0.11.3 patch notes and deployment timeline

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Chris wrote:

The 0.11.4 patch contains new versions of some art assets that are smaller. That's why it has to redownload this much. This will help with load times, memory usage, 32 bit crashes related to memory usage and possibly other related problems. There may be other performance improvements in that patch (and certainly in later patches) depending on what's ready when.

Excellent, with the art assets being reduced in size i would hope to see the sharp dips in the fps that people get being alleviated(though some will still have problems with older cards), it was quite clear that after upgrading that the problem wasn't the gfx card or the drivers or how the game ran for the most part, it was just some things took that wee bit to long to load and had a knock on effect to the FPS

1 gig patch sounds like new 3d art for chests!!! *crosses fingers*

What about Ice Nova? We all know it's great for Act 1 Normal, maybe Act 2, but in the end it has FAR lower base dps than literally any other spell apart from Frost Wall.

Ice Nova damage is so bad that (assuming all gems to be level 20) if you had a 16 quality Detonate Dead which somehow didn't deal any of the fire damage off base corpse life, only the flat physical damage, it would still have more base DPS than Ice Nova. Shockwave Totem does 163% of the dps which Ice Nova does. Shock nova, 263% the dps of Ice Nova.

Ice Nova is quite possibly the least usable of all damage-dealing skills in the long term (yes, even considering the large AoE), and hasn't been buffed at all since 0.9.6, about a year and a half ago. What's the deal?

Was there supposed to be uniques in this patch??

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Chris wrote:

The 0.11.4 patch contains new versions of some art assets that are smaller. That's why it has to redownload this much. This will help with load times, memory usage, 32 bit crashes related to memory usage and possibly other related problems. There may be other performance improvements in that patch (and certainly in later patches) depending on what's ready when.

The new chat system in 0.11.3 does not log to your client if you're not in a channel. You only receive messages if you're in chat. This has the advantage of not filling up your client log (and saving bandwidth), while unfortunately meaning that you can't join chat to see messages that you weren't around to witness.

Nice, I like such technical infos, I did some textures and game arts by myself in the past and it was actualy quite funny to make the graphics as small (in filesize) as possible without loosing image quality, thats almost an art I guess. ^^ Feel free to post some before/after pix if you want, I like stuff like that. :)
Will there also be an fix for the various "black area" bugs that I have over the game here and htere? I mean black or much darker tiles in the levels, squares that do not light up etc... it's still pretty commin, especialy in indoor Areas.

Love that you guys are active in improving this game which really encourages me to not be afraid to spend some money on it. SOME game companies go silent for a few weeks then take servers down for a day to come out with an update like "changed price of vendor item" lol, you guys go silent for a little bit and then huge improvements (1gb!) appear in the pipeline. Beautiful, keep it up there's still a lot to improve!

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Chris wrote:

The new chat system in 0.11.3 does not log to your client if you're not in a channel. You only receive messages if you're in chat. This has the advantage of not filling up your client log (and saving bandwidth), while unfortunately meaning that you can't join chat to see messages that you weren't around to witness.

You have no idea how many people have argued tooth and nail that it was already like that with me. Will be a nice change I imagine, only thing I would miss is maybe being able to turn global on to see rip spam that happened while I had global off in a race. That does mean if you don't have global on that it wont send the xo has died at y spot and first to reach level z spam right?

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Chris wrote:

... you can't join chat to see messages that you weren't around to witness.

Some people hide the chat when there is too much loot or effects on the screen but want to continue the conversation after such event. I like the chat changes very much but this huge flaw makes me sad. Better way to do this would be separate "hide" and "join" chat functionality as they are obviously different.
Keep the clientside "hide" please >_<

Hurrah!

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