A new location coming in the next content update

Hello, and welcome to DevBlog #92!

In our last DevBlog, we had just returned from the vacation. This time we've got the ball rolling at full speed again!

In this DevBlog I'll be covering the upcoming rework and partial redesign of Job Boards. We also have some content teasers here, and I'm happy to say that this content is releasing next week.

We also have some QoL for the in game world map that'll be releasing soon, fixes to the rollback issue, and ANR (application not responding) news.

It's a lot to cover, so let's dive in!

World Map QoL, content update & more

World map is going to include some icons highlighting what is available at which location

Crushy has also been working on adding some nice icons to show up on the World Map. We intend to release this next week alongside some new content that's been worked on by Weasel & maxchill! Crushy has also worked on a fix to the rollback issues, and we've released an update today that should already fix that for the most part.

We don't have a distinct release date for when this update is going out (but we're quite confident it'll be released next week) and it'll contain both new content & world map QoL. The Job Board rework & redesign is going to be released later.

Myzozoz has been hard at work with trading. But more on that in another dev blog!

Another new location that's coming in the next update

Job Board rework & redesign

This is something I've been working on since I got back from the vacation, and I'm estimating it'll take a couple weeks more until it's ready for release!

This rework and redesign includes a lot of things:

• Jobs will be rerolled once a week instead of every day
• Job boards will offer 20 jobs per board (might still change a bit, and special boards like Herbert's can differ in this regard)
• Jobs will be rolled on the server and will be same for all players in the game
• Jobs UI & in-game logic will be reworked quite a bit, which should help with some ANRs (application-not-responding)
• You will be able to accept jobs even if you're not at the job board's location
• When it comes to crafted items, you can return items of higher quality than what the job requires
• And a bunch of other improvements!

We've been internally talking about reworking the Job Boards for quite some time now. There's been a lot of feedback on this system and it had created some annoying gameplay loops. All of these designs are aiming to address those issues.

Other goals with this rework is to make it much more easy for our content designers to update existing job boards and when making new ones. The current job board system needed a lot of manual work. The new system addresses this, making it much faster for our content designers to focus on other things. And the other thing this addresses is ANRs, as job boards have been causing those (especially on Pixel devices, more on this later).

A first look at the still WIP job boards rework. The UI will still change a bit, and the numbers shown here are definitely not final

ANRs

Application-not-responding (ANRs for short) have been an issue especially on Pixel devices for a long time now. While I've tried to alleviate this issue (and Job Board rework should help it as well once released), we've now decided that once Crushy is finished up with this update and fixing the rollback issue, he'll dedicate the time that's necessary to finally fix the ANR issue for good.

Previously I've done my best to apply small fixes to it, but properly fixing it takes at least 2 or 3 weeks of development time, which I've never found time for as I'm often busy with feature development. To everyone who has been patiently waiting for this issue to get fixed: that will be the next thing Crushy is going to work on and it'll be fixed for good. It'll take some time, but you can rest assured that there's going to be an update that is coming soon-ish that fixes it. The rollback fix that was already released should also alleviate the issue a bit, but it's not a comprehensive fix to the issue.

Until next time

Bugs in Arenum?!

That's all for this DevBlog!

For everyone who've had the ANR issue, I also want to say I'm sorry it's taken so long. Now with an extra developer we finally have the luxury of having someone who can tackle these kind of issues we haven't had the proper time to tackle without it delaying feature development efforts too much.

Happy walking and stay hydrated everyone!