Sharpen your blades and memorize those spells, the first passes of combat and spellcasting are here. It has been a busy four months since 0.1.5 but we have delivered on our promise to keep development more focused and our release cadence tighter. While many areas of the game are lacking polish and classic accuracy, with the addition of combat and leveling, the core game loop is now structurally complete. We’re very aware of just how much work there is still to do but we plan on continuing to iterate to completion in the coming releases.

While kicnlag and I have continued working together on the engineering front, I really do need to highlight the incredible work he has done, not only in this release or for the client, but for the project in general. Between his additions to the website, deciphering decompiled code, fixing bugs, and driving entire features, he has been a huge asset to this project and is an important part of why we have been able to pick up steam in the past year. Not to mention, he single-handedly added spellcasting, experience handling, and leveling this release.

It’s also important to give a huge shoutout to two Lantern team members who have continued contributing professional-grade art assets to the project.

Modestlaw has continued to assist not only with our Lantern UI needs, but also with his EverQuest upscale project (available for all EQ clients). His ability to track down source images for even the most blurry textures, create stunningly detailed upscales and paint entirely new textures that fit perfectly into the EQ style continues to blow our minds. You can see more of his work here.

Chucktropolis, who has been working in the shadows for the past few years, has unveiled his incredible work on not only generating an entirely custom classic-era zone, Rujarkian Hills, but also his seamless continent rework of Norrath. We will absolutely support these creations inside of Lantern in the coming releases. You can see his continent and custom zone content on his YouTube here.

Thank you also to Torven for helping me try to wrap my head around all of the complex combat logic.

Lastly, thank you to everyone that helped test this release: Landon, Zoidberg, vermadas and Umple.

As with the previous release, we’re going to forgo listing out the dozens of small fixes and features and instead focus on the big ones.

Changes

• Base combat system - Auto-attacking with your primary weapon only. Basic damage and delay formulas. No active skills (e.g. kick, backstab) or passive skills (e.g. dual wield, double attack) have been added. Use hotkey 'T' to toggle auto-attack.
• Base spellcasting system - Spellcasting routine, cast validation, mana and reagent consumption. Spell effect system has been added. The following effect types are supported:
  • True North
  • Identify
  • Infravision
  • Ultravision
  • Telescope
  • HP (heals/damage)
  • Mana
  • Bind Affinity
  • Gate
  • Create Item
  • Shadow Step
  • Change Form
  • Instant HP
  • Portal
  • Combat Portal
  • Height
  • Weather Control
• Experience system - Killing NPCs now gives you EXP. All of this data is exposed in config files so that it can be tuned.
• Leveling - Players can now level up (and down).
• Death - Upon death, players are teleported back to their bind point.
• Character slope orientation - Races like humans will stand upright while spiders orient themselves to the surface normal.

Notes:

• Combat accuracy and damage formulas don’t feel quite right yet. We’re going to continue to work on improving them and expose exactly how the systems work so that we can get feedback and fix issues.
• Zone persistence is not yet implemented; each time you zone or die, a fresh copy of the zone is created.
• Bard songs are not yet supported.

Download

Client downloads for Windows, macOS and Linux are available here.

How To Play

Please refer to our LanternEQ Quickstart Guide.

How You Can Help

• Download and test the build. Let us know what you think!
• Report any bugs on our bug tracker so that we can fix them.
• If you have an idea for a feature or improvement, add them to our feature request tracker.

Next Release - 0.1.7

In the next release, we’re focusing on:

• Combat (formulas, passive skills, configs, documentation)
• Spellcasting (more effects, configs, documentation)
• Skills system
• Guildmaster training
• Health/mana tick
• Dropping items/money

LanternExtractor

Changes

• Add client data copy and sound extraction for LanternEQ client
• Fix duplicate skeleton bone for Highpass Citizen (HHM)

LanternUnityTools

Changes

• Update project to generate LanternEQ 0.1.6 compatible asset bundles.
• Add character slope orientation.
• Fix a number of animation bugs.
• Fix skeleton attach point issues.

LanternEQ Website

Changes

• News section
• Support page
  • Feature requests
  • Known bugs
  • Report a bug
• Versioned commands

See you in the next release!