Ueda

The duration each message shows in Chat Bubbles depends on it's length Short chat messages like "Oh" have short Chat Bubble times compared to long chat messages now. Transformation Technique now lasts infinite duration, but breaks when you are attacked or attack. Transformation Technique no longer works as a substitution technique. Transformation Technique cast time reduced to 4 seconds. Transformation Technique cooldown reduced to 40 seconds.

Wolf is off today, but I'm working the weekend because I'm going to be away for 2 weeks for military reserve training starting Monday... so I want to leave some goodies before I go. Chat Bubble & Emoticon Improvements Chat Bubbles, Emoticons and Names never overlap anymore. Eg. If the name is being rendered, it will push the chat bubble and emoticon up. Chat Bubbles are colored if you are a Gold Ninja or higher rank! GMs and Admins get bigger text so we can stand out during events. Map Item Improvements Fancy new animation when items are dropped! Hold CTRL to reveal item names, also helps to locate items behind walls/trees etc. Fixed something to do with lighting indoors... again.

Collecting Titles When you get a title now, it'll save in your title manager panel (accessible through Ninja/Character window). Added a way to get back "Hero of the Toad" and "Beast Slayer" titles, just revisit those NPCs. Also, added "None." option that allows you to turn off your title to display. (Admin only) New map list panel for GMs & admins Neatly lists active instances and normal maps separately & built in new UI system. No more winforms. Fix for point light minimum intensity being too bright in day time (This should be the last problem with the lighting engine) Adjusted clone names to match players (Hopefully we can add clones back in soon) Removed hardcoding of Cloak of Invisibility breaking on next hit. Now shares a universal "NextHit" property in our editors. We can add NextHit to any kind of buff now.

Added special map mode where maps can be set to always Day or Always Night. Useful in special cases. For example, for Chunin Exam arenas, we don't want them to be night time in the arena map as it'll be too dark for spectating and in videos. Players transformed into objects are no longer targeted by target key or clicking Can use transformation into objects to really hide. Right-click menu still works, otherwise players can transform into objects to avoid getting reported. Players and NPCs target boxes expanded to include their heads (Before & After) Will still prioritize the player standing on the hovered tile so that people can't be blocked. Display Player Title over name Show off your titles or turn them off when you want with the new title manager (as of next server update) Different titles come in different colors! Also increased name size on hover and target. Transformation Technique cast time increased from 2s -> 5s Transformation Technique cooldown increased from 30s -> 60s Transformation Technique Experimental Change Transformation technique now works as a substitution when the player is hit. It teleports the user behind the attacker but also reveals his true identity. (Admin Only) Fixed event references being wrong when an event is deleted. This is the reason why so often there are NPCs with the wrong names in the dialogue boxes. Hotfix for bug where when you tried to trade a player, sometimes it would say you can't because they had a pending team invite. Fixed Critical Damage still being 1.5x towards mobs and in some cases. Fixed events/npcs giving Titles but removing previous ones. We'll add a way for players to collect the ones they deserve in-game soon. (Hopefully) Fixed the bug where some players were getting negative buff durations that lasted forever. Eg. Infinite Battle Injuries (Hopefully) Fixed missing furniture bug Fixed error cause lights in day time to be too bright in last few versions Fixed title menu error when no titles available

Dear Ninja, We've recently cracked down on a syndicate of cheaters who exploited a vulnerability in the game to cause irreversible damage to the game's economy. However, with the help of vigilant players and @Erox, we've managed to reverse the bulk of the damage caused. This involved millions of ryo of cheating, and 65 banned accounts. Some extremely imbalanced trades, items selling way above market prices have also been reversed. So if you notice Ryo has disappeared from your account. Don't panic, you'll see that the items you sold have been added to your account. More of such reversals may happen in the coming days. If you are involved directly in cheating, you may come forward with information on other cheaters or exploits in return for lenient punishments. We will also accept appeals, but for the most part, these 65 accounts have too much damning evidence to consider reversing them. Regards, Ueda

I may not reply to every suggestion post. But I'm not sleeping. We have years of backlog of features and ideas to implement. We finished this today. Tada. First suggested in 2013.

Wolf came back after all, so we worked on some stuff together! We got more done, but those require server restart, so we'll do it tomorrow. Title Selection A long and much requested feature, the ability to choose between different titles you've earned or been assigned. They also display a description when selecting them! (I'm still thinking of them) Added Mouse Scroll Wheel functionality to New GUI system windows like Corp Panel and Housing Panel. Typing in New GUI System input boxes should ignore other input now. Fixed visual error with minimum light intensity for Rect lights. Improved visuals for Blood Tonfa, shines brighter red now.

