Greetings Pioneers!

This week we have resolved a lot of the issues with the single player experience, fixed up more crashes, and have been designing more AI and loot placement in our new abandoned base areas. The Huntermite is coming together with refinements to combat and new attack animations to give it much more of a bite…

Here’s what we’ve been up to in more detail:

John – Lead Designer

SO, back to fuel and talking through AI reviews this week. We’ve been refining the attacks and feel of the Hunter this week and trying to establish some of the behaviour changes we need for corridor combat (charge relentlessly) vs open spaces where it will stalk, retreat and maintain a distance, similar to what we call “hollywood-style-combat”. The latter is now in, but the relentless attacks in corridors and refinement of combat overall has been broken down now into manageable tasks for animation and behaviour implementation.

I also worked through the critical path for any players who want to engage with the story components, which mean that designers have more input for initial AI actions for any players who engage with these featured areas. As a sneak peek overview here’s the exterior of the initial single player spawn location;  

And one of the interior locations;

Lee – Technical Director

Well we finally managed to solve our shader issue from last week and the builds are running a lot smoother. The single player game is now running a lot smoother as more and more bugs get fixed. This week I have continued the work to prevent our AI from getting garbage collected, which we hope will help out considerably with multiplayer server performance.

Tom – Designer

I’ve spent this week tearing apart the landscape with lead developer Tristan and two of the other Toms, trying to hunt down the best solution for our material node spawning system. It looks like we’ve nailed down the best route forward, now all that’s left is to implement it!

OG Tom – Designer

This week I have split my time between more mining node generation and planning the layout for the new drop pod. The mining node tests we have been conducting over the past couple weeks have showed some really nice results with the density and placements of nodes. The next step is a solid implementation and I have been investigating with Tom, Tom and Trist about how we can have both the generation method we want and keep our performance up. The new drop pod design is starting to move forward now with several paper designs down it’s time to start adjusting the drop pod testing the new blockout.

Matt – Art Director

As we’ve come to a stage where we’ve managed to finalise the creature types throughout the first area of the island, placements are getting the full design treatment. I’ve included a few sample shots of our visual design/review process for these placements in just a few of the areas. These designs are iterative and will change from now till the next release and beyond that with the communities input!

Lauren – Lead Animator

This week has been all about the latest of our upcoming enemies, the Huntermite. I have been animating some attacks that make good use of those huge jaws. I have been refining locomotion, damage and speed while creating bespoke combat and idle animations for this mite-on-steroids. I wanted it to feel both aggressive and intelligent in its movements. The Huntermite will attack exclusively with melee, while the Splintermite will mostly use it’s AOE splinter bombs for more variety in combat.

All the animation present in the first gif are retargeted directly from the Splintermite and will be replaced. The benefit of this approach is that the behavioural AI and animations can be developed simultaneously with a base set of animations already present for preview.

You can look forward to a new gif/video on the Huntermite, with it’s own animations next week 🙂

Sam – Concept Artist

Ahoy there! This week we finally have a colour scheme for the Hunter creature, which I think does a good job communicating which parts are armoured and which are exposed. Notice the two pulsating sacs on the underside of the tail area – a possible weak spot, perhaps? The overall palette is meant to convey that this animal is an unnatural mish-mash of heavy shell/bone mass and more vulnerable, fleshy bits.

As well as the Hunter, work has begun on a completely new humanoid creature, simply known as the “zombie” at this stage. We’re looking for something at bears some resemblance to its former human self, but also possessing some scary and feral-like qualities seen in the Stalker. So far I’ve done some initial concepts for this, but we’ll be refining the bracket for exactly what we want some time next week.

Andy – Lead QA

This week myself and Jamie have been tackling multiplayer. Which for a while there meant running around the new world trying to kill each other.

We managed to sign off issues we had been havin with dragging and dropping items in the players inventory, collision issues within the new structures, lighting and post process issues in multiplayer and reviews of the new huntermite.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix`

P.S. Don’t forget, you can check out all that we’re currently working on now and our future plans on our Public Trello Boards here:

https://trello.com/b/dmyocCtO/eden-star-public-board

Greetings Pioneers!

More epic work on the creatures and level has been the apple in our cybernetic eyes for the week. Initial ambient sound passes have been underway, optimisations, and we’ve started some solid revisions to the drop pod design for early game testing. Here’s what we’ve all been upto..

John – Lead Designer

Our new design boffins are now tackling our spawn/opening area after some healthy discussion during the start of this week. Hopefully by next week we’ll get our teeth into adding the pickups and minor content required for it to act as a better induction to the games basic but essential mechanics. The correct format is essential before we get full playthrough feedback.

Matt – Art Director

Bug fixing for level issues mainly, aside from creating a lot of LOD meshes and optimisations. I’ve been in the process of adding a LOD terrain to visualise the distant terrain areas that are streamed out, drastically improving performance. 

Distance terrain LOD WIP

We’ve begun doing some revision work to the starting drop pod, and commenced sculpting our ‘Hunter’ creature model.

Lee – Technical Director

This week I have been taking a look at a shader issue which was causing the build machine to recompile all the engine shaders on every build. This was causing build times to skyrocket towards 20 hours on average.

I’ve also been looking at a few of the issues we have in multiplayer to make sure they are still relevant now we have upgraded the engine. The other thing I have been working on this week is preventing AI from being destroyed so we are not having to worry about the garbage collector. Instead they will now be put into a pool so we can eliminate the spawning overhead too.

Ricky – Senior Developer

Updated to the new drag drop mechanic on top of the UI menu’s fresh design which lead to some slight rearranging of functionality to accommodate.

