Greetings Pioneers!

We’re making great progress on the new inventory system this week, setting up lock boxes, drop bags, and recovery of items on player death. We’ve also been smashing bugs and continuing work on new features and creatures including the IKA Drone featured in last week’s blog update.

Here’s what we’ve been up to:

Matt – Art Director

Started breaking down the weapons into their respective parts ready for our modular system. The new system will allow up to 20 different variations of weaponry across stocks barrels and grips, so as you can imagine I’ve been a busy boy. This also includes blocking out new weapon parts for our grenade launcher and bolt launcher.

Our first few sets of character armor are undergoing some heavy duty work as well this week, so expect to see it enter the game shortly after the new inventory is running smoothly.

Lastly I’ve been setting up improved destruction visuals on our build assets that went in last week, which will hopefully be ready for our next hotfix/build!

Tom – Character Artist

Just finished up the high poly model of ‘The bear’ this creature gives you those kind of hugs that are just to die for.

Lee – Technical Director

This week I have continued with bug fixing and making optimisations where I can. I’ve also continued with the planning of Allied AI which the player can build and control. This should then allow the player to set up AI Patrols or able to help the player as they explore the world and keep the native creatures in check.

Tristan – Senior Developer

This week I have been working on updating our weapon trace logic so that it’s ready for the implementation of different damage zones on AI and players. We are looking forward to the days when we will be able to SMG headshot an Ika in the face. I have also been doing the usual bug fixes. More specifically to to do with foliage (indestructible trees were not a feature) and melee (hopefully no more random one hit insta kills).

Lauren – Animator

This week I have been continuing work on the Allied IKA Drones, setting up their blueprints, attack animations and landing states. This is very much work in progress, they have a tendency to blow eachother up at the moment!

John – Lead Designer

This week I have been working on a load of different systems with the team including a design that consolidates the ways you interact with the world when using the Energy Harness (Right mouse button). It’s evident that people always need basic build and resource gathering interactions and so we’re moving those modules/their effects to become a staple part of the Tool itself and not optional Modules.

The real focus has been on looking at how we’ll handle all of the loot drops in the game including items, resources and energy. Our system had become crazily complicated and so we cut it all down into the following categories that we want to implement as the staple interactive components within the world:

• Targets
  • Have HP, can be destroyed, can be smashed, produce either an Item Generator or a Pick-up when destroyed, e.g. Enemies, KO’d enemies, Sac Plants, Turrets, etc.
• Item Generators
  • Have HP, can be destroyed, cannot be smashed, produce Pick-ups when destroyed, e.g. Trees, Rocks, Structures, Utilities, Corpses, etc.
• Pick-ups
  • Have no HP, will time-out if in the world too long, instantly go into the player inventory when interacted with if the player has capacity, has a Unit Weight for the purposes of Inventory Space, e.g. Energy, Resources Materials/Food, Inventory Drops (either individual items or groups of inventory items, such as a player inventory that drops upon death or a weapon crafted in an Armory)

This lets us form a foundation for all inventory drops that will be hitting when we release the new inventory system sometime within the next few weeks. This also has some crazy links to player Armour and the Robotic Allies that we want to implement too.
One weird, unrelated question that I want to ask is – how do you feel about certain armor types having HP of their own?

Yves – Senior Developer

This week I have been working on Modifiers. This is a system that allows for the recognition of a structure so that the appropriate fortification can be selected automatically, this should make fortifying your bases that little bit easier! In addition there will be a modifier for the placement of lights and doors within other structures. I have also been debugging like a boss.

Ricky – Developer

This week I’ve gone to a place that I don’t know where I’m going to. Mysterious things will undoubtedly happen. I am surrounded by colour. There is a vast expanse above my head. All thought has begun to evaporate from my mind. I only seem to think of food and meow. I’m losing touch with Meow meow. Meowww.

Marcin – Designer

The Inventory is beginning to take shape nicely, so I jumped onto the work needed for the objects that let you interact with it: the Lockbox, the Armoury (crafting station), and the “Lootbag”. Matt has done the models a while ago, and I was finally able to put the objects together and see them working.

On top of that setup I have been making necessary system preparations for the blocks destruction effects update. The blocks’ visuals have already changed twice since those were last touched, so it’s long due. As for the designs John and I have looked into unifying the functionality of the Energy Harness module, as well as making the fortification system much more user friendly in the nearest future.

Simone – Concept Artist

This week I’ve been working with Matt to finish and refine designs for the grenade launcher and the engineering station as well as start work on the Bolt launcher and the repair station/purifier.

