Trym & jumps
By Maja - CEO, Concept Artist
NPC drawing spree
Wow, September really went by quickly. This month I focused on drawing another important NPC, named Trym. Who will be the cross country instructor? So now we have Trym for cross country, Rini for show jumping and Elin for Dressage. I’ve also started on another NPC, who will be more of a cafe barista or shopkeeper. Those are important as well. I am trying to complete my NPC list. There are still some left, but the majority is done.
Fences and jumps
As a smaller task I drew some fun jumps with different types of themes. So I made some food-themes-jump, a norse theme jump and so on. Here are a few jumps that are quickly made out of the same shape that appear different due to color and text. I imagined a box or a stand with lemonade/lemons, so then I continued with making an orange version and lime version. They look very fun! I added a leaf on each half of the fruit as support for the shape.
The update & Nordland
By Mathilde - Community Manager, 3D-artist
This month has been quite a ride! I've been mostly working behind the scenes on smaller things such as fixing the environment and getting it as ready as I could for the new update, making sure that the new tack doesn't clip through the horse while moving, adjusting the show jumping courses, making icons for the inventory, and much more. In addition to this, making the trailers for the game that you can now see on our Steam page, the patch highlights, and of course the social media content you can see across all of our platforms.
While I've been working on many different tasks regarding the newest update we released, I've been able to set aside a little bit of time for new horses as well. Next up on the list is the Nordland horse which is a Norwegian horse breed that is very similar to the Icelandic horse, although it doesn't have the extra gaits. In the photo, you can see an early draft of the base mesh shape. The high detail sculpt, tack fitting, and other aspects of creating new horses is still on my to-do list for this one.
Waterfall & stable
By Tirna - Project Manager, 3D-artist
As many of you have seen already, the environment is far from done, lately I have been working a lot with behind the scenes tasks, so unfortunately there hasn't been much development in the environment. However, there has been something done, and the main thing is the waterfall, that has been quite underwhelming to look at. So here are a few pictures of the new waterfall! The ground and area around will be more worked at, but we wanted to share how it looks like now, in the development, and hope you are as happy with the waterfall change as we are.
Speaking of changes; we’ve been thinking a lot about changes to the stable property, and we’re excited to share what’s in the works! Some parts will stay the same, but others are getting a big update. The aim is to make the property make more sense, both visually but also more practical for you as a player.
The plan is to have space for up to 20 horses. One of the smaller buildings, with two paddocks, will be set up so the horses can roam as a small herd and choose whether they want to be inside or outside. The other stable will be more traditional. And of course, the larger pastures around the stable will remain, giving the horses plenty of room to graze. We’re also thinking about adding an indoor arena, but we’re still figuring out where it’ll go. These ideas are still in the planning phase, so things may change, but we’re feeling good about where we’re headed. Hopefully, it’s something you’ll love as much as we do!
Clothes & sitting
By Marius - Animator
Clothes
After we added the tack and inventory system for the horse, we felt that we wanted clothes to be changeable too. So I started the process of separating the clothes meshes from the character. Though the programmers were busy with the then upcoming update, making sure everything worked. I could try to make preparations for making a system for it, though with no aspirations that it would work before our programmers can take a look at it. And adding new stuff right before an update is something you shouldn’t do as it can break everything that works there and then.
Sitting
I was talking about interactions with objects with someone that got me thinking that we would need an animation or at least a pose for when we want to start adding that. Especially where the interaction interferes with the character and not the object. Like sitting for example, where the character needs to be moved and placed based on a sittable area or object like a chair or bench. I made a few variations, but for the most part they are really similar.
Before the update went live we needed to test new and old features, to see if they worked as well as test performance between computers; then report to our programmers. And when the update got closer we needed to capture gameplay to update our steam page.
Big Fixing & Polishing
By Green Horse - Programmer
Playtesting and Livestreams
September was a busy month with behind the scenes administrative work, QA with Patreon testers, and bug fixing. The main focus of this month for me was to run playtests with our Patreon testers to find and squash bugs for the update that we just released. We did a rapid 4-day session where we isolated the main issues, wrote them down, and updated the build in between the livestreams. A huge thank you to the testers who joined me during these livestreams.
Memory usage, Rendering and Performance
I'm noticing that I'm not really a tech artist, so fiddling with shader values to get things to look right is not really my area, but overall I think I got most of the foliage to behave well enough for this update, except for the bushes. They have issues. Very relatable. The problem was the render range of the asset pack that we use. The foliage visibly fades out after 40 meters or so, so I upped it to around 200 with a 50-meter fadeout range. It's not really that important to have things look perfect in this update, but to bring the game conceptually to how we want it to look.
Astride is a texture heavy game. All the horses require different layered textures in order to create the final horse texture and the process of doing so loads in many textures at once creating a memory spike that might close the game for players with low amounts of free memory. I reduced many of the nature assets to be capped at 2K resolution instead of 4K and 8K. This reduces the memory usage, but some players are still having issues with 16GB of RAM due to the spiking. I enabled texture streaming on Low, Medium, and High resolutions to test things out but left it off on Ultra. This seemed to work. Closer to release, we will do proper optimization passes to make the game run well on our target platforms, but during development, that type of work is quickly made obsolete by changing environments and assets. During development, we will focus on low-hanging fruits.
