JJ/Seir
- Director & Founder
Hello Anomalies,
A lot has happened over the past month. A separate team is now developing a much smaller project under the internal name Project Aperture, funded entirely independently of Primeval Horizon, with the goal of helping fund future projects for our studio including Primeval Horizon itself. More details on that are coming soon.
Here at Remnant we deeply value the developers who bring our projects to life, and ensuring they are fairly compensated for their time and talent will always be a priority for us.
We are also in talks about producing Short Films set within the world of Primeval Horizon. Alongside other avenues we are pursuing to bring the funding this game deserves, the Short Films give us something far more achievable in the near term while keeping the world of Primeval Horizon alive and growing for all of you.
We cannot wait to share more soon!
Ember Newcomer
- General Artist
This month I was tasked with giving the logo of Primeval Horizon a brand new design! The design took inspiration from the project’s fantastical sci-fi themes, colors, and creatures. My thought process behind the logo’s concept was to give a compliment to the title “Primeval Horizon” by including a landscape. In this landscape are a couple of Primeval Horizon’s characters; a Mapusaurus bellowing at the light that protrudes from the mouth of a giant entity. On the ground of the landscape is a formation of organic-like thorns rooting into the world like a corrupted overgrowth. All these things combine to emphasize scale, darkness, and mystery to summarize the identity of Primeval Horizon.
Michal
- Environment Artist
Over the past weeks, I've been translating Ember's vision of a Wovenwood into a game-ready asset. It was a great pleasure to do that from the artistic angle, as there was immediate resonance with the concept she conjured, full of intricacies and visual interest. However, because of the tree's complexity and its distinct look, it was a technical challenge at times. Initially, I tried to approach this in a mostly procedural manner, to speed up the workflow not just for this particular model, but for future versions of Wovenwood trees. It was successful to some degree, but to do full justice to the original vision, I decided to start again - almost from scratch - and I modeled by hand the main shapes. Only then could I sleep well wink. The next challenge was to model, sculpt, and texture the leaves, which I had never done before despite having some past experience with creating foliage. I always preferred to grab my camera, go to the woods or to the fields, and rely on the photos I took to build texture atlases, so there wasn't a need to create them artificially. That part actually went quite smoothly and I enjoyed the process, as well as the final outcome. The tree is now finished visually, but there is still work to be done to properly animate it to meet the latest tech of Unreal's Nanite vegetation to ensure the best quality and performance. It was my first task in bringing custom vegetation to the Primeval Horizon universe, so a big Hello to everybody and I hope there will be more!
Dima
- Technical Director
What’s new with the Engine? Well, we’ve really put a lot of our efforts into Physics, as we’ve explained from the last video. I have continuously worked very hard over the last month on Jolt Physics being integrated into the Engine, pulling out Unreal Engine’s built in Chaos Physics from almost every nook and cranny. We’ve had some great results shown from time to time, but still a lot of bugs to fix.
Some highlights include:
Simulating physics on static meshes.
There are still a lot of remaining ownership and authority paths that really tie into Chaos, making it difficult for Jolt to take over in circumstances or from first time play, but I have actively researched and dug into these rabbit holes in order to unwind these paths.
Ragdolls are also fully implemented.
Ragdolls now work really well for NPCs, one of the comparisons you can make between Chaos, and Jolt is that Chaos treats bodies like balloons that flop, and tumble over on the ground. Initial tests were pretty janky, but we’re at a much better spot now.
Jolt has a very meaty approach where it retains the skeletal in the ragdoll, giving better baseline results of ragdolling that is very accurate to bipedal or later quadrupedal skeletons.
There are some remaining bugs relative to the Player where AnimMontages will not unhook when going into the Ragdoll state. I have decided to take a break from this, and move onto stability, which is what we will talk about next.
Lastly, deep architecture integration.
A lot of work here is experimental in nature, but we’re getting really great results, though there were some bugs that weren’t addressed yet, which are now being worked on to be stable.
These include
Simulation step stability
Deeper roundtable ownership hooks for Jolt
And more.
Keep in mind Projectiles haven’t been addressed yet, but they will be soon!
There’s some really great and exciting emerging experimental gameplay in this area, and I hope you can be just as excited as we are about this shift in paradigm not just coming to Primeval Horizon, but our Unreal Engine games in general.
Wardragon & Henry
- Quality Assurance Leads
Anzu's 3rd and final boss perk has been created. Welcome Birds Of A Feather, an Anzu perk that priorities team gameplay and location strategy. Proximity to group member eggs increases knockback... and you are quieter on your feet - perfect for an ambush on an unsuspecting thief. Not only this, but a Birds Of The Feather Anzu has increased resistance to environmental effects, all so you can keep watch longer. Otherwise, QA have mostly been working behind the scenes to refine and polish concepts, including donator flora and fauna; actively harmful flora are under the microscope currently.
Find out more here!