Disclaimer: Features discussed in this post reflect what is currently under development and may change in the future.

INVENTORY DRAG AND DROP

Players can now organize their inventories by dragging items both within and between personal and structure inventories. This feature works hand in hand with the hotbar functionality, allowing users to sort their items and equipment more efficiently alongside the hotkeys.

Additionally, dragging an item outside the inventory screen now drops it on the ground, just like using Alt + Click. We'll continue working on improving inventory functionalities into the future.

VISIBILITY CULLING IMPROVEMENTS

Tall structures such as walls and foundations now use visibility culling, allowing players to see themselves when moving through Keep and Town areas. We hope this enhances the user experience when fighting in tight spaces surrounded by dense structures. Similar improvements have also been applied to cave assets, improving visibility while exploring the Underworld.

VISUAL IMPROVEMENTS

TORCH CLIPPING

In some cases, the light emitted from torches could clip into ceilings or walls, causing the light source to vanish and plunging the player into darkness. We’ve added a system that dynamically adjusts the torch’s light position when it comes into contact with surfaces, allowing players to use torches more reliably inside structures and caves.

CANAL RENDERING

We’ve also addressed some problematic interactions between canals and terrain that caused them to sink into or float above the ground unnaturally. To resolve this, we’re now using vertical wall extensions to cover gaps in the landscape instead of dirt piles. In theory, this approach can handle gaps of any height simply by adding a taller mesh.

Sloping sides were added to the extension pieces to make transitions between extension heights look nicer. In the picture above you can see the debug traces indicating which type of extension to spawn (green=no extension, yellow=low extension, orange=medium extension).

UNREAL ENGINE 5.6 UPGRADE

Anvil Empires now runs on Unreal Engine 5.6, bringing several useful features for future development. We’ll be taking advantage of the new character animation tools as we redesign how our characters function on both technical and visual levels - this is also part of our ongoing efforts to improve rendering performance when many players are on screen. The upgrade also resolves multiple GPU crashes that players experienced under Unreal 5.1.

Be sure to add Anvil Empires to your wish list on Steam. If you want to join the community, head over the to official Discord server or Subreddit.