The Sands Whisper Your Name News

Good evening fine folks ,

I finally managed to get some development time in over the past two days.
I just wanted to post a quick update on what I've been working on.

[Quick Slots UI]

Work on this has just about been completed, items can now not only be picked up and moved around in the inventory but they can also be added to the Quick Slot bar. This will make equiping and using weapons,tools and items much simpler than the previous system.

Seeing as that work is just about done I went about making sure that all the back-end stuff for using tools to gather resources is also done. The backend setup for using weapons is also done. The next things I'll focus on is getting some new animations in place and making a range of melee and projectile weapons to test out with folks online. I don't have an eta on this update but we'll see how things go.

[Conclusion]
There's still plenty of work to be done but I'm happy with the progress made over the course of two days. I hope you all enjoy the forthcoming weekend. Please feel free to share your thoughts.

Best Regards
MrNexy

Good afternoon fine folks,

It has certainly been a very busy week in terms of development, perhaps a lot more than has been the case in recent months. I just wanted to give you folks a quick run down of whats changing in the coming updates. I'll also be taking some down time from today until Monday. So updates,development and testing should resume on Monday.

[Item Pickup UI Elements]
Today's update has this already in place , when you pickup items or gather resources a UI icon will pop up in the bottom right of screen. The design and animation is open to change and debate.

[Functional Quick Slots]
As of today's update these are only cosmetic, however once I have the back end side of things setup you'll be able to equip tools and weapons.

*Note*
In preparation for this you won't be able to gather dates to eat but you'll be able to gather stone and wood (albeit without any tools in hand :S)

[Host Game Menu]
As of today's update there are no real options for hosting other than hosting a LAN or Internet game. Next week's update will add a 'Host Game' Menu that will allow you to set a custom server name and player limit. While there aren't many options at the moment, they will be expanded in the future to allow hosts to modify drop rates and other things related to world and game behavior.

[More Placeholder Animations]
With the ability to equip tools and weapons comes the need for new animations and animation states.

[Conclusion]
That's it for this weeks round of updates , I'm going to take off for the weekend and get some rest. Please do feel free to share your thoughts and have a great weekend ( Weekends start on Thursday around my neck of the woods :D ).

Best Regards
MrNexy

Just a few improvements I put together this morning for UI. More to come in the next update, including UI elements to indicate that you've collected items or resources.

- MrNexy

[UI Improvements]
When searching for or joining a game, dialogue boxes will appear to notify you of the result.

[Voice Chat Icon]
An Icon now appears above player's head when they press down the [V] key for voice chat.

[Menu Navigation Improvements]
You can now use escape to get back to the Main Menu from all other Menu's , when you are in game and the Main Menu is up you can press escape to close it and return to the game.

Hey there fine folks,

This update has taken a little while longer than even the last one has. It was worth taking the time to put some important things in place. The systems and features mentioned below are still a work in progress , if and when you find bugs please do post them in the relavent discussion board.

[Hands !]
I have fashioned some first person hands from the character mesh that Dan Hitchen created previously. The animation isn’t great but gets the point across for the time being.


[Foliage & Resource Collection]
I’ve done the ground work that will enable players to gather resources such as stone,wood,plant fibre and scavenge-able food from nearly every foliage mesh placed in the world (Within reason of course).
I made some new grass meshes as the old ones were made using the concept art made by the ever awesome Tien.



For the time being you can gather dates from the Palm trees that you’ll find around the world and you can drink directly to reduce thirst. The logic is in place for collecting wood and stone from Palms and Boulders but will only be made available once I’ve finished the second part of the inventory system. This is something that I hope to work on for the next update.

[New Menu System]
There’s a new menu system in place. Its not extravagant but it gets the job done for the time being. From here you’ll have access to the server browser and more graphical settings, as well as a method for exiting the game properly. A note on the graphics settings however, if you reduce the anti-aliasing below x4 the reflections on the water will disappear and I’m not sure why but will see what I can do after some further investigation. Also please note that I haven’t set up any save system for the settings just yet , for the time being you may have to change the settings to your liking every time you play the game. This will be taken care of in the next update.







[Server Browser Menu & Multiplayer Testing]
Right good folks this is where I need your assistance, I have tested the server browser locally with UE4’s Null OnlineSubsystem and it works with no issues. I have gone through the steps to get it working with Steam and now need a hand testing it out. The functionality is fairly basic at this point and doesn’t include support for invites or steam’s server browser, this functionality will be added later on once I know the system is up and running and its been tested.

Make sure that Atajrubah has been added to your firewall exceptions and that the standard steam ports are open on your firewall or router. Please feel free to add me on steam if you want to find out exactly when I’ll be testing the multiplayer functionality :)

Linux Support
This update doesn't apply to the Linux build at the moment as I'm having some issues packaging for the platform. Once these are resolved I shall update the Linux build to be on par.

[Conclusion]
Thats it for this update. Expect bugs,graphical glitches and certainly the occasional debug text popping up. Please feel free to share your thoughts and any issues you may encounter on the discussion boards.

Best Regards
MrNexy

Good morning fine folks !

I'd like to apologize for the later than usual update. I've upgraded to Windows 10 and migrated the project over to Unreal Engine 4.8.3, some house keeping was necessary to get things working smoothly but it's done now.

[Testing Instructions]
A very important notice. When you want to try out the latest build when it goes live , please be sure to uninstall the game through steam and re-install it. That way you are getting a clean install of the build without any remnants of the old one to cause issues.

[Basic Graphics Settings]
I have added a few graphical options to the intro screen. Once I've rebuilt the menu system I will make a full set of graphics options available to you fine folks. For the time being this should help things run a little smoother on older systems.



[Inventory]
I have put more work into the inventory and it now supports automatic stacking, each stack has a limit of 64 for the time being and if a stacking operation results in an excess the excess will be created as a new object with the proper stack count. There are still some bugs/exceptions that may cause items to disappear if the inventory is full , I'm working on a solution for this.



[Time Of Day]

The next thing I did was fix the time of day, I rewrote the system from the ground up inside of the GameState. This allows for Day/Night cycles to be synchronized between the server and the clients. The day is split into Dawn,Morning,Noon,Dusk,Night and Midnight and can be used to govern the behavior of AI,events,loot spawning and environmental conditions at different times of day.








[Landscape and Water]
As part of house cleaning the previous landscape has been re-built , this time it uses LODs for distant parts of the terrain. This has improved the frame rate significantly. I have also done some work on the old water shader that I had implemented originally. Its not spectacular and shaders certainly are an area in which I need improvement. It should however do for the time being and can be re-done later on.









[Multiplayer]
The work that I've done this week has also ensured that things are ready for multiplayer testing. Over the next week I will be putting together the various elements required for Online connectivity and basic player-player interaction.

[Conclusion]

Once this is set up and tested on my end I will make it available for you folks to test out. For the time being though, won't you try out the latest build of the game and leave feedback in the discussion boards ?

Best Regards
MrNexy