Full notes
Full The First Explorers® update
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Repeated intro
Hey!
What changed
- Performance
- UI and audio
- Maps
I'm here with the monthly development summaries from August and September, enjoy :)
TFE Development Summary - August 2025
📽️ Lots of work for the Gameplay Video, which was shown at gamescom 🛠️ More character system rework 🛠️ Pathfinding improvements 🛠️ Balancing of wood production times 🛠️ Fixed a problem that harvestables were not reachable in certain situations 🛠️ Added a benchmark flyover for consistent performance measurements 🎨 Designed and implemented the Roman Great Fort building (landmark) 🎨 River visual tweaks 📔 Finished evaluation of the playtest from June 📔 Organized & clustered all bug and improvement tickets from that playtest 📔 Organizing and planning upcoming features after the big gamescom milestone
TFE Development Summary - September 2025
Notification System
🛠️ Implemented a Notification System where notifications can be reported to from everywhere (e.g. from Buildings, Units, GameState, etc) 🛠️ Implemented a configurable grace period when to show the notification after it has been reported 🛠️ Created a flexible Data Lookup System so that notifications can be easily extended or modified in the future 🛠️ Implemented different types of notifications (Show in a List, show as 3D Widget in the World, show as one time Notification in game world or at screen center) 🛠️ Implemented a Notification List, that shows current notifications on the left side of the HUD (scrollable) 🛠️ Notification in a list can be dismissed or jumped to reporting actor by clicking on it 🛠️ Notifications can be resolved by the reporting actors ⊞ Added camera preview snippet of reporting actor when hovering a magnifying glass icon on notification in the notification list (you remember the focus camera snippet from Settlers 4? ;)) ⊞ Show different 3D Notifications widget in game world based on notification type
Skirmish Lobby
🛠️ Implemented a Map Data Catalogue system that automatically fetches all available maps and their data ⊞ Created the first iteration of Skirmish Lobby layout ⊞ Map can be selected from a dropdown ⊞ Possible Start Positions are drawn on the minimap preview ⊞ Each player can change the start position (if not already occupied) ⊞ Bots can be added and customized ⊞ All kind of settings for players can be changed (like the player's color, teams, difficulty of bots (even though thats not yet implemented), etc) ⊞ Global match settings like GameMode, Start Goods and Start Units, Combat Power at start etc. can be adapted ⊞ First Steam integration which means that the steam avatar and steam name of the player are collected and shown correctly
More Stuff
🛠️ Increased penalty for bad digging spots 🛠️ Balancing of start units and start goods 🛠️ Added Map Bounds 🛠️ Fixed that camera could go out of map bounds 🛠️ Fixed that camera kept moving when Alt+Tab to Desktop 🔁 Shared how the new Notification System works (Patreon vip) 🔁 Shared how the new Skirmish Lobby works (Patreon vip) See you next time and let me know what you think in the comments! :) Best, Sebastian
Source
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