FTessaro - Lead Programmer
Much of my work this month revolved around the gallimimus, which has a different way of grabbing things, as it may use either its mouth or hands, so I developed a small system to control when to use one or the other, including swallowing something that was grabbed using the hands, the system adapts automatically. Included to that change, pickup also adapts to the size or position of the target. Like for tall trees it would use a Pickup High, or Pickup Mid animation in some cases. For stuff on the floor it would use Pickup Low.
Some more work animation related to beipi and diablo too, for all the shared abilities. Did some work on troodon Venom pounce visuals, mostly, but also adding support for the future uses of Pounce and transitions mid pounce, interesting things that are coming. Troodon is also getting some new small mechanics for Venom Pounce to help the troodon players to know about the condition of the target, envenomated or not, which stages, etc.
Lots of work done for fixing a significant amount of bugs or wrong behaviors, including diets. Besides that some code improvement, balance changes, optimizations and new things for camera and audio.
I have also added the option for server admins to enable/disable species through the admin panel, allowing or preventing further spawns of those animals.
dmIV - Programmer
I continued working on some gallimimus abilities. Its main damage source is from a kick attack, which can be performed while standing, running or jumping. If the animal is swimming or had its legs fractured it can use a peck attack, but it’s not very effective. When playing as a gallimimus it’s very unfortunate to break your legs, since you not only lose your ability to run away quickly, you also can’t fight back properly.
To help with that, there is one more trick in the gallimimus’s bag. It can protect itself from some fall damage by automatically springing forward to soften the landing. Falling from too high can still result in fractured legs or death, but it’s safer than other dinos.
Other than that I’ve been looking at various smaller tasks, such as the ceratosaurus’s vomit scent, bug fixes, balance changes, moving some blueprints to C++, smaller optimizations here and there.
VisualTech48 - Environmental Artist
The Dome and only the dome has been my soul focus this month, as it's a magnificent, yet massive object and point of interest in the map. Since transitioning to nanite, we are now open to options of having massive modular pieces like this dome, which we will feature in the new Gateway map.
To further reveal this massive structure, it will have four primary entrances for now, three of which are land based, and one directly connected to the river.
To ensure this all works and fits perfectly, I’ve made a Dome kit as we do work with modularity here at The Isle for human structures, which now consists of various height elements of the dome, and its main features like the massive window hexagon shape details.
Alongside that I’ve translated one of the small parts of the Dockyard kit to fit into the Dome kit to ensure more flexibility for the interiors, especially giving a lot more to the dark metallic look of the Dome, as it's far more industrial.
Dome Kit which features more concrete and industrial look.
Wedge - Sound Designer
The majority of this month I was focused on working on audio for the gallimimus, which now has all the sounds it needs for both adult and juvenile stages. I have also created some ambient spot sfx such as rustling and twig snapping that are implemented to play for Galli when in forested areas to keep players on their toes and consciously aware of the sounds that are happening around them.
I have also spent some time cleaning up and improving diablo’s calls, introducing processing to the legacy sounds, especially increasing the level of the higher frequencies which previously were lacking leaving the sounds seeming dull, as well as adding additional layers to elevate the recognisable calls in line with Evrima’s sound. Its adult calls are complete and implemented, but I am experimenting with a slight change to its 3 call, instead ending the call on a quick and sharp beak clack in a threatening display.
I’ve also made some adjustments to certain elements that relate to audio, the positions of ambient zones on gateway have been adjusted, volume balance to the ambiences as well as the volume and attenuations on the waterfall and ocean surf sounds.
I am now spending time play-testing troodon, cerato, beipi and galli to make any necessary improvements to their sound design as well as balancing audio levels and tightening up the implementation of audio for these creatures so they are sounding their best.
Tapwing - 2D Artist
This was an interesting animal to approach. Fun to draw, but difficult to come up with scene ideas for. We had to hash out a few conceptual ideas to nail this one down. It’s similar to tenonto, but more visually limited, lacking utility of its tail or something like claws. How and where does it travel, or what can it do in the face of predators? Thinking of ways Maia can use its bodyweight or how it can interact with its environment were among the main features.
The other focus was maia’s motherly rep. A characteristic predominantly depicted by gentleness, but one can’t forget the other side of being a good parent means defending the hell out of your offspring. Good (vengeful) mother lizard.
I’ve been looking forward to this one.
Anatomically it’s a mix of clunky and elegant which is an interesting combo of characteristics to find poses for, how dynamic can you even make the pose without having the animal look completely off balance? There’s definitely a balancing act to say the least. We definitely wanted to make sure the deinocheirus looked dominant when holding its own in its native environment.
On the shading side, this was a perfect opportunity to play with water effects for the swamp setting. It’s mostly just doubling up on the shading layer, but it works well for differentiating between what’s above and below water.
hypno - QA Lead
This month has been a busy one for QA as far as bug reporting and balance testing is concerned. With 4 upcoming playables, it has proved a challenge that we were more than happy to take on.
