Greetings Pioneers!

Art and development are advancing ever closer to that alpha release standard. More elements are being tied together, working together and fixed in general. Quality of life fixes have also been worked on such as revamping lighting systems and materials, as well as auto equipping of Items. Finally we are organising getting the art team better hardware to speed up production *whips team*

John – Lead Designer

This week I’ve been looking into a load of business related shizzle! I’m hoping to really get back to it next week in order to start some of the new guys working on getting the new UI sorted and up to scratch. I think we’ll find a bit of a hole with the info screens/map, objectives screen and vehicles once the roaming enemies and new level zone A is complete, so having those components started as soon as possible will help with get the full feel for direction.

Matt – Art Director

Working on piecing together our new male character mesh after finishing the female. Our new character model setup is practically finished so we’ve moved on to putting together an in engine benchmark for the new skin materials to bring them to life a bit more as well.

Lee – Technical Director

So this week I’ve been working with Marcin developing the new AI behaviour planners and identifying any bugs along the way. I’ve also been looking into giving the level designers the ability to have the AI run a specific script of tasks instead of running their normal planner so we can have AI react to specific events in a certain way.

Tristan – Senior Developer

I’ve been working with John and Andy to get new workstations for the art team. I am currently on holiday with my lovely wife and plan on coming back revitalised and ready to kick ass.

Yves – Senior Developer

Improving melee combat with the introduction of blocking and parrying, with a bit of luck I would have got the finishing move in too, otherwise that’s coming in next week.

Ricky – Senior Developer

Made good progress on the consumable weapon which is needed to complete our new 1-10 equippable slots work.

I’ve also been working on some auto arm on pickup functionality which will mean you can walk over weapons, armour or equippable weapon consumables while having empty hotbar slottage to send em straight there and get using them without all the fun of opening the inventory UI first.

I’ve also been debugging the objectives save system to get it designer ready.

Marcin – Designer

This week, I’ve been working with Lee on the perception checks for the AI. We’ve been looking into compartmentalising perception data so that instead of coming in big compound chunks we can gather and access only as much as is needed. Also Lauren and I have been putting together generic humanoid Aim Offset assets, which will allow us to aim the upper body of any humanoid accurately no matter what weapon or locomotion pose it’s currently using.

Joe – Environment Artist

So I’ve been reviewing some of the rather lovely art Tom’s been implementing for the starting area of the game, as well as having many many discussions with Rick on how to go about reworking the in-game UI to make everything clearer and more concise for you guys, based on Matt’s concepts. I’ve started with new visuals for the hotbar to complement the new functionality the other guys have added in.

Tom W – Designer

Over the last few days, I’ve been completely reworking the way we approach texturing, especially with regards to things like landscape and foliage. The benefits of this should include a massive reduction in the amount of memory being used by the game at any point in time, as well as allowing us to do some nifty effects down the line with regards to terrain changes. On top of that, I’ve reworked our skylights to adjust according to the time of day, which should lead to much more cinematic lighting throughout the game.

Lauren – Animator

This week I have been animating new attacks for the Stalker, which has been slightly neglected for a while, we’re looking forward to adding new behaviour that is different from other AI and actually add more characteristics that will make the name make a little more sense, having it stalk the player before attacking, dart in and out of combat and hopefully be a little more interesting to engage with. I have also started rigging up our shiny new player character meshes woot!

Andy – Lead QA

John has forced me to do all the exciting things such as writing documents and pricing up components for new workstations. But as soon as I’d knocked that out of the park I got back to the good stuff…

I’ve been testing the crafting on player mechanic along with the new hotbar work done by Ricky and Joe. We also had a big change with the terrain that was implemented into the engine and I got to run around a section of the world that’s looking vastly different to what you guys will be used to. Tom, Matt and Joe have done an amazing job.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix

 

Greetings Pioneers!

This week has been all about AI and melee, as well as how they work together. We have been pulling together multiple systems this week and finally have something we can see all the areas working together as we designed, exciting times!

John – Lead Designer

As you can tell from our latest development work we’re focusing on injecting a lot of quality into key areas of the game, combat with creatures being the main pillar of a long with improvements to the player characters, their looks, and movement. We’re hoping to group these features together for concurrent releases as we get close to finishing them.

Matt – Art Director

Continuing work on the character setup for Lauren and refinements to her first person arms. I’ve also been setting up of the finished male mesh with textures and materials.

Going into next week I’ll be getting around to finishing the new first person arm meshes that go with the new characters, The heads and eyes will have better shader work done to them as well so they look more realistic!

