Abducted News

The two big items with this update: Abducted is Beta complete, and Real-time Ray Tracing has been added.

Abducted is entering the home stretch as of Beta 1.35. No new level layouts are planned, no major changes or addition to content is going to go in. Now that's not to say 1.35 is completely polished or bug free, it isn't. Abducted still needs final narrative and story elements implemented, and cinematics need a finalization pass.

But that's really it. Largely, the game is visually final (with some exceptions and pending fixes). The overall structure of the game is final. Know that anything that looks visually incomplete is being worked on, and any temp story elements that are there now are a priority to get fixed up.

The other big item is Real-time Ray Tracing or RTRT. Abducted runs the latest Unreal code 4.22.1 and with some tweaks it now supports RTRT.

Keep in mind this is a high end graphics option only, and for people who want to mess around with the cutting edge of graphics tech. The minimum card is an Nvidia GTX 1060, 1070 or 1080, with the RTX series being preferred. If you want to see this on your GTX card, I highly recommend you run the game in a lower resolution (set to 50%-70% resolution scale in the video prefs). I've done my best to optimize it, using every performance tweak and option available to developers right now. Ray Tracing is very expensive obviously.

I'll start a thread in the forums here for RTRT support, how to enable it and various issues.

I would consider this an experimental feature as almost everything about it is quite literally brand new. Going forward this feature will expand and get better, for now its a start! ːsteamhappyː

The Mac version has been updated to beta 1.34 bringing it in sync to the Windows version.

The day after I posted the latest beta, Epic released Unreal 4.22.0. I want to support Ray Tracing so work began right away to bring this feature to Abducted. Preliminarily speaking, I don't think this is going to be difficult to do. More on this in a future post, but I think there are enough fine tuning options available to make this run well on 1080 hardware.

Right now Abducted gets 60fps+ on a 1080 graphics card, epic settings, 1600x900. I think in many cases it does much better than that, ranging from 70-90fps. So a careful implementation of Ray Tracing should get at least 30fps on that same hardware, maybe better. As I mentioned in an earlier post, RT will be a toggle in the video prefs most likely. The game will still look great with current gen rasterized graphics of course. Ray Tracing will take it up a notch and be a quality option for people who care more about beautiful graphics than maximum framerate.

One other technical note: Distance culling may go away as a graphics option. As of Ue4.22, Epic reconfigured how the engine draws lots of objects. In the old days, developers would do culling of objects early and often in order to keep framerate up. Now with the latest engine, there may no longer be any real benefit to doing this. This needs to be evaluated, and some things may still benefit from not being drawn at long range. So we'll see, but I can imagine that it may not matter anymore to cull distant objects. Ray Tracing is very rapidly changing not just the graphics themselves, but how we as developers should consider them.

And keep in mind, Abducted is a game that needs to support large outdoor spaces like this at a very high framerate. It's not just a corridor game, Abducted contains large nonlinear vistas:

(Beta 1.34 screenshots will be scattered throughout this post)


A first implementation of the upgrade system is in 1.34. It's real simple, collect Fragments scattered and hidden throughout the game to upgrade your abilities. Everything from speed, energy regeneration, flying distance, low mass reduction and others are implemented, tested and working. There are some ultimate upgrades that are part of this as well as achievements for collecting fragments in the hundreds.

Right now this is a simple system. There's a minimum of feedback on the HUD and Arm interface in the sense that you are told how many total Fragments you've collected. Some things are missing, like an upgrade screen on the Arm for you to get more detail (see which upgrades you have, which one is next, etc). There are a couple of known bugs with it, like some Fragments collected at the end of some levels may not carry over to the next one. But the system works and will be expanded on for the next release.




The big change here is the change stance key (default Q) is gone. Instead your default movement will be faster and she'll make some contextual decisions about how to move in the environment. The camera is tightened and more personal, entering/exiting the Dreamscape is getting some better FX. It should feel more refined and like everything else closer to final release.

Shift isn't just a run key in the game, its a good key to press if you want a wider field of view. Holding Shift pushes the camera back, widens the camera and gives you more situational awareness of the environment you're in.

There needs to be more integration and usage of the Dreamscape ability in general. As you play you should realize that clues will be found there, and it's often a good way to scope out things around you and what lies ahead. Integrating this ability more into the story and gameplay is coming up, some of these tweaks will be subtle to achieve it.




You can see the hints of Dreamscape objects by default, and Discoveries are now touchable. Walk up, interact, and unlock a new Arm topic.

The Arm ability and conversation system will see major updates in the next beta. It's lagging a bit behind other updated abilities right now and has some known bugs. But I do believe it will become more interactive and important in the next beta.




The first level of the game is undergoing refinement to get it finalized. This involves gameplay, graphics, layout changes, story changes, new and different cinematics. training, literally all aspects. It's not 100% complete in 1.34, but the difference between 1.33 and 1.34 is significant.




Graphics are dramatically updated across the game and continue to be finalized. Today also happens to be the day Epic released Unreal 4.22.0, which is the first shipping release that enables Realtime Ray Tracing. Very likely the next beta of Abducted will upgrade to 4.22 and may support ray tracing as early as beta 1.35. I'm evaluating this on a system with a 1080 GTX card, and as long as I can get 20-30fps ray tracing on that system it will probably go into the next release.



Thanks for reading! Enjoy and have fun.

Beta 1.34 is coming along and will have a mountain of updates. This might be the single biggest update yet and is a significant step towards final.

First off, final graphics are coming in:



This is zeroing in on the final art and polish of the game. There are little fixes and tweaks here and there, but it's nearly done.


A first implementation of the upgrade system is going into 1.34. It's real simple, collect Glyph Fragments scattered and hidden throughout the game to upgrade your abilities. Everything from speed, energy regeneration, flying distance, low mass reduction and others are implemented, tested and working. There are some ultimate upgrades that are part of this as well as achievements for collecting fragments in the hundreds.


The big change here is the change stance key (default Q) is gone. Instead your default movement will be faster and she'll make some contextual decisions about how to move in the environment. The camera is tightened and more personal, entering/exiting the Dreamscape is getting some better FX. It should feel more refined and like everything else closer to final release.


You can see the hints of Dreamscape objects by default, and Discoveries are now touchable. Walk up, interact, and unlock a new Arm topic.


The first level of the game is undergoing refinement to get it finalized. This involves gameplay, graphics, layout changes, story changes, new and different cinematics. training, literally all aspects. It's not going to be 100% ready in 1.34, but the difference between 1.33 and 1.34 is significant.


Realtime Ray Tracing is being looked at. Nvidia is set to release new drivers in April that will support all cards from the 1060 up. I don't have these drivers yet, but I'm evaluating getting Abducted on the latest Unreal code (v4.22) when Epic completes it. Currently they're on preview 7 of 4.22 and its not quite ready for general use. But it looks like moving from 4.21 to 4.22 will be simple and probably just work, which means Ray Tracing becomes an option.



More on this as it develops. As you can see the developer options for Ray Tracing are all there, and there's plenty of controls to keep it running well. I think this will probably happen, so if you have a modern card I'll provide a toggle in the video prefs to turn Ray Tracing on and off.

Thanks for reading this far if you did. As I said at the beginning of this, 1.34 will be a huge update. I don't think I've highlighted even half of what's new and changed in this next release. Should be happening very soon, just as soon as a short list of bugs and critical fixes can be done.

Hey everyone, just put up a small patch to fix some endgame content issues. This one improves the alternate outfit, fixes some rigging issues on the main character, does some layout improvements on the endgame levels. There were also some minor bugs to fix.

Anyway enjoy and have fun!