DevBlog #35

FTessaro - Lead Programmer

Much of my work this month revolved around the gallimimus, which has a different way of grabbing things, as it may use either its mouth or hands, so I developed a small system to control when to use one or the other, including swallowing something that was grabbed using the hands, the system adapts automatically. Included to that change, pickup also adapts to the size or position of the target. Like for tall trees it would use a Pickup High, or Pickup Mid animation in some cases. For stuff on the floor it would use Pickup Low.

Some more work animation related to beipi and diablo too, for all the shared abilities. Did some work on troodon Venom pounce visuals, mostly, but also adding support for the future uses of Pounce and transitions mid pounce, interesting things that are coming. Troodon is also getting some new small mechanics for Venom Pounce to help the troodon players to know about the condition of the target, envenomated or not, which stages, etc.

Lots of work done for fixing a significant amount of bugs or wrong behaviors, including diets. Besides that some code improvement, balance changes, optimizations and new things for camera and audio.

I have also added the option for server admins to enable/disable species through the admin panel, allowing or preventing further spawns of those animals.

dmIV - Programmer

I continued working on some gallimimus abilities. Its main damage source is from a kick attack, which can be performed while standing, running or jumping. If the animal is swimming or had its legs fractured it can use a peck attack, but it’s not very effective. When playing as a gallimimus it’s very unfortunate to break your legs, since you not only lose your ability to run away quickly, you also can’t fight back properly.

To help with that, there is one more trick in the gallimimus’s bag. It can protect itself from some fall damage by automatically springing forward to soften the landing. Falling from too high can still result in fractured legs or death, but it’s safer than other dinos.

Other than that I’ve been looking at various smaller tasks, such as the ceratosaurus’s vomit scent, bug fixes, balance changes, moving some blueprints to C++, smaller optimizations here and there.

VisualTech48 - Environmental Artist

The Dome and only the dome has been my soul focus this month, as it's a magnificent, yet massive object and point of interest in the map. Since transitioning to nanite, we are now open to options of having massive modular pieces like this dome, which we will feature in the new Gateway map.

To further reveal this massive structure, it will have four primary entrances for now, three of which are land based, and one directly connected to the river.

To ensure this all works and fits perfectly, I’ve made a Dome kit as we do work with modularity here at The Isle for human structures, which now consists of various height elements of the dome, and its main features like the massive window hexagon shape details.

Alongside that I’ve translated one of the small parts of the Dockyard kit to fit into the Dome kit to ensure more flexibility for the interiors, especially giving a lot more to the dark metallic look of the Dome, as it's far more industrial.

Dome Kit which features more concrete and industrial look.

Wedge - Sound Designer

The majority of this