Lee – Technical Director

So this week I have been adding new functionality to the planners to allow the designers more control over how they setup the behaviours and control the AI. The new behaviours are starting to come together now, while we identify new primitive tasks which are still needed.

Marcin – Designer

The goal for this week for me was to complete the first iteration of the generic melee combat behaviour for AI. I know this sounds like just redoing what we already had, but this is so very much not the case. We effectively took all of our previous systems, broke them down into tinier pieces and are now putting them back together in more effective combinations.

As an example of this process I can talk about the “Move” command. Previously we had a mother of all move tasks, which was responsible of performing every single type of AI move in the game. And in general it was always trying to move the AI to its target (usually you). We have taken a massive metaphorical sledgehammer to it (with massive help from Lee) and from the pieces we can now put together all kinds of different move tasks per desired behaviour, such as:

• Well known and loved “move towards your target”,
• Move away from the target, but maintain eye contact,
• Walk slowly around, not looking at anything in particular
• Strafe in a circle around a point, etc.

Another major part of the combat rework is the “attack component”, which I have very briefly mentioned before. It fills the role of a manager that unifies and communicates with all AI attacks in the game, (which I am also remaking under the new system). Previously every attack was implemented as an independent entity, with it’s own complete logic, timings, and data. That approach gave us a lot of freedom, but ultimately deprived us of the ability to maintain it, because, when you have 5 different functions that check if target is in range, after a while it was impossible to tell which one was the right one. I know it sounds crazy, but I guess this is what “work in progress” really means.

The new system groups various attacks into 1 of 3 categories: ranged, area, or melee. They make sense from the system’s perspective because each type requires different set of conditions, but ones that will always be shared for all attacks of the type. Centralising logic like this frees the attacks themselves to only contain logic that determines how the attack looks, sounds, and feels, and we can still do crazy things with that.

Tristan – Lead Developer

This week I have been researching localisation (***NOT*** with a ‘Z’) and all (well probably just some) of the woes that come with it. This should help us out a great deal with speeding up the localisation process when we come to it.

Ricky – Senior Developer

After extensive meetings with lee about a newfangled gizmo he’s created to thoroughly optimise a few of our HUD systems, I’ve been looking into some of the bugs which have appeared such as how servers sometimes not accepting parameters.

Lauren – Animator

This week I have been working with Marcin on the new Melee. I have started on new attack animations for AI that should give more variety to how our creatures engage the player. We are moving away from the zombie-like ‘run up to player then attack player until dead’ behaviour into something that should allow for more strategy and fun.

Andy – Lead QA

I’ve been looking into many of the issues that the community mention on the stream forums regarding multiplayer servers and certain player built assets taking environmental damage while inside an eden kit shield. Happy to inform that we have discovered the cause of these issues and we are working on a fix for them currently.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix

 

Greetings Pioneers!

Occasionally there is the need to break up the usual blog update with a more in depth feature. Which means.. For this glorious Friday we’ll be sharing our character customisation system plans and how we’re looking to implement it initially. Suggestions are welcome, and in fact we believe it is the whole point of developing systems in early access, even prior to a working version.

For the pipeline of the new character system, each Male and Female Character start with a wonderfully airtight base suit that supplies them with the environment they need to maintain body temperature and proper pressure on planets with denser or lighter oxygen atmospheres. Phew.. that’s the technical Jargon out of the way!

Then there’s the good bit. Each suit will be customisable with 3 different colours. A primary (Undersuit) secondary (Padding) and tertiary (Trim) colour. This should allow for colour variations on your pioneer that will please and offend the eyes. Ontop of this we’re thinking of including custom patterns, and the overall material look of your suit.

We’ve also been in consideration over setting up some basic but limited size scaling to make your character body appear slimmer or more muscular in size. 

Basic face and eye colourisation will be implemented to begin with, with a push to get in some facial feature adjustment (As you can see in the updated design pre-vis image below). Adjusting the scale and spacing of facial features is something we would love but would most likely be added later down the line! 

Armour sets that you build or find in the world are a separate matter. Because these are not decided on before launching into a game, we’re toying with having colour variants you can set. These may not be as unbound as the actual character suit customisation.. But then again if you want rainbow coloured adventurers anything is possible, apart from unicorns of course. Only space unicorns are possible.

All work and design is in progress, so your feedback is and will always be a beautiful thing. We can’t thank the community and new supporters enough for your patience. As suggested in the previous blog, once we have something enjoyable and cohesive with these in development features for you to test, you’ll obviously be the first to know about it!

See you in the fray

– Team Flix