Devblog #5: Production Insights

Filipe - Lead Programmer

The battle for performance continues in both client and server fronts, it is not over yet, but we are definitely winning! Several bug fixes this time, with some related to old friends of ours, especially Pounce and Drag. Pounce is still WIP after this update, we are also reworking several things with the mechanic, including new animations. Also, as we’re talking about reworking stuff. We’ve decided to rework our Ability system to prevent any Animation from ever running on the server side, which has resulted in significant performance improvements. Some people may wonder how it's going to work for replication. But that’s just part of the magic, we won't say anything :P

Besides all that and bug fixing, I’ve lost count of how many bugs we’ve already fixed. I also worked on fixing and improving upon a variety of UI elements and additional mechanics that will be added to the game soon, such as chunks of meat from corpses that you can't carry or drag. Fancy audio mixers per species and size differences affecting how sound should be perceived. Buffs, Debuffs and other things that are still being discussed internally, but we’ll talk about those later on. See you all next time!

dmIV - Programmer

First of all I finished the post process volumes for the rivers. It took several tries to get right and we had to adjust some rivers to fix some graphical artifacts, but in the end they now act like you’d expect them to.

You might remember me writing about how I improved the performance of footprint scent clouds. I decided to rework it once again and this time it performs even better. The engine has a feature that lets you render identical meshes for very little cost, which I put into use. It requires a more complex management of the footprints, but it was definitely worth it.

My main addition this time is the new utah attack that we teased previously. It works similarly to the Tenonto’s claw attack in the sense that it turns you towards the camera direction whilst adding some movement. The big difference between them is that the Utah moves significantly faster. In the Tenonto’s case I was able to get away with using the standard movement logic, but now I’ve had to add a new state to support this kind of behaviour, which also benefits the claw attack you’re already familiar with. The control scheme went through some iterations, the winner being to press your left mouse button whilst holding the alt key. This ties nicely into the free look mode, you can aim your attack efficiently without changing your movement direction and then execute it. I also made the Tenonto claw attack deal damage during the turning sweep if you aim behind yourself, giving you a better fighting chance against nimble predators.

Other than various bug fixes I spent much of my time looking into our performance issues and remedying them. We made many improvements on the whole so the game will be much more stable and enjoyable.

VisualTech48 - Environment Modeler

Glorious fences are taking a bit longer this month, I’m close to perfecting them so you might see some new perimeters soon put up, but it’s TBD (To be decided) where and when.

Besides that I’ve been managing to pull new assets for some undisclosed locations like barrels, pallets, crates, new trim textures for the *!”$!”$)!”)=%=%#”!% REDACTED, fencing and the kit for the *!”$!”$)!”)=%=%#”!% REDACTED as well with all new walls and a different style