The Isle News

[h2]Filipe - Lead Programmer[/h2]
Another month of intense work focused on bug fixes, server and client performance and replication reliability.

This month I reworked part of the pickup ability to avoid having the need to respawn pieces of meat, which not only grants us additional performance, but also looks significantly better. It was a necessary improvement, as now both the elite and schooling fish use that same system. We’ve also resolved a hefty number of hilarious bugs relating to the fish, sometimes failing to float at all or deciding to fly away to the stars… It took a little time, but with the assistance of our marvellous QA team we managed to stabilize those issues.

The infamous Deinosuchus lunge, making mechanics like this function as necessary without the feeling of latency (having to wait for the server to execute code and send it back) is quite challenging. Similar to pounce in some aspects, lunge doesn't “wait” for the server, but applies what is needed, predicting that the server will agree, if the server says no for any reason, well, you know, everything breaks.

Most people know by now that we will be opening the QA branch again, for stress tests and disconnect issues before the full release of Update #3. We hope to find any missing issues from that test and of course, we count on all of you to help us, since numbers make a big difference. See you!


[h2]dmIV - Programmer[/h2]
I’ve continued work on the flight movement, giving more control over speed. For one, it is now possible to brake and slow down, letting players have more precise control when they want to land accurately. On the other hand a faster flight is now possible when sprinting. It lets you move significantly faster, but you might want to watch your stamina.

I’ve also made some improvements to diving to make it smoother. There is now an acceleration and deceleration, you also change your up-down direction more gradually. Overall there are less and less sudden movements while diving, making it feel like you really are in water.

I’ve set up the 360 attacks for the Deinosuchus and Pteranodon. They use the same logic as all the others, so this one was a quick addition. I also added a version that is used while swimming as a Deino. The tests showed that the Deino’s turn rate is too slow to catch up with attackers from behind, so this tackled that issue. I also gave the Tenontosaurus some love and made it use controls more like the other species. The left mouse button is used for biting, while pressing it in combination with alt will perform the claw attack. I also separated the kick and the tail slam, so that the latter is only used when alt is held while pressing the right mouse button.


[h2]Amar0k - AI Programmer[/h2]
This month has been a little crazy for me. I've had to take some time off due to personal reasons. However I have been mostly working on fish movement and trying to improve server performance regarding AI overall. There is also a big change being implemented to how AI will behave as a new server config option has been added which will allow switching AI behaviour between realism and player simulation. The difference should be self explanatory but i will go ahead and define it now.

Player simulation: Acts and behaves as close as possible to actual players, sometimes can be hard to tell the difference, such as spam crouching or bunny hopping around. This also includes the Realism traits.

Realism: Acts and behaves as a creature of that size/nature would generally behave in the real world, such as immediately fleeing as far away as possible from a larger predator.

This is obviously a LOT more effort to do but in the teams opinion is the right way forward to get to where we all want the game to be. I have pretty much finished the backbone of this system and have started working on the AI personalities/traits as some of you may have seen in my recent streams.

Also we are moving to more species based spawning, still randomized within a region but more biased towards what type your character is. I.E Amphibious will spawn near or in water.


[h2]Wedge - Sound Designer[/h2]
This month has been a continuation of work on the areas that need addressing for the audio of water and flight gameplay. The underwater ambient audio has had an overhaul with bespoke sound cues for each water body type – swamps sound stiller than previously, oceans churn and bubble from the surf and waves, the flow of rivers can be heard and being near waterfalls underwater produces a spatialised heavy rumbling. To compliment this the groundwork has been laid for creating a more immersive audio experience diving deeper in water – as the player goes deeper the filtered yet still audible sounds of the ambience above will slowly fade as a more intense underwater ambience is introduced, including distant groans and cries of creatures that could be lurking in the deepest depths.

Heartbeat sounds have been created which will be introduced and increase in rate as the players oxygen levels decrease – this in combination with the changes to underwater ambiences will help to give a completely different feel to the underwater environment and gameplay – complimentary to the Deinosuchus’ ability to drag creatures underwater. All the Deino’s prey will hear is the deep tones and wash of the underwater ambience and the sounds of their struggle to escape; their heart starting to race and vortexes of water as they attempt to escape the Deino’s clutches.

Likewise with the Pteranodon the ambient audio will change as it flies higher, accomplished with new attenuations added to ambient loops which are applied solely on the Z-axis distance from the ambient zone.

Missing foley sounds are starting to be addressed; more detailed water foley sounds have been created and are ready to be implemented for the Deino – including sounds for submerging and emerging which differ based on if the listener is above or underwater, as well as entering/exiting/falling in water. The sound of bones crunching have also been added to Deino’s eat animations to give it a more intimidating audio aesthetic. On top of all these enhancements the general foley and vocal audio of both new playables are constantly being added to, tweaked and improved to progress towards Update #3.


