This fork will do the following:.
- Test hard forks of Xaya games
- Update the GSP to allow vehicles to path through other vehicles
- Spawn new starter vehicles in city buildings instead of outside
We’re taking this opportunity to improve gameplay and at the same time test a Xaya game hard fork.
For the game improvements, we’ll be changing the movement mechanics.
In the previous Treasure Hunt, every full game node computed paths that allowed for obstacle avoidance and pathfinding around other vehicles (every 100 hexes of movement). This worked fine, however, it was computationally expensive when having to calculate paths for 1000s of moving units on the map, and this made syncing the game world in fully decentralized mode quite slow.
We solved this so that there actually is no intelligent path finding in the blockchain game logic, instead the user just submits waypoints and a direction. This reduces computation as the front end can just submit more waypoints to avoid vehicles when it submits the path.
Currently, however, the frontend does not automatically take into account other vehicles as obstacles when placing paths although it is invisibly implemented to do so. This is because we need to update the frontend to give the user a choice to avoid or not, as being in combat you may want your units to move to exactly where you say.
By not having this implemented for the user, it has caused an unseen issue which was brought about by a user attempting to exploit the free starter pack to take advantage of the “faucet” that gives each new account 0.3 CHI.
Although he did not receive any significant amount of CHI, he did cause 100s of vehicles to spawn around the starter cities causing new players to think they are stuck when they try to move.
We could enable switching between obstacle avoidance and combat modes in the front end to set waypoints around them, however we believe we have a better solution to this (and we’ll do both):
The new change will allow vehicles to no longer be obstacles, however this will reduce the speed of the vehicle by 80% if occupying the same hex tile.
This reduces most pathing and obstacle issues whilst also keeping the PvP strategy element complex as players still need to consider other vehicles as obstacles.
In addition to this, we will also now change the spawn locations for new units so that they appear inside the starter city buildings (docked), as opposed to a random place outside of it.
This hard fork will activate automatically for anyone using 0.5.3 or later version of the Taurion installer.
Although it is not compulsory to upgrade, you should because if you don’t we will not pay out the prizes for those in the original dimension. Although prizes are won in a decentralised provably fair way, paying them out is not. Therefore in this alpha instance, you must update if you want to claim the prizes at the end of the competition.
If you do not update, you will be playing in a parallel universe where different events may and will occur.
