Two and a half weeks of development
This is one of our largest development logs so far, covering work completed between August 1 and August 17. Much of this period focused on one fundamental part of the experience: how your character and everyone around you moves.
We also made extensive improvements to combat, talents, interfaces, performance, the launcher, and several everyday systems. Behind the scenes, we started building a new generation of internal tools that will help us create content and resolve problems more efficiently in the future.
A complete rewrite of remote player movement
The largest effort of this period was a complete investigation into how other players move on your screen.
We instrumented two clients simultaneously and captured the exact position and timing data being sent, received, and displayed by both sides. This allowed us to investigate several connected problems, including players sliding or snapping after dodges, jumps landing short before suddenly correcting their position, movement skills appearing to play in place before teleporting, and characters drifting while walking backward.
These problems were caused by several different issues working together. Instead of addressing each symptom separately, we rewrote how the client reconstructs the movement of other players from network data.
Dodges now finish much closer to their correct destination. Remote jumps begin from the proper position, preserve their speed throughout the arc, and transition correctly into their landing animation. Characters no longer continue sliding while frozen in a landing pose, and backward movement no longer causes visible drifting.
Skills that move the character, such as Scamper, are now displayed correctly to nearby players instead of appearing to play in place before suddenly moving the character to the final position.
Combat timing and status effects
The movement investigation also uncovered several problems involving combat timing and status effects.
Knockdown, throw-up, and other crowd-control effects were ending approximately 10% earlier on the server than intended. This created a brief window in which players could act before the effect should have finished. These durations are now enforced consistently.
Hit reactions now apply their intended action lock and can no longer be canceled prematurely. We also corrected situations where skills could occasionally be used through status effects that should have prevented them.
Another issue caused the next skill used by a remote player to fall back to a weaker animation layer after certain movement abilities. This has been corrected.
Talent cooldowns now remain synchronized when a skill is refused or canceled. Previously, the displayed cooldown could become inaccurate and occasionally cause a skill to fail just as the interface indicated that it was ready.
Guard, dodge, and combos
Guarding received several important corrections. When the server refuses a guard because the character lacks stamina or cannot act, the client is now informed immediately. Previously, the character could remain visually locked in a guard pose even though the server had already canceled it. This was the cause of guard appearing to break after receiving several attacks from a boss.
Raising and lowering guard while walking now blends smoothly instead of snapping between animations. The stamina bar also reflects the cost of guarding as soon as guard is raised.
Dodge rolls now end when their animation finishes, removing the additional delay that could leave characters unable to act after they were already standing. Dodge can also no longer cancel a hit reaction incorrectly.
In PvP, the window for chaining one skill into another was shorter than intended. It has been increased to 2 seconds to restore the expected combat flow.
Skill inputs made during a basic attack chain are now queued more reliably instead of being silently ignored. This was especially noticeable when chaining skills after super or upper attacks.
Every weapon type can now follow up correctly after a dodge roll. Previously, this only worked as expected with swords, maces, and bows. Spears, greatswords, greataxes, staffs, and dual-wielded weapons could leave the character unable to act until the roll had completely finished.
Using a potion, eating food, or applying a bandage will no longer be interrupted unexpectedly by an unrelated stance change.
We also corrected visual equipment issues that could hide another player's shield during combat or display a weapon both in the character's hand and on their back at the same time.
Talents, cooldowns, and buffs
We found and corrected a defect that had been silently reducing the damage of 47 different buffs to zero since the middle of May.
This included the final explosion of every elemental gem stacking sequence, commonly recognized by players as the elemental diamonds. If you saw the stacks building correctly but the final hit caused no damage, this was the reason. The final effect now deals damage correctly.
A Sorcerer passive intended to reduce the cooldowns of Flame Pillar and Flame Tornado was being applied in reverse, increasing their cooldowns instead. The effect now works correctly.
We also corrected cooldown displays that consistently showed one second more than the real duration.
The Style Mastery requirement for cross-style skills was incorrectly displayed in red for every character, including those who had already met the requirement. Its status is now displayed correctly.
Purchased gesture items, including the couple dance and New Year bow, are now only offered for the action bar when the character actually owns them. Previously, unavailable gestures could appear as draggable before being rejected with a confusing message.
Another correction prevents the second effect of certain buff types from being silently discarded.
Elemental Solvent
Players who want to remove an elemental enchantment from a weapon without replacing it with another element can now use the Elemental Solvent.
The stone removes the current elemental enchantment and returns the weapon to an unenchanted state. There is no success roll or additional gold cost beyond the stone itself.
Action bar and interface improvements
We corrected two problems affecting the action bar. Placing a skill or item on the second or third action bar page could incorrectly send it to the first page, and increasing a skill's rank could leave the previous rank assigned instead of replacing it with the new one.
Chat messages containing an apostrophe are no longer silently discarded.
