Attention Officers,
Thank you for joining us for the 75th edition of our Ready or Not Development Briefing, July 5th, 2024!
Today we’re sharing our teaser trailer for the incoming Home Invasion DLC, announcing the successful efforts of the UE5.3 github community in completing our open-source modding tool bounties, announcing a new optimal 4-week schedule for newsletter communications, and laying out community-focused comms/events that we’ll be releasing with our returning Community Manager, Kaminsky!
These development briefings serve to keep you in the loop about parts of our ongoing support for Ready or Not, however the briefings do not encompass everything that we’re working on at a given moment. Please keep in mind that everything in this development briefing is work in progress and subject to change.
Vol. 75 Development Briefing Summary Points:
(not a changelog)
- The teaser trailer for the incoming release of DLC 1 "Home Invasion" is now unveiled with emphasis on its story premise! (https://youtu.be/byt7k1z46QI)
- Our Unreal Engine 5.3 updated open-source modding tools bounty is now successfully completed.
- These updated tools benefit UE5.3 modding as a whole but also help support RoN’s transition to UE5.3, with an official SDK still being our ultimate end goal.
- Starting today, we’ll be changing the schedule and structure of our newsletter-type communications so that they run in 4-week intervals.
- In addition to the existing developer briefings, we are re-launching community focused newsletters. They will release in offset 4-week intervals so that there is a new newsletter of some sort about every 2 weeks.
- Our returning Community Manager, Kaminsky, will be providing many community-focused communications and hosting events like gamenights, giveaways, and AMAs!
Home Invasion is on the Horizon
(Video below: DLC 1 "Home Invasion" teaser trailer)
— — —
UUUS76 MLLX 2246 NMSMIX
URGENT — WEATHER MESSAGE NATIONAL METEROLOGICAL SERVICE LOS SUENOS 07:52 AM PST.
...CATASTROPHIC DAMAGE EXPECTED...
HURRICANE ANTONIO HAS NOW BEEN UPGRADED TO A CATEGORY 5 STORM. ANTONIO’S PATH IS BEING MONITORED, BUT IT IS CONSIDERED TO BE A HURRICANE POSSESSING UNPRECEDENTED STRENGTH... SURPASSING THE INTENSITY OF THE SAN DIEGO HURRICANE OF 1858.
EXTENSIVE DAMAGE TO LARGE PARTS OF LOS SUENOS IS EXPECTED. CERTAIN AREAS ARE LIKELY TO BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS...PERHAPS LONGER. AT LEAST ONE-THIRD OF WELL-CONSTRUCTED HOMES ARE EXPECTED TO SUFFER EXTENSIVE ROOF AND WALL FAILURE. ALL GABLED ROOFS WILL FAIL, LEAVING THOSE HOMES SEVERELY DAMAGED OR DESTROYED. A FURTHER THIRD OF WELL-CONSTRUCTED HOMES ARE EXPECTED TO SUFFER ROOF AND WALL FAILURES OF VARYING SEVERITIES.
[...]
ONCE HURRICANE-FORCE WINDS ONSET ... DO NOT VENTURE OUTSIDE!
UE5.3 Modding Bounty Complete
We’re elated to announce that our bounty to update Unreal Engine 5.3 open-source modding tools was successfully fulfilled by github contributors last week.
This is a critical step to modding UE5.3 games as a whole and is instrumental to help keep modding in shape for our Home Invasion launch, at which point Ready or Not will be using UE5.3 instead of UE4.27. Check out the Vol. 74 development briefing for more info!
Thank you so much to everyone who contributed to updating these modding tools. We are in the process of rewarding bounty payments to the top contributors as we speak.
A special thank you to LongerWarrior and atenfyr for their exceptional efforts in helping reach this goal.
"UAssetAPI already had limited support for Unreal Engine 5 assets before the bounty was posted (for example, the new fields that got added to exports were already properly serialized) along with functional read/write support for "unversioned properties" (a more compact way of writing struct and class data that is used by some newer UE4 games and most UE5 games).
However, support for both of these things was full of little bugs and missing property types, and 5.3 did change a couple of small things on its own (e.g. the addition of the DataResources map). Ensuring that the software worked well on every asset in Ready or Not required more attention to detail than the software had received before, which means that a lot of long-standing bugs and missing types, including ones that also happened to affect parsing for older games too, were discovered and fixed.
Updating UAssetGUI was a much simpler process, as nearly all of the legwork is done by UAssetAPI; most of the relevant changes made were in adding new entries to the GUI, fixing bugs in the code that syncs to/from the asset data source, and fixing graphical errors, although UAssetGUI did see the addition of new features unrelated to the UE5.3 port such as .pak support."
—atenfyr
Regardless, our ideal solution for Ready or Not is still to have a dedicated official Software Development Kit (SDK) to continue to empower our modding community. We are committed to making our SDK a reality and carrying out the complex work that the project will demand.
New Newsletter Schedule and Structure
Starting today, we’ll be changing the schedule and structure of our newsletter-type communications so that they run in 4-week intervals. However, you can still expect to receive some form of newsletter communication every 2 weeks. This is because we will be alternating between posting development briefings and community-focused newsletters during that timeframe in offset 4-week intervals.
We’ll also be massively increasing our community-focused events and communications with our returning Community Manager, Kaminsky!
We’ve made this decision to better ensure high quality communication is available for each newsletter-type communication and align more harmoniously with our careful post-1.0 development cycle.
Generally speaking, Early Access development has an expectation of being more fluid and includes a massive scope of things to cover, but we want to be extra mindful now in the full release about avoiding situations where developers are mid-implementation or testing yet we are trying to gather info for public communication. Those scenarios can have an elevated risk of miscommunication or not being able to properly account for issues that could pop up.
Furthermore, some developments like brand cooperation partnerships (e.g. to include official gear or weapons in the game), DLC, or other long-term strategic parts of development require precise timing before we communicate them.
Community-Focused Communications and Events
The amazing Kaminsky will be handling the community focused newsletters and many other great community related plans he has!
Here’s a quick message from Kaminsky himself:
“Hello Officers! Some of you may recognize me from my short time in the position a little over a year ago, but my name is Kaminsky and I’m the Community Manager for VOID Interactive. My hope is that, going forward, we’re going to be seeing a lot more of each other.”
The extensive community focused newsletters will feature mods, artwork, and more to put a spotlight on the talented members of our community. Other community related events include community question sessions with the development team similar to the AMAs we’ve done in the past.
Community game nights and giveaways are just some of the additional plans you can look forward to, so keep an eye on our official RoN Discord and community newsletters for more info!
We hope that this approach will allow us to continue to deliver our regular newsletters at a high quality as well as cover a greater breadth of topics that are valuable to all of you in our wonderful community.
Conclusion
With the Home Invasion release incoming, updated UE5.3 modding tools prepared, a new schedule for high quality communications, and a return of our many community events along with Kaminsky, we are looking forward to what this summer and beyond will bring.
This concludes our 75th development briefing, thank you again for joining us. Be sure to fall in next time for more development news!
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