Hair, paintings & lore

By Maja - CEO, Concept Artist

Mane and tail: revisit
There has been a while since I last did anything with the horse’s hair cards. But now I got the chance to take a look at them again. I had to do some adjustments to the short mane, long mane and redid the forelock for many horses. Since last time, I’ve gotten a better grasp of blender.

The most fun part this time was to fix the forelocks. Since the ones we have are mostly suited for the warmblood, breeds with thicker manes often looked a bit strange. I made sure to look at forelock images of each breed, even though I believe I have a good grasp of how each breed’s forelock tends to look. This resulted in me redoing the Alter Real/Lusitano forelock entirely, as well as the more draft horses like Jutland and Percheron. Mostly all breeds at adjustments.

Examples for edited short forelock: Jutland, Alter Real/Lusitano, Nordland and Fjord

Examples for edited medium/long forelock: Percheron, Icelandic and Alter Real/Lusitano

All the manes, forelocks and tails are sent to Mathilde, so then she will be able to do some more adjustments where needed with both textures and colors visible.

WIP: Painting for the stable
With the exciting stable design coming up we have some free space that’s ideal to put an “illustration/painting”. So I have looked at classical painting to draw some inspiration from. The “painting” will of course be horse themed, featuring a Fjord. I am aiming for the “national romantic vibe”, which was quite popular in Norway during the 1800s.

Now, this is still early progress, but the shapes are coming along fine. The background is slightly inspired by a part of Mjøsa as well. It's been a while since I’ve done an art piece like this. It’s so fun, especially after all the writing I’ve done and am still doing.

Lore
After writing so much game design last year, it’s just naturally that I write some lore too, even though we have had this planned for a long time. However, we still need some more definition and adjustment to this aspect. This means the property’s story and Eldheim.

Stable development

By Tirna - Project Manager, 3D-artist

The stable is coming along bit by bit, and these are the newest updates. Some textures are broken or have small errors, but they will be fixed before we launch the new stable. For now, the textures are mostly to help see the vision.

Since last time, the floor has been done. The old stone floor with a fan-shaped pattern gave the perfect old stable look that we were aiming for. However, in the stalls, they have upgraded over time, with a more stable material: concrete. With some wood shavings on top (There will be more wood shavings later). At some places in the stable you can also find a beautiful carved pattern.

The doors out to the paddock have also got textures. And we can’t wait to see cute horses peaking through the open windows.

The ceiling has gotten some more support and structure to it. For some reason, the structure stole the texture from another place, so it can borrow that until it has its own texture.

Here is a before-and-after picture. We thought it helped reflect the light better, so it wasn’t a boring void of a ceiling.

Speaking of voids…The main entrance has been through a lot of changes recently!

I struggled a lot with making sense of this main entrance… It gave a sneaky, dark backdoor vibe, where you could expect to be jumped by a ghost rather than being the actual main entrance. So the walls were knocked down and I tried to make it more cozy. But it still didn’t scream “main entrance”. So I tried again… But we all felt that it was unnatural to have a space to sit here. And other equipment already has an assigned space.

But this sitting space is still kind of cute. But just not for the entrance. So it got moved upstairs. The plan is to have a grand painting behind the bench, so when you look up from the first floor, you won't see the bench, but a large painting.

Then… What now, what screams a good first impression for the stable? It was time to think outside the box, or outside the stall (that joke works a lot better in Norwegian). What makes sense to the player, and not necessarily for a stable? A showroom of your achievements and highlights! Like a little progress museum!

Not my proudest artwork… But the vision was more important than the execution. 

By doing this, I came across a few problems. So the decision ended up with Expand the space, rather than force it. I had to fix the wall texture anyway. So now you will be met with a grand hall of fame!

Where two of your beloved horses will greet you from each side of the entrance. For reference, the horses will get large stalls with paddocks.

Lastly! Since this is an old stable, we need some old functions, and at the same time, we changed something in the game design document. There will be a hole in the ceiling and the hay will be pushed down from this room. From here, you fill a wagon with hay and then give it to the horses. 

There will be some changes here as well. - The window will be moved up, and when it is filled with hay, it will look something like this.

Starting the Friesian

By Mathilde - Community Manager, 3D-artist

You may have noticed that I have sort of disappeared from the devlogs as of late. I've been busy working another part-time job, but this month and February I have more time to spend on Astride before I start working another job in March. While my wish is to be able to work full-time on Astride, I am limited by my personal budget, and the best solution for me at this time is to focus mostly on a different full-time job while doing what I can on Astride in my spare time. This way, the other developers have more finances on their end while I can still be a part of the game and contribute, just at a slower pace.

Thankfully, the other amazing developers of Astride are still going strong even with me stepping aside to stand on the sidelines from time to time. I still have so much faith in this project and do not intent to leave anyone or anything behind.

Moving on from that to what I've been working on lately - the Friesian horse is finally in the works! This breed was chosen by you, the community, and I was honestly so happy that this breed was chosen. I haven't yet worked out a good way to deal with feathers on the legs yet, so please use your imagination for them in the meantime! As for now, I've only done the basics of fitting the base model into a more Friesian-like body type that is ready to get the high-poly sculpt. This is where more/different details are added to make the Friesian stand out even more from the other breeds.

I also have some tack fitting to do, but that will have to wait until I am done with the high-poly sculpture and have somewhat finalized the model. Of course, feedback is more than welcome, I am no Friesian horse expert!

Tech troubles

By Marius - Animator

For my part I have been bogged down by computer problems that froze my computer anytime I tried to work in 3D. One day it worked, the next it didn’t. While trying to find out what was wrong, I found that the upgrade from windows 10 to 11 had majorly broken key parts of all Microsoft applications, forcing me to do a reset.  After that it became clear that a reset wasn’t enough to fix things and I had to do a complete formatting of the C drive. The problem still persists, but at least the computer lives long enough to let me diagnose the problem.

Cleaning up code

By Ouroboros - Programmer

I started the new year by picking up where I left off before Christmas: spawning the player character into the game world. Following this, I started enabling a few of the core systems such as the character controller, the camera, some UI, and animations. It might sound pretty straight forward when written like that, but I spent time on each system to clean up, optimize and simplify the code. The camera in particular has taken a lot of work to get right for both first-person and third-person. I was able to simplify the code a significant amount, while also fixing some of the existing issues (no more ending up inside the character’s head).

I have finally reached the point where I’m ready to start making some builds for testing. The main focus will be to test the new multiplayer system, the character controller, and the camera. I want all of these to be as good as possible before moving on. Now that I can make functional builds, I can also start doing some profiling. I have made a temporary test scene that I will tweak to be able to profile different parts such as vegetation rendering, lighting, and physics. It will be interesting to see how much impact the different systems have on the game performance, and how big a difference the optimizations will make.

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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.