This memory snapshot was taken before I reduced the texture size and added texture streaming.
Reins are a bigger task we need to tackle. There can be many tacked horses on the screen at once with reins. Reins are heavy to simulate on the CPU, so we need to find a way to load balance this in a way that isn't detrimental to the visuals. I have some ideas, and I think we want to test out the following: Simulate reins for the players closest to you with physics. Use GPU-based rope shaders for players a bit further away from you. Use baked rein animations for players furthest away from you. Disable reins entirely for players really far away from you. I have a sneaking suspicion that shader-based reins can replace physical reins if we can make them behave well. I think I also want to add a bunch of options for players to mess around with in regards to reins and their performance. All this requires a bit of research and development so it will take some time before we can fully implement these changes.
Server performance is sadly locked to rendering performance at the moment. Later, we will include a standalone executable to run servers, but at the moment, if you are running a server on a lower-end computer, the performance will not be good for players joining. This is also made worse by the physically simulated reins. The end goal is for players to host dedicated servers, a standalone executable that players can host on their own computers or on rented cloud servers. This will make servers run as smoothly as possible.
Update, saving, & bugs
By Ouroboros - Programmer
We were finally able to get a release out this month, which included a lot of features I have been working on these past few months. Sadly, the save system didn’t make it due to a bug that we discovered a bit late. I have been pretty busy fixing other bugs and doing some polishing. Several of the bugs were in the horse creator, and in particular with the randomize buttons. Our Patreon testers were a huge help when it came to bug hunting, and I was able to focus on fixing them rather than finding them. As such, we were able to get rid of a lot of bugs.
Right after the update was released, I started looking into the save system bug. It took some tries to reproduce the bug, but I eventually found a way to do it and figured out where the issue was. Finding out the why and the where of a bug is the most time consuming part, so it didn’t take too long to fix it after that. We were then able to get the save system out in test and managed to iron out some more bugs thanks to our testers.
The save system is currently made to only work in singleplayer. The reason for this is that multiplayer is complicated and several scenarios must be taken into account. For example, what if we load the game world of the player that hosts the server, but then another player puts an eldhest in their inventory and skedaddles out of there. The host would be missing an eldhest in their game world, and the other player would have an extra eldhest. There are several ways to solve this, but we still need to put a lot of thought into what the best solution is for Astride. And this is only one scenario. We also have tack, quests and courses to take into consideration. Since data is saved locally on the player’s computer, the relevant data will have to be sent to the server. There are some limitations to this in relation to the size of the data, the format, and how often it is sent. In short, there is a lot to think about.
With all this being said, I have been working on multiplayer save this past week. The first iteration is done and will be out in test before long. There are many things that can potentially go wrong when loading and saving data, so we’re taking it one step at a time.
Building atmosphere
By Darline - Internship
This month, as part of my internship at Raidho Games, I was able to work on exciting 3D
designs for Astride. I designed a variety of assets that contribute to the atmosphere and
immersion of the game world. Each of these tasks not only represented a creative challenge,
but also gave me the opportunity to further develop my skills in the field of 3D modeling and
texturing.
One of the larger projects I tackled was the design of bridges. These bridges have to be both
functional and visually appealing, as they play a central role in exploring the game world. It
was particularly important here that the structures fit organically into the natural environment
and still appear stable and robust. By using different stone textures and by incorporating
natural signs of wear, such as moss and worn edges, I was (hopefully) able to create an
authentic design that gives the player the feeling of being part of this rustic world.
Another highlight of my work was the campfire, which I designed with a special focus on the
Norwegian atmosphere. Here it was important to me to convey the special mood of Nordic
life. I made sure that the textures of the environment convey a feeling of coziness and the
rough nature of Scandinavia - as if you were sitting by the fire under the northern lights on a
clear night.
In addition to these larger projects, I also modeled a number of smaller but equally important
objects. These include a mailbox, a pin board and birdhouses that enrich the game with
everyday elements. These objects contribute to the lively village life and help to present the
world of "Astride" as an inhabited, realistic place. The mailbox, for example, was designed to
be not only functional but also visually eye-catching - with details such as worn metal parts
and rustic wood.
I particularly enjoyed working on objects that stand out due to their Viking aesthetic. Here I
was able to let my creativity run wild and incorporate details that are reminiscent of Nordic
mythology. Carvings based on runes and traditional patterns as well as robust materials
such as rough wood and dark metals were used. These elements fit perfectly into the overall
picture of the world and give it a historical depth that takes players back to times gone by.
Through the various projects this month, I not only expanded my technical skills in 3D
modeling and texturing, but also deepened my understanding of the interplay between
design and atmosphere in games. It was a great pleasure to be part of a creative team and
to contribute with my work to shaping the immersive world of Astride. I look forward to
diving even deeper into the development in the coming weeks and taking on more exciting
challenges.
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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.