Development Update 08.11.2024

Hey all, welcome to this week's progress report.

Level: 

We've started testing the Nanite landscape to assess performance impact and explore features like tessellation for enhanced terrain fidelity. While work on the landscape continued, we brought the first iteration of the redesigned Umbar buildings into the world map to gather team feedback on scale and appearance.

Code:

This week, we continued working on UI for the new combat system. The enemy status display is functionally complete and we started implementing the player status display in the HUD which includes displays for health, build-ups (exhaustion, burn, poison, shock), and status effects, as well as which weapon is currently equipped and the quick slots.

Speaking of quick slots, we improved how they work. If there are multiple items of the same type in the inventory, it's now possible to assign a specific instance of those to a quick slot.

We continued polishing the new ranged combat, as well.

On the sandbox side of things, we have continued working on the custom particle system prop. New options have been added for spawn offsets, spawn distance limits, drag and curl noise for even more flexibility. A lot of default particle textures have been added in addition to being able to pick your own external images.

Character: 

The new Wildfire outfit for males has been completed, rigged and transferred to several Max, Sethro and Bol- based characters, this week. We also started work on a new outfit for a regular medieval villager look which we will add to the sandbox and possibly Umbar if it fits. The female Wildfire outfit is in its final stages and will be ready for implementation next week.

Animations: 

In the animation department we had a less creative and more technical week this time, tackling the final implementation and fine tuning of the creature animations we finished recently. Arac, Blackwing and Hopper are now already giving us (and each other) a good fight in our test level, with the Raptor joining them today! We also started work on some basic unarmed attacks for humans, as the combat system requires every NPC to always have at least this default "weapon" available.

Design:

Our quest to shape up the combat continues, this week we implemented the Arac monster attacks and continued working on the Blackwing attacks and hovering moves. We also continued our QA iteration for melee and ranged combat and it's getting better and better. Another aspect of combat that was worked on this week was the data setup for hit colliders for all the different species and their attacking body parts.

Thank you for all your continued support,

-Wild Life Team