There have been hundreds of issues that cropped up over the course of integrating the new species to EVRIMA. New playables introduce new mechanics that can break almost anything we had previously done. Now we have to consider totally new scenarios, such as what would happen if a deinosuchus is to lunge at a ceratosaurus while a troodon is envenomating it. Does it cause a crash? Maybe! We didn’t know until we had tried as many possibilities as we could think of. I am happy to say that all playables now seem to be in a good place as far as bugs are concerned, so we’re now getting to the part of just playing the game. Stress testers will play a big part in this process soon, as they will be our first line of feedback after QA to determine how fun or unfun they are to play as, and will allow us to make tweaks to them accordingly.
On the topic of tweaks, have a look at some of these more notable balance changes we’ve made for this update:
Unique night vision ranges have been set up for all existing and new playables. Much like in legacy, there are some characters that will excel in the dark, while others will have a more difficult time. In most cases (not all), playing a larger character will result in reduced night vision range as a way to balance their immense power.
Dryosaurus:
Tenotosaurus:
Omniraptor:
Carnotaurus:
Unique bleed modifiers have been set up for all bleed attacks. Specifics will be detailed in the changelog for the update. This is something that we have been meaning to add for some time now. As it was in legacy, we now have the ability to setup unique bleed modifiers for all the basic attacks in the game – for example, this will allow us to give the tyrannosaurus bite more flat damage than the giganotosaurus, but deal less bleed than the giga bite, etc.
The deinosuchus water sense passive ability has been adjusted to only appear for prey that swim on the surface of water. This was done so that both juvenile deinosuchus and beipiaosaurus have a more effective way of escaping an adult deinosuchus, making for some interesting cat and mouse scenarios between the two playables.
Dryosaurus’ dodge ability now has 2 “charges”, as opposed to it consuming stamina. The time it takes to recharge these is not set in stone, but you can see how it looks here.
Ceratosaurus has a “Charged Bite” ability. The longer you charge the attack, the more damage it will deal. This will also deal an increased amount of bacteria to the target, meaning you do not need to land as many bites to cause them to vomit.
As many of you already know, the beipiaosaurus can breach the surface of the water akin to a dolphin. We decided to take this a step further and allow this ability some use in gameplay, by having it restore a portion of the character’s oxygen when performed.
Gallimimus, when grouped, has a “Mobilize” ability. When performing a broadcast, all members within close proximity will receive a speed increase for a few seconds. When timed right, this can allow a large group to maintain the speed boost by “stacking” their broadcasts, at the cost of being obnoxiously loud to any nearby predators.
Unfortunately, I do not have anything to show you on troodon at this time – its venom needs further work to be clearer to the player what stage it’s at and whenever it has reset.
You will, however, be glad to hear that performance has once again been a large focus of the upcoming update. On top of our move to Unreal Engine 5, we have also been adjusting our default config files to ensure a smooth playing experience for those that meet our recommended hardware requirements.
Seiza - Video Editor
For the past few weeks, I've been focusing on VFX in the video editor. Since we want to give many of our videos an older look, I started using Red Giant in the editor. This will give me a better workflow in the future when I want to create VHS, Terminal or Analog looks. I was able to try this out directly on the latest trailcam video, it's the first trailcam video at night, so I imitated the night vision in the video editor and made it look as realistic as possible.
And of course, the planning of the next release trailer is already in full swing, but the stress test will give me another impression of what is really realistic and makes sense in the end and what doesn't.
I especially want to look at the interaction between beipiaosaurus and deinosuchus and get more inspiration. Otherwise, it's now time to start implementing the first scene ideas.
KissenKitten - Producer
No rest for the weary as they say. While our move to UE 5.1 has been relatively smooth, it has not been without issue which is to be expected with any engine update. This month has been chock-full of hoops, hurdles and bug boss battles. But we’re coming out of the otherside relatively unscathed. 6.5 has been expanded to include a lot more playables than originally intended which we’re excited about and hope you are as well. We look forward to getting this update to stress testers as soon as we can so it can go live pending tweaks. Very excited to see how the new creatures interact with the current roster in your hands.
Aside from the above creatures which the team has gone into decent detail about, work is in full swing on the diabloceratops and dilophosaurus which will be the next playable additions after the current 4 are debuted. The diabloceratops in particular ushering in a new mechanic specific to ceratopsians and those best suited to deal with them. I’m sure the programming team is going to LOVE that process. Sorry guys.
Anyway, expect to see me in the community discord periodically over the coming weeks to take public temperature of a few legacy animals that may or may not be making their way into production after the aforementioned. Wish us a powerful tailwind as we round out this update and move forward. Take care!