Our main focus right now is the new and improved animal AI system. After many months of work on it, Tommi merged that new codebase into the game project, and we've been busy debugging it. But while he works on that, we’ve also had time to dig into our backlog (a long list of minor improvements and enhancements) and get a few things done. Today's video shows eight of them that we think you will find enjoyable:
1) In the Find a Mate quest, once you finish the trial period, you'll have an option to stay in the fall season and hang out with your mate for awhile, before progressing onward to winter and establishing your territory.
2) More refinements to the high-elevation snow line. You might have noticed in the Lost River DLC map, there's still snow on the mountaintops in late spring, which really adds to the mountain feel. We've now set this up in Amethyst and Slough Creek, and Andrei expanded this functionality so I could also set it up in the fall season on all maps.
3 and 4) We've got an excellent new 3D artist, Damian Paterson, working on WolfQuest assets. Along with other things, he's created two new cottonwood tree models, which grow near the Lamar River in Amethyst. He also made a much better model of lupine flowers.
5) Susan has been having fun creating more than 80 new wolf dreams images, nearly doubling the number of main game dream images. What wolves make of these dreams is up to them -- and you.
6) Susan also scoured the National Park Service online photo galleries for more animal and Yellowstone images to use in the game's loading screens, and has been writing additional gameplay tips and Yellowstone factual tidbits to entertain and inform players while waiting for game scenes to load.
7) One thing that's been missing from Anniversary Edition is the observation airplane that occasionally flies overhead to check in on wolves with radio collars. Andrei is creating a new subsystem that brings that airplane back — and as with everything in AE, it's a big improvement on the old version. This airplane actually does track your wolf, honing in and circling around it, and even following your wolf if you're moving, for several minutes before moving on.
8) And, of course, the pronghorn, which we introduced in a recent devblog, have been on our list for a long time.
All these things will be in the next game update -- but that still won't be for awhile, as we have a fair amount of debugging still to do on the new AI, plus beta testing and tweaking all of these and other new features. We’ll share more about them in upcoming devblogs.
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The WolfQuest saga will continue! Stay tuned for more news in upcoming devblogs about it and other new features!
Once the game is completed on PC/Mac, we will turn our attention to other platforms.
We do not announce specific release dates. We will release them when they are ready.
