Greetings Pioneers,

Whilst we push many extra hours of work into heaps of upcoming content, we feel people deserve a better balanced game to play in the mean time.

So we’re excited to bring you our final update within our 1km Island map. Our next update will be on our main 4 x 4 km Island!  We’ve done some extensive balancing and bug testing to get this build to you today, taking on board the feedback we’ve received. The team are especially happy to say the game is now a lot more forgiving in it’s initial stages of play while also remaining challenging for the more advanced players.

So what’s new?  We have added different visual styles of base fortifications to this current build, which will now represent the durability of certain material types you build them from.

We have many balancing tweaks, changes and major bug fixes in as well, which you can read in our full changelist below.

Important: please update your servers to the latest version to work with this release, thank you.

• Added new Primitive Fortifications variants. There are now 3 distinct styles, which depend on the Material you choose to build your Fortifications out from. This mechanic will be expanded on in future updates.

• Changed the timing of incoming waves at night so they are not as intense.
• Enemy waves start smaller and get tougher as the night goes on.
• All enemies, the player and all blocks have had their numbers rebalanced so that enemy creatures are a much bigger threat to static defences, but not as punishing to the player who wants to contribute to the defence:
  • Turrets are now cheaper, but more vulnerable to enemy attacks.
  • Pioneers’ attacks are slightly more powerful. Pioneers also take less damage from enemy creatures’ attacks. We want Pioneers to be able to contribute to protection of their bases at night.
  • Ikas and Vipers no longer pull other characters in upon death. They still push away with the final explosion.
  • Ika and Viper Spit attack now disables turrets for a short period of time.
  • Splintermite spikes explode much quicker, but no longer when touched.
  • Eden Kits have had their cost significantly reduced. Also at lower levels, the Eden Kit Shield is much smaller. This means that new Eden Kits are much easier to acquire, but are much weaker without upgrades. Upgrading Eden Kits now also doubles their maximum durability from the previous level.
  • Regeneration module (to heal structures) is now much cheaper to craft.
  • A lot of utilities and defences have had their health lowered.
  • Structures built out of Cerulium or Tennal will now have more HP that those built from Ironite (as these materials are rarer).
  • We are in the process of revamping damage type and damage resistance mechanics. For the time being, the base material you use to build your structures will only affect their HP. The damage resistances have been equalised across all materials.
  • We are phasing out Arches and Arch Corner primitives. They will not disappear, but they can no longer be built or fortified.
  • In single player, you are no longer forced to restart the game if you die when your Replication Units are on cooldown or unpowered. Removed Replication Unit Cooldown completely in single player.
  • You can no longer add more Items into an already dropped bag, neither a personal one, nor the one that drops when you die. This was never intended.
  • Lights no longer use power.
  • Made eden kit column have the title of the kit in the tab.
  • Multiple physics and foliage optimisations.
  • Build asset rendering optimisations.
  • UI optimisations.
  • Armoury has been renamed to Crafting Station.
  • Sac plants now spawn Plasmafire.
  • Kinetic Blast now does damage by default.
  • Made the night fog slightly brighter to emphasise the toxic atmosphere

• Fixed Pulse Amplifier upgrade, which mistakenly required another upgrade before you could Activate it.
• Fixed Energy Harness upgrade tree, which had incorrectly 2 upgrade slots taken by default.
• Fixed enemies flailing their limbs uncontrollably during “ragdoll”. They are still flailing, but controllably.
• Fix for bodies of offline players standing back up on clients and also being able to push them around on the client by walking into them.
• Fixed Text Chat allowing some of the game commands through while you’re typing (such as ‘q’ for Build Mode or switch weapons)
• Fixed an issue causing keyboard keys to stop responding until you click after sending chat message
• Fixed an issue where once you were sent an invitation to join a colony, if you logged out you could no longer see it, respond to it, or receive a new one, until its timer run out.
• Fix for upgrade trees no longer working after a loaded game
• Fixed being able to access lockboxes/eden kits etc at extreme range even without the prompt being onscreen
• Fixed an issue with some UI (Inventory Weight bar for example) which would display at the incorrect size and/or each side would be different thicknesses
• Fix for UI Menu not re-displaying items that were placed into a dropbag after closing and opening the menu
• Fixed the death prompts and map markers displaying incorrect or incomplete information
• Fixed an issue where the output column wasn’t visible in the UI Menu (‘I’ key menu) after closing the menu from the Colony Tab.
• Fixed an issue where AI were unable to find any utilities to attack.
• Fixed an issue where Turrets were not able to shoot through doors and windows
• Fixed a few sounds which were extremely loud.
• Fixed an issue where Turrets would not find a new target after losing and regaining power.
• Fixed an issue preventing using smash when you had 0 energy, despite smash not using energy.
• Fixed an issue with AI Perception where it could sometimes not pick up targets which were nearby.
• Fixed a popup, which would warn you about signing over structures when you decline a colony invitation.
• Fix for Eden Kit upgrade tree cutting off the bottom of the last node at some resolutions
• Fixed graphical glitches during reloading of sniper rifles while aiming down sights.
• Fixed an issue which allowed foundations to be built overlapping obstructions.
• Fixed an issue preventing players from being healed by the Eden Kit shield in multiplayer.
• Fixed an issue where some players were not always seeing the deployment screen in single player.
• Fixed issue with trees regrowing through foundations after a save. (might be a few this first time round though as the trees ids might be out of date after new engine upgrade)
• Fixed issue with foliage not getting removed on client.
• Fixed issue with disconnect message boxes occasionally being unclickable when getting kicked from server.
• Fixed a bug where you would auto sprint after landing even when you were not previously sprinting before jumping or leaving the ground.
• Fixed a bug where you would stop firing while the fire button is held if you are given velocity (attacked by ikas, dropped to the floor or jumped, tail whipped by stalkers etc).
• Fix for compass and map sometimes having multiple of the same marker.
• Fix for Eden Kits not showing on the compass.

Known Issues

• Vogels sometimes get stuck and stop moving
• Very rarely Ikas will find their way underground and attack from below.
• Ikas can sometimes attack you or your base from a very long distance.

You can keep up to date with current development via our Trello boards.

Thank you all again for the continued feedback and we hope you enjoy this latest release!

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix

Greetings Pioneers!

We had really hoped to get an update out today but we were foiled at the last hurdle. We have found an engine bug with the navigation system in 4.12 that we need a fix for from Epic before we can release (they should get back to us soon).

This bug is related to the recasting of the navigation mesh, which stops it from updating after a while. Ground AI use the navigation mesh to pick valid spawn locations and move around. As it’s broken currently it could cause a number of symptoms including ground enemies not attacking your base at night and not spawning from hives when you get close or damage them. We want to put out a hotfix that is better than the current release but we feel it’s not yet at that stage.

We have been working on some fairly large changes which address some of the balancing concerns plus a huge number of other much needed bug fixes. We’ve also added some variants for fortification visuals that will change depending on the material you construct them from. New release coming ASAP!

Here’s the latest news from the core areas of the game we’ve been focusing on:

Modular weapons

The new weapon parts from Matt are in and animations from Lauren are coming along nicely. We have some new Ironsights and re-vamped scopes and are in the process of designing the stats of each weapon part along with recoil, firing mechanisms and other effects in preparation for the next stage of development.

Check out some of the progress on the weapons and animations below:

(work in progress)

Abandoned colony bases

Matt is working on constructing the huge lost colony bases that we hope to populate for the new map release. Rather than feeling empty we want them to feel lived in so have been working on some decorator items and proxy models for utilities that you will be able to build in the future!

Creatures

Joe, Tom and Simone have been making steady progress on our biome creature types. This week has seen the development of several crustaceans come to life. All of which will be lesser creatures found roaming the windy outreaches of the world. We’ve also been focusing on the development of a bird of prey creature which will be one of the most common flying aggressive-neutral fauna types.

Survival Stats System

We’ve been putting in the ground work for the Stat system, making sure it has the flexibility to be able to cover any changes we may need. It’s cover everything from Health to Thirst to Progress, every character will have it’s own stat table, giving the potential for more complex AI behaviour in the future.

Thank you all for the continued support. You can keep track of our progress as always on our Trello Boards.

See you in the fray

– Team Flix

 
Greetings Pioneers!

