Hi there,
we are bringing to you our monthly update with some new information about the actual development status. Since the last Devlog #5 we had holidays therefore we managed to do less, but the work that have been done is as valuable as always.
Every player stat actually implemented (more will be added later) is connected to other systems and they are functioning well.
The Main Menu system is on adequate level to EA release and is also finished. Additional features will be added later.
We began to add some ingame help screens also (due to some new features - mainly for navigation, the fire system, sailing, ...).
We are working on cleaning up the ingame UI system. Hunting for minor issues and fixing them is on daily basis.
Working on our Sleep feature is also almost done. There is a huge amount of parameters affecting the gameplay, so we are also tweaking the engine each day a little.
We must pass another optimization stage, for now due to visible islands in the current cluster. Our game engine must handle all the objects/items on every island (wet/dry items, fruit/meal 'aging', pots for collecting water on sunlight or not, ...) and it has huge impact to CPU. For example: one banana palm can hold up to ~50 bananas at once (in our system). What if there are 20 banana palms on an island and what if there are 5 visible islands at once (with 50*20*5 bananas) :-) ? Other items, on non visible islands, will utilize a small trick to handle all of the situations. Also, we are not billboarding the entire islands as a whole, but all the objects on them separately (due to the wind effects on the vegetation, ...).
We have to work again on our Rope System. We want to use a rope as a normal physical rope, not only a line between two objects. In some circumstances the system has very heavy lags. Maybe we will make the rope system available in later versions after the EA release only.
We are going to add some new simple models for building and crafting. After the EA release we need to hire a professional 3d modeler who can create all of the needed models for us.
That's all for now, we will bring some new information in our next devlog, stay tuned!
G4GTeam.