Good morning, afternoon and evening everyone-!
We have decided to begin uploading our weekly updates that we do every Monday on discord here on Tuesdays. These updates are divided into 3 teams world, creatures and human/code this week is our code update, so here it is-!
This week we have a little bit of a shorter update as we visit the more technical side of things of the development. There are mostly two major features to be showcased this week which are very anticipated things to come!
NEW Dragon Ability System~!
Hatchet is working on a revamp of the ability system for dragons: this is done so that we can implement a more modular ability system for our powerful beasts. This will make the system far more flexible and easier to implement and improve when new dragons and new abilities are being added. This will also result in a more consistent behaviour in attacks between the server and client (the player), for short fixing a great deal of issues that we have currently in regards of visual errors and not knowing when/if you have been hit.
We are also looking forward to adding flinching animations later in the development, which will provide more easier visual cues to when a character is being hit. This will remove the constant need to keep an eye on your health bar or second guessing whether you hit or not.
Setting up some fancy servers~!
The last couple of weeks our senior programmer have been working on getting our new P4 server setup (w/ support for streams and parallel operations), with our custom engine fork of UE5, and converting the project to a "native" UE project which most Unreal tools by Epic expect. Working on setting up Horde w/ UnrealGameSync for automated builds + binaries distribution to the team, and once this is up and running and deploying builds to Steam, they will be moving onto setting up and integrating Epic Online Services in the game w/ EAC and steamworks.
UPDATED Human "Heavy" Novice Bone Armour!
Our lead concept artist, Vitaerris is moving ahead with redesigning more of our human armour concepts. Today we are showcasing the novice's "heavy" bone armour variants! Bone armour is going to be part of some of the early game for the humans, but rest assured it is going to be useful for the later parts of the game as well if so desired. We are giving each armour type their own "unique ability" you could say. This will make all armour in certain terms viable and ideal to craft instead of just quickly climbing the resources to get better armour as fast as possible.
NEW WIP Character Customisation System!
DISCLAIMER: this is our first pass on skin selection and customisation system! Nothing here is permanent and there is going to be loads of testing in the near future patches! We have not yet limited any of the colour wheel choices and selections, so excuse the bright and unnatural colours shown within the video, this is only a very early work in progress.
- Here is a video featuring the basics of selecting skins. With Vulgan we currently have mostly static skins, so you can see here our developer testing and scrolling through the available skins.
- Another, an early work in progress skin customisation editor. Again, we do not have setup colour wheel restrictions or created any of the palette's yet. Right now it is still very simplistic and quite bright.
- Below you can see two testers side by side with their "customised" skins with different colours. A lot of those pesky replication issues (visual errors where a player's skin is not what its supposed to look like) has been fixed. Though there are still things to tweak and clean up before we feel comfortable to release it to the Patreon testers.
So what else is being worked on?
. Optimisation continues as the forefront for the world and level design.
. Reworked character selection backend to make it more modular and make it easier to expand with new dragons.
. Skin selection and customisation will be tuned and refined.
. Started work on rudimentary skin customisation through colour palette.
. Our skin artists are working together with our programmers to make all skins from here on
. out (and possibly transferring over old skins into the new customisation-friendly state).
. The new dragon ability system will be properly setup and requires further testing.
. Working on creating our build graph for Steam deployment and servers.
NEW MONTHLY Development Video!
Last but not least, you know what's coming up! New month, new compilation of everything that has been worked on through June! Make sure to give a look, a like and share! Let's get some reactive interaction going:
So that's everything this week , we will be doing these every Tuesday from now on , but if you want them early head over to our discord-!