[h2]hypno - QA Lead[/h2]
QA has been dedicating a good chunk of time towards balance testing for Update 3. We have recognised and addressed many obvious improvements pertaining to the current public build and have been actively listening to community feedback - we’re really excited to see how these play out when the update is live and look forward to reading what you think about the changes!

There’s too many to list here but I’ll cover some of the more important additions. The full list will be released with the patch notes for the update.

As some of you may already know, we’ve addressed weights being wildly inaccurate for the upcoming patch. Expect the weight of your dinosaur to reflect the size of your creature much better now. Dryosaurus has been on a very strict grazing only diet and lost a total of 430kg using this one weird trick. Doctors hate him!

With the weight changes, some of you may have already caught onto the size changes we made to Carnotaurus and Tenontosaurus. The two creatures were scaled down for two reasons, the more important being that in the long run these sizes will make much more sense for gameplay balance.

The Carnotaurus is the fastest dinosaur on the island and as such we’re tailoring it to a “small game hunter” playstyle; it will focus on running down anything smaller than a Tenontosaurus. The Tenontosaurus has been set up so that it can go head-to-head with the Carnotaurus, so long as it uses its crowd control stunning attacks efficiently. The second reason for the scale down is due to it being a heavily requested change because “muh realism”, for lack of better terms. Feedback is very important to the QA team to determine game balance, so keep it coming!

Bleed potency has been increased across the board. Expect it to play a much larger role in combat now as attacks deal more bleed damage, causing your blood pool to drop significantly faster, thus causing your character’s regen rates to slow down equivalent to your remaining blood pool. I would highly recommend not moving too quickly when suffering from such injuries, as movement states will now affect how much blood you lose as well. Why don’t you have a lie down? You’ll feel much better. On top of this, we’ve decided to make wallowing less important in negating these effects (though it does still help.)

The cursed pounce stat rework. This was always going to be coming, it was just a matter of time! The statistics for pounce have been readjusted to promote its use as an attritional tool, rather than crazy amounts of damage. Pounce will deal deadly amounts of bleed damage, which focuses on wearing your targets out, instead of just outright killing them. Does this mean it will be impossible to hunt large targets? No. It just means they’ll require much more coordination and strategic thinking to do so.

Bucking has been significantly buffed to be worth performing now.

Other than that, it’s the same as usual for the team - check my previous dev blog posts for what that entails. We’re still hard at work testing the Deinosuchus lunge and it’s definitely one of the more complex mechanics, so it’s taking us a bit longer than usual compared to some of the more basic additions. Fingers crossed we catch all the bugs with it before you guys can!

As Filipe already mentioned, we’ll also be opening the QA branch to you guys when we believe all of our high priority issues are fixed and the new mechanics are functioning to a good standard. The reason for this is so that we can have the new mechanics tested under more stressful conditions (additional players) and so that we can confirm the random disconnect issue is fixed once and for all.


[h2]VisualTech48 - 3D Environmental Artist[/h2]
This month I’ve been patching a lot of small issues with some of the models, but mostly the whole month went into finalizing the fences to correctly fit the spline, to be able to walk in them, and making a bunch of variants and optimizing them. It's been quite a formidable task, especially making LODs for each and single variant, but we got the ball running and within a few days, I should be able to test them out on my end and finish the additional broken variants. Does that mean you can pass through them…. Hmmm. We shall see :P

To see the amount of fences - the lods check out this image here:



Alongside that, the fences got an overhaul with a lot of decals, and a lot of attention to detail to be sure that it all fits and can be translated onto real world terrain. This includes the new concrete texture that is made far sharper and with a lot more details. The rest of the details will be handled by shaders when the time is fit.

In these images you can see one broken variant, others are still in progress.






[h2]Tapwing - Concept Artist [/h2]



This one was a bit of a balancing act. On one hand, it’s a giant Komodo dragon, but on the other, we still want to find a way to make ours unique to the isle.

Body proportions mostly stayed the same, most of our exploration revolved around the face: Longer teeth, hidden teeth, square features, sharp features, heat pits and larger scale features. Ultimately we decided on a facial design that was predominantly Komodo dragon, but beefed up the body and accentuated facial features to be more menacing.

The rest of my month revolved around concept edits, Bary concepts and another set of nature sketches.


[h2]KissenKitten - Producer[/h2]
Indeed I’ll say, this month has been a bit of a blur. There’s so much going on all at once around here the time soars by. The team has been hard at work on Update #3 and all the bells and whistles to accompany it. This month has been full of testing and tweaking, testing and tweaking. One thing about doing something new is that you have to be the first to brave all the difficulties associated with the innovation. So that leads into highly iterative designs. Where we fine tune a feature over multi variations. The Deino’s movement is a great example of that. Based on the types of movements we wanted it to achieve, we had to fine tune what type of animation was needed and what implementation method was best. Sometimes these creatures have twice the number of animations than what you’ve seen. You only see the final version but sometimes there’s been 2-4. Not for every animation though, it's primarily mechanic related. Maybe in the future we’ll dig some of those up. But in the meantime we’ve got a few outstanding animations that we need to tweak for these two but we’re making good time. We are so excited to get this update to you because we’ve been working hard trying to provide a new experience in The Isle. We believe we’ve done that. The Deinosuchus and the Pteranodon are the heralds of the hard work that’s going into this project. We look forward to sharing the experience with you. Be kind to each other and yourself.


[h2]Closing Remarks[/h2]
That’s February. As always, we hope that you enjoyed this insight into both our development process and the hardships we’ve had to overcome as we tread through these uncharted waters. We’ll see you in the next DevBlog!

[h2]FTessaro - Lead Programmer[/h2]
Desync was the main issue on public builds since we went on a quick vacation. In the end, we found out the main issue behind it, which was a tool that helps with performance. Took some time for me to find the exact piece of code in the engine that was causing that, the lack of documentation is a big problem in those cases. Fortunately I found something and managed to decrease the desync issue, which can still be tracked and improved more, hopefully.

We also updated the engine to the latest version, which broke a few things and created more bugs, some of them are still in-game right now, like a strange sound stuttering for some people, we are investigating and will send an update as soon as possible.

Besides that, the work continues as always combating bugs, crashes and working on new features and dinosaurs. Deinosuchus and Ptera are taking a little longer this time because their gameplay is very different from most animals in-game, and we want to make it right. Have been working on Deinosuchus, mostly, with its different ways to interact with food and combat, especially the lunge ability. This ability is similar to pounce in some aspects, but won´t be an automatic ability, the player will have to time the lunge with bite to actually grab prey. Also, this ability has different effects when swimming in deep water, shallow or even on land.


[h2]dmIV - Programmer[/h2]
An issue that affected many of our players is that sometimes players get out of sync with the server and they see your character running in an incorrect direction. At this time they are able to attack and damage you before they receive a correction from the server. This led to many annoyances because players were taking damage unfairly. I addressed this issue by adding a server-side validation. Hopefully this will reduce your frustration when playing the game.

There were a few methods that people could use to safe-log instantly. It was quite annoying to track down what was happening exactly and it turns out that those cases are treated as a “kick” by the engine instead of a standard disconnection. I added a check to make sure that the instant safe-log only happens when someone was kicked for real.

I don’t think a month goes by without me touching our animation blueprint. I made several new improvements, especially to diving. It feels much better now and I also addressed some more specific cases. I also spent much time setting up the water walking system. What it means is that the animal detects the ground when swimming and uses its legs to “walk” when close enough.

Another new mechanic for the Deino is called water sense. This lets you detect vibrations in the water you are in. It’s a passive ability, but you can hold the scent key (Q by default) to extend your detection range when stationary.

There were a few other smaller changes, like the Tenontosaurus claw being usable repeatedly or meat chunks being scentable. There are still several features in the works that we need time to work on, but I expect that we will be able to get them in your hands soon. I hope you are as excited as I am to work on them!


[h2]Wedge - Sound Designer[/h2]
This past month has seen me creating and implementing sounds to the new mechanics being introduced to both the Deinosuchus and Pteranodon as well as creating more suitable foley. Considering these two are the first water-based and first flight-based additions to Evrima, this has involved creating bespoke sounds that fit the unique circumstances for each of these creatures.

The Pteranodon flight sounds have been improved adding more variations in the strength of the wing flaps and a dynamic system based on velocity to accompany; when velocity is slow the flap sounds are slightly stronger, and vice versa. A flight wind system has been introduced, also controlled by the velocity of the Pteranodon. The intensity and pitch of the wind sound is increased as the velocity does, resulting in a rushing wind sound when diving or falling. Subtle wind whoosh sounds have been created for moments where players are passed by a Pteranodon, and are ready to be implemented. Although the new wind system does achieve this doppler effect, I think the combination of a systemic approach layered with recordings will further improve the believability.

For the Deinosuchus a lot of attention has gone into its unique water sounds, taking into account that the sounds need to suit the movement, but also be subtle enough that it is viable for the creature to hunt undetected. Subtle trickling and paddling sounds have replaced the more blatant quality of the generic swim sounds. The introduction of animations for the water walking will allow me to also play subtler sounds. At the moment walking in shallow waters uses the land walking animations, consequently the conventional footstep sounds are played for this surface type, which does not reflect how the sound should behave. However more expressive splash sounds have their place for the Deinosuchus, such as with it’s Lunge ability.

Because the Deinosuchus introduces lots of potential for underwater gameplay, the underwater ambience and sound mix have been adjusted and will continue over the coming weeks. However they are not currently implemented correctly for all water bodies, which will be addressed as well. In addition lots of underwater supplementary sounds have been created and are gradually being implemented to support the audio immersion of underwater gameplay.


[h2]VisualTech48 - Environment Modeler[/h2]
This month has been a test of patience. The new *REDACTED* (Perimeter Fences) are going as expected, there is a lot of testing to be done constantly, and it's been a wild ride so far with all the fixes with it, but all in all going the direction we want.

These fences require some more additional planning as said and in its textures in which I’ve made a whole new trim kit, alongside a new concrete base and its own decal trim mesh kit for heavy and huge leaks.

That alongside a new really cool and simple animated model that should be coming at some point, which some might have seen, the Satellite Dish Tower, which has a lot of joints and I do believe is a model that I pushed myself even further to get it detailed properly in a constraint time, so It worked out really cool.






[h2]Baardo - Dinosaur Modeler[/h2]
Over the last few months I've been working with the concept team to create elder versions of the various playable species in the game. From a design perspective it was a bit of a tight rope as we found it important to make the elder versions easily identifiable from their adult counterparts while also being similar enough in shape and proportion so they could reuse animations. Care was also taken to make sure that they worked with the existing topology so there is minimal technical overhead to their implementation. All in all it proved to be quite fun to take the already monsterfied dinos and make them even more gnarly and monstery.




[h2]Tapwing - Concept Artist[/h2]

If I had to sum Kentro up, it’s our smaller, faster more offensive stegosaurid. I used a blend of oryx and porcupine as references for this one, somewhat elegant and very stand-off-ish.

There’s a few ways we could go about attacks/abilities on this one, a sweeping tail strike (as opposed to our stegosaurus’s stabbing strike), the shoulder check and something in the vein of a defensive stance - creating an aimed wall of spines to fend off foes, but we’ll have to see how that goes programming-wise.


Chubby looking yet nothing but muscle. I largely just referenced bighorn sheep for these guys; territorial, highly competitive and ready to showdown against anything around it’s size. In the way of abilities, we have the famous charge and a bone crushing head strike. Maybe it could even be more resistant to pounces and grabs.


[h2]KissenKitten - Producer[/h2]
This month for me has run me a little ragged but not in a bad way I suppose. It’s been filled to the top with documents, animations and interview processes. For the team, although a lot of production time went into getting the current hotfix to live, I am still very pleased with the team’s forward momentum on Update #3. My time in regard to Update #3 has been solidly spent on prototyping and polishing.

I’ll lift the veil a little on how that shakes down for those interested. Forgive me if you’ve heard it before. So, we first start with the mechanics themselves on paper, or on screen in this sense. After the mechanics have been decided upon, the animation team enters into the prototyping phase. During which, Bryan and I come up with how we think the motion should look when performing that particular action. Sometimes there’s crude ms-paint drawings involved lol. The prototypes are made quickly and usually lack a lot of the polish we like our animations to have in their more complete iterations. The reason being, that we do not want to spend too much production time on an animation that may turn out to be a complete dud for that action in-game. Sometimes the idea and the final result do not align. So prototypes must always be a rough draft to save on production time. The prototype is very rarely what you see in the final version you get to play as. Once we’ve completed it, we send it over to the programming team and they plug in the prototype animation into the mechanics they’re building for that creature. Sometimes, it looks great right out of the gate. But most often, some adjustments will need to be made to the animations in order to get them to not only look good but function nicely as well. An animation that looks great outside of the engine, won’t necessarily look great in-game on import. Some tweaking is often needed. So a lot of prototyping in both animation and programming has gone into the Deino’s numerous lunges and modes of locomotion as well as the Ptera’s skimming, flying blends, landings, jumps and more. However, once we have the basic foundation set for how we want those abilities to generally look and the mechanical function is behaving how we want, then we lean hard into polishing up those prototypes and turning them into final versions. We’re really looking forward to completing this update and getting it into your hands!


[h2]Closing Remarks[/h2]
Now that we’re back from our Holiday break we’re refreshed, eager and roaring to go. Whilst we’ve had a few bumps in the road in terms of performance (improvements still ongoing), the Pteranodon & Deinosuchus are shaping up to be our most mechanically intricate playables yet and we're all incredibly excited to see what shenanigans you all get up to! That’ll wrap it up for this month folks, look forward to seeing you in February! - Punchpacket.

Hey Islanders,

This is just a small hotfix primarily aimed at stomping out the desync issues that have plagued the previous version of the EVRIMA Public Branch. You can check out the patchnotes below!

[h2]Changelog 0.6.48.29[/h2]

Additions

• Updated project version to 4.26.
  
• Added regional spawn cooldowns. If you die within a spawn zone, you will be temporarily locked from respawning at the location for 300 seconds.
  
• Added new Utahraptor sniffing animations for scent.
  
• Added Pitch and Volume multiplier to CharacterEffects Notifies.
  
• Added volumetric clouds. These can be enabled in your graphics settings at the cost of performance.
  
• Added "DisableHints" to gameplay settings.
  

Enhancements

• Dropped damage requests when the target is desynced on the requesting client. This should help to prevent players being killed from attacks that didn't hit them on their client.
  
• Enabled knockdown and stagger against pouncing Utahraptors.
  
• Changed Carnotaurus idle attenuation so that it can't be heard from far away.
  
• Improved small metal footstep sounds.
  
• Some visual improvements to swallow, pickup and pounce
  
• Increased the time for a corpse to disappear after depleting its food value.
  
• Added a small turning radius while swimming to avoid turning in place.
  
• Made Tenontosaurus tail slam cancel pickup abilities.
  
• Adjusted Tenontosaurus claw/bite velocity threshold, claw attack can now be used in succession and while walking.
  
• Made Tenontosaurus claw attack update free look movement direction.
  
• Volume balance of creature vocals.
  
• Made flesh chunks scentable.
  
• Disabled underwater footprint ripples.
  

Bug fixes

• Fixed server desync causing visual movement stuttering.
  
• Reverted Utahraptor pounce to requiring 100% growth to avoid unforeseen issues. We will revisit juveniles pouncing again some time in the future.
  
• Fixed small issue in weight replication value.
  
• Fixed wood footsteps not playing correctly on wooden pallets.
  
• Fixed Utahraptor's not releasing a carried corpse when hit by a Tenontosaurus tail slam/kick.
  
• Fixed being able to stop without sliding or decelerating.
  
• Fixed Utahraptor's occasionally becoming stuck in the pounce animation.
  
• Fixed player's mouths closing when trying to swallow while swimming.
  
• Fixed player's characters disappearing instantly whenever they lost connection to the internet.
  
• Fixed Carnotaurus charge canceling its vocal animations.
  
• Fixed terrain alignment when partially submerged in water.
  
• Fixed unsafe logout removing pawn in certain cases.
  
• Fixed a load of issues pertaining to the upcoming playables Deinosuchus and Pteranodon.
  
• Fixed flesh chunks giving more food if eating them from the ground instead of swallowing them.
  
• Fixed meat of chunk floating if trying to swallow while near another meat chunk.
  
• Fixed charge cooldown indicator not appearing if the charge duration lasted longer than the cooldown timer.
  
• Fixed enemies sliding after being pounced.
  
• Fixed issue with the Hypsilophodon floating when dropping its corpse after carrying it.
  
• Fixed Stegosaurus bite occasionally causing targets to become impaled on its tail.
  
• Fixed Utahraptor becoming stuck during its pounce after it was tail slammed by a Tenontosaurus.
  
• Fixed some bugs related to stamina (sprint and oxygen) causing players to sometimes die from drown already on land.
  
• Fixed being able to swim backwards if the client had low FPS.
  
• Fixed admins not auto respawning if they died while in spectator mode.
  
• Fixed admins being able to enter spectator mode if they were dead but hadn't yet gone to the character select screen.
  
• Fixed AmbZone Loop sound parameter not being set by day cycle.
  
• Fixed footstep issue with Hypsilophodon idle animation sounds.
  
• Fixed rare crash from null ref at spring arm.
  
• Fixed uncontrolled Utahraptors spawning when players connected after quick logging.
  
• Fixed crash caused by null char reference when setting team id.
  
• Fixed Carnotaurus pain sound being excessively loud.
  

[h2]Filipe - Lead Programmer[/h2]
After the release of an update we usually start working on improvements, bug fixes or reworking things that aren’t functioning as intended. That’s exactly what happened after the release of Update #2, we deployed several hotfixes, which not only fixed stuff, but also added additional content.

Performance is always one of our primary concerns, whatever we do we try to do it in the most optimized manner possible, but sometimes that doesn’t work out or it results in bugs, but there are always several ways to do something, but to make it good and performant is the real challenge.

Anyways, we’ve got a lengthy list of bug fixes, but we’ve also managed to add some additional content. We reimplemented the Foliage Interaction to the foliage, and I managed to make it work with replication in a very efficient way, so you can see foliage bending and shaking when something moves, big or small.

I also managed to create a solution for the Admin spectator camera, to display usernames and Steam IDs of all connected players in the server, it works well and doesn't cause big performance hits to the server, since it is mostly data, not processing. This is a very popular addition for admins, but doesn´t stop there, we will add more as progress moves forward.
Also implemented some improvements to ragdoll, especially when replication is reinitiated, to pounce, pickup and some movement server corrections as well as vocals. But vocals were not exactly improved, they were reworked, to be more efficient, have more realistic attenuation distance (being adjusted yet) and also avoid any kind of latency. So now it is latency free and in sync with animation.

Other small things are, for example: Plus icon to blood meter, so you know when it is being recovered. A new (surprise!!) health indicator in the dinosaur profile (heart icon). AI now bleeds, so easier to track and chat now clears the list at a certain point, to avoid performance issues, besides simple commands to toggle them:

/gl - Sends a message in Global chat
/gr - Sends a message in Group chat
/ls - Sends message in Local Species chat


[h2]dmIV - Programmer[/h2]
As always there were many bugs that needed to be fixed. One that was particularly annoying was juvies not being able to get out of water in the same places where adults had no problem. The way swimming works in the engine can be difficult to work with and slow swim speeds led to this issue. Fortunately one of my movement system overhauls made it possible to just add a little boost to the dino’s speed until it successfully gets out of the water.

With the Tenontosaurus gaining access to CC attacks it became important to add some prevention against getting stunlocked. Later on I also tweaked the attack to only stagger dinosaurs that are close to your own weight instead of having a sharp limit where something is either knocked down or unaffected. It still felt a bit too strong so I disabled CC for attacks that hit the tail.

I’ve been able to dedicate most of my time to working on the Pteranodon lately. Stamina is now consumed when gaining altitude during flight so you can’t just fly forever anymore. I made gliding not consume any, but we’ll see how that works out. Initially I just set some baseline values and we tweak those as time goes on. The takeoffs work better now as well. Starting your flight from running is free, but it only lifts you up a little. Taking off from standing still takes you much higher quickly, but you’ll feel its impact on your stamina so it’s best suited for situations where you need to get away quickly.

Finally I’ve been busy working on the skimming mechanic. If you spot a school of fish in the water you can try to catch one by flying over them while holding the right mouse button. Then you just need to release it at the right time. It might sound like free food, but hitting the water could easily mean you becoming someone’s dinner instead.


[h2]Amar0k - Programmer[/h2]
As I’m sure many of you are aware I’ve been working on the Regional Spawning System. It allows players to select from a variety of spawn areas, a significant QoL improvement for playing with friends. It also helps to prevent spawnkilling by distributing players across a general area rather than on a static spawnpoint.

The majority of the last few weeks I’ve been working on the brand new Fish AI, which is now ready to be pulled apart and destroyed by our eager QA team. Terrain Alignment and IK is also on the way, though it is still in its early days and I can’t wait to share more.

We’ve also been tinkering with the recently released Unreal Engine 4.26 update and we’re in the process of getting the project ready to transition to that version as it contains some very nice features that we are hyped to take advantage of.


[h2]Wedge - Sound Designer[/h2]
My attention has been turned towards designing the vocal sounds for both the Pteranodon and the Deinosuchus the past couple of weeks. Both creatures present their own unique challenge. For the Pteranodon I wanted to create a sound palette unique from existing examples, whilst maintaining believability for all calls. The core layers of the final sounds after a few prototypes consist of various rhythmic bird-like chirping and cooing sounds and beak clacking, as well as sustained croaks, hisses and screeches. Additionally, the Pteranodon attack and pain sounds have also been created.

As most modern Crocodilians have a limited range of vocal sounds, the difficulty with the Deinosuchus was stretching the few sounds they do make over several vocalisations and still be varied, relying on the expressiveness of these sounds to convey the right feel for each call. An interesting element introduced is the pop of its jaw latching shut used in both the threaten call and bite sound, however this sound as well as the rest of these calls may be subject to change as they are evaluated.
Another aspect of the audio that has become an issue is the attenuations on the Vocal calls, locating the Dinosaur that produced the call as it stands is difficult. So adjustments are being made to create a more realistic representation of how the sound is affected over distance whilst still allowing the calls to travel long distances. This is an ongoing issue that will be regularly refined as we progress and more creatures are added.


[h2]Tapwing - Concept Artist[/h2]

It’s an animal I pictured to be an in-between of passive and vicious. When it comes to behaviour, I referenced cheetahs and bulls loosely. (Posing certainly didn’t transfer easily with such different anatomy) In the end I went with the watchful, bull-like , almost elegant hunter. It’s lands are the plains and it’s either going to be curious about you or looking to eat you.


The oversized honey badger of the Isle. With an iron stomach, its able to dig into many putrid carcasses that might otherwise poison other carnivores. Even cannibalism isn’t far from the menu. A vicious bully with a vicious bite, but when it can’t chase its foe away, having a more hydrodynamic body than its peers can give it an edge to take the food and run.



I don’t know about you but it’s hard to not see seagulls, albatrosses and Rynchops looking at Ptera. Though a glider primarily skimming for fish, it’s also got a knack for harassment and thievery. So keep a sharp eye on your food and a tight grip on your prey, or it might disappear faster than you can take notice.


[h2]KissenKitten - Producer[/h2]
Well look at this! The last DevBlog of the year! 2020 has been a wild ride for all of us and not just the team but the whole world. But through it all, we have remained steadfast in our intent and vision. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our new players for your budding interest in our game and all of our veterans for your continued support over the years. Game Development is a challenging vocation but make no mistake, we are here for it. Through our trials and tribulations, our successes and triumphs and our mistakes and losses, we have endured and in many ways flourished. Each day we grow as people, as a team and as developers. You all are an integral part of that process so thank you all so much for being a part of our journey and helping to push us forward.

For me this month, I’ve been updating some EVRIMA animations as well as passes on the Pteranodon’s animations and features. Setting the stage for Update 3. With December being our shortest production month of the year, we’re rounding out with a hotfix to Update 2 that should hopefully give you all some fun experiences over the holidays. I’m shooing the team away today to spend time with their loved ones, catch up on shows, play games or just stare at a wall in an empty room for a few weeks if they so choose. But no production (if I have anything to say about it). Everyone will return to production the second week in January, hopefully rejuvenated and ready to hit the ground running on Update 3. We have already soared over so much ground with the Pteranodon (sorry Punch) that we should be able to get the Ptera off of our production plate relatively quickly (crosses fingers). The Deinosuchus though, is going to be our heaviest hitter. We are striving to knock it’s gameplay out of the park and give you guys a unique experience for this aquatic terror with all the shoreline lunging, deathrolling, bone crunching action, the likes of which you have never seen. Outside of a documentary anyway. So wish us luck going forward, keep those bug reports flowing and have a wonderful holiday and a better 2021 than your 2020. As always, be good to yourselves and each other. See you next year!

[h2]Changelog 0.6.30.37[/h2]

Additions

• Added and setup simple terrain alignment for all species. This is currently WIP.
  
• Added regional spawning system. Pick a general area to spawn in for ease of finding other players.
  
• Added health indicator to the character profile screen.
  
• Added a "Plus" icon to blood when it is being recovered, so it is clearer when you are regaining blood instead of bleeding.
  
• Added manual banning option for server admins.
  
• Added player names and their SteamID64 when in admin spectator mode.
  
• Added toggle for admin spectator camera names. Use Shift + U when in admin spectator mode to toggle player names on/off.
  
• Added chat to admin spectator mode.
  
• Added commands for chat:
  /gl - Sends a message in Global chat.
  /gr - Sends a message in Group chat.
  /ls - Sends message in Local Species chat.
  
• Added a "Press to Buck" hint when latched onto by a Utahraptor pounce.
  
• Added simple solution for "replicated" interactive foliage. Scales by dinosaur size.
  
• Added interaction to material instances.
  
• Added new scent particles system to water and corpses.
  
• Added distance submix to medium attenuations and tweaked medium attenuation settings.
  
• Added distant reverb submix to small vocal attenuations.
  
• Added generic layer to mud knockdown sound.
  
• Added wood footstep sounds - walk/trot/sprint - for medium and small dinosaurs.
  
• AI have a reduced chance of seeing another character if they are crouching or not moving.
  
• Added the first pass of human structures.
  
• Added a lot of preparations for future content.
  

Enhancements

• Changed the admin spectator camera key from "/" to "Shift + /" by default, to prevent admins from accidentally entering spectator mode during regular gameplay.
  
• Changed pounce to be canceled when hitting an object, like a tree.
  
• Made AI bleed.
  
• Made all chat boxes clear old entries after 250 messages in total, improving client performance.
  
• Renamed the community-made teleport location names with placeholder names, pending their official equivalents.
  
• Moved vocals to a new system that's more efficient and latency free.
  
• Tightened small dinosaur call attenuations.
  
• Tightened medium dino call attenuations.
  
• Tweaked close foley attenuation settings.
  
• Changed attenuations on Carnotaurus pain, bite, and eat vocal sounds.
  
• Changed attenuations on Stegosaurus bite and pain vocal sounds.
  
• Changed Hypsilophodon attenuations and volumes.
  
• Change to small broadcast attenuation.
  
• Improved medium attenuations.
  
• Improved small dinosaur attenuations.
  
• Improved Carnotaurus drink animation.
  
• Improved foliage interaction system. More stable, less jittery.
  
• Improved Carnotaurus swallow sounds.
  
• Increased the broadcast range for both the Carnotaurus and Hypsilophodon.
  
• Adjusted broadcasts notifies to fix hold and not hold modulation of sound cue.
  
