Update log
Full We Who Are About To Die update
The complete published notes, normalized for clean reading and source attribution.
Extracted changes
- Performance
- Gameplay
- Balance
Ave Aspirants!
It's already time for Preview #3 of the Blood & Sand update! We're getting closer and closer to the update release - we'll reveal the release date for the Blood & Sand update at the end of this post!
In this Preview, let's dive deeper into the Physics Overhaul, Optimizations and more Career changes!
Combat - Physics Overhaul!
Blood & Sand brings a pretty extensive Physics Overhaul. Now I want to preface this by saying, this kind of stuff will still happen:
The game is designed like that! Goofy antics intact.
As seen in Preview #1, Blood & Sand has hit-reaction animations now, where in the past this was a pure (often crazy) physics impulse. This has been made far more subtle and that's what lead me to the physics again.
In the end, I rebuilt the entire character-physics and physical animation systems in the game. I took some time to more properly understand the engine and implemented it this time "as it should be".
This was really worth it - the result is more quality and stable physics in general. Everything feels more realistic and fluid.
FPS and system stability
One major boon from these overhauled physics is that the game is more FPS stable - actually (technically) playable at something like 5 FPS for the first time. This means in general, whether you're playing at 30 FPS or 200 FPS, the physics should behave closer to how they're designed.
Better death ragdolls
There are several ragdoll profiles now, which adds some cool deaths!
death
Better Proportions (again!)
I feel like I do an improvement every Major Update on this, but this may actually be the last time.
The proportions and physics are oddly linked, so it only seemed right. We Who Are About To Die has evolved over the past ~10 years from a fairly cartoony game to more stylised-realistic. The biggest change was the child-like-cartoony-big-head proportions of characters, which have constantly evolved to be more realistic.
Blood & Sand is no different! 'OLD' here is the currently live update.
This time, the character in the Career Menu has also gotten the same upgrade! That one was a few updates behind, and still looked especially cartoony.
The physics are also noticeably better here and so I made them more pronounced!
I've also redone and adjusted some of the animation stuff, like the general stance, and posing for 2 handers:
Just for fun, check out these old version of the proportions (which were already way less cartoony than start of development!)
Image #2 is from the actual Early Access Release!! It really highlights how far we've come already to me.
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Better Physical Animations
The physical animations -- where it blends between an "active ragdoll" and animations during combat (after hit etc) have been improved and balanced. Generally speaking, again, movement is more realistic and fluid.
Especially during low stamina, the physics no longer completely take over the body, instead you still maintain decent control but there are more animation driven cue's that a character is out of gas.
To rebalance this, general damage output of a low-stamina hit is lower. (as previously, it relied on floppy arms more). Here it is again from Preview #1:
Optimisations
The engine upgrade we did should come with general optimization improvements. On top of that, characters have seen a decent performance upgrade.
Hand in hand with the animation upgrade, there's a pretty significant animation performance upgrade too across
Source