A devlog update
Hey everyone! It has been a wild start of the year for Eldria. If you're keen on dev updates.. Buckle up, because a lot happened.
The great monorepo migration
We consolidating everything: six different source code repositories, into a single monorepo. No more juggling multiple versions of code and wondering which version of what talks to which. CI/CD pipelines were migrated and optimized to match. We also bumped all server code to .NET 10 which brought some nice goodies (mainly for me).
It was a few days of "fix CI, fix CI again, fix CI one more time" but we came out the other side with a much cleaner setup.
Doors! Actual doors!
Eldria now has working doors. You can open them, close them, and roofs now hide properly when you're standing in front of a doorway. This may seem trivial but it was a chance to introduce the mechanics which opens the door (pun intended) for other more interactive objects down the line.
NPCs are getting chatty
We added a dedicated NPC dialogue protocol, meaning NPCs can now have proper conversations with players (click to choose options in a dialogue popup). Elder Halward, our friendly starter NPC, now hands out starter weapons and mumbles to himself when you walk by. We also added Hilda the innkeeper as a new NPC. Cursors now change when you hover over monsters and NPCs too. Small thing, but it makes the world feel way more responsive.
Say, whisper, yell
Chat got a facelift. We implemented /say, /whisper, and /yell slash commands. Whispers render in cursive and are translucent, which looks surprisingly nice. Players that are more than one tile away cannot hear you.
Multi-tile objects and huge improvements to the asset editor
Objects can now occupy larger footprints on the map, and we started work on multi-tile collision detection which will make it much easier for us to add larger objects to the environment. The asset editor was very crude and became a huge painpoint for us when we started building the map for the first part of Mirenroot, so we're really happy to have this fixed! It's becoming a genuinely capable world building tool.
Testing and infrastructure
We added the first real end-to-end tests for the Unity client, including a login flow test, which required a pretty significant refactor to make the client testable in the first place. The realm server got database versioning and proper seeding. We also moved our infrastructure from CDK to Terraform, because apparently we like rewriting things.
Rendering and UI polish
A bunch of smaller wins that add up:
- Improved minimap with player marker and made it translucent so it doesn't cover the playable area
- Fixed weird rendering artifacts (black vertical lines that would sometimes mysteriously appear)
- Overhauled the overlay menu, but it honestly still looks too bad to show.
- Tooltips on items, monsters, and NPCs
What's next
The world is starting to feel like... a world. Doors open, NPCs talk, and we have real tools to build content with.
Stay tuned.
