Dynasthir News

[p]During the course of development these two points have kept coming up again and again. And for good reasons, the input experience is important to players.

Glyphs
For a long time the task of implementing just one, safe for two sets of glyphs has seemed somewhat insurmountable with the rest of the game needing to be made and catered thereafter.

And you guys want a third!

I want to provide players a good solution to selecting whichever glyphs they prefer. It will have to wait until after release & it is a high priority for us to look into this proper. I can't promise exactly what the solution will look like, but hopefully it'll be easy enough for you to partake in.

For now we have sorted every glyph into their own .Pak file which means modding & replacing the Playstation glyphs is really easy. I hope we can provide an in game solution to make this easier. I'd love automatic detection. We might settle for a toggle.

Mouse movement in menus[/p][p]The whole menu system was built on top of a custom solution for retrieving inputs with a lot of little special cases. It's honestly a mess and a true testament to what technical debt can look like.

I don't know exactly what I can do here, without uprooting months and months of bad code that will ripple through the entire project requiring very thorough testing before it is ready for the public.

The first months this will not be a priority. It would simply block our ability entirely to push other updates as anything less than a surgical incision into the system to replace many little bits of code, would leave other systems prone to bugs.

I know it's not ideal. I hope adjusting to using KB WASD or arrow keys won't ruin your immersion. Because that is what it is. Your way of seamlessly interacting in the way you expect the game to work, helps bring you closer to just exist in that world.

And I promise to take a look at it. Just, know it will be a while before we can bring love mouse movement in menus the way it deserves.[/p][p] - Mireneye

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[p]We stand at the very beginning, the birth of our child. A project of which me and Ulfgang has curated for many years.

It's with the heart of an artist that I (Mireneye) would work on this game forever and perhaps It would never have been released?

It required all my sanity to call the shot and say; this year is the year (More on this in a future update).
And it has taken all of our insanity to get us there.

We know deep in our hearts that Dynasthir is in a state where parts of it require more time to match our vision in terms of design.

And with that said, I'd like to address why I called the shot to not go for an early access sort of approach. Frankly I'm sick and tired of companies that keep their games in early access forever, even releasing full fledged expansions to it while it's still in EA.

I wanted to hold myself and us to a higher standard. This also comes with a responsibility to you, the players. And in this regard we failed. I wish parts of the game would have been released in a less rough state, but more time or the EA label would not have done much of a difference for us.

It would just have given an excuse and we stand here before you without excuses. We are facing the music. We are incredibly proud of how far we've come, self funding the entire project.

We are happy to take such a momentous game across the finish line. But we know to get there it carries innumerable scratches from an absolutely bonkers development cycle.

So what then? What do we leave you with? A promise. A promise to keep working, keep updating.
Keep finding new ways to surprise you. I hope that together, over the course of the coming year, we can take this behemoth by the horns and ride it to victory, together.

I hope you will be with us for the ride.[/p][p] - Mireneye

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[p]
Adressing feedback we recieved during Steam Next Fest.
I'll be speaking to you in the capacity of me, Mireneye, responsible for game logic, programming, studio/project lead & creator of the lore of Dynasthir.

I want to preamble this by saying that this is a first game for us. A small studio of two people. And that I don't have the greatest hardware.

1, The game runs badly on recommended specs.
You are probably right. On my limited hardware I pretty much would be happy with it running a locked 40fps. And I modeled the recommended specs after it. I recognize it's not ideal, and people expect a game that looks like a "Ps3 era game" to run at least 60 on modern hardware.

From what I can tell by our profiling, a strong cpu in terms of single core performance will help the most. As it appears to me we are primarily bound by game logic.

We try to simulate a lot of the world and how it moves without the player nearby. We had to give up a lot of that in order to get near good framerate.

Had I known years ago I would have done R&D into this specifically. I naively believed Unreal was going to scale nicely. It did not.

We WILL do our best to optimize. I've been on that train for the last two years; I have a lot to learn & a lot of profiling to do. We will continue to work on & improve performance as we go.

2, Game looks bad/monochrome/has bad filter effects/can't see anything
The world of Dynasthir doesn't have day/night it only has weathers. Dark & light come in that form, in various ways. This has been a challenge for us to design as for various reasons UE4 never matched visuals in editor and in game. I believe I've fixed this issue. And I hope you can see the difference yourself.

We tightened the Ambient Occlusion a bit. We reintroduced a bit of our colors from our desaturated set. We cleared up some fog that pushed up onto the camera. We no longer wash the entire scene towards red. We allow other colors to come through.[/p][p][/p][p]3, The game is empty.
We have some ideas we might try to make the start of the game feel more engaging and exciting as you are just starting off on your adventure. One of them is making the town be in a more active crisis. With more combat encounters across the starting town. And while still inhabited, a more hostile environment.

But ultimately there will be moments where you contemplate your journey and slow down. I want to give you the right impression of what we are building. We are building a conversation with a dying world.

Finally. Even after release we will continue to infuse the world with more things. There are things we have dreamed of but not have had time to get into.

I hope that our final polish on things before the release will elevate the experience for all of you. Be patient with us as we use every single shard of time we have to make this game into something special.

I'm very excited to let you guys travel beyond the demo walls. We have a lot of weird & strange secrets waiting for you. Or perhaps, for someone else. I suppose.. you might have to talk to each other?

Perish the thought.

- Mireneye

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[p]This one may require some more time in the oven. We've tried to tackle some tricky bugs that have to do with tabbing in and out of the game. Inadvertently we may have activated the cursor in some places where it should not be. Clicking the screen should help get things back in order.[/p][p] Current Patch V 8.0.7.0[/p]

• [p]Movement/slide smoothing fix, we applied some more math to it![/p]
• [p]Tabbing out of the game to a separate screen then clicking to get back should no longer cause weird focus issues between game and ui[/p]
• [p]Some NPC homes in Wilden have been expanded[/p]
• [p]Fixed some NPCs showing the wrong Glyphs between KB/Gamepad[/p]

[p] Known Issues[/p]

• [p]Fresh openings of Inventory / menues may display the cursor. This is unintended behavior as result of other fixes[/p]
• [p]Some vendor NPCs still show the wrong glyphs between KB/Gamepad[/p]
• [p]Some side quest NPCs (Particularly Running types) don't fully work[/p]
• [p]Glyph functionality mis-match in rebinding Flicks
  [/p][p]- Ulfgang & Mireneye [/p]

[p][/p]

[p]Some patch notes based on user feedback of the demo.[/p][p] Current Patch V 8.0.6.0[/p]

• [p]TAA is now default AA[/p]
• [p]DLSS should default to Off[/p]
• [p]Resting at a Foci should now remove negative stat modifiers[/p]
• [p]Tweaked placement of a wall piece in Wilden[/p]
• [p]NPCs bend over back less in order to see you[/p]

[p] Known Issues[/p]

• [p]Some Special pathing NPCS do not run/move when they should. Affecting only side quests[/p]
• [p]Glyph functionality mis-match in rebinding Flicks
  [/p][p]- Ulfgang & Mireneye [/p]

[p][/p]