Wild Omission News

I have created an ammo management system. Guns will have a set amount of ammo they are able to hold at a given time, when you reload it checks for if you have ammo in your inventory and reloads according to how much you have spare.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NwwoOWbs-k


Animal hitboxes and ragdoll constrains have been improved and now properly wrap around their bodies.




The Moon phases now render correctly.




There were some pretty major performance issues with the weather. The main issue is that when the tornado would contact a tree, it would tell it to change its mesh to a stump. This is normal and supposed to happen, the issue is that it would telling the tree to do this every frame, regardless if the tree was already a stump. This resulted in major CPU overhead trying to change the mesh constantly. This has been fixed and the performance is much better. Improvements to storm cloud rendering have also been made.


I have made a change to how player saves are loaded. The game will now always try to match the host save. What this means is that, if I have a world, and I have lots of items in my inventory that are vital to playing the world, and I give my friend the world file, he will load in with all the same items that I had.


I have made many changes to how actors are saved and loaded. Previously if I were to do so much as move a file around, it would risk breaking save files. Now I have created a system that allows for greater compatibility over the long term. It uses lookup tables with identifiers to find the class it needs, rather than pointers to classes, which could change from build to build. Along with this I have created a versioning system for save files, which is able to detect what version the save was last loaded on, and perform any compatibility updates if needed, preventing the save from becoming corrupt. I have already put it into action by changing the location of the sea level, and landscape height. The system was able to correctly reposition all objects to the new ground location. There has also been simular compatibility code added for things like inventories, to detect if the amount of slots has changed since last load, and properly resize the amount of slots without corrupting items. BLAH BLAH BLAH BORING TECHNICAL SPEAK BLAH BLAH BLAH.

• Animations have been optimized.
  
• Equipable Items now use skeletal mesh.
  
• Graphics Quality settings are now auto detected on first time launch.
  
• Grass rendering has been improved for better performance.
  
• Fog can no longer be completely opaque.
  
• Lights will stop rendering at a distance of 30 meters.
  

I have began experimenting with projectile based weapons. My plan is to have a Bow, Handgun, Rifle, and Shotgun. Currently I have just been doing some testing with a "Bean Gun" which you can see in the following video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE1J0QOyXTM


Last week I showed some pictures of the new animals in Wild Omission. However they didnt yet have any animations, and would just walk around without moving their legs. I have now made some (admittedly janky looking) animations for walking and idling. They will also swim when in water.

https://youtu.be/-WDVdSJkp60


Because there are now animals it only makes since that they would drop food when killed. There are now three new types of food items, Pork, Beef, and Mutton. Each food item has a raw, and cooked version. Raw meat can be cooked in a campfire or furnace. Eating raw meat will deal damage.




The water shader has been given some touchups. Previously it had some weird normal shading artifacts, and the shore ripples were flowing in the wrong direction. Both of these issues have been resolved, and the water looks much better.




I have made a much higher quality impact decal texture.




Along with the new decal texture, a new Blood Decal, Particle, and Sound effect have been added for impact on anything living.

• Made footstep sound effects quieter based on player feedback.
  
• Centered consumption sounds.
  
• Fixed Escape not closing the pause menu.
  
• Fixed items falling through ground.
  
• Fixed quick moving items to full crate from causing items to go missing.
  
• Fixed item name tags from staying on screen when the inventory menu is closed.
  
• Fixed animal spawning causing game to crash.
  
• Fixed bug that caused low health effects to not show up.
  

This weeks devblog is unfortunately a little bit lacking when it comes to things to talk about. This was because I have spent some time planning rather than developing, I also upgraded the power supply in my computer. Hopefully next week I'll have more to talk about. With that said, these are the changes made to Wild Omission this week.



I have finally added animals to Wild Omission. Currently I have only made Pigs, Cows, and Sheep, but in the future I plan on adding more. They spawn around areas where players are, and will despawn when you go far away. They will wander around and make noises, but cannot currently be killed, and they aren't currently saved in the save file, so reloading the game will make them dissapear, however I might change this in the future.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oISNgsSHqBs


Fixed bug that caused nametags to not show up when hovering over items in an opened container.

Ever since building was introduced back in May, there has only been one material to build with, WOOD, but now Stone, and Metal, have been added as new options for those with a little more resources to spare. The crafting cost is the same as the wood counterparts but with each material you will need their respective resource. For example if a wood foundation requires 300 wood to craft, a metal foundation requires 300 metal to craft. Each Higher tier has more durability than the previous, wood has 100 durability, Stone has 250 durability, metal has 500 durability. Along with these metal doors have also been added, they are just like the wood doors but with 150 more durability, and different sound effects.




A New Lighting fixture has been added. This time instead of being wall bound, it is a Ceiling Light.




It is now possible to hold shift while clicking on an item in your inventory to quick move it. If no containers are open the item will be moved to the nearest available slot in your inventory, If a container is open it will move the item directly to the container, and it can be moved back in the same way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MAy1Qz2zWE


When placing any deployable into the world, new "dust" particles will spawn.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRPw5kNC4Mc


[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

After seven months of development, it's finally here. In Wild Omission you will notice that the sun now moves throughout the sky, and once it sets, you will see the newly added moon. The moon also has phases going from new to full. Along with the visual changes that come with night, the ambient sounds have now been made dynamic depending on the time of day. During the day you will hear birds, at night crickets.




Because it now gets dark out, I figured now would be a good time to add a new deployable source of light. It works similar to the furnace, taking wood as fuel, but it cannot smelt anything, making it only useful as a light source.




Previously the deployable preview would not update every material on its mesh, only the first material. this would break when deployables have more than one material. The preview now properly updates all materials.




I have been trying to track down the source of some serious multiplayer lag issues for weeks. It had driven me mad. I have optimized every part of the multiplayer down to the smallest possible bit, and the problem still persisted. However as of Monday I have figured out the problem has nothing to do with my netcode, and that the problem is Instead related to my router or computer. I found this when ZONER was able to take part in a playtest, he observed no lag or stutter despite the fact the I was constantly lagging. The only good that has come of this, is that the game's bandwidth usage is really good, the bad thing is that I have spent a month tracking down a problem that wasn't real.


These changes were too minor, or not quite interesting enough to get their own section, but should still be mentioned.

• Fixed scaling issue that caused game chat to shrink.
  
• Fixed Building Hammer not playing effects for clients.
  
• Fixed selected item slot not getting refreshed.
  
• Fixed furnace effects not playing.
  
• Made equip sound quieter.
  
• Deployable placement rotation tweaks.
  
• Changed attenuation of deployable placement sounds to make them cut out sooner.
  
• Fixed players spawning in under the world and dying instantly.
  
• Fixed players not being able to deal damage to other players.
  
• Made it easier to open and close doors.
  
• Improved fog rendering.
  
• Improved door open and close animation.
  
• Fixed selected item durability bar not interpolating to red.
  
• Fixed sapling deployable preview rendering incorrectly.
  
• Made some resources spawn aligned to landscape surface normal.