# Blade and Sorcery Update 1.0.3 released

- Product: Blade and Sorcery (https://whatsnew.fyi/product/blade-and-sorcery)
- Vendor: WarpFrog
- Date: 2024-07-22
- Original notes: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/629730/view/4360131166004937476
- Permalink: https://whatsnew.fyi/product/blade-and-sorcery/releases/2024-07-22-update-1.0.3-released

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Reuse: the summaries, labels and curation here are © What's New. Quote freely with attribution and a link back; wholesale republication of the corpus is not permitted — terms: https://whatsnew.fyi/terms. The vendors' own release notes remain their publishers'.

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- **fixed** — Fixed exploit where items could be duplicated
- **fixed** — Fixed crystals falling through the ground when physics is set to low
- **fixed** — Fixed AI getting too close to player and glitching into the player by removing tiny weapons from AI
- **changed** — Changed shield enemy behavior so shield bash is now a secondary circumstantial behavior instead of primary behavior, keeping enemies at proper distance
- **changed** — Changed AI behavior so enemies not actively attacking the player will hang back and not crowd the player in group fights
- **fixed** — Restored missing death animations for AI
- **added** — Added initial enriched presence for Steam
- **changed** — Increased audio sample rate for SFX and Music to improve audio quality
- **changed** — Resetting settings in the option book will now save options with the default value
- **added** — Added logging and fallbacks if the game cannot write to the log file
- **added** — Added SpectatorHide layer which the spectator camera cannot see
- **changed** — Made inventory artifact mesh preview invisible in spectator camera but visible once grabbed
- **fixed** — Fixed Navmesh issues in Collapsed Ceiling, SewerGate, and Castle_10
- **fixed** — Fixed Transi_Castle_16 rope rotating when the LOD changes
- **fixed** — Fixed bucklers improperly positioned when worn
- **fixed** — Fixed error with archery target and archery target support not showing in inventory
- **fixed** — Fixed water settings refreshing too often and spamming the log file
- **fixed** — Fixed skip message SFX not being linked to the UI audio slider
- **fixed** — Fixed Eraden Tunic nerfing the player's focus regen
- **changed** — Activated a Unity optimization that improved loading times including up to 50% faster loading for dungeons
- **fixed** — Fixed metallic props and weapons being too dark

Hello mates! Warpfrog team have a new bugfixing patch for you, along with some optimizations and improvements to AI behaviors.

Fixes in this patch address a wide range of issues such as the exploits where you could duplicate items, to full-blown nasty bugs such as crystals having a chance to fall through the ground when physics is set to set to low.

There are also a bunch of AI fixes included in this patch. As mentioned before, AI is hell for us because we have a very complicated system of behavior trees that have way too much cross-branch dependencies and spaghetti code which creates a system where one tiny thing changes here, one massive thing breaks over there, and a ton of iteration time in between.
This was just the way it all organically happened from constantly developing the game, adding a ton of new staff to the team to the previously one-man project over time, and changing the roadmap scope over years which added things to the game that were never planned for, etc.

The most major thing that would fix these type of issues would be to start from scratch with the lessons learned to develop a nice new clean code, and that is exactly what we will be doing when we develop our next game on the new Thunder Road 2 framework. However for B&S we are stuck, so the best we can do is keep tweaking what we have and try to iron out the worst issues.

One of the most notorious issues to be addressed in this patch was related to the AI getting too close to player, sometimes even glitching into the player. It may not be perfect as it is still a WIP but an easy first step fix we took to alleviate this issue was to remove the tiny weapons from AI where they could never effectively find the right attacking distance in VR; for example the little hammer.

Another good rangefinding fix was addressing an issue with shield bash where shield enemy would constantly get in the player's face to try and rangefind the bash attack as the primary behaviour, instead of only bashing as a secondary circumstantial behavior when player got in the AI's face. Before now, if you were fighting a shield enemy they were most likely constantly in your face trying to shield bash you which was the opposite behavior than intended; the bash was supposed to keep you away from the enemy.

These two fixes help a bunch, but where things get hairy is in waves of multiple enemy, as AI rangefinding issues tend to get compounded when multiple enemy are present. To help, we amended a behavior for AI where those were not actively attacking the player will now hang back and not crowd the player.
Multiple enemies will still close in to attack player, but those who are not actively attacking will get out of the way rather than just standing there idling in your face. This will hopefully help reduce the sensation of AI crowding the player for no reason in group fights.

Meanwhile 1v1 the AI seems to be doing well and ranges all seem to be good, and attack pattern seems to be good and working as expected. The later factions (Eraden, The Eye) will attack with more ferocity than the early easy factions (Wildfolk, Outlaws).

The dodging behaviours for all AI is something we still need to iron out, as it is still not triggering properly and so was not included in this patch. We have a strange issue to diagnose where the dodging enemy is moving as though stuck in mud... they do the dodge animation but remain on the spot, which as you can imagine is not effective, lol.

A nice plus for AI in this patch is that some missing death animations were restored! It was one of those things where a "simple" change somewhere totally innocuous caused a ripple bug effect to cause regression and it had disabled death animations.

Last note - You might have noticed the download for this patch is huge; really sorry about that, guys! There is an optimization in Unity we needed to activate because it improved loading times for all assets, including up to 50% faster loading for dungeons, which of course

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