Icarus Week 188 Update | Atmospheric Lighting and Firewhacker Improvements

This week, we have two system update which have accompanying large write ups.

Our Atmosphere System, responsibly for lighting, shadows and reflection accuracy, has been updated with multiple cubemaps for each Biome in Icarus. You should see much better colour, detail and lighting in-game with this improvement.

We’ve also buffed the Firewhacker, making many improvements increasing its usefulness, which had reduced over the years as denser fuel sources crept their way into the game.

Finally, we’ve got massive news about next week’s update, which will the biggest since New Frontiers, and is aptly named, Copernicus.

Notable Improvements:

• Fixed a Long Standing AI issue where creatures would stand still when recieving damage when hit from far away instead of reacting accordingly
• Brand New Backgrounds for the Blueprint Tech Tree
• New In-world effects for the BEAST Scanner
• Fix intermittent boss health bar visibility for some bosses for people playing on Dedicated Servers

This Week: Atmosphere Improvements

This week, we’ve added graphical improvements to lighting, shadows, and reflection accuracy.

Specifically, we’ve updated our atmosphere system with bespoke cubemaps for each different biome in Icarus.

This means that the ambient lighting used to brighten up the game world should be more accurate
to the area around it. Rocks, buildings, landscapes, and other objects will all take on more of the nearby environment colour, meaning fewer dark black shadows, and more accurate lighting on all objects.

The end result is similar to NVIDIA’s global illumination (GI) solutions, with none of the associated costs. And what’s more, the updated cube maps will have zero performance impact.

This required a rewrite of how cubemaps were utilised within the Atmosphere Controller. Previously, all ambient lighting and skylight reflections in Icarus were calculated using a single 360 degree cubemap scene capture.

This meant that we needed to have our cubemap approximate lighting for all biomes at the same time, resulting in a flat and overly dark end result. The way it did this was for each point in the world, a sample was taken from the reference image (cubemap) and multiplied together with the desired intensity of ambient lighting. This affected both the colour, and the brightness of the lighting applied.
Because we only had one cubemap to sample from, it wasn't applying the green hues you'd expect from the Swamp or the yellows of the Desert. Metallic surfaces were also given grey reflections. In general, all ambient lighting was more muted we'd want and we sought to improve this.

We've upgraded Icarus' atmosphere system to blend between multiple cube maps as required. This means we can create bespoke ambient lighting and reflections for each of Icarus' vastly different regions as we see fit.

Check out a few before-and-after shots to showcase this patch's improvements:

This Week: Firewhacker Buffs

Fire in Icarus is a fairly unique experience in the world of survival games. It exists to connect early-game dangers and provide an extra way to differentiate storms from one another via lightning. It's a great example of how a small system added to a game can make a world feel deeper and less static.

‘Realism’ is a good word to describe what features players might intuitively expect in a game, but it's often a bad goal for balance. In real fires, we see an exponential growth as fires spread in all directions and gain access to more and more fuel. In-game, we know buildings are placed on a 3x3m grid, with a fixed number of possible neighbours. Our deployables are consistently sized, so a base can't be too densely packed with burnable fuel. With the fire location fairly well scoped, we were able to make some programming choices so that the fire could spread at a more linear rate, so that it wouldn't get out of control too quickly.

Rocketwerkz has another game called Stationeers, which also features a fire system. Often, fires start when you have hydrogen and oxygen in a mix, and you accidentally spark them. A mix like that used to combust extremely quickly, just like here on Earth. Players often wouldn't even get to see or experience this happening, and they would return to rooms full of very hot carbon dioxide and pollutants, where they would be very confused as to what happened. Our solution to that was to do literally the opposite of what happens in the real world, and we made hotter fires burn less and less, so that ‘maxed’ out fires would continue to burn for a while, instead of instantly using all their remaining fuel.

Coming back from that aside, we wanted to make sure fighting a fire in Icarus wasn't too frustrating. The firewhacker is a delicate balance of stamina, attack speed, stamina drain and extinguish rate. Too much in one direction, and fires went out too quickly; too much in the other direction, and every base would burn down.

We ensured firewhackers were a simple recipe you could make early in the game, right from your character. We added forced periods of cool down before things could reignite, so you could be guaranteed to be able to save parts of your base from fire. We also switched the firewhacking swing from a slow 3-second overhead hit ( much more like the repair hammer) to the much quicker frantic whacking. Finally, the most significant early game fire change wasn't about the firewhacker but instead the firepit, which allowed players to solve many of their fire problems themselves, once they experienced an accidental fire or two from the cheaper campfire.

Eventually, we felt that the fire needed to spread to nearby foliage. This wasn’t driven by many gameplay desires or pacing metrics, other than it felt odd and wrong when fire couldn’t spread to nearby trees and bushes. Over the years, with new maps, biomes, and areas, some regions became much more dense with bushes and trees than the original Olympus map. These new fuel-rich environments unbalance the firewhacker, and many regions became forest fire risks.

So, after perhaps the longest setup for some simple tweaks, here are the changes we’ve made that hopefully will make fire fighting more fun, and less frustratingly futile:

• Changed firewhacker extinguish logic to allow multiple non-building pieces to be extinguished from a single successful extinguish roll, to have a better feeling ‘firefighting experience’ where fire density isn't fixed
• Changed Foliage extinguish cases so that the fire heat is entirely removed, which will stop foliage from automatically reigniting after the forced extinguish time elapses
• Doubled the time foliage is forced extinguished from 7 seconds to 14 seconds
• Increased base chance increase on failed extinguishes from .05 to .15
• Increased base extinguish radius from 80 to 120
• Increased base forced extinguish time from 5 to 7
• Changed extinguish count logic to ensure effects still play when extinguishing foliage
• Due to increased firewhacked extinguish chances, we decreased durability loss on successful extinguish from 500 to 200
• Improved the fire whacker audio behavior so that the generic impact plays from within the whoosh to ensure the player isn't misinformed about what's happening
• Balanced the firewhacker audio for better recognition of impact vs extinguishing vs whooshing

If you have feedback or experiences about fire or our approach to it, feel free to add a comment below, or drop us a ticket in Feature Upvote.

Next Week: Copernicus (featuring Great Hunts)

Next week, we’re dropping our biggest update since New Frontiers.

Aptly named Copernicus, this massive free update aims to enhance a lot of existing content with the addition ~50 new items added as new rewards to existing missions across Olympus, Styx and Prometheus, five Legendary weapons that can be upgraded by killing world bosses and a 70+ brand new achievements to unlock.

Alongside the update, we’re releasing the Great Hunts DLC, adding three new branching Campaigns exclusive to Open Worlds, totalling 34 new missions which can change the world you are playing on. With these campaigns come three new world bosses, new creatures, three exclusive legendary weapons, six earnable character talent points and ~60 new items which you unlock exclusively through playing the campaigns.

You can check out more details on Great Hunts and Wishlist below before the release next week.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3315290/Icarus_Great_Hunts_Campaigns/

Your support makes these updates possible.

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/40692/Icarus_Pets_Bundle/

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/35727/Icarus_Complete_the_Set/

Changelog v2.2.63.139765

New Content

Fixed

Future Content