Joe – Environment Artist

I’ve spent all week working on removing the red arrow from the Laser Posts. It’s a mammoth task and I don’t expect to get it in until early summer.

Just kidding, I’ve mainly been working with Ricky on the implementation of visuals for the new inventory HUD, creating and assigning various icons, descriptions and shaders. I’ve also looked at HUD graphics for shiny new things such as building Modifiers, the Armoury and the Lockbox, and added holograms for the Industrial Fortifications. Today I’m working on tweaking Tom’s awesome work with the ‘Elephant’ creature (name TBC…).

Andy – Lead QA

I often find myself writing the same things (more or less) in the dev blog. However this week, as recommended by the witty Matthew Clark I am going to talk about Knitting and Happiness…apparently.

I know nothing about knitting, but the trick to being happy is fixing bugs, and bugs I be fixing. By finding excellent reproduction steps. Been hunting down those elusive crash bugs this week in particular.

QUALITY ASSURED! ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)>⌐■-■

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix

Greetings Pioneers!

We hope you’re enjoying the new buildables and lights, many thanks for all the feedback we’ve received so far!

We are looking to get a hotfix out soon for a few bits and pieces, including an issue where trees and swamp trees are sometimes leaving behind indestructible duplicates after they are mined.

This week, in between work on yesterday’s update we have been busy with upcoming features and designing and planning for the next stages of development.

Here’s what we’ve been up to:

John – Lead Designer

Hey guys,

It’s been a long week of testing designs, sorting flights to SXSW, talking to press and setting targets for major milestones! We’ve also had an amazing amount of great feedback from the community regarding the changes to the Build System and have tried to convey that the initial implementation of Fortifications are most definitely a halfway-house…

So, last week I said that we would share some of the full design ideas for the final phase of the Build System with you, and true to our word, here it is.

The current Build System has been said to be convoluted for new users, whilst current players (including some of the team) find it a little clumsy. So we decided to revamp the interface to use the Radial Menu designs that we concepted when we first started to rework it a while back. This also means that Build Mode will be separated from the standard Tool Primary Modules and will instead become a standard fixture of all Tool models (1, 2 and 3). The new default “Build Mode” button will be accessed by “Q” and should work as depicted below.

Categories show first, with the last item selected in the centre;

…then the Category Items;

…finally, the Materials, which you can also scroll the mouse to select as before (not depicted here).

We also have an advanced controller option that allows for a slightly tweaked version of the current build mode, with a quick way to open and select the specific Item and/or Material that you want directly.

To see more, including an initial idea of Category group buildings and how Modification system works, check out this link to the designs here :: https://trello.com/c/gokOJPBd

PLEASE GIVE US YOUR FEEDBACK ON THE TRELLO CARD! 🙂

Lee – Technical Director

This week I’ve been looking at ways to try and optimise the way the AI planners work and also the way new creatures are spawned into the world. I’ve also been dealing with bugs as and when I can. Some of the bug fixes made it into the latest release.

Tristan – Senior Developer

Today I’m in the Norwegian Fjords. As a viking I have undertaken my new mission of skiing whilst eating waffles and drinking coffee, simultaneously. My evening will of course consist of staring at wild Elk whilst enjoying Whale meat, for dessert I will ponder the vast expanses that my new Troll like brethren present to me.

Yves – Senior Developer

A massive bug slay, memory leaks, crashes and unoptimised code.

Ricky – Developer

The new Inventory UI is now coming along nicely and I’ve been working towards bringing the several elements of it together so the functionality will be useable.

Matt – Art Director

Finishing up the high resolution model for the Paladin armour set. Been adding new build assets already for our next update, these include and L and U shaped Stairway. Finally I’ve started to implement and revamp textures and materials for our player controlled Robots! (previously featured in our tech demo)

Marcin – Designer

This has been a very stressful week for everybody with getting the release finished and ready. I have been involved in only some of the bug fixes, but I was mainly busy with behind the scenes stuff, such as designs for the Inventory, Power and Fuel system, Replication Units (aka Spawn Pads) and Deterioration. The development of the inventory is in full swing, and just this week I created almost 140 different classes including new Items, Recipes, and Categories. Anybody else would go crazy, but I’m already there and only happy with a spreadsheet. 🙂

Joe – Environment Artist

The first part of this week consisted of helping test our shiny awesome new features for 0.1.7, along with fixing some bugs to do with level collisions, decals and a puddle of death people have been getting stuck in \o/

I then created icons and textures for the new Build menus, updated the new structure icons for clarity, and then finalised the layout concepts for the Build wheel.

