Dev-Blog #68 – Work on Combat, Animations, Latency: Upcoming Patch 0.6.0

Patch 0.6.0

In short: removed all desyncs, removed all lags, completely new combat and netcode.

Greetings, fellow Vikings! It has been a while since we last talked about what’s going on in the studio. It’s time to bring you an update directly from Cologne, and we have exciting news for you! From the first day of early access, we have listened closely to your feedback and added lots of new features to the game. On paper, we now have implemented almost everything we had planned in the beginning. A few weeks ago, we sat down with the team and discussed what parts of the game would need to be worked on in order to improve the game experience as a whole. We decided it would be Valnir Rok’s combat system.

A NEW Combat Design Approach

In the brutal and unforgiving world of Valnir Rok, combat is a core component. Whether you enjoy PvP or a PvE, you will always face your enemies with an axe or sword. It is something that should feel right. So, after a lot of brainstorming sessions we came up with a completely new combat system, that we want to introduce to you in this article.

The new combat system consists of 4 core moves that can be used to counter each other:

• The Base Attack, a wide angled sword-swing that hits targets in front of you.
• The Heavy Attack, a strong attack that needs to be charged and strikes your opponent from the top. It has to be aimed carefully, but causes devastating damage when it hits.
• The Low Block, a blocking move that will only block base attacks.
• The High Block, activated by holding Space when blocking. It will only block heavy attacks.

All of these moves can be executed while standing still or walking around. A big drawback of the old combat system was that your character always took a few steps forward when performing an attack, letting you end up behind your opponent. The new system allows free movement at all times, so you can stand still or move around while attacking or blocking however you like.

New Animations

All these new moves need their own animations. Luckily, Neysha recently joined our team. She is a professional animator and created and fine-tuned over 15 completely new character animations for the new combat system.
The animations are timed precisely and aim to convey as much information as possible so that you as players just know what is happening on screen without even thinking about it.

New Superfast Networking

Neysha isn’t the only new team member. Holger, an experienced Unity Programmer also joined us at the office and is working together with Felix on the game code. In the past, network latency was always a big deal in Valnir Rok. We were always optimizing our systems as much as we could to address lag, desyncs, rubber-banding and other problems. Together with Holger, we’re eliminating these issues once and for all. We developed a brand new netcode that is designed to be as fast as possible from the ground up. The new system transmits information over ten times quicker than the old code, effectively removing any avoidable delays. During our internal tests, we could control our characters perfectly just by looking on other player’s screens, awesome!

A New Game

All these changes combined are literal game changers. It already feels like a new game and we’re not even done! For this reason, we have decided that we should finally increment the version number. This update will be Patch 0.6.0 of Valnir Rok. We’re planning to release it within the next few weeks.

Get Ready for Q&A

Do you have questions about the 0.6.0 Combat Update? Great! Post your questions in the forum thread or in our Discord. We’ll collect them and make a Q&A video where we will answer them in person and maybe tell you a little bit more about the future of Valnir Rok.