Greetings Colonists,
Welcome back to another Dev Blog where we share with you some of the ongoing development work happening on Entropia Universe.
Performance
In recent years, our team has been creating more and more amazing zones and locations, setting new standards for the game - most notably in our Setesh update with Port Cabrakan, but also in instances like the Spina Queen's Lair. These newer or more dense areas of the game often can come at performance compromise.
David from the Engine Team talks about these new changes:
"When we went over to PBR lighting in the game, the parameters are packed into masks where the textures have channels that represents different values. We pack them as occlusion, roughness and metallic in the r, g and b channel. If you compressed them with earlier gpu block compression methods you got large squares and it destroyed the quality, so they were stored uncompressed. There were also other texture presets that packed very different values in each channel that was stored uncompressed.
We have now implemented support for a newer GPU block compression format called BC7 which allows us to compress and accurately represent packed data even if the channels don't have any correlation to each other. It allows us to store textures at a much smaller size with similar image quality.
This reduces load times and VRAM usage because it has to load far less data. The storage space of the entire game will also decrease. In some performance heavy areas, the team have seen up to a 60% increase in performance."
We hope to have the changes live soon.
Voting System
When it comes to making important changes and decisions, as well as trying to understand player opinions around certain topics, we want to ensure that we get a truly representative result. While polls on PCF (our forums) and other places can give some insight, it ultimately limits our responses to a fraction of the playerbase, and only certain types of players that frequent these spaces (often times people who have not played for many years).
As such, we have begun work on a fully fledged voting system ingame, that will allow us to get important feedback and sentiments on anything to do with the game, to help shape changes going forward that includes all players.
The voting system will be weighted, taking into account total time played and other factors. This will also allow us to introduce weights specific to questions, such as applying higher weighting to votes from estate owners for a question affecting estates.
This work is a reflection of our ongoing commitment to better listen and understand the needs of our players, and help shape the way forward in Entropia hand in hand with you all.
Character Creator
We previously mentioned that some work has been happening on our character creator to go with our new and improved new player experience - Qingyuan from the AI Team has more to share:
"We're updating parts of the character creation system to make creating a new character more interesting and flexible.
New players will be able to describe their character's look using text, voice, or images. Alongside the existing sliders, new AI-powered tools will help generate a base appearance that matches those descriptions. The player can then adjust details as usual.
The system starts from a single general description that defines the overall look of the character. From there, players can fine-tune using interactive "bubbles" that represent different character features. These can be adjusted quickly by clicking them or by using voice or text commands, instead of searching through sliders to find the right setting.
The purpose of this update is to modernize character creation and make it easier to reach a desired look quickly. Players can start from a broad idea - like wanting a viking-inspired design - and have the system generate a fitting base style.
All manual controls remain, allowing full customization for those who prefer detailed editing. This addition brings the character creation system into the future of Entropia Universe, making it faster, more intuitive, and more creative from the very first step."
Halloween Mayhem
While we will be sharing the full details regarding the upcoming Halloween Mayhem soon, we wanted to briefly mention what you can expect this time around.
As usual, we will have the Survival Instance format, with tweaked rewards.
Our Halloween Strongbox will receive a brand new item...that may make the bearer somewhat of a "glass cannon"...
Instead of the Assault or Annihilation Instance, we have opted to have Mayhem creatures out in the game world (similar to migration or mini-mayhems). You can look forward to brand new items to discover, tokens to collect, and even some new World Boss Mayhem Creatures!
As always we continue to trial and experiment with fresh formats and ways of operating events so please give us your feedback after the event. More info to come!
To Conclude...
As always there are many projects and things going on at MindArk, and next time we look forward to sharing with you some details of other changes coming to Entropia Universe.