This patch brings the game onto Unreal Engine 5! You will likely not notice too many things from this yet directly (showcase features like Nanite and Lumen are still not quite ready for use in the project), but this migration makes it possible to grow the project further in the future while all the new goodies in the new version of the engine become more mature. There's also a good dose of polish and bugfixes in this patch.
With this patch out the door, we can focus our efforts fully on new playable characters (work on these has already been underway for a while).
Details on what changed since the beta patch and things to watch out for below.
PSAs:
❗ A quick note on performance
Foliage rendering performance has been improved, but the amount of foliage has also increased on the map. If you're having performance issues, that's the first thing to check in your graphics settings (Foliage Density) . The game can scale it down for you if you're struggling.
❗ Client crashes
We haven't seen any frequent crashes, but have run into some rare crashes here and there that appeared to happen deep in the engine's bowels and did not seem directly related to gameplay code. We're keeping an eye on this.
❗ Server crashes
Early in the beta patch test, one of the servers exhibited a crash/restart loop. Once we tried to investigate this however, it didn't happen anymore. We're keeping our eyes open for this, but if you're a server owner and this happens to your server see the section below on how to switch back for the time being. Please also do report it to us.
❗ How to switch back to the old version
We've opened a new steam branch dubbed legacy-0.5.0 where the previous patch will remain available and you can switch back to. If you're a regular player and you want to switch back (or you want to play on your legacy server as a server owner), make sure you remove your old settings at C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Local\IslesOfYore (this will also remove your skin presets, back those up).
❗ Known issues
The following issues are still present. They're planned to be worked on, but weren't immediately game-breaking and have been deprioritised over getting work done on the new playable characters:
- Surface displacement (sand/snow) has been temporarily removed due to Unreal Engine 5's removal of Tessellation. Displacement will likely come back in the near future through an alternate solution.
- There's a couple areas where foliage is in incorrect places or angled in such a way that you can get stuck on them. While we polish this out, if you get stuck, press the unstuck option in the escape menu and if needed, relog afterwards.
- Interactable foliage might pop in with the wrong scale. A workaround for this is to walk a good distance away from the foliage, wait a few moments, and come back to it. Issue is known, but needs a bit of further development to fix.
- While the issues with river collision are better than in 0.5.0, it's still not fool-proof and remains an area of active development.
- There's a couple weather types that don't blend very nicely (foggy -> clearskies for instance), you might see the weather being temporarily too dark or too bright while it transitions. This is being worked on.
- This is not a new issue, but wanted to acknowledge that we've found a couple of scenarios where there's some rubberbanding. We're going to look into improving this in an upcoming patch.
Changelog
Features
- Added Turn in Place for Deinonychus.
- [Work in Progress] - Added interaction effects to water. This works well in lakes, sort of with the ocean, but not yet properly in rivers. Work in progress. Small asterix to place here is that you currently have to be in the water for the interaction to be visible active for other players too, which will be improved.
- Expanded the amount of foliage that react to touch.
- New biome: rainforest.
- Added extra sounds for Deinonychus.
- Added a "what's new" screen on the main menu.
Polish
- Various improvements to turn in place. Some more work is needed to round it out completely, but it's a lot more stable and is now by default turned on, no longer marked experimental. It's still optional for the moment though.
- Expanded and polished Deinonychus' animations.
- Added various action/emote icons for Deinonychus to radial menu.
- Removed experimental tag from Deinonychus. He'll still get more polish (especially in the audio department) and further gameplay features, but the basic implementation should be fairly solid now and no longer warrants the experimental tag.
- Reworked jungle and redwoods biomes with better foliage distribution to achieve less repetition and more organic placement.
- Expanded jungle biome to run along the beach.
- Cleaned up (reduced artifacting) and greatly expanded the amount of Kauaʻi ʻōʻō audio sounds.
- Server performance improvements.
- Improved foliage rendering performance on the client.
- Another round of big improvements for weather and time-of-day lighting. Further work continues on this.
- Tweaked rivers in various positions on the map to reduce clipping and collision issues. However, see known limitations section on this.
- Adjusted roaming area for scanners so they're less likely to get stuck in the rainforest. Though this is not fool-proof, the game is in need of a better navigation solution to properly fix this.
- Added AI spawn points in the new coastal jungles.
- Tidied up various rainforest spawn spots where it was overlapping the waterfall and the alpine biome.
- Tweaked light occlusion of sun and moon as they rise and set, to be better blocked by the geography in front. Not perfect, but a decent step forward.
- Added a new "far shadows" option.
- Added a "Full scale" button to make switching to 100% screen resolution easier.
Balance
- Nerfed bleed.
- Buffed bleed resist Brachio.
Bugfixes
- Redid water system to mitigate issues with collision. The "floating above water" issue the game had is a lot better now, but still not rock solid. Some areas where the discrepancy is very large we can much more easily tweak now if we run into them, but there's still some limitations with how far we can fix this. Surface transitions between water bodies also sadly took a hit in visual quality (you'll be able to much more easily see a cut on the water surface), slated for improvement. This overhaul represents an intermediate step to bridge the gap until a more mature and higher fidelity water solution is in place.
- Fixed foliage jittering due to wind changes. The experimental wind opt-in is now gone from the menu and enabled by default.
- Fixed flickering on Redwoods branches.
- Fixed vaulting onto foliage.
- Fixed various cases where the locomotion system would skate around instead of moving naturally.
- Fixed various cases of items not despawning in water.
- Fixed nesting preview placement material not being properly visible at night.
- Fixed a bug where clicking the "build nest" option while already trying to build a nest, would duplicate the placement and not allow you to cancel the initial placement preview.
- Fixed a bug where other players would appear as walking sideways (incorrectly oriented) while strafing.
- Fixed character automatically walking onto termite mounds.
- Fixed footprints showing up on character is if you walk through them.
- Waterfall is no longer brighter than the sun at night.
- Foliage now properly dampens wind intensity and interaction once grabbed.
- Fixed an issue where the 2D aurora would not show up (which is enabled if the volumetric clouds graphics option is disabled).
- Fixed various ambient audio tracks not looping properly.
- Further stability improvements to turn in place. Reminder that while it is now enabled by default, it is still optional. We feel it's stable enough for use, but it's not as butter smooth as we want it to, you can still opt-out in the controls menu for the moment.
- Fixed a desync (resulting in jitter) that happened intermittently while moving. See also earlier note about known issues with rubber banding that we're further looking into.
- Fixed smelling causing a squared shadow depression on the landscape.
- Fixed an issue where the sim.time command didn't set the correct time.
- Fixed various sky rendering instabilities.
- Fixed various issues with dynamic weather.
- Fixed various issues with the aurora.
- Fixed wind intensity behaving incorrectly on some foliage. We're still improving this further on a per-foliage basis.
- Fixed another cause of foliage wind jitter.
- Fixed foliage blur that that occured while it moved, with the exception of grass that cannot currently be fixed due to an engine regression in UE5.
- Fixed black rendering artifacts on certain ferns.
- Fixed a bug where desired screenscale wouldn't be persisted.
Miscellaneous
- The "TAA Gen 5" graphics option has been renamed to "TSR" (Temporal Super Resolution) to fit the new UE5 terminology.