The horses are getting a hair cut and I’m the hairstylist

By Maja - CEO, Concept Artist

Spooky season is here and I’ve been continuing my work on the horse’s mane and tail. Note that I’m still learning Blender and how to work with hair cards, but I felt I got a better grasp around it this month. Last devlog I focused mainly on the long mane and the roots. This time I worked on the short mane, which proved to be a bit more challenging to work with than the long mane. I also worked on the forelocks, so that they were fitted to each horse and adjusted. 

A few hours was spent on the tail, testing out ways to make it more interesting and dynamic. Some adjustments were maybe too much. However, I keep having to do adjustments, because after testing it we found some issues causing some hair cards to be invisible. And I learned quickly that the texture doesn’t follow the hair card exactly, so even though it looks nice in Blender doesn't mean it looks good in Unity. Yeah, this is a huge task, and I think I need to add more cards to make it look fuller. Still, I enjoy working with this more than I anticipated. I’m looking forward to improving my skills even more in this area. 

One of my favorite parts has been to edit the shortest forelock in the game to fit other breeds like the Fjord and Icelandic. Because it just didn't suit them at all, they need extra volume! I’m excited to continue this work, though it needs to be tested a lot before completing it fully.  

Testing and preparing for the Breeding update

Breeding will be an important part of Astride and to have it in the update is fantastic. We had to take a lot of screenshots of record content for the trailer and Social media. I had just a good time breeding horses and buying horses in the game to create cute foals for the video. You can get so many different results from the same horses. 

For update trailers we need to decide on what are the most important features to showcase. This of course being breeding and the foals, as well as day and night cycle and of course the mighty Percheron. The part that was the most time consuming was to lead the foals to different spots. They aren’t the fastest at the moment. But at least they are movable. Also recording content throughout the day and night cycle was lovely. So many different looks for everything.

Designing and further planning

There is no month without some paperwork here and there. Now, I’m preparing some documents for shaders goals for the game. To give ourselves a clear view of what we want. I am especially excited for a hair-shader in the future. I have much more to design and plan, so I’ll head into the new month with that in mind.

A Touch of Tradition: Rosemaling in the Stable Design

By Tirna - Project Manager, 3D-artist

Last month, we began working on the traditional stable, which also led us into the world of traditional Nordic art and patterns. This month has been filled with planning, meetings, and — as autumn tends to bring - a fair bit of seasonal sickness. So while development on my side hasn’t been the biggest leap forward, some nice progress has still been made!

Here is just a sketch that I made, inspired by different traditional Nordic buildings, reimagined as a stable.

A big focus has been on UV mapping, the prep work that needs to be done before texturing. Alongside that, I’ve been creating a whole set of new pattern stamps inspired by Rosemaling: a traditional Norwegian decorative art that directly translates to “rose painting.”

By designing these in Photoshop with transparent backgrounds, we can easily apply them to different assets in the stable, from furniture and walls to smaller details, like a brush or a bucket. giving everything that warm, handcrafted look. There are now around 35 unique stamps ready to use!

Painting these intricate patterns directly onto 3D models would’ve taken much longer, so this method lets us stay flexible while keeping the handcrafted feel we want.

This furniture was created last month, but they got finalized after we created the patterns. We are looking forward to putting together the Nordic Cosy stable.

Our vision for the stable is something unique and full of history, not a modern, freshly built one, but an old, character-rich place that has seen generations of horses, which we do hope you will create too.

Foal Animations

By Marius - Animator

While looking though the few animations that are made for the foal, I realized that I would need a movement animation to be an alternative for the bucking animation. The initial bucking animation was made at the approximate speed my reference moved so it is quite a bit faster than the walk animation; which at that point was the only other movement animation made. I decided to make a normal movement alternative for bucking, as we will need it so that when we implement bucking it doesn’t just start sprinting along from a walking speed. It should ideally keep the movement speed it has or maybe have a slight shift in speed, but not a complete change as it would with only walking and bucking animation as it is now.

After looking at the movement speed the initial bucking animation was made in, I found that it is around the same speed as canter would be for the foal. I took some time looking at different clips of foals moving and running around to see if I found one that showed a stable enough canter to loop, filmed from a good angle. While I didn’t want to change too much, other than making sure the legs didn’t clip through each other, I did try to incorporate some of the differing movement the foal had.

Starting the process of adjusting the horse canter to the foal seemed easy at first, but I quickly remembered why adjusting or adding to the canter animation usually takes so much time; I needed to animate the turning animations for left and right individually as they do not mirror in movement.

Foals & Major Bugs

By Ouroboros - Programmer

I was able to finish implementing the foal during the first week of October. I got the last few textures set up, which included foal camouflage, and made it possible to lead the foals. The rest of the month was spent on bug fixing and polishing. The build with the foal model was released in test during the second week of October, and it was in this build that we started to see some concerning issues.

For the build with the foal, we had also updated the Unity editor. At the start of October, Unity released a message stating that a security vulnerability had been discovered in all versions of the Unity editor that had been released since version 2017.1. It was advised that everyone update to the newest Unity editors, and so that is what we did. After this, there were instances where save files made in earlier builds of Astride no longer worked and left the player stuck under the world. We are not quite sure what exactly caused the issues, but the assumption is that there are some changes in newer versions of the Unity editor that don't interact well with our code for setting up the client and server worlds. Everything would load properly on the server world, but it would stop on the client.

We were initially hoping the issue only happened for save files from older builds, but it was eventually confirmed that it could happen with save files for new builds as well. We had no idea about how common the issue would be, how many would be affected, or what triggered it. At that point, we had to seriously consider if we should delay the update. While we were looking into the different options we had, Marius got the idea that we could stick with the old Unity editor and instead use a patcher tool Unity had released to patch the security vulnerability in builds. We gave it a try and, luckily, it worked. The security vulnerability was patched and there were no more issues with the save files or the client and server worlds. Thanks to that, we were able to go ahead with the release of the breeding update.

Even though we managed to find a solution to get the update out, it is still recommended by Unity to use the newer editor version. This is also something we wish to do so that we can get access to the newest features and improvements. While the plan was initially to start work on implementing client quests, we have decided to instead focus on updating the client/server code in Astride so that we can upgrade our Unity version. I will also take this chance to look into optimizations so that the game will run smoother. I expect it will take some time, but it will be worth it at the end.

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Please be aware that the content featured in these devlogs represents an ongoing work in progress and may be subject to further changes. We are committed to continuously developing and refining our game. To stay informed about the latest updates and connect with the rest of the Astride community, we invite you to join our dedicated Discord server community here! For additional information about Astride, please visit our official website.