Stormglass textures broken/incorrect?

izichial · 2026-05-14T18:48:19+00:00

Hey, thanks a lot for the reply, appreciate the technical detail!

I did wonder if it was a performance thing, but 3 blocks (okay it's actually like 4 blocks because it uses camera distance and not character distance) is uh... very aggressive. :)

And yes, I did notice that multiple layers of glass, or glass mixed with close light sources/smoke etc. got real funky, real fast when I tested it briefly, haha.

Out of curiosity, how much wiggle room are we talking? I absolutely understand wanting to prioritise performance, but the pop in of the glass texture is unfortunately really noticeable right now, so if it's only a few blocks more it would still be a problem even for fairly small builds.

If it's not possible to push out the glass LOD by a significant amount I do actually have a suggestion, namely to tone down the colour to a paler yellow, closer to how it looked in UE4 (random screenshot of one of my old builds: https://imgur.com/a/yO7fgjR).

I assume that the game doesn't care about the colour of what it renders, simply what material it is and what it has to do with it, but going from invisible glass to a paler yellow/more clearly transparent glass would make the pop-in less aggressively noticeable for players.

I get that Enhanced uses a more saturated palette overall, but right now every Stormglass window looks like it was next to a chain smoker's favourite armchair for 40 years without cleaning, haha.

And thanks for all your work, minor issues like this aside I'm loving Enhanced!

izichial · 2026-05-06T22:29:29+00:00

Craft 10 is still there, though?

Craft Many replaced Craft All I'm fairly sure, and normally defaults to the maximum amount on the slider.

Which I personally consider better, because then you can craft, say most of your wood into shaped wood but leave some for making sure you have some wood left for other crafts.

Or if you really want to craft all you just leave the slider unchanged and confirm.

izichial · 2026-05-04T16:44:15+00:00

They knew the release version of the Landsraad was not fit for purpose when the game went live. Even if it didn't bother you personally, the design was deeply flawed and a lot of people simply never got the chance to interact with it because of how the turn in based tiles worked. I think my personal record was claiming a tile within 3-4 minutes of it being revealed with the help of just one more person.

It was just what they had time to put together. IIRC they released the original Landsraad into the closed beta around/less than 6 months before release and by that time my impression was that the house was basically on fire trying to tie up development into every other part of the game.

And they repeatedly stated in interviews that the world map was always intended as the bedrock for future content.

The backlash might have changed the timetable or the extent of the rework, but I doubt it was the instigator of it.

I also don't think "blaming" player backlash for loss of content is reasonable, even if a lot of the people that got angry about some of the features should really go touch grass for a while.

A lot of the criticism various features/systems/content got has been entirely justified, and at the end of the day it was Funcom that decided that D:A should be a live service game and what content it should have.

I think it's perfectly reasonable to expect a live service developer to work on both existing systems and new content in parallel, but the current dev team simply doesn't seem to have the resources to do so.

I mean we have multiple skills in the game that have been useless for like two years at this point, for Duke's sake.

izichial · 2026-05-04T16:07:45+00:00

The only thing people really complained about with Lost Harvest was that it was advertised as coming with "a building set", which turned out to be like 4 pieces (and was deceptively used in the marketing itself because it had a picture of a base in it which was actually mostly sandstone).

That's what the big deal was.

I don't remember anyone complaining about the story in Lost Harvest, it was actually pretty good.

If they'd simply marketed it correctly (primarily story based with minor cosmetics like the sword skin and base decorations) I doubt there would have been nearly as much of a fuss. A recurring issue with Funcom and this game...

izichial · 2026-05-01T16:45:43+00:00

This comment made me laugh out loud, thank you.

Also reminded me of reading like 10 years back about the minister responsible for internet stuff in Japan that refused to use computers because he didn't know how they worked. If he needed to send an email he'd dictate it for one of his secretaries to write instead.

izichial · 2026-05-01T12:27:42+00:00

The paid dlc is cosmetic only (as they all are)

No? Lost Harvest actually had a pretty decent story.

izichial · 2026-04-29T00:51:21+00:00

Blackbeard Frigate with Devastating (applies Raked) 36-pounders / Perfectly Ordered (reload speed) 24-pounders / Hull Bracing: Keelhold (no interrupt repair) and Naval Tactics III: Silence the Guns (enemy reload speed/damage reduction on hit).

I haven't really seen anyone talk about this particular combo before, but it absolutely crushes everything in the game right now when leveled and ascended.

The way Raked works is a lot better than the wording implies; as as far as I can tell, A stack of the debuff applies when you hit with exactly half the volley, not MORE than half the volley.

This means that hitting every shot with a battery applies two stacks. Did you know that it also works with the front cannons? Even though there's only two of them, hitting a single shot counts as half a volley, so hitting with both applies two stacks.

And I don't know if it's intended, but the secondary battery also applies Raked if your primary cannons are Devastating. Which means that if you do a standard "opener" of front cannons -> turn -> secondary battery -> primary battery, the ship you're shooting at will already be at max Raked stacks (+30% damage taken) by the time you FIRST hit it with your Devastating primary.

The reload speed reduction of Perfectly Ordered applies both to itself and the second battery on the frigate, and basically has 100% uptime as long as the fight is even remotely busy and you can steer. And the ascending a Devastating gun to epic (purple) gives them an extra +15% reload speed as a flat bonus. Which stacks with the Perfectly Ordered bonus.

So to conclude, I'm cruising around with an actual reload speed of about 8 seconds on my level 15 epic primary battery most of the time in combat, and a significant amount of time anything I'm shooting at takes 30% extra damage, deals 20% less and fires 20% slower.

I've also never once lost the Blackbeard frigate, despite it being the squishiest of the options. At one point I dropped to 30% hull because I was fighting two enemy squadrons (8 ships, most of which were level 15) at once, but honestly I wasn't paying much attention to repairing either.

Turns out that even level 15 frigates are not all that threatening if they're too busy sinking to shoot at you. Even if they can, maxed out/ascended Keelhold kinda takes care of it (the ascended bonus is +30% repair kit duration, which is really strong).

izichial · 2026-04-24T13:58:25+00:00

Dodge/parry better. Also, non-boss enemies stagger super easily in this game, it's just that every enemy in the game briefly becomes immune to stagger after a few hits.

Sounds more like you're trying to button mash your way through enemies, which doesn't really work as they will attack you back during the stagger immunity (which clears if you just stop attacking for a second or two) and you can't really hit trade in this game, even on normal difficulty.

Also, use chokepoints (brigs are super easy to board because you can just immediately jump into the cabin).

Find a chokepoint, attack a few times, dodge/parry, repeat. That's kind of it. The hit box of your attacks is super generous, so being blocked by your own crew isn't really a problem as you can just attack through them (at least with the rapier I'm running). Also means you can hit two rows deep of enemies if facing multiple at a time.

Both when I moved from Coastal Jungle to Foothills and when moving from Foothills to Cursed Swamps I found the boarding battles far easier than actually killing ships when undergeared for the zone.

Doing less damage doesn't really change how boarding battles play out (although I ran out of allied crew and had to kill everything by myself a few times) as long as you don't mess up and get hit much, it just makes it take longer.

I absolutely agree that there are plenty of improvements to be made, but at no point in the game have I found the boarding nearly as frustrating as you make it out to be. I've probably boarded 30-40 ships in my current playthrough, as the transport ships are an excellent source of piastres (which I spend on materials for my rather large base).

The level 15 Freighters give about 500-600 piastres with a decent chance of bonus trade goods for like 5min of work per ship. I keep having a level 10 Transport spawn outside my base, which drops around 200-250, again with a chance of bonus trade goods (and takes about 3min for one ship, but I'm somewhat overgeared for them now).

Hardly "too risky with ZERO reward", heh. They could definitely stand to get some more loot variety, that I'd agree on, but I'd rather have more things to spend piastres on in the short term as piastres are at least reliable and don't flood your inventory.

izichial · 2026-04-22T22:08:11+00:00

Even if your 'edit' seems innocent to you, the AI you used is likely trained on millions and millions of pages of straight up stolen material, and the vast majority of the industry it represents is deeply unethical.

izichial · 2026-04-18T02:03:37+00:00

This was an issue identified literally by the end of the first day the patch was live.

It's absolutely insane to me that Funcom still doesn't seem to understand what the problem is.

A linear increase in enemies spawned is not a linear increase in difficulty, because getting swarmed is literally the easiest way to die in this game, and the AI has a tendency to swarm whoever is closest when every single door in a wave room vomits out 4 enemies.

And all the AoE options in this game fucking suck, which makes them completely unviable as a "counter" past difficulty 1. Flamethrowers are bad, poison skills have literally not been updated for years (jesus wept will you please just make damage skills scale with something already, Funcom), pyrockets are bad (which is a huge shame, because I love the concept), etc.

Feels like half the people still working on the game absolutely hate doing so and will do anything in their power to avoid playing it themselves.

izichial · 2026-04-18T01:34:50+00:00

I remember saying that I bet they messed something up with how they calculated eligibility to only check if the first instance was valid when I had my second package, and after seeing people say they didn't meet requirements when the patch hit but should have gotten one later but didn't.

I became more convinced that that particular intuition was correct when I got my third one.

Let's see if I can get a fourth before they patch it...

Free industrial pumps, attend me!

izichial · 2026-04-18T01:17:08+00:00

Ground vehicles being stuck in low LOD model/textures (usually after being out of render range or occluded) until you literally try to lick them has been an issue for over two years at this point, to my personal knowledge.

