Hello everyone,
progression has been a little slow for the past few weeks, there are several reasons for this.
- We've been in the tedious process of upgrading our engine from Unreal 4.18 to Unreal 4.21, and testing the implemented mechanics during the process to make sure things work like they should / better. After discussing with other friend developers, they recommended us to upgrade, as Epic Games updated their entire Net Code (server/client related) to support their game "Fortnite", along with several other things. Furthermore, that's admittedly something we should have done sooner.
- We're hoping this will address lag-related issues from collision updates, server-side, that's been the majority of the lag source: server ticking slowly for large player counts due to updating every player's collisions.
- We're adding a first pass on the aquatic live birth - that means no more "nest" required to nest as aquatics.
- We've re-coded several things related to players and creatures, removing code that was added between the acro patch, which was crash-less, and the egg thief patch, which introduced the crashes. This code could potentially have been the source of the occasional server crashes when players log out. This is the kind of problem we're pretty much unable to test outside of the public branch, despite our efforts at trying to reproduce it with our testers.
- Along with this, game's lighting is being revisited with the new engine's version, and is a first pass for the process of upgrading our creature's shaders, and the overall look of the game. This, of course, will come in due time and improved through several future patches.
- Thanks to resources we did not have before the game's Early Access release, we're looking into talents to help work on mostly animations. Once we are in contact with artists capable of pulling off the quality we're looking into, we'll be updating/doing proper animations for most of the new creatures (acro, megalo, para, pachy, orycto, krono... And any other new creature model requiring an update), along with various texture and/or model updates.
- Pteranodon will be fully recoded soon, with fresh, pure c++ code. Should run faster, and work better. We're very aware of its current issues!