Hello everyone,
Another week seems to have flown by. We’ve been busy working on 1.8 and beyond. Water reworks will be discussed below along with the introduction to Steam's Rich Presence. We’re also working on the start of numerous quality of life issues. After our 1.8 update, the team will hunker down and focus on early game issues and polish. We’ll get all of your feedback and found issues taken care of before the addition of any more major features
Water and Its Challenges
1.8 will feature many new graphical features and improvements with one of them being improved water. The water in game now is the second of a couple of placeholders we’ve used. We’ve had quite a few challenges with water in the past. A major one is water transparency and how out of place it would look in our world. Most of that issue was caused by fog rendering incorrectly.
There are also topographical challenges on the island. Black island has rivers that flow into oceans along with lakes and smaller bodies of water. 1.8 also introduces swamps which is another added level of complexity. It has been a challenge to make these intersecting and flowing bodies of water look good.
We've also had issues in the past with over complex solutions that were too heavy on performance. Sacrificing a good chunk of performance for slightly better looking water just wasn’t an option.
Swimming
I realize writing this that the first question to likely be asked will be something along the lines of “Can we swim yet?!”..No, no you can’t. That being said, water assets, shaders and the drag of knowing they’ll need sorting was a major stopping force behind swimming. Post 1.8 we will be working on a major chunk of our issues and your feedback/suggestions. Swimming will be sorted shortly, we promise.
The Outcome
We've managed to find a compromise with our fog that makes it possible to use transparent water without it looking out of place. This, in combination with the new reflection system, allowed us to finally find a different solution that looks better and isn't too heavy on performance. The transparency really brings bodies of water to life and edge blending makes the waters edge feel far more realistic.
Old system lacks transparency
New system with transparency
Old River
New River and Edge Blending
Old system waterfall and lake
New system with reflections and edge blending
Lake Baron old system
Lake Baron new system
Steam Rich Presence
Something that has been missing for quite awhile is Steam's Rich Presence integration. The player now has access to Linux server files, additional hosts and the ability to host your own server from in-game.
James has spent some time this week working on integration and things are going great. Players will have the ability to join friends directly from Steam's friend list. Along with the ability to invite and join, you’ll notice status updates. Players will be able to see what friends and others players are doing. Whether it be fortifying, healing, fighting zombies, driving or even riding passenger your player status should update nicely.
Game invite
Status updates (format likely to change, feedback welcome)
GPORTAL
With the release of server files we were contacted by the guys over a GPORTAL. They will be handling some of our new official servers alongside Allgamer. We’ve had quite a few requests for locations in South America so we’ll be adding a couple of servers there in Brazil along with Germany, Japan and Russia. You’ll see servers labeled “Official RU1 By G-Portal”.
In Summary
Things are really cracking along nicely now, we’ll be introducing our Patreon page in May. We should see 1.8 on default early in May and we’re excited for 1.9 and the future of Survive the Nights.
We’re doing our best to get 1.8 ready and into your hands. It has been a massive update so far and likely one of our biggest, if not the biggest since alpha release. A lot of the game world has changed and a lot of new features are going in. We’ll do our best to get an experimental version into your hands in the next week or two.
As always, thank you for the continued support of the game and the team. If you’d like to discuss anything in this blog or anything else at all please feel free to join our Discord Server.
Links
Discord: https://discord.gg/survivethenights
Changelog: https://changelog.survivethenights.net
Twitter: https://twitter.com/STNgame
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/STNgame
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/a2zinteractive
Website: https://www.survivethenights.net
Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/a2zinteractive