A roadmap for the time to come has been highly requested since the launch of Astride's early access. We would like to let you in on our short, mid, and long-term plans for the rest of this year. Please keep in mind that changes may happen while development is ongoing but we will do our best to share news of changes with you.
Information
Unity DOTS
Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS) is a collection of packages enabling us to create best practice, high performance, multiplayer games with significantly less technical debt and fewer challenges than the old Unity MonoBehaviour workflow. However, Unity hasn't converted many existing features available yet, like Animation and Terrains. Therefore, we are opting in for temporary solutions until they have converted these packages. We have tried out a couple of third-party plugins in the past but they are either not compatible with DOTS or lack support for DOTS in the future.
Short Term
Optimization & Bug Fixes
There is a mix of Unity bugs and code bugs that needs to be addressed and fixed in the short term. Crashing, game-breaking bugs and poor performance is the main focus in the short term and we hope to fix these as fast as possible. We are also able to hire our freelance tech artist again so they're back to help out with adding more quality settings and doing general "Tech Artist" optimizations. We will also add more graphics settings to enable granular control as one would expect in modern games.
Show Jumping
We want to enable server owners to host and manage show jumping competitions with scoring mechanics and leaderboards. We also want to enable players to join perpetual competitions in servers without the need for a manager. At the same time as working on this game mode we will tweak the horse movement controller to feel better to use in show jumping.
Audio
Our sound designer has made some relaxing ambiance that we would like to implement into the current scene. Music for the horse creator has been made and is on its way. Horse sounds and riding sounds will be implemented once our custom animation system is at an acceptable state. We will be recording sounds from a local horse barn.
Rider
We have a few rider animations but at the moment they are in a placeholder state. We need to lock in the animations we want for show jumping and dressage before we start making proper rider animations. We are aiming to have the first look at the rider in-game in the early fall.
Chat
We will implement Vivox and enable players to chat together in-game. However, it is important that we implement the Steamworks API into the game first so that each player is bound to their Steam ID and can be muted/banned from servers.
Mid Term
Dressage
Dressage is the next development phase that we've applied funding for and will be the main focus for fall/winter. A lot of animation work needs to be done as well as design and tweaks to the horse movement controller in order to enable the high-precision movement required for dressage.
Mac Build
We can make a Mac build from a Windows computer with the Mono scripting backend, however, this produces a significantly slower build than making a build from a physical Mac with the IL2CPP scripting backend. We want to give the project a proper optimization pass and make a physical Mac pipeline before we feel comfortable adding the Mac support tag to the game. Right now the horse shader is not compatible with Mac, and our vegetation asset is not DX12 and Forward+ compatible. But our freelance tech artist will be re-making the shader to make it more optimized and compatible with all platforms.
Terrain, open world content, and collision
Since we are using DOTS we need to wait for a DOTS-compatible terrain workflow before we can implement proper terrain collision supporting the upcoming character controller and an update to the current horse controller. Internally, we put indoor show jumping and dressage as a focus while we wait for proper terrain support. But we noticed that horses don't like to be contained when there is beautiful nature to ride around in, so we put a temporary solution in place and made an opening in the fence.
As of right now, the collision is all clientside as it just samples the height from the height map and sticks you on top of the terrain. We could spend some effort making a temporary hybrid solution to bridge the gap between the old terrain system and DOTS, but it would require a significant amount of research and development that we don't have the resources to do at the moment. If a simple solution presents itself, we can look into that as an upgraded temporary solution until Unity releases its open-world terrain workflow.
Long Term
Moving Character
Unity DOTS provides an experimental character controller that we want to utilize. However, a requirement is that terrain collision works as we do not want to fall through the terrain. Initially, we set this feature as a milestone for later, but we can experiment with our testers until we are ready to release it to the main branch.
If you have any questions regarding this roadmap, do not hesitate to ask. We will do our best to provide you with clear answers.
