Isle DevBlog #7 Spittin' it out there.

Filipe | FTessaro - Lead Programmer It’s been a busy month as we’re hard at work finishing up this next update. I’ve been working this month mostly on bug fixes and improvements in general. Some of the improvements required changes to how various abilities worked to detect the ragdolls, such as eating and pickup. The addition of pieces of meat and schools of fish adds further complexity to the code, resulting in additional bugs of course.

We’ve made significant improvements to the Utahraptor pounce, some technical issues remain, relating to the engine which causes a weird rotation problem. I hope to fix it ASAP, but it won't delay the update, as we’re able to easily deploy the fix in a hotfix update.

Ragdolls have received more attention, especially when picking them up or dropping them around, including bodies in water, weird behaviors are still expected sometimes, just because ragdoll physics are really hard to "control". Expect to see additional improvements in the future.

AmbZones were updated to account for the new day cycle system, which is not the final system, all that will be improved down the road.

Another important thing we’ve been working on is server performance, which we’ve improved to allow for more stability, more players and decrease the chance of jittering or teleportations.

Client performance has also seen some improvements, but with the addition of the basic day/night cycle we are not going to see a substantial improvement just yet. Keep in mind that the day/night cycle wasn't in our plans for Update 2, so we will continue working on improving it´s functionality and performance. The strange over time fps decay seems to be fixed, which I think will be a major improvement for the client experience overall.

Bleeding has been a very popular topic in QA meetings and discussion, not only related to its functionality, but also how much and how it affects the game. Bleeding uses a mathematical system that simulates individual wounds, each wound has its own time of bleeding and blood "damage", that is stackable. If your blood pool reaches 0 you simply die. That is when wallow comes to help you, to avoid dying from bleeding after a long battle, you can wallow to clog your wounds temporarily, allowing you to survive while your body closes the wounds. BUT, if during the time mud is clogging your wounds you are attacked again, all your wounds open and start to bleed again, so be careful! UI indicators were also added, but overall the functionality itself is still WIP, so bleeding can still change depending on the balance requirements.

Besides all that I also have been working on adding some more security to the game code, mostly related to admin and dev commands. We will be improving the game security a lot more over time.

Amarok - Programmer Well, every month seems more crazy then the last it’s been a busy few weeks preparing for Update #2 fixing bugs and working on some last minute additions. I really felt the environment needed some attention so we worked on adding the new Day/Night cycle early and it's been well received by QA and I'm sure a lot of you have seen the screenshots although still a WIP it really improves the overall feel of the game.

I also worked on improving the situation with keybinds, All of you gamepad players can now rejoice as support has been added for those along with being able to set any keybinds that were previously missing.

AI has also seen some