Escape The Pacific News

Hi everyone,

the new Escape the Pacific version 'Alpha 26' is now available.

For this update we were mainly focusing on adding the new Collectibles mechanic, expanding the fire system, making the Banana trees chop-able with a couple of new features and there is a new Papaya tree and fruit.

The most important new feature is the Collectibles mechanic which has huge impact on gameplay making it more interesting. The basic functionality which is implemented will be expanded to a big dynamic system with a very wide variety of possible items and spawn locations. The actual implementation spawns some collectibles almost on every island. Later the system will work together with the storyline and will be influenced also by the players actions.

The newly added Candles are bringing a whole new level to the fire management and are altering the players night life in a big way - they can be used to preserve the fire or as a simple light source. The Candles can only be collected for now, later we'll have recipes to craft them. Strong wind or rain can extinguish them - later some new features and models will be added to further expand their usability and to make protecting them against weather elements easier.

Banana trees are finally chop-able and can provide: banana leaves - used to build structures, banana stem - the bananas left on it lasts longer, banana tree trunk - will be usable also as a material in crafting and building recipes.

There is also a new Papaya tree and fruit. Only raw the Papaya fruit is edible at the moment. Drying and preparing with recipes will be added a little later.

We managed to fix some serious issues which were causing objects on islands and trees to levitate and/or to disappear from the islands when travelling to very remote islands and returning from them.

Changelog:

New features:

01. Added: Papaya tree
02. Added: Papaya fruit
03. Added: Chop-able banana tree
04. Added: Banana stem
05. Added: Banana leaves and trunk
06. Added: Banana leaves building tier
07. Added: Collectibles system
08. Added: Small Barrel for longer water preservation
09. Added: Small Crate
10. Added: Tankards, Bottles, Goblets
11. Added: Candles

General:

01. Added: Opened water container objects always rotated upwards

Fixes:
01. Fixed: "Levitating trees" issue when travelling to remote islands after save/load
02. Fixed: "Levitating objects" issue when travelling to remote islands after save/load
03. Fixed: Chopped Palm Tree trunk last module doesn't disappear when hitting it (when there are still Fronds)
04. Fixed: "Disappearing objects" issue when travelling to remote islands after save/load
05. Fixed: "Disappearing blueprints" issue when travelling to remote islands after save/load
06. Fixed: "Sails above masts" issue after save/load
07. Fixed: Correct differentiating between states of food items when placing from inventory

We plan to check and test the Raft and Sailing mechanic again. Issues regarding them will be solved with higher priority. We plan to work some more also on the newly introduced Collectibles system. The additional plans include also the Smoker, Bow ... Besides these new features the Animal's AI will be still on the agenda as the new Sailing UI and the new Menu. We will work also on solving the new issues and we will re-check some older issues too. Other new features will be added as implementing of the planned features and fixing of the issues will allow us to.

Thank you for your patience and for your constructive feedbacks helping us to get rid of the issues as fast as is possible.



G4GTeam.

If you have any further questions do not hesitate to ask us. We will try to answer your questions in detail.



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Hi everyone,

the new Escape the Pacific version 'Alpha 25' is now available.

For this update we were mainly focusing on refining and expanding the lately added spoiling system with Water spoiling. There is a new simple Diverse Diet mechanic and fruits can be dried/cooked too.

The lately added Spoiling system has been updated to be more universal to allow us to add more food with different types in the future more easily. The spoiling graph has been modified to be more slow at the beginning and to be more fast at the end of the spoiling interval. The actual hunger values based on the spoiling state as well as the spoiling state itself is now displayed in the UI. The general spoiling speed of some food has been lowered also.

The newly added Water Spoiling system represents another interesting feature that adds another level of realism to the game. Like food also the water can spoil in high temperatures and in direct Sunlight. Water in the Water collector in the Sun spoils faster as in Coconut Pots placed in shade. The next step will be to add some bigger containers to preserve the water for even longer time intervals. One of the preparations for future additions is the newly added ability to pour the water from one container into another.

The new Diverse Diet mechanic is a very simple system which makes the survival more interesting. There aren't nutrition, sugar, fat and protein levels - the player only needs to have the consumed Sea Food, Land Food and the Fruit levels on nearly even values to get the most energy from the consumed food. Big differences between the amount of consumed different types of food lead the energy gained from the meal being low. As in the case of the Spoiling system also the Diet system is an implementation which can be changed in the future as it will be more refined and expanded to offer a simple and interesting way to increase the immersion in the game.

Fruits can be dried or cooked which is also a base functionality for future expansion of the cooking system.

Some issues were fixed regarding the Coconut Palms and their Fronds as well as: reappearing Fronds after being cut, need to chop the trunk twice, bad saving/loading and so on.

