Update on progress towards next version

This week I want to talk about the progress towards the next version of the early access. As explained in previous posts, there are four main big areas being worked on right now (new physics-based dragon, dragon creator, battles and destruction) as well as some additional 3D assets, like the new dragon saddle and armour. Let's go through the four areas.

For the physics-based dragon, the focus so far has been on creating a so called physics-based character controller for it. This is basically the thing that moves the dragon around the world. The vast majority of games in Unreal Engine (the game engine we use) simply go with the default class that comes with the engine, but it's not made for this level of physics simulation and won't be good enough for us. This has been very experimental because I wanted to see how far I could take it and kept trying new ideas, but I now have something that will be pretty cool. I might do another post explaining what it does in more detail after it has been shown.

For the dragon creator, in terms of the implementation there has been quite a lot of changes to address some technical issues and give us more flexibility in the future. Almost all the technical challenges so far have been resolved and what remains is mostly to just implement it - which is still a lot of work, even if you know how it should be done. Then there's the UI and dedicated creator mode that will be a big task on its own, and of course all the different customisation options that need to be made.

For the battles, we have mainly worked on the behaviour of units on the battlefield and made several big improvements compared to what has been shown so far. Units can now target enemies from much further away, large crowds can push other crowds with their mass (like a horde pushing through a frontline), units can swarm around congested areas and generally move more naturally, and more.

For the destruction, we've mainly worked on the pipeline for creating the structures as well as testing the new physics engine. It is mostly ready and what remains is creating structures, optimising performance and testing it with the physics-based dragons.

As for the timeline, it's gonna take a while until all of this is ready. The bottleneck is the new physics-based dragon because everything else depends on it, and making the new controller has taken longer than expected (but also turned out better than expected). I doubt all of the features can be ready this summer, but at the same time I don't want to wait too long with the next version because I need to see if the Patreon grows to support employing the interns when they are done at the end of summer. One alternative that could be shipped much earlier is to not do the full switch from the old dragon to the new dragon immediately, but instead include the dragon creator + physics-based ground movement as a separate mode while still having the current dragon flight available as usual. This would let you try out the dragon creator without having to wait for the full transition to the new dragon with ground movement, take off, flight and landing in the first region, something that will take quite a while to make.