It's still just me today. Wolf's having more health & family health issues and will be back soon. Lighting System now works indoors too We can add lights to stuff like the candles in Abandoned Lair, lamps etc. Maybe for furniture in the future as well. Camera focus in dialogue Camera moves to focus on Events/NPCs you are in conversation with. Rebalancing of Critical Damage Reduced Critical Damage from 1.5x to 1.25x This applies to both NPCs and Players. No changes to critical chance. I don't think this needs too much explaining, but it never felt good to randomly get so much damage in caused by randomness. It's important that when you take a large chunk of damage from both NPCs and players, it feels deserved. While we still want some element of randomness, 1.5x is too much and in some cases with bosses would mean the difference between getting 1-shot to death. Fixed Ghost Hits on weapons caused by AGI Stat Self-explanatory, hits that weren't registering would happen for weapon users with higher than normal Agility stat. Fixed Visual Events/NPCs bug where they moved when you entered the map Visually, NPCs would appear to move 1 tile, most commonly downwards, the first second you entered the map. Fixed Events/NPCs bug where each dialogue you clicked would technically exit you from the event. This was mostly a system level error, but could have caused other issues. Slowed down pulsing God Ray effect It was a little too fast.

Glowing God Rays Effect Note: This is not actual speed, this is x10 the actual speed of the effect. Subtle effect, previously static god rays from the sky now fade in and out and move a little each time to simulate clouds moving in the sky. Improved Clarity of Night Effect As much as we like the idea of vision being obscured at night, we hear you. We reduced the darkness and fogginess of night. (Hopefully) Fixed a common crash that has been happening over the past few days linked to Corp Chat. Side note Also, the pace of updates the past few 2 days have been slower due to Wolf being ill. So it's just been me fixing stuff I can. Hopefully he'll be back soon! (Probably tomorrow)

Fixed adding friends Give error message when trying to equip item when you are not in the right corporation Locked Pushballs to only be usable on Pushball map Fixed manually resizing game window / screen size causing weird graphical glitch (holes between tiles) Improved lighting color at dawn Added lighting minimum opacity for lights that can be visible in day time Server now restarts monthly instead of weekly We've been reviewing server performance over time with new metrics, we've fixed all issues as far as we can tell causing any decline in performance over time. Weekly automated restarts are no longer necessary. Our next goal is to review the performance over a month (however, we manually restart the server way too often because we push updates almost daily) Fixed dynamic shadows being off when login even when set on

https://www.ninonline.org/forum/troubleshoot/#Flush+DNS

New Dynamic Shadow System An advanced 2D shadow system that works together with our Advanced Lighting System to create cool subtractive rendered shadows. Added options for Advanced Lighting System & Dynamic Shadows While it may be tempting to stick to what you are used to, and while it may have some performance impact. We have optimized our advanced lighting system (not so much the dynamic shadows yet) to the point where most computers should be able to run it with very little performance impact. Generally, if your client is already running at hundreds of FPS, eg. 500fps, and you have a 144hz monitor, you get the same experience playing at 144fps or 500fps. So even if it feels good to reduce effects to get arbitrary numbers above your monitor's refresh rate, I highly advise against it. Enjoy the improved visual fidelity! Optimized Lighting System with Sparse Quadtree Grid Should see up to 20% more FPS on lighting heavy maps. We generate something known as a Sparse Quadtree Grid to optimize what needs to be rendered by the game. Basically, this very simple automatically generated grid contains the information the engine needs to tell what lighting effects it needs to render and what it doesn't. Super advanced coding magic by @TheWolf Increased Max Lighting Size for Spotlights in our Advanced Lighting System Fixed Samurai Hairstyle visual glitches Fixed Sound Issue that started in latest versions (regression) Fixed Transformation Technique (regression) Improved Day/Night Clock Would show PM at 12AM, this is fixed. Improved Day/Night Overlays Longer days, shorter dawn and dusks. Improved light intensity at dawn Glowing/Pulsing/Flickering Lights now pulse at different timings

Time/Day/Night related changes Game time now takes place over the span of 24 in-game hours. Previously the game's clock would go from 0-12 and then restart. This was a little weird. The game's world now has 24 hours, but moves 4 times as fast as real hours. Meaning 6 hours per day cycle. This should help players who play short periods of time a day at fixed time being subject to only ever seeing one time of day. Added clock at the bottom right of the HUD. We intend to next, sync the time system with the server's time and set raids and world events to happen at fixed in-game world time. For example, raids might happen every (game) day at 12pm. In the future with automated tournaments and such, we could make it happen every 4pm game time, as another example. This should make things a lot clearer. Fixed day/night sometimes turning black for a moment when GMs adjust time.

We have some planned changes for BI in the future that should help with this to an extent. But this will always be a thing to some extent as well. We can't completely make the player unable to fight, that's too harsh. We also don't want to make the player stuck in the hospital because that's not fun.

We have to re-light some of the maps yeah. Let me or Erox know about these maps and we can fix them right away. We're not adding the old targeting back because we're not going to be able to sustain legacy versions of everything we make at the rate we're making changes. We'll continue to work on this targeting system, look and style more to make it more pleasing. But I hope you understand why we can't be making legacy options for everything people prefer, we can't maintain it.

