Escape The Pacific News

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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