SnailHunter ADMIN
26 days ago
Thanks Drew — good catch, and it turned out to be a different thing than it looked like.
The painted backdrop on that map — sky, clouds, the lake, the green fields, the distant hills — is actually correct. I pulled the original game's data for Meet the Parents out of the v0.83 client and compared it piece by piece with what we ship: every layer, position, parallax rate and tile spacing matches exactly.
What was broken is the scenery in front of it. Every prop on that map — the log cabin, the palm trees, the bird's nest, the chimney — was being drawn pinned by its top-left corner instead of by its proper anchor point. Because each prop has a different anchor, they all slide by a different amount: the cabin drops about 250 across and 155 down, the big palm tree well over 400, while the nest and chimney barely move at all. That is exactly why those two ended up hanging in mid-air, and why the little heart plaque from the front door was floating next to a tree trunk.
The cause: this map's prop art loads on demand and it is the heaviest on-demand load in the game. When the small file that says where each picture should be anchored had not arrived yet, we drew the pictures anyway, with no anchor, and nothing warned anyone.
Fixed three ways. We no longer draw anything we cannot anchor — it waits, then appears in the right place as soon as the anchor file lands. We added a second, working source for that anchor file (the old backup source was one that refuses to serve this artwork at all). And it now logs loudly if it ever happens again.
Please re-test: walk in, leave and come straight back, then hard-reload the page and return. First visit after a reload is the important one. Same three checks on Amoria town would help too.
The painted backdrop on that map — sky, clouds, the lake, the green fields, the distant hills — is actually correct. I pulled the original game's data for Meet the Parents out of the v0.83 client and compared it piece by piece with what we ship: every layer, position, parallax rate and tile spacing matches exactly.
What was broken is the scenery in front of it. Every prop on that map — the log cabin, the palm trees, the bird's nest, the chimney — was being drawn pinned by its top-left corner instead of by its proper anchor point. Because each prop has a different anchor, they all slide by a different amount: the cabin drops about 250 across and 155 down, the big palm tree well over 400, while the nest and chimney barely move at all. That is exactly why those two ended up hanging in mid-air, and why the little heart plaque from the front door was floating next to a tree trunk.
The cause: this map's prop art loads on demand and it is the heaviest on-demand load in the game. When the small file that says where each picture should be anchored had not arrived yet, we drew the pictures anyway, with no anchor, and nothing warned anyone.
Fixed three ways. We no longer draw anything we cannot anchor — it waits, then appears in the right place as soon as the anchor file lands. We added a second, working source for that anchor file (the old backup source was one that refuses to serve this artwork at all). And it now logs loudly if it ever happens again.
Please re-test: walk in, leave and come straight back, then hard-reload the page and return. First visit after a reload is the important one. Same three checks on Amoria town would help too.