We'll fix this as soon as we can. It's not that we don't want to. It's just hard. We fixed this when we fixed the timers. If it is still happening to you, help us by making an issue on the issue tracker with a video demonstrating it so we can pin point your issue. This is not a new thing. We haven't changed this since 2013. The only thing we changed is that the client side visual shows the players rotate to what it has always been rotating to. It was a bug that it didn't, and was the reason why sometimes people would be facing down but their jutsu came out to the left/right for example. As long as you play on a resolution where the height is less than 1440p at the moment, you can play without forced zoom. The reason is because we have to draw the line somewhere on how much unfair advantage you can get by having large monitors. Because Nin's maps are largely vertical, we take into consideration vertical height at the moment. We have updates planned for BI, but this might not make it better. There's really not much we can do without severely making the game just extremely punishing when you faint in combat, Glad you see it. More in the works.

New Day/Night Overlays & Lighting System A good example of how our new UI system is helping speed up development. This feature and all the editors were completed by @TheWolf in the last two days. Also, the new Day/Night Overlays are done with shaders and is more optimized than the old day/night system. It's possible that some users may experience good performance gains from the new system. Fixed Item Sell Price being displayed wrongly, improved message Spider eggs would sell for 2 Ryo but when you double-clicked it, it would say "This item will sell for 1 ryo" Now it'll say "Spider eggs sells for 2 ryo" Fixed GPU Utilization being high in Main Menu Forced VSync on main menu to make sure the client isn't trying to render infinite frames on main menu. Fixed furniture rendering [BUG] image over them sometimes

We'll find a way to do something to solve this problem

Baked Player Rendering Player characters and all their paperdolls (Skin, Eyes, Hair, Weapon, Accessory, Shirt, Vest, Pants, Shoes, Buffs) are now baked to a single render texture, should increase performance on maps with large numbers of players drastically. This also allows us to apply shaders to the player character like the outline shader. Look behind feature You can now see your own player, and your vicinity behind walls. You can now see your target and it's vicinity behind walls. Outline targeted players Player targets are now outlined, like mobs have been. When zooming, smooth maps texture Previously when zooming, the map would stay "nearest neighbor" style rendering, which didn't work well with non-integer scaling. This wasn't obvious, but now we smooth it with the same bi-linear filtering we had on the player for non-integer zooms. The transition should be slightly more seamless now when zooming. Corp chat (/c) Type /c <msg> to speak to everyone in your corporation Targeting tracking is now available on any zoom level, not just when zoomed in You can still disable it in settings if you don't like it, meant to help track action. Fixed Corp UI flickering bug

The hair showing was the bug.

Improved pixel art for Swordsman Hairstyle & removed rogue pixels. Fixed corp panel promoting/demoting/removing yourself instead of selected player.

Testing new UI System We've implemented a new immediate mode UI system that Wolf created that we will slowly move all our UI over to. For the time being, it is being used for Corps and Houses. This UI system is highly optimized, once we've completely moved all our UI over to it, it should increase performance (FPS) marginally. There's still some quirks to work out, like typing in the name input box will open other windows and scroll wheel for scrolling isn't working yet. In-game Corps UI (Previously running on WinForm) Updated House UI (Previously running on WolfUI) Added TV functionality for players TVs will only work in Instanced maps (aka. Houses) for the time being. To display any YouTube video on a TV, copy a youtube URL in your clipboard with CTRL+C, then interact with your TV. It will sync the video with other guests ( but not the time stamp at the moment) Added new graphics for Pushball New blue look and logo for Pushballs to differentiate it from Dodgeball. Collecting server performance analytics to MongoDB Moved Blessing Data to MongoDB Players can now report other players while fainted/incapacitated and waiting for revives. (Admin Only) GMs can now mute players with spaces in their names with text command. (Hopefully) Fixed bug where players could not be traded sometimes The error message "This player is busy!" would appear, even though they weren't. Names now appear in error messages that say "Player is not online!" Will instead display "John is not online!". Removed shadows when sitting down They didn't make sense. Removed shadows when lying down This made it look like they were floating above the bed/floor. Improved wing animations for both Angel Wings and Devil Wings based on player feedback They now bob along with the character on all directions. Fixed the following graphical bugs Restored quality of Black Shoes paperdolls, they loss a lot of shading in optimizations a year or two ago Fixed rogue pixels with Black Shoes for female characters while sitting down Fixed Weasel Kit head turning into wolf head in one sprite pose Fixed Anniversary Robe color issues for female characters while sitting down and stunned Fixed Hide Hair functionality on a system level for things like masks that wrap your entire head. Fixed message "Player's level is too high" spacing, grammar and punctuation issue

Fixed bug where invisible walls that cause rubber banding appear on random maps. bug (2).mp4 Logging important server information into cloud, allowing for server info to be accessed by charts and APIs.