Note: The Core Redesign Release has not yet been released and is targeted to ship in mid to late December.
This post focuses on the character movement changes coming with the Core Redesign Release. Subsequent announcements will focus on other areas that the Core Redesign Release will change in the game.
All the character movement systems have been completely overhauled. Character movements have been augmented to meet a few key goals: movement stability, movement fairness, and movement performance.
To enforce movement stability, characters are now bound to the NavMesh. The NavMesh is a descriptor that defines where non playable characters (NPC) can travel in the world. The player is bound to the NavMesh except when airborne. When the player is falling, they are pulled back to the NavMesh. Why did we do this? First, this helps prevent instances where the player can fall through surfaces. Second, this helps prevents the player from ending up in places where they can become stuck. This leads to more stable movements and better immersion.
Limiting the character to the NavMesh also enforces movement fairness. The player is now mostly constrained to areas where the NPCs can travel. This prevents odd situations where the player can go somewhere that an NPC cannot.
Movement performance improvements come from two major places: multithreading and binding the player to the NavMesh. By locking the player to the NavMesh, we only need to query for collisions with other objects that move. This reduces the number of calculations needed to move the character.
Character movement calculations and collision detection have been multithreaded (uses multiple CPU cores in parallel) to allow for more efficient processing. These performance improvements mean that more NPCs and animals can be spawned at once thus creating more complex scenarios. They also allow additional calculations and queries that allow players to move more realistic in response to the environment. For instance, character movement rates are reduced when travelling up a slope.
Subsequent announcements will focus on other areas that the Core Redesign Release will change in the game.