AOA - Rediscovering the Magic
Hi all! Adrullan Online Adventures is our Unity 6 URP voxel based MMORPG with a custom C# server. We have been developing the game as a team for the past 5 years. Here I'll share some information from our journey.
#Adrullan Online Adventures - Unity Dev Progress Report
ripe sandal
Ambient Audio System
We were originally utilizing Ambient Sounds from Procedural Worlds, but ran into limitations. We developed a fully custom and very powerful Addressable Ambient Audio system.
We have a third party audio system that's very nice for our ambient sound scapes and music. We get a lot of compliments on our early sound and I'm quite proud, but we have discovered that the asset loads all the clips into memory arrays, so we were paying 2x the cost of every sound in the game. We went to their support and been discussing it for over a year, but didn't get much help. Then we dug further and found, oh, no, actually then it makes some buffer and 3x's every sound. Sound is historically the largest asset in a game. One music track is generally the same size as several textures or dozens of 3d models. I've used Addressables in some of my WebGL projects so the game runtime could be very small for quick loading and streaming in the assets and been happy with how the system is maturing. We're now successfully loading our armor and music should be wrapped today via that system. We still have the additional functionality to build out for the ambient sounds to match everything we had with the asset with random placement and timing of sound events (like birds chirping all around you), but we're OK picking at that more over time.
Community Stress Test May 2025
In our May 2025 stress test, we managed to break our ATH with > ~1,300 CCU. Asking everyone to box, we managed close to 2k, and then started spawning BogBots. We hope to continue to increase the number of real players as we believe we are capable of supporting our 4-5k target per server to make the world feel appropriatly populated.
Community Alpha Test 6
We've announced our 6th open test and excited to open the gates and get feedback. The team is crushing content dev and I've been implmeting more animations in Mecanim to flesh out our abilities. Here's a quick breakdown on what the team has been working on. You are also formally invited to check out the test if you are interested. Post questions here after playing and I'll be happy to addrss our technicals.
The time has come to once again set foot in our ever-evolving world! We're thrilled to announce Community Alpha Test 6, opening its gates on Friday, July 11th at 5:00 PM ET (<t:1752267600:f>) and running through Sunday, July 13th at 10:00 PM ET.
🎮 What's New Since Our Last Adventure?
Our team has been hard at work refining and developing the Adrullan experience:
- ⚔️ Balance & Combat Refinements: Difficulty adjustments for more engaging encounters
- 📈 Class Progression Improvements: More satisfying ability spreading as you level
- 📊 Enhanced Mechanics: Stats now have more meaningful mechanical effects
- 💡 UI & Quality of Life: Better tooltips, descriptions, and interface improvements
- 🏘️ Expanded Willowbrook: New content for our Halfling friends
- 🗺️ New Camps & Creatures: Fresh challenges await across the landscape
- ❗New Quests & Secrets: Tasks and hidden secrets continue to spring up across the land
harsh moss
How do you join the discord? it says the invite is invalid
ripe sandal
How do you join the discord? it says the invite is invalid
Hi! Thank you so much for pointing this out. We'll correct our vanity URL. We no longer have the online. Apologies! Thanks again and for your interest!
I'm not allowed to post direct invite. Apologies.
Dunnock Hills - The Halfling Ranger
Ahead of our Community Alpha Test 6, we've just dropped Patch 0.10.18 with tons of enhancements, refinements, and new content. One stretch goal the amazing @Redbeardflynn hinted at in his recent video can now be confirmed. Our tooling and modular design philosophy allowed us to quickly get up and running expanding the roster of Willowbrook!
Introducing Halfling Ranger
Hailing from the Dunnock Hills, these hardy halflings, belonging to the Hillwatcher guild, protect the Eastern front of the Ardent Vale from invasion, and monitor the hamlet of Ehrensdale for any threats. Enemies of the Halflings should beware the many towers of the Hillwatchers, and the settlement they train their rangers from.
Choose this or one of our dozens of Race / Class combos!
You can check out the full 0.10.18 patch notes at https://account.adrullan.online/patchNotes
Dunnock Hills Development
Ranger was a debated Race / Class Combo for Halfling. Some of the team had concerns, mostly surrounding physiology. Warrior however already has access to Archery, and as we continued to flesh out the final Race for the eastern region of Adrullan, we found Ranger options anemic. Ahead of our test, we tasked ourselves with seeing if we could get this new combination in. Though there is still a lot to flesh out, we're thrilled to say we took the area form a depressing blank run from Frostfall Foothills down to The Moorhavens, to a fully realized zone, satellite town, and class starting experience in less than a weeks time. Led by Landon, the chief auteur of Willowbrook, Skeeter, and Riggles jumped in. Leveraging our MineCraft tooling and ever growing modular prop kit, we're thrilled as we know, ultimately, the games success will be a content arms race. I'd be lying if I said we weren't scared, but experiences like this prove we made the right choices for rapid implementation and iteration.
We hope you can check it when you play as Halfling Ranger or another of the dozens of Class / Race combos available July 11th!
ripe sandal
🙏🏻
Good reminder!
So, Hiddentree started poking at the project around 2017 (same time I was kicking off designs for mine, and so was Brad McQuaid). The game started its life usng Unity assets pack assets (all three of us using the same Protofactor ones) and diminished textures for a "boomer shooter" style. The server was custom, but written in Node JS. The game was strictly first person. In 2020, Hidden would move the project to Kronnect's VoxelPlay and converted to a voxel style to allow for more rapid buiulding and content development. It was through Kronnect's showcase's that I discovered the project and joined Hidden. We added Modestlaw, Skeeter, and Stolistic from the Project Lantern EverQuest Client replacement project I contribute to as well. This gave us a powerful art lead who had redone every texture for trilogy EQ in Modest. A powerhouse programmer and server guy whose worked in every language, on firmware, MAME, and more with Stolistic. And with Skeeter a known EQ Emu vet that's ran tons of servers, made tons of content, and knows MMO mechanics inside and out. We continued to build out the team and the world over the next 5 years... as well as our Discord presence.
what's funny - We're still using the Protofactor rigs for the vast majority of our mobs 😛
https://x.com/h1ddentree/status/1317739396016209920
X
🎉 10,000 Discord members strong!
We're incredibly grateful to have each of you with us on this adventure. You've joined at such an exciting time, and we can't wait to share more of our world with you. 💜
Jump into Adrullan together on July 11th for Alpha 6! See you there!
ripe sandal
Hiddentree shared a bit on our custom voxel rendering rendering in our Discord. Chunking, culling, meshing. More to come. https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/804171808231784535/1391578219047813281/image.png?ex=686c67b5&is=686b1635&hm=247eb17680df043060cd4c6246550d8b4e3a3314a54361cf3136789d0fca3606&=&format=webp&quality=lossless
Additionally we had a streamer event and flash test this past weekend. https://youtu.be/NPLszbwRnRU?si=eHaxrlfsYlY0MEWI
ripe sandal
Hey all! We hosted two flash tests ahead of the big one this weekend. Shook out some interesting bugs I'll document more soon on! Check out the Patch Notes. Was a frantic rush with every character butt naked 1 hour before the test 😅
There is a first impressions video premiering right now as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCGECEkutO8