Lauren – Animator

This week I have been rigging up and animating the IKA Drone, an allied robot specially designed to take out the three-legged flying Alien IKA and Vipers. At the same time I’m reducing the number of bones in the Alien IKA legs, which should improve performance when there are a lot around. I have also been rigging up a smaller, legless flying Bot for use as a scout.

Simone – Concept Artist

This week I have been working on revisions for various designs and have started work on two new Utility equipment – Engineering Station and Repair Bench.

Tom – Character Artist

Just about to start a new ground creature lovingly known in house as ‘the bear’ images coming soon!

Andy – Lead QA

This has been a very long week, full of back and forth adventure. We managed to get a few fixes tested and in which was a big win for us. Then we had an issue with floating bases that just wouldn’t go away, which meant we had a few late night. It all seems worth it though as we had a lot of love through our social media yesterday and this morning regarding our latest update.

See you in the fray!
-Team Flix

Greetings Pioneers!

Today we’re giving your Materialise Module a very shiny update indeed! Now allowing for the construction of Fortifications and Lights! We’ve introduced a the new ‘High-Tech’ build set which will serve as the template for more build sets to come, with the aim to create visually distinctive sets depending on the material you build them out of.

Note: This is the FIRST iteration of the Fortification system. We will be aiming to simplify it further as the game progresses. For now you will need to select the right fortification for the piece you want to attach it to, then snap! Fortified.

Of course there is just the one set for now- you can currently build these new primitives and fortifications out of any non-energy material, this will change when more sets are added later.

More critically we have taken our time in tracking down and fixing several serious bugs that were introduced in the last few updates, including memory leaks and server saving and loading issues, check the changelist below for details 🙂

Important! Please read:

– If you are running your own server, don’t forget to update it to the latest version!

– Saves have been updated now the new build assets and fortifications have arrived so this means you will be starting from scratch with your bases, sorry about this- we hope the shiny new structures you can build make up for it!

Changelist:

• New build set visuals – the ‘High-Tech’ set! This currently replaces our default visual for buildings while we work on other build sets.
• Added Fortifications – A new exterior structure type you can build on the outside of walls in order to further protect them. Currently there are Wall, Window, Corner, Corner Window, Arch, Corner Arch and Door Frame Fortification pieces.
• New Utility: Ceiling Light.
• New Utility: Wall Light.
• New Primitive: Door Frame.
• Added Eden Kit Bubble merge visuals for overlapping friendly bubbles.
• Added basic Controller Invert Y, this uses the same option as the mouse invert y in the Options Menu settings
• Added Ctrl+Alt+P to hide HUD for a screenshot mode (this may be changed in future depending on how users would like the use the functionality. Please let us know!)

• Multiple primitives, which performed the same role (e.g. 3 different corners) have been consolidated into a single block.
• Added new icon styles for Primitives, Fortifications and some Utilities in preparation for future build sets.
• Door health modifier has been increased from 1 to 1.1
• Added optimisations for the enemy targeting arrows, which should help performance when there are lots of enemies in view.
• Rearranged Categories for the Build Menu (Middle Mouse in Build Mode), and added the new Fortifications category.
• Minor improvements to Material Shard visuals.
• Tweaked the distance in which Stalkers get to the player before standing up

• Fixed a memory leak on the dedicated server caused by unwanted particle effects.
• Fixed a memory leak on the dedicated server caused by memory allocation code in the navigation system.
• Fixed a very rare crash to do with decals.
• Fixed an issue that prevented the laser turrets from working while making them look like they were.
• Fixed replication, line of sight, rotation, and positioning issues with the Missile Turrets, which should make them more reliable.
• Fix for VSync not always getting set correctly on some systems.
• Fixed another bug with our Octree pathing system.
• Fixed an issue where Fauna could get deleted at night while you were being attacked.
• Partial fix for toxicity bar when outside the Eden Kit shield, the bar would show incorrect values
• Fixed no collision on some Onyx rocks.
• Fixed an issue where too many Cirrus Spores were being created around Hives in the world.
• Fixed an issue with the Ram attack of Ikas and Vipers that was causing them to go out of sync if anything was hit.
• Fixed an issue where the Ikas/Vipers would not use their spit attack.
• Fixed replication issues with destroying large amounts of foliage.
• Fixed issue with connection becoming saturated when destroyed to much foliage.
• Fixed an issue where sometimes the Vogels would stop moving.
• Fixed being able to place some primitives upside down.

For our latest known issues please follow this link to the public trello boards.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix