With the milestone Monarch update complete and a vigorous marketing campaign for DoN underway, this very important update brings more polish to the product as a grand welcome for new players to the game.
2017 Trailer - Please Watch!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6tz5fIVm5w
Please watch this trailer and provide your feedback! Share it around :)
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Chemical Vision vastly improved
A rich medley of bright chemical trails amid colorfully saturated flowers & fauna for your eyes to savor!
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New World Preset: "Temperate Forest Flowers"
World-Preset is DoN lingo for a random map configuration that is used to generate the game world. They're not maps in the traditional sense of the word, but since people are more familiar with that term I'll use that here.
Here's the new default map from various perspectives:
The new preset is very graphically demanding so if you're experiencing major frame rate issues try the previous default: "Temperate, Simple" or "Performance Friendly" presets instead.
Major bugfixes & Visual polish
As noted in the forums, a number of major bugs quietly crept in with recent builds. As DoN grows larger, the existence of several gameplay systems for each species means that sometimes new creatures and features will inadvertently introduce bugs.
You can help by reporting any issues you see; my thanks to the various players who reported some of the bugs listed below:
- Various Jumping Spider walking issues fixed (rotation, getting stuck, etc)
- Caterpillar animation jittering fixed. They're much smoother now.
- Twilight transition fixed, major lighting/time-of-day improvements
- Landscape improvements: View distance increased for all flora. Distant parts look less "empty" now. More to come on this soon.
- Seasonal simulation: Herbaceous/perennial plants now properly "Spring up" (as they should) at the end of Winter season.
- Grooming now hides the HUD for the duration of "groominess"
- Players are encouraged to use Chemo vision through a new input hint
- Frequency of Camera hints reduced. Some of them were getting way too obtrusive.
DoN's Next feature: Multiplayer (finally!)
Multiplayer support is finally happening. While the original roadmap had milkweed plants, grasshoppers, more land creatures, etc queued up, right now Mutliplayer offers an important way to enhance the existing product and open it up to a wider audience.
"Act - IV Mating & Reproduction" (you'll understand what I mean if you see the Monarch metamorphosis video!) will have to wait. Mating & Reproduction is still crucial to fulfilling DoN's animal lifecycle vision so it will be revisited at some point.
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That's it for this update!
PS: Keep spreading the word about DoN!
A full-fledged Nature game absolutely needs to be made, it is gaming's final frontier and Drunk On Nectar is the game to make this happen.
You can help by telling everyone that a game like this exists!
With ❤,
Venugopalan Sreedharan