The long awaited functionality for assigning the Thumb Mouse buttons is also added.

Changelog:

New features:

01. Added: Water Spoiling system
02. Added: Diverse Diet system
03. Added: Peeled Banana for drying
04. Added: Coconut Flesh Cubes for cooking
05. Added: Thumb Mouse Buttons assignment

General:

01. Added: GUI Status Icons for Eat, Drink, Hit, Craft values of the item aimed at
02. Added: Spoil Speed is translated to a new curve shape: slow at start, fast at end
03. Changed: Seagull Egg spoil time has been changed to 7 days
04. Changed: Yellow Banana spoil time has been changed to 3 days
05. Added: Spoiling time set to 5 days for Coconut Cut
06. Added: Spoiling time set to 5 days for Coconut Pot
07. Added: Spoiling time set to 5 days for Coconut Green Cut
08. Added: Water-plane for Coconut Cut
09. Added: Water-plane for Coconut Pot
10. Added: Water-plane for Coconut Green Cut
11. Added: Tiny Banana plant can be chopped like other foliage (Bush)
12. Added: Small Banana plant can be chopped like other foliage (Bush)
13. Added: Items in Inventory will also be grouped based on their Water Level

Fixes:
01. Fixed: Palm Frond not re-appearing on Tiny Standing palms after frond was cut and saved/loaded
02. Fixed: Already cut palm Fronds from a Small Palm that were save/loaded and chopped down don't re-appear again
03. Fixed: No need to chop down an already chopped Small Palm with already cut Fronds again
04. Fixed: Correct cookstate of the cookable objects at save/load

We plan to work some more on the Spoiling system and the Diverse Diet mechanic too. The planned addition for the Water container/preservation system will be washed-up Barrels on the shore - which will also introduce the new Collectibles mechanic. Additional plans: Smoker, choppable banana palms, banana palm building tier, new fruit, Bow ... Besides these new features the Animal's AI will be still on the agenda as the new Sailing UI and the new Menu. We will work also on solving the new issues and we will recheck some older issues too. also. Other new features will be added as implementing planned features and fixing issues will allow us to.

Thank you for your patience and for your constructive feedbacks helping us to get rid of the issues as fast as is possible.



G4GTeam.

If you have any further questions do not hesitate to ask us. We will try to answer your questions in detail.



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Hi everyone,

the new Escape the Pacific version 'Alpha 24' is now available.

For this update we were mainly focusing adding the next one of the base mechanics: The Spoiling system. Furthermore we increased the Drying rack capacity, fixed some major issues and we managed to optimize some more engine code too.

The newly added Spoiling system represents another survival mechanic that makes the gameplay more interesting. The speed of spoiling depends on the given object (banana, meat, egg, dead turtle, ...), on its Cooking state (raw, cooked, dried, ...), on the ambient temperature and whether it is in the shade or on the direct Sun light. To not have piles of spoiled food and animals, all of the spoiled objects can be destroyed by hitting them with the axe. Spoiled food can't be Dried or Cooked anymore. The more food is spoiled the lower its quality will be and the benefit effect when consumed. Dead turtles and crabs with lower nutrition quality spawn meat with equally lower quality. The quality is actually indicated by a green icon in the inventory and green colored texture on the object itself - the material specific unique textures for spoiled state will be added later. In the inventory food is grouped based on 10% steps regarding quality - an egg with 85% nutrition quality will be grouped with another egg for example of 88% quality but not with the egg of 75% quality. The spoiling speed will be modified and fine tuned in the future to achieve the most pleasant results.

We have increased the Drying rack capacity as it was requested by the community. Salmon Rotation and position on the Drying rack and on Cooking places was fixed.

The Banana palms had one issue which was causing more different issues related to the Banana palm itself. By fixing this one issue the following problems were eliminated: not saving banana trees correctly, disappearing bananas, popping up banana palms on other islands as they originally spawned and partially hovering/buried banana palm trees.

One of the most FPS influencing issue was also fixed: When the Action bar is shown - either aiming at some object or holding some object in hand - frames won't drop drastically to a ~20% value anymore.

Changelog:

New features:

01. Added: Meal Spoiling mechanic
02. Added: Spoiling for Banana Yellow
03. Added: Spoiling for Meat
04. Added: Spoiling for Seagull Egg
05. Added: Spoiling for Salmon
06. Added: Spoiling for Crab Fiddler
07. Added: Spoiling for Oyster
08. Added: Spoiling for Turtles
09. Added: Spoiling for Coconut Meal
10. Added: Spoiled Meal can't be added to Drier
11. Added: Spoiled Meal can't be added to Cook Place
12. Added: Spoiled Meal can be destroyed with Axe
13. Added: Spoiling state is displayed in the Inventory as green bar
14. Added: Meal is grouped in the inventory by 1/10th spoiling value steps
15. Added: Food has less effect when consumed when food quality is lower than normal
16. Added: Killed animals spawn meat with equal quality as they had when alive

General:

01. Fixed: Action Bar doesn't causes huge FPS drop down to 10% when key shortcuts are displayed
02. Changed: Minimal island distance in the local cluster is increased
03. Fixed: Bug in Banana trees caused banana palms not being saved, popping up on remote islands, disappearing in general as well as hovering/being buried on other islands
04. Added: Correct drying position and rotation for Salmons
05. Added: Correct cooking position and rotation for Salmons
06. Added: Drying Rack drying spots increased to 15
07. Fixed: Sea Gulls when sitting on nests are positioned higher to prevent positioned half way in on rocks
08. Fixed: Seed number is correctly displayed in ingame menus after the game was loaded
09. Fixed: Skill values of player character are correctly reset to zero when a new game is started
10. Fixed: Cooking time for newly harvested Oysters is now set correctly

We plan to add some interesting features in the near future such as: Diverse diet, Smoker, choppable banana palms, banana palm building tier, new fruit, dried fruits ... Besides these new features the Animal's AI will be still on our agenda as well as the new Sailing UI and the new Menus. We will work also on solving the new issues and we will recheck some older issues too. Other new features will be added as implementing of the planned features and fixing issues will allow us to.

Thank you for your patience and for your constructive feedbacks helping us to get rid of the issues as fast as is possible.



G4GTeam.

If you have any further questions do not hesitate to ask us. We will try to answer your questions in detail.



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Hi everyone,

the new Escape the Pacific version 'Alpha 23' is now available.

For this update we were mainly focusing on adding some of the last engine changes: Bigger islands, Ocean waves depend on distance from the islands and each island can have its own sea gull flock. There is new grass and a new wind model added and many optimizations were done.

One of the two most visible changes that greatly improve the immersion with this update is the possibility to create bigger islands. They can hold up much more foliage, corals and animals and also due to this fact (not only due to gameplay) they are rarer, at most 0, 1 or 2 islands are spawned in an island cluster. The islands topology generator was also updated so the surface isn't necessarily only flat - it is a little more elevated and there are some small tops on them. Please note: When some of the biggest islands is causing huge FPS drops try to lower the Environment quality settings or generate another world.

The next very nice added feature is the colored Pacific ocean. In future updates the color will change also based on the latitude the player is located on. In the actual state waves size, color, transparency and underwater blurriness are changing not only based on the wind speed but also on the distance from islands. In calm wind near shore the water can be very transparent while in strong winds between islands waves can be quite big making paddling a challenge.

There is a new - but not final - grass added which replaces the old bright green one. The new grass is lower, denser, nicer, consists of less triangles and generates less draw calls. The next important engine change was that every island which has beach rocks can have its own sea gull flock. This opens the door for more sea gull flocks per island and the creation of sea gull colony islands will be easier.

The new wind intensity model not simply and rapidly iterates between the minimal and maximal wind speed rates given for the actual day but also tends to stay in its minimal and maximal values for some more time. It is possible to happen that the player is left on the ocean with unchanging calm wind for about 1 ingame hour. This feature will be changing based on the difficulty setting in the future.

Besides adding these new features we decided to spend some time optimizing the game engine. The deeper ocean and the bigger islands caused higher CPU and GPU usage which we needed to address to keep the FPS high in as much time as it can. The optimization consisted of: Reducing the draw calls, optimizing the LODs, internal procedure refactoring, transform some code to parallel executing when that was possible. We will continue with code reviews and optimizations continuously to allow the game to be more enjoyable and to increase the possibility to make the world more detailed.


Changelog:

New features:

1. Added: Bigger islands
2. Added: Colored Pacific ocean
3. Added: Ocean water transparency based on wind strength
4. Added: Ocean water color based on wind strength
5. Added: Ocean underwater blurriness based on wind strength
6. Added: Ocean got bigger distance waves compared to shores
7. Added: Every island which is having at least one rock on the coast has its own Sea Gull flock
8. Added: New grass model
9. Added: New Wind intensity change model

General:

1. Fixed: Around 25 internal engine, procedural and graphical optimizations

We will continue to work on the Animal AI as there are some issues which should be addressed with higher priority. As most of the major engine changes are already implemented we will now focus more again on adding new content and gameplay elements. With the help of our best 'external' team mate Chris we are preparing a new Main Menu and UI. We will work also on solving the new issues and we will recheck some older issues too. Other new features will be added as implementing the planned features and fixing issues allows us.

Thank you for your patience and for your constructive feedbacks helping us to get rid of the issues as fast as is possible.



G4GTeam.

If you have any further questions do not hesitate to ask us. We will try to answer your questions in detail.



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