Filipe - Lead Programmer
Another month of intense work focused on bug fixes, server and client performance and replication reliability.
This month I reworked part of the pickup ability to avoid having the need to respawn pieces of meat, which not only grants us additional performance, but also looks significantly better. It was a necessary improvement, as now both the elite and schooling fish use that same system. We’ve also resolved a hefty number of hilarious bugs relating to the fish, sometimes failing to float at all or deciding to fly away to the stars… It took a little time, but with the assistance of our marvellous QA team we managed to stabilize those issues.
The infamous Deinosuchus lunge, making mechanics like this function as necessary without the feeling of latency (having to wait for the server to execute code and send it back) is quite challenging. Similar to pounce in some aspects, lunge doesn't “wait” for the server, but applies what is needed, predicting that the server will agree, if the server says no for any reason, well, you know, everything breaks.
Most people know by now that we will be opening the QA branch again, for stress tests and disconnect issues before the full release of Update #3. We hope to find any missing issues from that test and of course, we count on all of you to help us, since numbers make a big difference. See you!
dmIV - Programmer
I’ve continued work on the flight movement, giving more control over speed. For one, it is now possible to brake and slow down, letting players have more precise control when they want to land accurately. On the other hand a faster flight is now possible when sprinting. It lets you move significantly faster, but you might want to watch your stamina.
I’ve also made some improvements to diving to make it smoother. There is now an acceleration and deceleration, you also change your up-down direction more gradually. Overall there are less and less sudden movements while diving, making it feel like you really are in water.
I’ve set up the 360 attacks for the Deinosuchus and Pteranodon. They use the same logic as all the others, so this one was a quick addition. I also added a version that is used while swimming as a Deino. The tests showed that the Deino’s turn rate is too slow to catch up with attackers from behind, so this tackled that issue. I also gave the Tenontosaurus some love and made it use controls more like the other species. The left mouse button is used for biting, while pressing it in combination with alt will perform the claw attack. I also separated the kick and the tail slam, so that the latter is only used when alt is held while pressing the right mouse button.
Amar0k - AI Programmer
This month has been a little crazy for me. I've had to take some time off due to personal reasons. However I have been mostly working on fish movement and trying to improve server performance regarding AI overall. There is also a big change being implemented to how AI will behave as a new server config option has been added which will allow switching AI behaviour between realism and player simulation. The difference should be self explanatory but i will go ahead and define it now.
Player simulation: Acts and behaves as close as possible to actual players, sometimes can be hard to tell the difference, such as spam crouching or bunny hopping around. This also includes the Realism traits.
Realism: Acts and behaves as a creature of that size/nature would generally behave in the real world, such as immediately fleeing as far away as possible from a larger predator.
This is obviously a LOT more effort to do but in the teams opinion is the right way forward to get to where we all want the game to be. I have pretty much finished the backbone of this system and have started working on the AI personalities/traits as some of you may have seen in my recent streams.
Also we are moving to more species based spawning, still randomized within a region but more biased towards what type your character is. I.E Amphibious will spawn near or in water.
Wedge - Sound Designer
This month has been a continuation of work on the areas that need addressing for the audio of water and flight gameplay. The underwater ambient audio has had an overhaul with bespoke sound cues for each water body type – swamps sound stiller than previously, oceans churn and bubble from the surf and waves, the flow of rivers can be heard and being near waterfalls underwater produces a spatialised heavy rumbling. To compliment this the groundwork has been laid for creating a more immersive audio experience diving deeper in water – as the player goes deeper the filtered yet still audible sounds of the ambience above will slowly fade as a more intense underwater ambience is introduced, including distant groans and cries of creatures that could be lurking in the deepest depths.
Heartbeat sounds have been created which will be introduced and increase in rate as the players oxygen levels decrease – this in combination with the changes to underwater ambiences will help to give a completely different feel to the underwater environment and gameplay – complimentary to the Deinosuchus’ ability to drag creatures underwater. All the Deino’s prey will hear is the deep tones and wash of the underwater ambience and the sounds of their struggle to escape; their heart starting to race and vortexes of water as they attempt to escape the Deino’s clutches.
Likewise with the Pteranodon the ambient audio will change as it flies higher, accomplished with new attenuations added to ambient loops which are applied solely on the Z-axis distance from the ambient zone.
Missing foley sounds are starting to be addressed; more detailed water foley sounds have been created and are ready to be implemented for the Deino – including sounds for submerging and emerging which differ based on if the listener is above or underwater, as well as entering/exiting/falling in water. The sound of bones crunching have also been added to Deino’s eat animations to give it a more intimidating audio aesthetic. On top of all these enhancements the general foley and vocal audio of both new playables are constantly being added to, tweaked and improved to progress towards Update #3.
hypno - QA Lead
QA has been dedicating a good chunk of time towards balance testing for Update 3. We have recognised and addressed many obvious improvements pertaining to the current public build and have been actively listening to community feedback - we’re really excited to see how these play out when the update is live and look forward to reading what you think about the changes!
There’s too many to list here but I’ll cover some of the more important additions. The full list will be released with the patch notes for the update.
