Greetings Pioneers!

When the large scale ‘important hero’ assets start getting the texture treatment, you know we’re happy with them. This is a very good thing for progress, as we start to lock down the location designs for the beginning area. Nice amounts of progress this week with character implementation, and collision cleanup for some of the new environment work as well, more details below!.. keyboard fingers at the ready, Go!..

John – Lead Designer

Like a mighty samurai or fearless knight I have once again charged headfirst into the battle field that is games development and vanquished my foes! I stand before you a changed man, a humbled man, a wiser man. And now looking back over the week, I know that my life will never be the same. So to paraphrase my favourite Harry Potter character “Johnny is a free elf”

Matt – Art Director

Doing some real scrubber work, making more accurate collision hulls for some of our newer rock assets (which need to be accurate so we can mantle and climb them properly). Earlier in the week I managed to finish up the prep work for the updated male model so he can be skinned and put into engine.

Lee – Technical Director

This week I’ve been completing work to allow the designers to give the AI scripted instructions to follow for in-game events and such. This will interrupt its normal planning behaviour and go and execute the event before returning back to its planning. Hopefully this will only add to the player experience.

Alex – Designer

I’m back on the relay this week! Working on the textures for it though now, as we have made some big new changes to the overall look and feel to the world. Some changes had to be made from the original concept piece, but it’s really starting to look like an ancient piece of tech left behind a millenia ago.

It’s also been a great excuse to explore a cool new workflow I’d been wanting to try out using projected normals using decals which is giving me a lot of freedom to make changes and tweaks really fast after a bit of initial leg work.

Tristan – Senior Developer

This week I have been helping an old lady make a cake. Cause I really fancied a nice spongy treat. Turns out, the old lady was evil and gave me none so ended up doing more ground work for localisation instead \o/

Yves – Senior Developer

I took this week off work as I am in the process of building my Duck Dynasty Tribute act and was scouring the countryside for fellow avid fans who wished to follow in the footsteps of legends themselves.

Ricky – Senior Developer

BOOM! Grenades. (Sorry for those of you with heart conditions, this post may contain LOUD explosion text, also sorry this warnings a bit late).

This week I’ve added the consumable weapon classes so our Hot bar can be filled with 10 grenades or multiple other puny weapons insignificant to the almighty grenade. I’ve also added in some little quality of life perks like auto adding picked up weaponry to the players hot bar for quick use if there’s an empty slot.

Joe – Environment Artist

This week I have been <MISSING STRING TABLE ENTRY>

Tom W – Designer

I didn’t see the light until I was already a man, by then it was nothing to me but BLINDING!

Jokes aside, I’ve spent this week reworking our lighting system, starting with the ambient skylight found throughout the game. Two major tweaks were needed, the first being to allow us to blend through four different cubemaps for the various times of day, Night-Sunrise-Day-Sunset. The other, was to stop the skylight from bleeding indoors, as it clashed with the dark spooky dungeon feeling we’ve been working towards.

In other news, I’ve done some performance tweaks on our new terrain materials, tripling their performance in-game.

Lauren – Animator

This week I have been skin weighting our shiny new meshes, starting with the female. This is a process that enables the new mesh to work with the current skeleton and animations. It’s great to finally see her running around!

I have also been experimenting with more groundwork in place for customisation such as morphing the mesh to get variants on different proportions but this is still at early stages so far. Suggestions are still very much welcome, let us know what character options you would like to see and we’ll see what we can do!

Andy – Lead QA

I spent the week pestering Ricky bout getting the grenades in and auto populating the hot bar and it paid off! You can now pick up items and they will automatically be placed into the first free slot of your hot bar meaning you can equip and use it much faster.

I’ve also been testing multiplayer with Jamie and admiring the changes Tom has made to the lighting and the skybox.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix

 

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