Morterra gets a cleaner, lighter player model

In June 2020 we replaced Morterra's player model. The new one looked cleaner, drew roughly half as many faces, and left room for crossbows, jewelry and character options.

The June 21, 2020 update gave Morterra a new player model. It looks cleaner than the old one and is much more efficient, drawing roughly half as many faces. We built it so we could add more content on top of it, such as crossbows and jewelry, and we said genders, races, hair styles and hair colors would follow soon.

Crossbows and jewelry arrived two months later in the August 2020 update, and character customization followed in December 2020.

Fixes

We fixed a bug that broke pointer lock for some players. We also fixed some major bugs in Firefox and kept working on others, though we still recommended Chrome. A number of small optimizations gave a slight overall improvement in FPS.

What we planned next

Next we planned to optimize the game drastically. The goal was a steady 60 FPS on a standard laptop without an advanced GPU, and after that, controls for playing on mobile.

After optimization, we wanted PvP to be more dynamic and more about skill. The plans were stronger bows, crossbows, sneaking, jewelry, bandages, and blocking with shields to absorb damage.

We couldn't say when these updates would come out. The new player model had been the hardest part, so we expected updates to come much more often from then on.