As some of you may already know, we’ve addressed weights being wildly inaccurate for the upcoming patch. Expect the weight of your dinosaur to reflect the size of your creature much better now. Dryosaurus has been on a very strict grazing only diet and lost a total of 430kg using this one weird trick. Doctors hate him!
With the weight changes, some of you may have already caught onto the size changes we made to Carnotaurus and Tenontosaurus. The two creatures were scaled down for two reasons, the more important being that in the long run these sizes will make much more sense for gameplay balance.
The Carnotaurus is the fastest dinosaur on the island and as such we’re tailoring it to a “small game hunter” playstyle; it will focus on running down anything smaller than a Tenontosaurus. The Tenontosaurus has been set up so that it can go head-to-head with the Carnotaurus, so long as it uses its crowd control stunning attacks efficiently. The second reason for the scale down is due to it being a heavily requested change because “muh realism”, for lack of better terms. Feedback is very important to the QA team to determine game balance, so keep it coming!
Bleed potency has been increased across the board. Expect it to play a much larger role in combat now as attacks deal more bleed damage, causing your blood pool to drop significantly faster, thus causing your character’s regen rates to slow down equivalent to your remaining blood pool. I would highly recommend not moving too quickly when suffering from such injuries, as movement states will now affect how much blood you lose as well. Why don’t you have a lie down? You’ll feel much better. On top of this, we’ve decided to make wallowing less important in negating these effects (though it does still help.)
The cursed pounce stat rework. This was always going to be coming, it was just a matter of time! The statistics for pounce have been readjusted to promote its use as an attritional tool, rather than crazy amounts of damage. Pounce will deal deadly amounts of bleed damage, which focuses on wearing your targets out, instead of just outright killing them. Does this mean it will be impossible to hunt large targets? No. It just means they’ll require much more coordination and strategic thinking to do so.
Bucking has been significantly buffed to be worth performing now.
Other than that, it’s the same as usual for the team - check my previous dev blog posts for what that entails. We’re still hard at work testing the Deinosuchus lunge and it’s definitely one of the more complex mechanics, so it’s taking us a bit longer than usual compared to some of the more basic additions. Fingers crossed we catch all the bugs with it before you guys can!
As Filipe already mentioned, we’ll also be opening the QA branch to you guys when we believe all of our high priority issues are fixed and the new mechanics are functioning to a good standard. The reason for this is so that we can have the new mechanics tested under more stressful conditions (additional players) and so that we can confirm the random disconnect issue is fixed once and for all.
VisualTech48 - 3D Environmental Artist
This month I’ve been patching a lot of small issues with some of the models, but mostly the whole month went into finalizing the fences to correctly fit the spline, to be able to walk in them, and making a bunch of variants and optimizing them. It's been quite a formidable task, especially making LODs for each and single variant, but we got the ball running and within a few days, I should be able to test them out on my end and finish the additional broken variants. Does that mean you can pass through them…. Hmmm. We shall see :P
To see the amount of fences - the lods check out this image here:
Alongside that, the fences got an overhaul with a lot of decals, and a lot of attention to detail to be sure that it all fits and can be translated onto real world terrain. This includes the new concrete texture that is made far sharper and with a lot more details. The rest of the details will be handled by shaders when the time is fit.
In these images you can see one broken variant, others are still in progress.
Tapwing - Concept Artist
This one was a bit of a balancing act. On one hand, it’s a giant Komodo dragon, but on the other, we still want to find a way to make ours unique to the isle.
Body proportions mostly stayed the same, most of our exploration revolved around the face: Longer teeth, hidden teeth, square features, sharp features, heat pits and larger scale features. Ultimately we decided on a facial design that was predominantly Komodo dragon, but beefed up the body and accentuated facial features to be more menacing.
The rest of my month revolved around concept edits, Bary concepts and another set of nature sketches.
KissenKitten - Producer
Indeed I’ll say, this month has been a bit of a blur. There’s so much going on all at once around here the time soars by. The team has been hard at work on Update #3 and all the bells and whistles to accompany it. This month has been full of testing and tweaking, testing and tweaking. One thing about doing something new is that you have to be the first to brave all the difficulties associated with the innovation. So that leads into highly iterative designs. Where we fine tune a feature over multi variations. The Deino’s movement is a great example of that. Based on the types of movements we wanted it to achieve, we had to fine tune what type of animation was needed and what implementation method was best. Sometimes these creatures have twice the number of animations than what you’ve seen. You only see the final version but sometimes there’s been 2-4. Not for every animation though, it's primarily mechanic related. Maybe in the future we’ll dig some of those up. But in the meantime we’ve got a few outstanding animations that we need to tweak for these two but we’re making good time. We are so excited to get this update to you because we’ve been working hard trying to provide a new experience in The Isle. We believe we’ve done that. The Deinosuchus and the Pteranodon are the heralds of the hard work that’s going into this project. We look forward to sharing the experience with you. Be kind to each other and yourself.
Closing Remarks
That’s February. As always, we hope that you enjoyed this insight into both our development process and the hardships we’ve had to overcome as we tread through these uncharted waters. We’ll see you in the next DevBlog!