This past week we've been working on many new features and have been monitoring this past release for bugs, exploits and balancing issues.
Since adding females meant working on new female character models, we put some work into making the characters look more convincing. To that end we've done some tweaking to the character's faces. Now the eyes will now make eye contact with others and the camera, instead of looking straight ahead off to infinity. The eyes also make small adjustments when looking around their target, which makes them appear a bit more aware.
The hair shader was also updated to look more convincing in light, have more layering, and show a bit of waving animation while the character is moving. Red hair color was added, since it's a natural shade we had previously overlooked. As well the hair color will more closely match the character's skin tone to avoid unlikely hair and skin color combinations.
We are also developing procedural hit reactions. When a character is struck, a force is simulated on a virtual skeleton. The reactions are not baked, meaning that the reaction is always unique and can vary depending on the location hit, the direction the blow came from, and what the character was doing at the time of being struck. This makes combat a much more physical, brutal experience.
We've been adding more to farming, as it's now possible to plant and nurture trees. Tree seeds are collected randomly from chopping down trees. When planted, the saplings will require water to grow just like the other plants and can grow to be a full grown adult just like their forest dwelling cousins. At their full grown stage you can choose to chop them down for wood, or keep them as features in your grand estates. They use the same code as our forests tech once they reach adulthood.
Work on spears is going well. We are nearing the point where we start playtesting and balancing them. There will be multiple tiers of spears similar to other weapons in the game.
Many new steel helmets are being implemented, some of them will also allow color changes. We feel this is important to help give further diversity on the final tier of items.
There has been much discussion on trebuchets. We are at this time leaning on making trebuchet stones have a bit more damage, but also cost more to produce. We plan to stick with one trebuchet stone at a time however, as we feel it makes more sense from a visual & gameplay perspective. As well, work is being done to allow them to be more accurate at aiming and give players more control over this aspect.
Work on allowing third party's applications to communicate with our game servers using the Rcon protocol is coming well. RCon, or Remote Console, is a networking tcp/ip protocol introduced by Valve to define how third party applications can communicate with their game servers. These applications can be used remotely to control a server via commands. This technology is most commonly used by Game Service Providers (GSP) to allow customers who rent servers to control their rented game servers from a web interface. However there are programs, such as Rusty, that have been made by the community to allow people to have more control of their game servers. Note that Rusty will likely not work well with are game because it was specifically made for Rust.
We have decided to follow this protocol as closely as we possibly can to make it easy for third party's to create applications to communicate with our game servers. Some other games have their own versions of RCon such as, Rust, Minecraft, ARK, and of course some, if not all, valve source games such as Garry's Mod and Team Fortress 2.
The next update is on track to release 2 weeks from now. There will be a wipe when the update comes in 2 weeks time.
Enjoy your weekend of gaming,
- The Code}{atch Team