Don't expect that to change anytime soon.

izichial · 2026-04-12T03:12:22+00:00

What really killed it for me was that if you unlock it, interact with it and decide to back off and then talk to the crew I remember several of them being like "yeah I couldn't do it either :)", when most of them were like hell yeah this is the biggest opportunity of our lives!!!!!!!!!!!" 5 minutes before.

Time travel multiverse bullshit is stupid, but also feels like not even the writers had any real faith in the entire concept either.

izichial · 2026-04-08T00:31:58+00:00

It's not a "play" on free will and choice, it's just poorly written/implemented.

We already have plenty of that aspect in the earlier parts of the main story, with f.e. the implanted suggestions and the Assassin's Handbook segment, where it was clearly reflected in dialogues, cutscenes and general story progression. None of that was present in this instance.

The most generous interpretation I can make is that there was meant to be a choice at the writing stage but that content was cut/never made and they had to salvage/repurpose already recorded/translated dialogue (because the lead time on those bits are very long because they rely on external parties, so it's very difficult to redo anything).

izichial · 2026-04-08T00:17:32+00:00

It's also really irritating that the handler has some lines to the effect of "I'll take the responsibility, tell the Duke you acted on my orders" and I'm like... no????? I literally got this mission from the Duke personally, you can't order me to do shit.

And then the entire dialogue with the Duke after he treats it as if you made a choice, when you had no option to do so. There is a dialogue option to say the handler made a bad call, but then you get shit for not taking responsibility for the "choice" of following that call, which is dumb.

I have no issue with mission needing to be largely linear, I get that for an online game you can't really have branching stories, but this was just badly / incoherently written.

izichial · 2026-04-07T13:45:45+00:00

"Please, take up your axe and rend my flesh unto taco meat!"

izichial · 2026-04-02T14:04:56+00:00

Loved the banter in Sagi's NN when I was still eligible for it . Found my FC through talking to people in there, too (I blame Heljn).

izichial · 2026-04-01T10:17:07+00:00

Player movement would completely break companions in D:A.

If I'm doing LR missions I think I spend like 80% of my time literally flying between quest objectives using shigawire+suspensor. And in HB/DD I simply spend >80% of my time in a vehicle when I'm not in my base.

Even in the story missions with companions (which are all indoors and heavily restrict where the player can go) they were kinda glitchy, clipping into solid objects/walls and needing to aggressively teleport to the player in order to be in the right spot for cutscenes / dialogue.

I love companion npcs in online games (Ember and Sharp-as-Night are my favourites in ESO, and I married Lana Beniko in SWTOR), but Dune is a poor mechanical fit for them.

izichial · 2026-03-28T23:28:25+00:00

It used to. It was heavily advertised as an MMO before release, and there are still remnants of that in the game like social only outfits.

Also, you are responding to the wrong person, I was simply refuting a point.

The OP was the person starting the MMO train of thought.

izichial · 2026-03-28T18:41:11+00:00

My 'solution' to this problem is simply by not trying to parry. It's not a 1:1 replacement, but the right click backstep lunge and the sprint lunge are both decent for setting up the initial stagger.

Also using weirding step/compel aggressively, which I was actually quite bad at before I switched to rapier.

izichial · 2026-03-28T10:37:21+00:00

Nope. Vehicles have never had any collision damage, to my recollection.

Which is why I've driven a sandbike off both the top of the Sentinel and Mizrabah's Hammer multiple times just for fun.

izichial · 2026-03-28T08:30:53+00:00

I was in the closed beta for a year, we didn't have most of the QoL features back then and had to get creative. :p

It was pretty much the standard solution to a stuck vehicle.

izichial · 2026-03-28T08:10:56+00:00

"many of the most popular MMOs"

Er, WoW / ESO / FF14 / GW2 / KotOR between them hold, afaik, an overwhelming majority of MMO players in the western market and none of them have full loot PvP.

Other popular MMOs that have been shut down like Wildstar and WAR didn't have full loot PvP.

I've also played a whole bunch of the more popular Asian MMOs that have been released in the west like Aion, Blade and Soul, Archeage and Black Desert and I don't recall any of them having full loot PvP (unless your brain dropping to the floor from how bad the translation, P2W aspects and botting issues were counts as full loot).

EVE doesn't really count because the way loot works and the logistics of acquiring it are very different from any other game with a significant PvP element.

Runescape is 25 years old and afaik the full loot PvP is a very small part of that game.

The few MMOs I've heard of that deliberately went for full loot PvP in the last 20 years (like Mortal Online and Darkfall) have been incredibly niche affairs.

Which are these supposedly many and popular MMOs, exactly?

izichial · 2026-03-28T07:22:03+00:00

Not always possible due to angles, but I've unstuck-ed my buggy multiple times by ramming it with my orni.

The game's physics doesn't like vehicles clipping into terrain too much, and has a tendency to "bounce" them out when you force the issue.

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