Hello everyone, welcome to this week's progress report.
Level:
We have been working on implementing a new batch of final assets, mainly for the Yterra ship region while also working on a nice detailing pass for the Pillar region. We are adding in the new Pirate Cove Island location and traversal options for Maya's Blade Questline, as well.
Code:
This week, we started improving our save system to ideally get rid of any lag spikes. When the system was first implemented, the hitch caused by a save was pretty small, but as the story world grew and more and more things needed to be saved, this hitch quickly grew into a stall of now over 2 seconds. This is unsustainable especially because we want to significantly increase the frequency of auto saves.
The Sandbox has received a new feature to make working with frequently used external content easier: the Asset Library!
The game will now automatically create several asset category subfolders inside your Sandbox root folder, where you can store any assets you use regularly. When selecting an external asset for a prop in-game, the file explorer will automatically open to the corresponding Asset Library folder, making commonly used assets much quicker to access. Additionally, if a prop is using external content that isn't currently stored in the Asset Library, a small button will appear that lets you automatically copy the file into the appropriate Asset Library folder and update the prop's path to use the newly copied file. The subfolder categories are:
Decals
Fonts
Material Textures
Media
Particle Textures
Skinned Meshes
Sprites
Static Meshes
Tattoos
Voxel Brush Masks
Voxel Brush Meshes
Additionally, a few small improvements have also been added:
The Camera prop now has an "Unpossess Time" to control how long the camera position interpolation takes when unpossessing it and the in-game file explorer now also has a small button to open the current folder in the system file explorer.
Character:
We added a sandal outfit to go with the new summer fits for all the characters who have got it so far. We also have made one more dress for some of the ladies, ok this is the last dress for a while now, promised, but they just are so pretty :D
Animations:
We have made a small pass and found several poses and routine animations that were suitable to be added into the sandbox poser feature, these involve facial poses for the dialogue emotion system, a few new routine animations that we made for the bandits in their camp have also been created and added.
On the naughty side, we have been making a few more individual animations based on some user requests.
Design:
On the quest side, we started (and almost finished) implementing the Max x Riv quest this week. The warrior scout Riv has been tasked with keeping a close eye on the Star People at Alpha Camp. As Max, you can offer to let him take an even closer look - perhaps in more than one way.
Elsewhere, Milanna made it back into the game as a romance for Max. She is an influencer who follows the Ranger expedition to farm content. Her attitude and high expectations will keep the player on their toes.
The Ancient Goatman entered the game world as an elderly spiritual guide. Providing unique background information on the Cloven and guiding the player on self-discovery trips to re-allocate knowledge points, he is the wisest Cloven alive.
Around Umbar, Andorin is now hunting cannibals in the Forbidden Forest and might even reward the player with a unique armor set.
Further, we wrote two new questlines to provide additional meaningful content for the Pillar region and the Great Plains.
We also finalized the dialogue for the new tutorial / game intro and have begun with the implementation of it all.
Thank you for all your continued support,
-Wild Life Team