Look! Up in the Sky!

The Heavens have been updated so all our heavenly bodies work even better than before.

In a few minutes I’ll be releasing several major updates to the Heavens and planets specifically. What you should expect to see are as follows:

1) The way observing planets works was entirely redone. Before there was a system that tracked their orbits that was used for the mana system and then some voodoo happened and that was output to the system used for Observe (as well as Study and Stellar Magic spells). I don’t know what was going on with that math but it was… wrong.

These systems are now directly driven by the existing mana system. What this means is that planets will now act much more like a moon (Being above the horizon roughly half the time) than seasonal constellations as far as when they can be observed. Further I’ve removed the day/night restriction from all planets (See http://sky.velp.info/planets.php?PHPSESSID=obmuriacb006c7lnfu9hf0lfo5 if this sounds crazy to you), and a number of planets no longer need a telescope to be viewed (Though a telescope will still certainly aid your observations).

2) All Heavenly bodies have had their prophetic potentials updated. This was done to give a better spread across seasons, levels and generally more reason to think about what you’re observing instead of falling back on the same small handful of heavenly bodies. In general the more elusive the heavenly body is, the more prophetic potential it has. This will make more sense if you remember that Recall Heavens is a thing now.

3) Corrected a minor math error that was causing stars to set slightly too soon. They’ll continue to rise as always but won’t set for an additional dozen or so days.

4) Numerous typo fixes and minor text updates to celestial bodies.

5) Assorted technical clean up that should mostly be invisible, though the round time calculations have been redone to use astrology instead of level and I believe all of the obscenely long round times should no longer be possible.

Thanks to Abasha and Evike for the bulk of the QCs and Melete for not running screaming when shown the math she’d need to QC for the planets.

PLEASE NOTE These are, for the most part, bug fixes and redesigns of flaws in the system and in game events do not and will not reflect these changes because in character, nothing changed. Normally I wouldn’t make a point about this, but there are ongoing events that tie into the heavens and I want to do my best to avoid confusing that story line with these updates since they’re unrelated. Apologies for the unfortunate timing.

-Raesh

“Ever notice that B.A.’s flavor text swells in direct proportion to how much one of our characters is getting screwed?” – Brian Van Hoose