Hail!

A fairly large patch was recently applied to Meridian, the 3rd one in the span of a year.

The contributors, many new, worked hard to put this together. I’m excited to share these notes to help shed light on what was updated.

Thank you all for being a part of Meridian 59, your passionate support and continued interest has helped keep it alive for 25+ years now!

This marks the first time since the 90’s that we’ve had this number of active contributors (4+ programmers!) help and work together to further develop our beloved M59.

October 2023 Update: Release Notes

Client Updates and Quality of Life improvements

• There’s now a VOLUME SLIDER FOR AMBIENT SOUNDS in the preferences menu - this allows players to independently adjust the volume of the various ambient sounds in the game. In particular, this should make building outside the guard house on the island less noisy.

• CHESTS and storage boxes are hidden throughout Meridian and many guild halls have huge storage chests. Players can now withdraw a SELECTED AMOUNT of any item from these chests while leaving the rest for later use.

• In addition, a SHELF was added to the chests for food and reagents in order to encourage a well organized collection of items!

• Now when you look inside your storage boxes you will notice the food and reagents appear at the top of the list of items while armor and weapons appear in the depths below.

• Pants, shirts, and skirts no longer break through normal use. They should last as long as the wearer desires the outfit. This was done to encourage players to customize their appearance as much as possible and removes the need to repair or rebuy articles of clothing every few weeks.

• SOLOMON, who operates Solomon’s Edibles in Cor Noth, will now buy reagents and foodstuffs from adventurers.

• After SYSTEM SAVES the player’s most recently used stat group is restored - if you were using your inventory prior to the system save the inventory should now be active after the system save (before, it defaulted to your spell tab)

• FONT COLORS; Dark green, orange, and pink text can now be used by players in their text communications with each other.

• The LATENCY WINDOW now updates a player’s current latency in real time with updates occuring once per second. There is also now an option to turn on the old-style spinning latency cube in the preferences menu.

• The system MESSAGE to a player accidentally trying to attack themself has been changed from: “You can’t see your selected target.” to “You can’t attack yourself.”

• Piles of dropped LOOT are now correctly rendered by the client: each item is given an apparent depth away from the player - this resolves items flickering and disappearing from view when fighting numerous monsters in a single room.

• Edges of objects in the game used to automatically blend towards the background of a room - this resulted in the appearance of a white outline around objects, particularly noticeable in areas with a lot of trees. Now, the apparent outline is removed, enhancing the appearance of the art with the world around it.

• Meridian’s MOON now goes through PHASES of WAXING and WANING. The passage of time in a meridian year can now also be marked by changing sunspot activity on the SOLSTICEs.

Updates to rentable rooms:

• Added a new command, “change lock”, which allows you to destroy all existing copies of your room key - no matter where the keys are stored or in whose possession.

• Added additional information to the room key descriptions, allowing you to check the remaining time and how many copies of your room key (if any) are in circulation.

• Innkeepers will no longer daily spam your mailbox with updates on the time you have paid out towards rent. Instead, they’ll send a tell when you log in to remind you when your room rental is close to expiring.

Spell/Skill/Item Changes:

• Jala’s spell Restorate has been reworked to have more of an effect on players with high vigor. Previously, Restorate had no effect on players with vigor above 160. Restorate now increases your rate of hit point regeneration at all vigor values. The size of the effect and the slope of the effect relative to the singer’s spell power has been adjusted to maintain a healthy balance.

• The Chalice of the Rain shows how many sips remain in its description. It’ll also give new message feedback to the user when dropped in a room where it can be refilled.

• Spell wands and magic rings track durability in their description similar to weapons and armor.

• Freshly dropped disciple robes will appear in a color signifying their dedicated school, instead of all of them dropping and appearing as blue. These robes return to this default color when unequipped. This improves identification of robes in piles of loot and in storage boxes.

• Riija’s Blink spell has a new success message after the completion of the intensive focus required to cast the spell.

• The appearance of some food items have been adjusted to differentiate the various edibles that have similar appearances.

Bug Fixes and Improvements:

• Node Attacks: Xeo’chicatl invasions have been fixed: specifically the bug in their timer that was allowing for multiple back-to-back attacks. With their controls working as intended, expect to see more invasions from the Xeos to challenge everyone and steal your mana nodes - and more chances to get valuable heartstones.

• Removed graphic resource distortion - the large, distracting black boxes - that appeared when a user had two or more clients open.

• Arrows fired from bows (in the hardware rendered graphics, on by default) now appear correctly and will project from the center of the bow, instead of from the players head (this affects 1st and 3rd person view)

• PvPers take note: Fixed an incorrectly applied spellpower modifier that was intended to vary spellpower and casting when using all long-range weapons. (All equip-able items have a spellpower modifier - weapons and armor generally reduce spellpower…) This fix affects each bow in their own specific way: common Practice Bow, Battle Bow and Long Bow; rare Nerudite & Magic Bows.

• Fixed a bug with disarm that allowed players to disarm and knock to the ground an opponent’s bonded weapon, or to disarm an event character or DM (you don’t drop a bonded item on death, and a bonded weapon is supposed to only be droppable manually owner). The disarm skill will still stun and cause the weapon to unequip from an opponents grasp.

• Fixed the bug causing brand new weapons (mace and short sword specifically) to appear to have been repaired before.

• Numerous potions and wand bugs resolved:

• Purify potions no longer erroneously fail.

• Removed unintentional Karma Checks on non-distilled potions, reducing the number of times Remove Curse, Cure Poison, and Cure Disease flasks sold by Lady Aftyn fail to have the desired effect.

• Players can no longer consume a spell item when a condition prevents the item from having any effect (example: you can’t drink a remove curse potion if you’re not cursed), saving accidental item waste. This also helps players who drink unidentified potions (dropped by monsters) from wasting stomach space.

• Creating and placing decorative items, art and ornamental objects has been improved for Administrators, as well as the the potent ability to create new custom descriptions. This allows for creative and efficient custom additions to environments, lore, better storytelling and communication with players.

• The F10 keyboard button can now be used as a hotkey when the inventory is active - previously this hotkey only worked when the gameplay area was the active element of the game.

• Fixed a long-standing and major visual bug when recovering from the blind effect, which often resulted in significant display and lighting artifacts that hindered gameplay in intense PvP combat scenarios.

• Closing the client will now immediately end the game music - removing the delay where the music would continue playing after exiting the game.

• Frogmen are now smaller in size.

• Dark Angels were made larger - along with their new audio effects and loot table, they’re now ‘complete’.

• The Chess Boards were updated to show the side you’re playing as facing the direction you’re in (patched by Zaphod himself!)

Behind the scenes game improvements:

• Numerous improvements made to the game engine and hardware rendering for its graphics - though subtle or invisible to players, they’ll improve overall game maintenance.

• Code cleaned up with the removal of a chunk of unnecessary duplicated entries.

• Numerous typos fixed in the dialogue and descriptions of the Brax Arena Watcher, Goad.

In addition to Zaphod’s hard work and Mayhem’s ongoing support, this release included contributions from Si, Aesica, Reborn Hero, Toko, Hektic, Grok, Essun and Gar.

Thank you to everyone who worked on this most recent patch and the previous two this year!

I’m personally enjoying feeling out all the improvements, especially the polished gameplay, graphics and QoL updates for players and those of us maintaining servers or creating content.

A special thanks to Zaphod for his steady guidance, time, patience and for creating Meridian 59 in the first place, then releasing its code to allow for all of these great updates from fans.

A lot was learned. The work has already begun for the next patch…

We hope you all continue to have fun playing here and calling Meridian your home.

May you suddenly feel a little tougher ~