DevBlog #31

FTessaro - Lead Programmer

This month I spent the majority of my time improving new and current systems. As part of that focus, code in general received some significant improvements and cleanup. Diets, Insects & Migration received some minor additions while we are still polishing them in QA. Our focus right now is ensuring they are fun and balanced, which is often more difficult than developing the mechanic itself.

You’ll be glad to know that corpse detection is now far more reliable and we added rigged skeletons (generics for now), which will allow them to be carried or dragged. In combination with shaders, VFX and organs this can be really macabre.

Hardened fruits like coconuts now have a chance to fall from trees and open upon impact with the ground, allowing animals ill-equipped to break them to have an opportunity for sustenance.

Added the Death screen from Legacy, with some improvements made to the Loading Screen and performance of the HUD UI in general.

Added new camera behaviors that interact with certain abilities like eating/drinking/pickup and just movement in general. These are not the final changes and the camera will continue to be expanded upon as development progresses. Other minor changes were made to Vocals, Humans, Interactable Foliage, the Troodon Venom Pounce and more.

Finally, I updated the NVIDIA DLSS plugin and implemented an alternative for non RTX users, AMD FSR2. Which will hopefully allow a wider range of players to enjoy a boost to their performance. It will also come alongside a variety of new graphic and game settings aimed at granting players increased quality of life.

See you next time everyone!

Amar0k - Programmer

This month I've been working on finishing the new scavengers and flier/swimming AI. The scavengers are complete and have moved to testing. Fish AI has had a big overhaul of movement and fleeing; they are now much more active and reliable with full rotation and interactive movement. Performance improvements have also been a part of these recent changes so we can allow more AI on the map.

Also the new animal AI framework is coming along nicely with more performant logic and reliability this will scale across to the new dinosaur AI. I have also been working on a complete AI behavior debugger to allow easier testing and for collecting performance data. Some small changes to the anti cheat also with an updated module and upgraded permissions.

dmIV - Programmer

This month I mostly worked on human related things. The biggest addition would probably be prone support. It works similarly to crouching and I was able to reuse some existing code fortunately which made the implementation significantly faster. There are some significant differences though, such as the character’s collision being shorter, limited sideways camera turning or the movement being restricted to crawling forward and backwards for now.

Our humans use what is called a “true first person” system. Most first person games attach the arms and equipment to the camera directly and add the legs separately if at all. We wanted to try a different approach and take the same character you would see from third person and place the camera where the eyes are. This presents many challenges that I looked at.

First of all, sometimes the character’s head can clip inside walls or the floor during certain animations. I ended up creating a system that dynamically adjusts the location of the mesh to prevent that from happening. It’s a pretty effective solution that fixes the problem without being noticeable. The second issue