So we have upgraded our Unreal Engine from 4.8 to 4.12 over the past week, now we are well on the way to stabilizing the build in preparation for the next hotfix release. There are still a few big issues left for us to fix however, one of which is that you fall out of the world and die when you spawn in Multiplayer, so we’ll need to fix that before we let it out the door… 😉

Meanwhile we’ve been continuing work on the creatures for the new map, the XP unlocking progression and the survival system, here’s an update to what we’ve been up to:

John – Lead Designer

I have been reviewing the work for the Creature Biomes and we can happily say that there are a decent number of Fauna shaping up for Alpha, ideally 15, plus the enemies currently in-game.

In addition to this I have been reviewing and revising some of the HUD and Menu designs, there is a lot more that we want to do with the HUD and in-world info, it’s about time we started to give it some TLC as we also intend to place the survival info on both the HUD and player UI.

Tutorial and game story are also starting to shape-up nicely and, whilst we are only looking at frameworks at this stage, I intend to introduce these elements shortly after we get crafting onto the player, along with the survival, new map etc.

Production has been a challenge this week due to the unforeseen issues that this last engine upgrade has caused, but I hope we will be getting a release out to you either this weekend or early next week with fixes in for the current issues in game. Sorry again for the wait and thanks for your support!

Matt – Art Director

There’s been a lot of tidy up work going on, I’ve been focusing on the addition of new weapon stocks primarily along with exporting and tidy up of for other components. Next up.. Work on colony bases for the new map plus more detail and revision to the weapon scopes!

Lee – Technical Director

This week I completed our migration over to the Unreal Engine 4.12, which wasn’t as bad as the previous migration. We are now trying to iron out any new bugs which this version of the engine has introduced. I’ve also been planning some tweaks to the AI’s ability to select a new target and making some more tweaks

Tristan – Senior Developer

This week i have been working on integrating our physics findings as well as ironing out issues from the latest engine update.

Lauren – Animator

This week I have been continuing work on the ‘Wolf’ animations and setting up simple blueprints for that and the ‘Deer’ using existing AI so that I can see them running attacking and running around. There is still work to be done with the individual AI and group behaviour mechanics for both. I’m back onto the weapon animations now with the shiny new modular pieces from Matt in between helping out with the 4.12 bug fixes.

Yves – Senior Developer

We’ve made the jump to Unreal 4.12, we have another load of bug fixes to do before we can move on.

Ricky – Developer

Mainly been fixing new warnings and errors in the new build, and a few UI and game tweaks like allowing single players to use Replication Units when available without the need for a cooldown.

Joe – Environment Artist

I started the week by finishing the game-res model of the ‘Deer’ neutral creature before creating some quick initial meshes for a few rather weird looking critters that we will be revealing soon. At the moment I’m polishing up the first of them and am hoping to finish the others next week! Here’s a sneak peek:

Marcin – Designer

This week has been all about that base, about that base… with lots of trouble actually, thank you very much. I’ve spent most of the week designing creature behaviour while attacking bases, but mainly – desperately trying to figure out every possible case of [queue damsel in distress voiceover] “This AI will not be able to get to that turret, whatever are we to do?” Those are the kinds of problems you run into when you are trying to have a building system, which lets player build however and wherever they fancy.

Additional bits consisted of designs for how creatures handle aggro and switching targets, as well as how does the ability to run away from and sneak up to creatures fit within the overall picture. It’s all like a big sudoku. 🙂 But you only have 2 numbers to start with.

Tom – Character Artist

I’m texturing our lovely ‘zebra’! Gonna be starting on the ‘Vulture’ soon also!

Simone – Concept Artist

This week I have been working with the team to make final concepts and textures for a set of creatures we have been working on so far. The ‘Deer’ has been modeled and I’ve created a few textures to help get the creative juices flowing for the look and style we want for this creature. There are some changes to be completed on certain creatures to make them more alien-like! Yes yes more tentacles, more bioluminescence and more cuteness…that last one isn’t right, I’ll just paint bunnies on my own time! Praise the bunny gods! \o/

Andy – Lead QA

This week I’ve mostly been using a visual logger that Lee implemented to catch the issues we have been having with the AI. Other than that I have been trying to reproduce the bugs that have come up since we updated the Unreal engine to version 4.12

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix