Greetings Colonists,
We wanted to take a moment to share a small slice of some of the exciting initiatives our team is working on that are on the horizon, in parallel to our other upcoming releases.
Items and crafting
One system we have started addressing that is particularly interconnected with items is our crafting system. We are excited to share some significant progress the AI team has made toward improving it.
Over the past couple of weeks, we have been working on an automated pipeline for identifying particular blueprints, items that are either impossible to craft or don't contribute meaningful value to the game's economic ecosystem.
We have been building a new version of a comprehensive relational database that more clearly maps all in-game items, their dependencies, and their economic weights. This enables us to programmatically detect various types of problematic items, such as dead-end crafting paths, "broken blueprints", undesirable end products and much more.
This infrastructure allows us to rapidly iterate on blueprint adjustments, ensuring craftable items serve a stronger purpose in the player-driven economy. This work is designed to improve not only the crafting system but all other systems as well.
Before any changes are made to the items identified in our analysis reports, we're also developing evaluation systems that provide more refined output before we make any real decisions.
We are looking forward to seeing how these refinements impact player engagement with the coming updates.
//Elias and Henning from the AI Team
Instant Replay - Sharing System
We know many of you love capturing and sharing your most memorable moments in-game, whether it's epic boss kills, valuable loot drops, or simply enjoying time with friends.
However, the current process can be cumbersome: running recording software in the background, editing footage, and uploading to external platforms all takes time and effort.
We've been making exciting progress on a proprietary instant replay system that would capture the last 30 seconds of gameplay, both video and audio, running seamlessly in the background. Think of it as our own integrated version of "shadowplay," but built specifically for Entropia Universe and accessible directly within the game client.
The vision is simple: with a keybind, you'd be able to save those spontaneous moments, view, process and share them with friends or followers directly from within the game's interface. No external software, no manual post-processing.
This system is still a work in progress and subject to change, and we'll continue sharing updates on our development journey in future devblogs.
Modernizing Our Interface: Chromium Embedded Framework
Our current user interface has served us well for many years, but we have identified several limitations, including lack of higher resolutions beyond 1920x1080, proper scaling/sizing, framework-level limitations, incompatibility with Unreal Engine 5's native systems and more.
We have now entered a testing phase for Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF), a modern, industry-standard framework used in numerous contemporary games. Our internal tests have been very promising, and we're excited about the potential CEF brings for delivering crisp, high-fidelity interfaces while accelerating our development process enormously.
As a first subject to this change, we've been developing a completely new interface for our upcoming Voting system using this framework. We've also established a new proprietary coding standard for UI development using CEF in particular.
This is already showing significant efficiency improvements, which previously took us weeks to develop now takes a couple of hours.
This is an important milestone in our efforts to modernize the game and prepare our systems for Unreal Engine 5. We look forward to sharing more progress in the upcoming devblog.
Thank you for your continued support. We're excited to keep you updated on these developments as they progress.
The Mindark Team