now, when you do /warp, the server loads the world from the database, which is installed on the same machine as the server, making the database work almost instant. However, if an Asian server requested data for a world, it would need to load it all the way from Europe. This isn't a massive deal and world loading would be at worst just 250ms slower. However, for an EU server player to enter a world loaded in Singapore, that would require the player to switch the entire server. This swap takes about a few seconds, so in the worst case, the wait to enter a world would increase by a few seconds from what it's now.

Constant server hopping is annoying, and ping jumping up and down depending on the world you enter is annoying as well. This is why I've planned that the server you're in would mostly recommend you worlds that are on the same server. I could also create regional LOUNGE worlds. That way every region has a lag-free hub world. These changes would also unfortunately cause a soft split in the playerbase, and you would see fewer players from other regions and more players from regions close to you (assuming that people obviously prefer to play with the lowest ping and smoothest gameplay). Of course everyone can still visit any world and chat with any players, but this kind of system would ensure that server hopping is as minimal as possible!

When is this all coming out?

Honestly, I don't know yet. The purpose of this blog post was to show that while things seem quieter than usual in game, it doesn't mean that I am not working on the game. It's actually the opposite: I've been working harder than ever behind the scenes doing major changes. I will not promise any release dates yet, because I straight up can't predict when any of this is coming out. It's coming out when it's ready, and I can assure you we are making progress towards the update release every day. Multi-server architecture, complete redesign of the character and clothing items, major fishing update, skills... These things are all exciting, but they require a long development time as they are all big updates. (The music note system is actually ready already; I just simply can't deploy it on its own easily, so it's merged into coming with the other stuff, unfortunately.)

I appreciate everyone's faith and trust in GE. Now I return back to work. I hope to give more updates soon!