In this update, we've continued the process of improving AI entity behavior and expanded the behavioral palette and made general world content and interface improvements. Here is a short-list of progress:
- Enhanced the ambiance of the Taldera region by meticulously updating insect and bird sounds, creating a more vibrant and realistic auditory landscape.
- Revamped sound sequences throughout the project, adjusting values and settings to achieve smoother transitions and more immersive audio experiences.
- Streamlined building structures by eliminating SteamGeometry components from doors and windows, resulting in optimized performance and reduced overhead.
- Addressed terrain layer settings in the Ancestral Tomb, ensuring accurate rendering and collision detection for a seamless exploration experience.
- Fine-tuned the AudioConfigurationManager to accommodate updated sound arrays, enhancing the overall audio management system.
- Updated building prefabs to reflect changes in design or functionality, providing players with more visually appealing and interactive structures.
- Revised biome profiles across the game world, refining environmental parameters to better reflect the desired atmosphere and gameplay mechanics.
- Implemented chunking of world sectors in the Overworld for improved performance and efficient resource management.
- Upgraded to the latest version of Unity (2022.3.27f1), leveraging new features and optimizations provided by the engine.
- Improved AI traversal logic to ensure better movement across different platforms.
- Added logic to allow NPCs to use the same interactors players are able to use, including doors, workbenches, and other NPCs for dynamic NPC-to-NPC dialog.
- Added more world interaction nodes for NPCs to help drive them around the world for more immersive behaviors.
- Made many overall improvements to the building process based on community feedback and internal testing.
These comprehensive updates aim to elevate every aspect of the project, from audio fidelity and visual aesthetics to performance and stability, delivering a more polished and immersive gameplay experience for players.
Over the following weeks, we'll be focusing heavily on world content and NPC expansion. Our goal is to complete the population of the entirety of Taldera (the starting province), by the end of the coming week, with polish occurring the following week. These updates will be rolled out at the end of the polishing week.
We've also continued our quiet development of our networking solution to facilitate our future co-op and the more MMO-centric player-hosted sandbox game-modes. Though this is quire a while away from a release, we'll be sharing some early gameplay footage of these modes later in the month.
Many more great updates are on the horizon, including a huge combat update and we're very excited to get them released. In the meantime, we're gearing up to start proper marketing and promotion of the project, so look forward to more updates soon!