The loading screen now displays the name of the destination zone.
Find a Party has been restored. The window previously displayed no available parties, and its entire matching flow was non-functional. Party listings, join requests, accepting players, and leaving the group are now connected from beginning to end.
Friend login notifications now display a complete message instead of showing only the character's name.
Typing in any text field no longer moves your character. This correction applies to chat, Trade Market searches, mail, guild notices, and other text inputs throughout the game.
Ground-targeted skill aiming
Ground-targeted skills such as Meteor and the Cleric's targeted heal can now be aimed properly in every direction.
The targeting reticle could previously become unreachable near the corners of the screen, and aiming felt progressively heavier as the cursor moved farther away. Starting the skill could also force the camera into a fixed angle.
These restrictions have been removed. The reticle now moves consistently throughout the available area, and the camera remains at the angle chosen by the player.
Arena and scheduled events
Arena queue counters were displayed one row away from the buttons they represented, causing each button to show the wrong queue population. The counters are now aligned with the correct activities.
We also corrected an issue that caused the scheduled Capture the Flag event to reject every registration attempt without displaying a response.
Cash Shop previews and prices
The preview button in the Cash Shop now works across all 588 products currently available.
Players can preview armor, weapons, bundles, and lucky box contents. When a box can contain multiple costumes, the preview can cycle through every possible appearance.
Bundle discounts are now reflected in the displayed price. The correct discounted amount was already being charged at checkout, but the product page continued to show the original price.
Bank and Trade Market
Premium Bank tabs 2 and 3 can now be unlocked correctly.
Enchanted equipment stored in the Bank now displays its real attributes instead of showing only the item's base statistics.
The Reset Interface option, which previously had no effect, is also working again.
Trade Market searches no longer display items that were never intended to be listed. We also added server-side validation to prevent modified clients from placing untradeable items on the market.
Zone transition performance
Traveling between zones could previously cause freezes lasting more than 400 milliseconds while nearby NPCs left range and were completely destroyed by the client.
NPCs that leave range are now placed into a reusable state instead. If the player returns, they can be restored immediately rather than rebuilt from the beginning. This reduced the transition freeze to a fraction of its previous duration.
Better performance in crowded battles
Particle effects and animation updates can now be processed across multiple CPU cores instead of running sequentially. This provides a noticeable frame rate improvement during crowded battles and scenes with many active effects.
We also corrected a memory leak that caused performance to deteriorate during extended battles involving many NPCs. In severe cases, the game could fall to approximately one frame per second after around 30 minutes of combat.
A separate memory leak affected clients left near NPCs for long periods. Facial animation data continued accumulating without being released, potentially reducing performance from 250 frames per second to around 30 overnight. This data is now cleared correctly.
A combat-specific lag spike was traced to a targeting reticle check competing with the same resource used for texture streaming. This has been corrected.
Background music is also no longer interrupted by combat sound effects during crowded encounters.
Visual improvements
Self-illuminated equipment, including glowing gems and similar effects, no longer flickers or becomes dark depending on the camera angle.
Environment reflections have been improved and now appear closer to the original game's rendering instead of looking unusually flat or dull.
We corrected a distant wooden fence whose illuminated edges could shimmer instead of appearing stable.
Objects at higher graphics settings now switch to lower detail levels at the intended distance instead of changing too close to the camera.
Trees and foliage received new lighting, distance, and detail improvements to bring their appearance closer to the original engine. This work will continue as we complete the transition away from the old tree-rendering library.
Launcher improvements
Interrupted downloads now retry automatically with progressively longer intervals instead of immediately stopping and relying on a manual retry that could fail again.
Large installations are now downloaded in a smaller number of larger parts instead of hundreds of tiny files. This also makes the progress bar and remaining-time estimate more stable.
We fixed an issue that opened a second blank launcher window when the launcher was already running, along with another issue that could request administrator permission twice during the same launch.
The game no longer requires administrator rights to start. The Play button has been updated accordingly and now launches the game correctly without unnecessary elevation.
We also corrected a launcher crash that could occur when running the game through Wine or Proton on Linux.
New development tools
Behind the scenes, we started building our first generation of dedicated in-house editors.
A standalone effect editor now allows us to create and tune visual effects while seeing the results immediately. We also started a new tree editor as part of replacing the old third-party tree-rendering library, along with the first version of a collision editor for finding and correcting areas with missing wall or floor collision.
These tools are not directly visible to players, but they represent an important investment in the future of the project. They will help us create new content, investigate problems, and correct issues more efficiently as development continues.
What's next
This brings Dev Log #10 up to date with the current state of Client Alpha. The work completed during this period improves movement, combat responsiveness, stability, performance, and many of the systems players interact with every day.
We will continue sharing development updates in batches like this one so everyone can follow the progress of RaiderZ Global without needing to search through technical changes individually.