Patch 0.8.0 - Dilophosaurus, AI interaction/packs, trilobites

This release brings patch 0.8.0 onto the main branch, making it available for everyone without tuning into the experimental branch. It also adds a few new goodies compared to the last experimental build (see end of page), read on for details.

Highlights

Dilophosaurus

The first highlight of 0.8.0 is the preview release of Dilophosaurus, which features an entirely rewritten movement system. The goal here is to improve the overall fluidity of the movement, and build a system that we can easily extend further as development continues. It features much better pivoting, by-default backwards walking, and should soon also feature much reduced rubberbanding (in progress).

🚧 Dilophosaurus is still in preview 🚧

Due to the complexity of this change, we're haven't hit the level of polish we want yet (especially the rubberbanding that we're tackling is an on-going concern at the moment). Dilophosaurus is freely available for testing and feedback for everyone, but we're keeping the experimental designation on it for now.

AI interaction & packing

This patch introduces the ability to pack with AI of your own species, including giving them commands once packed! These commands can be requested through the radial menu, currently including follow, roam, guard, or to change their stance (aggressive/neutral).

Juvies/AI with much smaller growth than yourself require gaining their trust to pack. The current implementation is intended like this:

1. Drop food when near them.

2. Friendly call to invite them over to eat the food.

3. (Optional: Threaten to reject).

4. AdjustedInvite once the food has been eaten (notetear chunk action conflicts currently, has been noted to be improved).

Trilobites

Trilobites have arrived on the island and are available as a snack. You'll be able to find them in the rocky coastal areas.

These critters are the first in a series of smaller ambient AI that we're intending to introduce to spruce up the liveliness of the island. More on this soon.

Map

The map has seen various updates, including new waterfalls!

We've also regenerated the landscape and tweaked the performance hotspots. This should yield more uniform and stable performance across the world.

All the changes are in the changelog below.

Full changelog:

Features

• New playable and early look at the new movement system: Dilophosaurus. Expect the animal to not be fully featured yet on initial introduction, its main current goal is to be the dedicated testbed for the character/movement overhaul. Other animals currently still have the old system.

• AI can now be packed with. Invite them by walking up to them, and hitting the invite button that pops up. AI will not pack if already in a team, or if they are below your growth stage.

• Juvies/AI with much smaller growth than yourself requires gaining their trust to pack. Drop food nearby, 2 call to invite over, invite to pack once food eaten.

• Packed AI can be commanded through the radial menu to follow, roam, guard, or to change their stance (aggressive/neutral), check out the options available!

• Corpses much smaller than yourself can now be swallowed whole.

Map:

• Redesign pass of the redwoods beach.

• Added a waterfall to the prairie. Rendering still needs some tweaking, early look.

• Adjusted map landscape, should yield more uniform performance.

• Note that as a side effect of this change, we still need to do more touch-up still of the landscape blends with detail meshes.

• Adjusted various landscape mesh holes.

• Removed collision from moss around swamp.

• Adjusted reed spawns around swamp, cloud rainforest lake, and large alpine lake

• Added another waterfall and small rivers at the cloudrainforest lake.

• Updated water and lilies at cloud rainforest.

• Swamp now spawns random geyser effects.

Lighting:

• Adjusted brightness of fog at beach level.

Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug where meat-chunk couldn't be swallowed.

• Various fixes for edge cases where character creation would show the wrong material.

• Speculative fix for the server restart leaving the selection overlay visible on disconnection.

• Fixed an edgecase where nest placement failed.

• Fixed ocean waves not curling at the coastline.

• Fixed a bug where lower cloud settings would draw through the world.

• Fixed black squares rendering over water in some places.

• Fixed ocean rendering holes at large distance.

• Player's adult animals can now pack with older animals past adult.

Changes

• Turn in place has been removed. It didn't work out the way we'd hoped and became too buggy to support. As movement is being completely rewritten, might come back at some point or in a different form.