• Adjusted size and location of some AI spawners.
  
• Adjusted water volumes size.
  
• Adjusted time of ragdoll activation.
  
• Carnotaurus attract and generic attenuation distance slightly increased.
  
• Small dinosaur steps attenuation tightened.
  
• Medium roar attenuation reverb send curve changed.
  
• Edits to characters materials.
  
• Made Charge cancel pickup of targets and avoid auto pickup when killing something small.
  
• Assigned Stegosaurus tail attack sounds to soundclass.
  
• Made bucking affect all pouncers, not just the last person to pounce you.
  
• Made list of pouncers to be removed before ending pounce.
  
• Turned up volume of dinovocals soundclass.
  
• Disabled spatialisation on underwater ambience and turned down volume.
  
• Vocal call audio level adjustments.
  
• Made corpses start floating much earlier. Increased collision thickness of buoyancy plane to avoid clipping.
  
• Decreased Carnotaurus deceleration rate.
  
• Increase timer frequency for pickup.
  
• Removed spatialisation from underwater ambience in oceans.
  
• Adjustment to footstep trace initial location.
  
• Improvements to light and fog on Spiro.
  

Balance

• Adjusted buck stamina "damage" across the board, allowing players to buck off Utahraptor's pouncing them more effectively.
  
• Increased Stegosaurus headshot damage multiplier slightly, giving a better chance of killing one.
  
• Prevented Tenontosaurus secondary from applying crowd control on tail hits.
  
• Increased Tenontosaurus juvenile attack power slightly.
  

Bug fixes

• Fixed the Utahraptor not taking damage from attacks when dismounting from a pounce or recovering from a failed pounce. AKA "the iframes bug".
  
• Fixed eating a corpse until it disappears causing a short input lock.
  
• Fixed Pounce getting stuck on water or trees, input locking the pouncer.
  
• Fixed Utahraptors floating mid-air if they pounced a wallowing Stegosaurus.
  
• Fixed Bucking not dealing stamina "damage".
  
• Fixed Bucking abilities not being committed.
  
• Fixed being staggered not canceling certain abilities.
  
• Fixed Eat/Drink ability allowing players to move while performing eating or drinking.
  
• Fixed some movement, jittering and translation corrections on Pounce.
  
• Fixed collision and a lot of model issues.
  
• Fixed Stegosaurus missing animation montages.
  
• Fixed dinosaur speed in profile menu.
  
• Fixed particle parameters not updating after they are deactivated.
  
• Fixed Gamehud sometimes giving blood mask when not damaged.
  
• Fixed client side spam animation to clear blindness.
  
• Fixed amount of connected players not showing correctly in the player list.
  
• Fixed HUD not updating when leaving spectator camera.
  
• Fixed Pounce issue when prematurely losing contact with target.
  
• Fixed Pounce releasing the target if it starts to swim.
  
• Fixed Carnotaurus post-slide animation issue.
  
• Fixed eating affecting Pounce detection.
  
• Fixed the Carnotaurus Charge picking up small dinosaurs.
  
• Fixed Carnotaurus juvenile stomping sound when charging on forest terrain.
  
• Fixed knockdown not canceling pickup.
  
• Fixed water bool not being false ever.
  
• Fixed water height offset for Tenotosaurus and Stegosaurus, causing small creatures to swim above surface.
  
• Fixed Hypsilophodon being dragged by the wrong socket.
  
• Fixed HUD info for thirst and hunger not updating when rejoining after a crash.
  
• Fixed clear vision not working if near any source of food.
  
• Fixed admins entering spectator if they pressed the spectator key while in the admin panel.
  
• Fixed some sounds still being audible when audio is set to 0 in the settings, such as the Stegosaurus tail attack sounds.
  
• Fixed swallowed AI still appearing with scent and the eating prompt still being visible for them as if they were still alive.
  
• Fixed Carnotaurus wipe animation playing multiple times if the client pressed the wipe key before the animation had finished.
  
• Fixed damage overlay appearing in admin spectator camera.
  
• Fixed screenshot mode breaking HUD if they were already in spectator camera mode.
  
• Fixed small creatures swimming in shallow water if they were next to a Stegosaurus or Tenontosaurus.
  
• Fixed Carnotaurus being able to bypass their drift by releasing the sprint key just before turning.
  
• Fixed being able to use Utahraptor's Pounce and Dryosaurus' Dodge while knocked down or staggered.
  

Known Issues

• Carnivores become stuck in an eating loop by tapping the eat key on a ragdoll. Pressing the eat key again will cancel the loop.
  
• Texture settings cannot be changed ingame.
  
• Moving too far away from your character with the admin spectator camera can lock up the player. Relog or slay yourself to fix this.
  
• AI can still sometimes appear invisible.