Wild Omission News

I have added grass models to the game. I added grass back in march, however the performance was terrible so I removed it. Now I'm back at it, and this time I have optimized it and it runs much better.




The durability bar in the inventory now interpolates to red as its item is damaged. Along side the inventory durability bar, the building hammer durability UI has also been improved. It now displays the name of the deployable, and its current health fraction.




I have broken the options menu into categories to make it easier to read. An option has also been added to adjust foliage quality.




I have finally finished the refactoring, and can now go back to normal development. See last devblog for more info.


I have made a number of enhancements and refinements to the networking this week. I have improved the replication flow of the inventory. previously on slow connections, when gathering resources the adding of items to your inventory would be slow and very unreliable. Now it is much more responsive, and I haven't seen it stutter unless under really poor circumstances (Host running less than 20fps, over a 400ms connection).

• Fixed a bug that caused the chat menu to shrink.
  
• Fixed bug that caused doors to get stuck shut.
  
• Fixed bug that prevented inventory durability bar from updating.
  
• Fixed crash caused by equipping items.
  

Every surface has been given a lightly scratched fingerprint dusted appearance, an almost plastic toy like look. This was something I had planned out before I started working on Wild Omission, and it pretty cool to see it finally to finally see it implemented. I have also greatly improved the water shader, and the placeholder block-out models have been mostly replaced with proper models




It wasn't too long ago that I learned about modules in Unreal Engine. They are a great way to keep code organized, and enforce dependency standards. However, Wild Omission wasn't made with modules, but I realized sooner rather than later I needed to convert the code base into modules. So I have been doing that for the past week (which is why there isn't much to show this week). This will make almost no changes that effects players, but it will make my life developing the game much easier. This ate up most of development time this week, but hopefully for the next devblog I'll have some much more exciting things to talk about.

Two new food items have been added, they are Canned Beans, and Canned Tuna.




I have much improved the spawn menu. There is now an icon displaying the item, a button for giving a stack, and the display name of the item.




Because some items are not obtainable by harvesting or crafting, and it isn't possible for me to add some crazy method of obtaining them. I decided to add small loot crates that spawn throughout the world. They contain normally unobtainable items such as Canned food, and Bottled Water, as well as useful resources and items, like Wood, Stone, Tools, and Building Parts.




Improvements to ragdoll constraints have been made.

https://youtu.be/ZUvl-JL1mF4


Additional Improvements have been made to the networking performance. The larger island has exposed several short comings in the net-code. So I have gone through and made further refinements and optimizations. Improvements to the security of friends only sessions have also been made.


A List of bugs have been fixed.

• Fixed World Items attempting to clump together when stacksize has been reached.
  
• Fixed Crafting menu icons incorrectly showing up as craftable.
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause a player to get stuck on the loading screen in a busy world.
  
• Fixed ResetLocationOfAllConnectedPlayers spawning players underground.
  

I have created a new island. It is huge compared to the old one, the old island was roughly 500 square meters, the new island is 2 square kilometers. It also features much more varied terrain, with a mountain, flat areas, hilly areas, and bays. I have managed to retain backward compatibility with saves on the old island, however new saves will default to the new island. One challenge I have faced when working on the new island is the network performance of having such a large area, so I have made lots of optimizations to how objects are loaded and replicated.




I have created a system for displaying notifications to the player. Currently this is used for letting the player know when items are added, and if they are currently starving, or thirsty, but in the future I could do just about anything with it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-uxLpbj-Y8

Low Health Post Processing
Created effects for low health.




Something that has been strangely absent for this whole time, is an options menu. I never added one because for the longest time the only people who would be playing, would be running development builds with a command console. So if they needed to make any changes to the graphics, or sound, they could do it there. However seeing that I plan on starting early access soon, I have finally got to work adding one.

Did you know I also make video devblogs? I have been making video devblogs since February, the first two were behind the scenes style, the rest are update summaries with gameplay. Check them out!
https://youtu.be/CkFceR8cdHA
https://youtu.be/CSr49fShSDA
https://youtu.be/W9UesQCF7js
https://youtu.be/DpH4w8KY_x8
https://youtu.be/Rdz5HFNGojg
https://youtu.be/Pz_gA5PGlYo