Screenshot by Discord community member Rizary.
This patch focusses on combat and adds a bleed mechanic. Different animals and their individual attacks now have unique likelihoods of causing bleed damage to the opponent. This effect is stackable, meaning that the more hits you take, the worse your wounds will end up being and the more damage you take. Further, wounds heal slower and even worsen on their own by moving around too much.
Another notable change in this patch is a bugfix for getting stuck on other characters. This would mostly happen for various AI characters once you got into their strike range.
Note on night time darkness:
Nighttime visuals have also been adjusted, see the notes at the end. Further balancing will be done to the light balance, there are likely weather/time combinations that are a bit too dark and need some adjustment. If they are disturbing, nudge the gamma up a little bit until the next patch.
Lastly, player characters can now vault, allowing them to jump onto objects like rocks, larger fallen tree branches, and if you're playing as Deinonychus, the smaller trees.
Full details below.
Features
Bleed
Adds a stackable bleed mechanic that adds wound that get worse the more you move around. The likelihood of adding one or more wounds per attack depends on the animal and the attack in question. Finishes this roadmap item.
Vaulting
You're now able to vault onto objects. To vault, get close enough to an object that isn't too high, and simply press jump once you see the input hint. This feature is a work in progress first draft and will get further polish. In particular it currently has these issues and limitations:
- You might have to walk around and up to the object you want to vault a few times to get the trigger (there's an input key hint). It's a bit fiddly. You need to orient the character towards the object and then look at it, for the trigger to appear. You also have to be reasonably close.
- There's some snapping (especially when Turn in Place is enabled)
- Not all rocks/meshes work great with the vaulting yet, you might sometimes see that the character doesn't manage to get on completely and falls back off. Holding the forward key meanwhile helps a little.
- Animations still need to be tightened up a little.
Deinonychus can scale small trees as well through this method, but a proper climbing feature is needed for larger trees. A prototype for this is being built.
Polish
Turn in place
The experimental turn in place got some love with a fix to resolve a great deal of the jitter that was visible while looking around and having turn in place enabled. The accompanying animations for Coelophysis (Deinonychus does not yet have TIP) have also been tweaked. This feature remains a work in progress, and is still undergoing further polish.
Nighttime overhaul
A previous patch made the night significantly brighter, but this washed out the visuals quite significantly. This patch makes steps towards rectifying the problem and making the night more appealing. This is an evolving feature, presentation and lightning balance will likely get further tweaks. There are likely weather/time combinations that are a bit too dark and need some adjustment. Feedback about this in the Discord is welcome, try playing with the gamma a little bit meanwhile.
Bugfixes
- Fixed an issue where players could get stuck inside other characters.
- Fixed a bug where logging out on a rock would cause you to be stuck inside the rock. You might still have a few seconds of jitter in the air as you log in, but it should correctly place you once it's done initialising.
- Fixed an issue where cursor sometimes stayed on screen after closing the F1 console.
- Resolved various issues with the interactable foliage instance spawning/despawning.
- Misc
- Deinonychus' teeth are now no longer visible while mouth is closed.
- Server performance improvements.
- Fixed scanner lights not turning on.
- Removed the fracturing effect on the termite mounds. This was based on an older system that is deprecated in Unreal, intent is to bring this back later in a different form.
- Added an input hint on how to close the help menu
- Removed unstuck and help from options on mainmenu