New Map changes, Model progress & More! - New Dev-blog #31 is Out!

Dev Blog 31

New build on the way

Islander

- Project Lead

Hey Extinctioneers,

This month has been focused heavily on cleaning up, stabilizing, and improving Echoes of Extinction after the Unreal Engine 5.7 upgrade. A lot of the work has been behind the scenes, but it is all important work that helps the game run better, look better, and feel more complete as development continues.

The team has been working across multiple areas this month, from optimization and demo bug fixes, to new foliage improvements, character selection UI, creature skins, models, traversal updates, sound design, and continued progress on upcoming species like Dracovenator, Tropeognathus, Pachycephalosaurus, and Nemicolopterus.

Overall, this month has been about strengthening the foundation while still pushing new content forward. The improvements being made now will help us build faster and smoother going forward. I also went around on Suna's new Parkour area and took some screenshots, curious to see how many tries it takes you guys to complete!

Video:

[dynamiclink href="https://youtu.be/qJPkLtoI-kw"]

Yaroslav

- 3D Artist

This month I have been working on Tropeognathus skins for each biome.

AirSickLowLander

- Level Designer

This month I’ve been working on integrating new features and optimizations for Unreal Engine 5.7, as well as addressing more of the bug reports from our demo.

I have begun replacing our foliage with Nanite skeletal mesh foliage instead of static mesh foliage, which should help improve performance and decrease the total disk size of the game. Along with that, much more of the foliage on the map is now voxelized as well, helping it retain its shape at a distance while cutting overdraw down to almost nothing, which is a huge performance win.

As of right now, almost all cover meshes for the ground are voxelized, and this has greatly reduced overdraw in dense areas.

I have also been filling in areas that have been empty for a while, such as the area surrounding the volcano and the meadows near it. I am going through every single mesh on the map and adjusting the amount of cards Lumen devotes to them for ray tracing coverage. In many cases, this can be reduced, which improves ray tracing performance.

I have also changed some of Nanite’s behavior by modifying clustering habits, and as of yesterday, material quad overdraw has been completely eliminated on the map. Every single material is now using compute shading because of this, which is much more performant.

The screenshots I attached show meshes being rendered with compute shading, represented in blue, our current very low Nanite overdraw on the map, and some of the new environment additions around the volcano.

FuriousSmaug

- Programmer

Hey everyone, this month I was back in engine cleaning up some issues related to the engine upgrade. Night vision, physics, sounds, and a few other systems all had various problems connected to the upgrade that needed to be corrected.

While working on that, I also took advantage of a few new and older systems within Unreal to optimize and clean up some of the dinosaur mechanics, particularly relating to the animation graph, GAS abilities, and UDS.

There were also a lot of updated animations from a couple of months ago that I got to add in. I also started adding the new Purussaurus skins, which come with two new patterns and a lot of new colour options. The same will also be applied to the current Eocarcharia and Ouranosaurus skins to bring them up to the same level of customization as the