UnReal World News

You know what... During the past two decades it hasn't been too many times that I have been on a sick leave, or unable to work on the game due to medical condition, wounds or injuries. But now a week ago I fractured my shoulder when falling of the horse during horseback archery training. Doctors orders are to wear arm sling for the next two weeks. After that a new xray will reveal how the recovery goes. Luckily no operation was needed. I just have to rest and wait, and so do you. So, I'll enter on a sick leave now and report back after two weeks.

I am mostly unable to answer to emails or at forums, but we'll try to handle the urgent cases somehow. Not to worry, I will survive. Game development and archery endeavours to be continued when the doc says so.

My current wounds and injuries screen looks like this :)

Time for a small but essential patch update. Additions in the now released version 3.52 are foremostly bugfixes for smoother survival, but some balancing of exploitish issues is also featured.

Find the full changelog below.

Cheers!

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** Saved characters from version 3.40-> are compatible with this version. **

- balanced: villagers' interest to buy boards

Previously trading boards could be used an exploit as villagers did buy them without any reasoning. Now there's a cap for villagers' interest in boards and they only buy the amount they want to have as a reserve. This varies from village to village, and some villages are not necessarily interested in player character's board trading attempts at all.

- added: NPCs will store the obtained timber in the village

NPCs may obtain timber (eg. boards) through trading. Previously NPCs just carried the heavy loads around causing unncessary burden for themselves. Now they eventually store the timber in the village.

- added: roasting meat/fish decreases its weight

We tought this was featured already, but no. Now roasted meat/fish loses about 25% its weight in the process.

- updated: NORTHERN BOW game encyclopedia info + image added

- added: new NPC kid portrait

Still not much variety with kid portraits, but if you are into portrait customization more of them can be now added for kids as well -> truegfx/kid?.png

- fixed: character creation extra skill point issue for 0% skills

Increasing and then decreasing skill for 0% level skills mistakenly allowed two points then to be spent on the said skill.

- fixed [rare condition]: quest generation and companion rehire delays

Long lived migrated character might encounter extremely long intervals between new quest generation and earlier NPC companions willingness to be rehired.

- fixed [rare condition]: bird thief quest sages forgetting about the quest

This occurred only with long lived characters. Sages involved in the quest first talked about it normally, but might not recognize the quest anymore after a while.

- fixed: kids not recovering from wounds and injuries

- fixed: young animal skins were worth the same as adult animals skins

Now the price is reasoned according to the skin size.

- fixed: when trading with NPC the accepted items they couldn't carry just disappeared from their inventory after the trade

Now the excess items NPCs can't properly carry are put on the ground as a common village property.

- fixed [rare condition]: aquatic birds flying still above the frozen waters

This was a result of aquatic birds terrain exploration routines failing to find them new meaningful areas to check if the waters at their habitat got completely frozen.

- fixed [rare condition]: irrelevant quest related persons appearing in chat dialog

Sometimes you were given chat options to ask whereabouts of irrelevant quest related persons in the village.

- fixed: young animals giving as much fat as the adults

Now the fat yield from young animals is more or less smaller depending on the cub/calf actual age and size.

- fixed: nameless villagers ie. occasional blank NPC names

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So...

Back in 2016 we got (and proudly hold) the record for longest update support for a videogame in GWR Gamer's Edition 2017.
And now, in the recently published Guinness World Records Gamer's Edition 2019 UnReal World gets the record for "First open-world survival videogame". Oops, we kind of created a videogame genre, but we do not regret :)

The book happily presented at the end of this post is a Finnish edition, and here's how GWR mentions the record in English:

"The second millennial decade has witnessed an explosion of open-world survival games, particularly on the Steam platform with the success of PC tiles such as DayZ, Ark: Survival Evolved and the battle-royale shooter PlayerUnknown's Battlegrouds.
The genre's trues roots can most likely be traced back to the indie sandbox RPG UnReal World, first released in 1992. Set in Iron Age Finland, player's principal aim was to survive its challenging and harsh environments. Incredibly, the game was still going strong and receiving updates, as of September 2017. The game was developed by two people - head creator Sami Maaranen and programmer Erkka Lehmus (both Finland). As of September 2017, it held the record for longest update support for a videogame."

(Yeah, it's out-of-date info with latest updates as the books live in press-time info. And in case somebody wonders about the near future updates a new bugfix and balancing patch is actually to be released this month.)





Erkka (co-designer) at the left, Sami (creator) and Alli (the cat) at the right.
And if you take a look at our previous GWR post it seems like have started a tradition with these world record promo pictures as well ;)

The summer is passing, the holidays are mostly over, and the time has come for me to return to the development chambers and slowly start getting back on track with the coding chores. When leaving on holidays somebody said to expect to see at least one fishing holiday picture. Well, unfortunately I managed to be so very absent from the forums that I basically didn't post a thing, but as a substitute for the past silence here's half a dozen random summer pictures for you.

Now it's whole lotta e-mails and post to go through to get an idea of how the community and unreal world has survived the summer of 2018.
And then, some fresh lines of code... One at a time...

Midsummer and the nightless nights... that's priceless.
UnReal World... it's on summer sale until 5th of July.

Just recently released version 3.51 is trucking alright, so we are good to hit the holidays now. Finnish summer will surely bring us some rainy days too so some tweaking, fixing and even patching may take place during the summertime. But officially I'm mostly absent from development chambers until early august.

Best wishes,
enjoy the seasonal goodies and I'll be sure to do the same...

Midsummer midnight 2018, just outside the UnReal World development chambers.