Butch – 3D Artist

The transport vehicle is getting the full on texture treatment! More pretties from me next week when I should have the majority of the texturing done.

Lauren – Lead Animator

This week I have been continuing with the development of the Huntermite, adding horrific looking appendages and tweaking its size so it still feels menacing but can still chase you down corridors. We have also been experimenting with physical animation which will enable us to have smaller capsules (these are the simple shapes used for character collision) while reducing the instances of clipping through walls with its long legs. It’s still very much work in progress!

I have also been continuing with placing sounds in the new areas to add more of the creepy ambiance we’re after.

Tom Whaley – Designer

I’ve continued work on the optimisation front, dropping the amount of landscape textures used from 24 to 9. This will go up again a little bit as we add more layers, but should lead to a much more balanced experience across platforms.

Carlos – Developer

This week has been mainly spent debugging some of our existing systems that were broken when we upgraded engine versions. Most of this work has been focused on the player’s inventory and ensuring that it gets loaded up correctly when returning to a server. I’ve also been helping to debug issues with building mechanic!

Marcin – Designer

Began doing a pass on the structure collision defaults so they work robustly with the new assets that have been added to the areas in the level.

Tom Whittemore – Designer

This week I have been continuing to look at the node generation system by setting up the meshes, destructibles and items for metal and the nodes. So we can start properly testing the density of metal in the world and how that affects crafting. Also we’re going to completely redesign the starting drop-pod and I’ve been looking at designing the new layout. At the minute this is still in the early stages but is already looking like a much better experience.

Sam – Concept Artist

Hello! Earlier in January you may have seen the design that we were intending to use for our latest creature in development, the Hunter. Since then we’ve seen quite a lot of people comparing it to the Warrior Bugs (or Arachnids) from the popular cult film Starship Troopers, due to certain design similarities.

These observations were, in a way, right on the money. The Arachnid has been a direct piece of reference for us throughout the creative process, as it’s more or less exactly the sort of thing we want for the Hunter. In light of this, we’ve switched up the design yet again, giving it a more arched, skeletal appearance and somewhat gaseous expulsions trailing from its body. Honestly, I think the design has really benefited from this rework, and we hope you do to!

Andy – Lead QA

This week I’ve been testing collision of the new structures in anticipation of the arrival of our new AI. Other than a few glaringly obvious issues, it was all smooth sailing.

From there I push forward with reviewing the overall level design and listed up tweaks we could make to ensure that the world feels believable and doesn’t limit immersion.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix

 

Greetings Pioneers!

Creature models, vehicles, and some hot info on the state of our next release. Which is currently getting the proper playthrough treatment. Here’s what we’ve been upto..

John – Lead Designer

Now our builds are in full flow, there are some blocking issues that we still need to conquer for this latest update. As per usual everyone is hard at work attempting to clear these up! I’ve been doing some forward planning so we can add finishing moves to the melee system down the line.

Matt – Art Director

Many things, many wonderful new things. I’ve put together the final version of our mite creature, worked with the wonderfully talented Butch on our transport vehicle. All whilst overseeing additional changes to the content/polish pass in level.

Lee – Technical Director

I started the week just finishing off some loose ends with the point of interest work and animation work for the AI. The last few days though have been devoted to trying to understand an Apex crash we have and an issue with our navmesh vanishing. We are very close to getting the Apex fixed, but the navmesh is still proving very illusive.

Tristan – Lead Developer

Other than foliage fix tests this week I have been mostly been looking into an Apex crash with Lee as well as reviewing AI changes. I have also reviewed some weapons fixes as it turns out we broke selling internally so we had to fix that up 🙂

Tom S – Developer

“Just another bug hunt” does a fairly good job of summing up this week, which has been spent chasing any performance related issues and ironing them out. I’ve also given the Dam and water materials some love, as felt they were getting neglected compared to the terrain.

Butch – 3D Artist

Oh yes, the polygons have finally formed into the shape of a transport that we desire. Texturing updates arriving next!

Carlos – Developer

With the selling module out of the way, I’ve been getting stuck into some of the bugs we currently have floating around. I’m currently looking into some respawn and loading bugs that we have. I’ve also been working on some audio changes which should allow us, and you guys in turn, greater control over sounds in the game!

Tom Whittemore – Designer

There has been a lot of testing the past couple of weeks implementing and testing various methods of generating the minable nodes into the world. Currently we’re still playing around with a lot of settings, so its likely to change but in world density feels right. So we can easily gauge the world density I make the nodes a luminous green so we can easily see them at night, which also looks awesome with the green atmosphere settings.

Sam – Concept Artist

Finishing tweaks to the Hunter creature concept ready for modelling. I’ll be moving onto a ‘zombie’ style creature soon which should be pretty exciting to develop!

Lauren – Lead Animator

This week I have had some time to do some much needed audio placement work for our new areas. Along with this I’ve been looking into general audio issues and tweaking the structure of sound classes so that Carlos can hook them up to the UI and allow more control for you guys over the audio.

It’s amazing how much a bit of ambient and responsive sound adds to the atmosphere, it has also been great to see it all coming together and exploring the new areas the rest of the team have been putting together. Along with audio work I have been rigging up the new game-ready mite model, it’s looking suitably disgusting.

Tom W – Designer

Applying some polish to the front of the Dam face, and updating water material shaders has been the main stay for this week. Behind the scenes I’ve been helping one of the other Toms develop our updated foliage/mineral spawning system.

Andy – Lead QA

This week I have been focusing on reworking our trello boards to allow us to prioritise essential tasks which will in turn allow us to get a build out to your guys sooner.

Me and Jamie have also been testing the issue we have been having with the Navmesh and trying to get to the root cause of the problem.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix