Odd Realm News

Hello friends!

First off, thank you all for being super patient waiting for these updates. I had intended to put the new content out into beta in March, and I was very close to doing this. In my last log, I had said it was two weeks out, and, at the time, that was true. The new Gwdir race was just about there. However, there were some things I needed to address first. While I've been working on these updates, I've received quite a few messages that talk about several issues with the UI. These are issues I've encountered myself, and they were bugging the heck out of me too. The last thing I want is for the core of the game to be worsened by annoying and unpolished UI. I couldn't just ignore the feedback I was getting. Since the last dev log, I've meticulously worked on those issues. Let's take a look!



[h2]Job and Room Toolbar[/h2]
This one was a huge annoyance for myself, and I'm sure a lot of you found it to be not great as well. It was implemented when there were only a handful of blueprints and rooms to choose from. So, it wasn't terrible back then. Now, there are just way too many entries to have to search through for the old UI to work. I've done a bunch of work on the layout, functionality, but you also won't have to open a separate window to see placed rooms/jobs now. Everything can be done from the newly updated selection window.

First thing you'll notice is that the jobs and rooms are now listed vertically. It shows the names of the jobs/rooms, and what requirements they may have. Rooms will show previously designated rooms, which you can select to add to, as well as what entities do not have the room. This is to help players understand who is missing, say, a Home when playing as the humans.



As well, along the top, I've added filters for job categories, and special rooms for races. You can see in the gif below that I'm using the arrow keys to navigate selections. This is something I've added to windows the selectable lists and tabs.



[h2]Settlers Window[/h2]

This is another window which desperately needed some love. One common piece of feedback I got was that players hated having to scroll, especially on this window. So, I've gone through all the windows and done my best to make everything fit. As you can see on this screen below, you no longer need to scroll horizontally to see all your skills. And, I did some work to the visuals of skills. I've made it so they are easier to read, and toggle. It's much easier to toggle all skills off/on, as well as reset them.



[h2]Entity Window[/h2]

Here's another window which suffered from scrolling. I've done a pass on it to fit everything into one screen. And, hopefully, the overall layout is clearer.



[h2]Production Window[/h2]

This window is the king of complexity and I did soooooo much work to make every part of it easier to read and use. I've added tons of functionality to be able to edit permissions for everything involved in a job. What items are used, what entities, as well as props if any are required. Don't want items stored in water blocks in your stockpile? You can now edit that level of detail if you wish. There's a million little polish items which went into this screen.



[h2]Inventory Window[/h2]

I've added a ton of new categories to help distinguish items in game. As a result, I've also added some functionality to the inventory window to help organize things.





This post mostly focuses on the window improvements, but I have also been working on content. One of the new additions is the Honeybee. You'll be able to place an Apiary and farm Honey.




I've added some new plants that grow only in bodies of water. Also, I've added to color to all the fish to help distinguish them.




There's an absolute ton of work left to do. I'm going to hold off saying when this one will come out because I honestly don't know. Most of the stuff I'm working at the moment is very small details which is tedious. I am so thankful for all of you following the game's progress and providing feedback. This community is amazing. I'll do my best to get this update done asap. Just know that I'm still extremely passionate about this game, and I work every day on it. I hope you don't worry that I've dropped off or anything. I'm in the final home stretch and it is quite the challenge, but we are getting there! Thanks so much for going on the journey with me. :)

Waylon

Hey everyone!

Sorry for the lack of updates. I have been so busy working away on adding tons and tons of stuff to the next expansion. I am so excited to share it with you guys. Not only does it introduce a race that I think is super fun to play, the Gwdir, it has lots of new content, UI improvements, and quality of life stuff.

I'm going to save a full detail of everything for the patch notes but here are some things to tease.

[h2]New Entities![/h2]



There are four new entities with very unique behaviors, including the Haast (seen above). I greatly improved my entity creation pipeline over the last two months, making it so much quicker to make entities. So, I'm going to start adding a bunch more!

[h2]New Rooms![/h2]



Bunch of new ones including a few you have all been asking for (such as the Fishery seen above).

[h2]UI Improvements[/h2]



Tons of UI improvements based on feedback, especially for the room management UI. Lots of cleaning up and making things clearer. Without getting too far into the weeds, I've made it so there aren't so many blueprints for players to look through. Instead, a blueprint acts as an action on an item. For example, there is now a Boil item blueprint which can be used on quite a few items to spit out a boiled version of that item. Players can then choose which items not to boil to narrow down those jobs a bit. But, again, I'll get into way more detail when I release the version into beta.

[h2]New Plants And Improved Plant Growth[/h2]

I've added a bunch of new plants that grow in the water. So, now, the oceans and lakes won't be so devoid of life. As well, trees will now grow out, having much bigger trunks, roots, and canopies. This is a big part of the Gwdir gameplay loop! :)

[h2]Next Steps[/h2]

There's a huge amount to still show off and I'm barely restraining myself from spoiling things. I think I'm about two weeks out from having this ready for beta. It's taken a bit longer than expected as I wanted to get a lot into this version. So, thanks for waiting so patiently!

Best,

Waylon

Hello dear friends!

I've been working away on the Gwdir race and they are very close to being ready for the beta branch. I wanted to put out this patch in the meantime as it has quite a few performance improvements, but, most importantly, carrying behaviour improvements. Settlers were wasting so much time carrying inefficiently and I needed to address that. Settlers will now focus on items closest to stockpiles first, and you should notice they will keep animal enclosure stockpiles filled in a more reliable way too. As long as you have the haulers and items of course.

I'm working on a job which lets you designate items to haul immediately. As an example, this will make it so you could force settlers to carry items on the edge of the map over items right beside the stockpile.

There are a few tuning and bug fix changes for you to check out in the patch as well. They should make things a bit more enjoyable and less teeth-grindy.

-Feature: Command line item spawn can now recognize item spawn groups with the '-ig' option. i.e., spawn -ig isg_starting_loadout_settlers
-Feature: Trees can now grow and many have larger trunks and roots. This change supplements the giant trees the Gwdir race rely on for their gameplay mechanics.
-Polish: Plants with low health will now get a color shift to show they are dying.
-Tuning: Containers will now show a different visual when full instead of when they have at least one item. This is to indicate at a glance how many containers are at full capacity.
-Tuning: Hated/harmful items are now added to prohibited items for room stockpiles if the room has 'Auto-populate diet items' on.
-Tuning: Entities will not put items into containers if they are lying on the ground in a stockpile room (as long as the item is permitted in the container).
-Tuning: Entities should stop less often when going about their duties. Cleaned up some unnecessary pauses in their behaviour.
-Tuning: Command line prediction is more accurate when comparing strings.
-Tuning: Plants will spawn less as their numbers grow. This is to avoid too many growing in one biome at a time. This does not affect planted crops, just naturally spawning plants.
-Tuning: Bumped up old age for Humans, and decreased their chance to die of cardiac arrest.
-Optimization: Item storing and management has been tuned and optimized to be more efficient. Entities should be much better at getting closer carry jobs to stockpiles to avoid going to collect items on edges of the map.
-Optimization: Music no longer creates a lag spike when it starts playing.
-Bug Fix: After 60 days, a settler wave event would occur every hour forever.
-Bug Fix/Tuning: Entities were continuing to move to a set point for a job even though they were close enough to do it. They will now start the job as soon as they are in an adjacent block.
-Bug Fix: Selecting New Map from the overworld screen without selecting a tile would load the tile from the previous map.
-Bug Fix: Items were being spawned in trees.
-Bug Fix: A null reference related to the lighting algorithm going out of world bounds.
-Bug Fix: Some item counts weren't displaying correctly.

I'm very excited to share the Gwdir soon. They are super cool and I think that you will all like them. Stay tuned over the next few weeks for that update to the beta. :)

Thanks everyone!

Hello everyone!

I've started work on implementing the next race, the Gwdir. In addition to them, I'm adding some other fun things to the game. The Gwdir aren't quite ready to play just yet, but I do want to get some testing help for the other new things being added. Let's take a look at those!


I want to start telling more of the history of Odd, and artifacts are a way for me to do this, but also give players more things to discover in the world.



Some items have the tag 'Artifact' and 'Can Be Studied' on them. These indicate that players can study them at the Library to unlock historical details and, potentially, new knowledge.

Regarding tags, I'm going to start using these more and more. And, I've made it so you can now search items by tag in the inventory list. Searching 'artifact' or 'can be studied' will only list those items with those tags. I'll also be getting rid of 'Item Categories' and replacing them with the tag system. This won't really affect the player too much. You'll still see Raw Food, Cooked Food, etc, but they'll be tags instead of a separate category system. My intention is for players to be able to make their own filters (like the ones you see at the top of the inventory window) based on tags, and even to make their own tags to categorize things. And, you'd be able to list the tag at the top of the HUD like you can with item categories. Again, not really something players need to care about, but some of you might find this helpful or interesting, so there you go.


Stealth entities have been a thing in the game for a while, but a few of the events weren't really set up correctly. This version re-introduces them with two events, the kidnapper, and the thief. These have hostile entities show up to steal children, and/or valuables. Entities can see stealthed entities when they are not working, and when the entity is in their sight for long enough. I will be introducing guard posts and some patrolling very soon, which will help players detect these entities. In the meantime, you should still be able to set up traps and the like to capture these lurking bad guys in your base.

[h2]Patch Notes[/h2]
-Content: Study Artifact job in Library. Studying artifacts can unlock new blueprints and bits of lore.
-Content: Several new blueprints and items related to artifact studying.
-Content: Trinket item type.
-Content: Several artifact items to discover in the world.
-Content: Added stealth thief event that steals Ren.
-Content: Added stealth kidnapper event that steals children.
-Feature: Tags can now be searched to filter item lists. i.e., typing 'can' will list items that 'can be studied'.
-Feature: Unlocked research now appears in a popup to show what has been added to the player's repository of blueprints and rooms.
-Bug Fix: Rare/Epic/Legendary items were not spawning in dungeons correctly.
-Tuning: The survival skill can no longer be disabled.
-Tuning: Generated Ardyn settlements now use Ardyn props and platforms.


Lastly, you'll no longer be able to disable Survival. Too many players were disabling this and then their entities would die of hunger/thirst and didn't know why. Instead of coming up with a bunch of annoying notifications to communicate this, it made more sense to just lock that skill. I could be wrong, so let me know if you can't play without being able to disable it for some reason I'm not seeing. Would love to hear your feedback there, and if you have a better solution. I'm happy to tune that stuff further.

As for the Gwdir race, it's going along very well. I'm currently making up the art and figuring out the details of their mechanics. I'm not going to spoil them just yet, but I am super excited about how they play. Personally, I think they are my favorite race so far.

Some other things to be excited for that will go into Lost Legends are: more social interaction amongst settlers, a family tree UI, more pros/cons for skills and jobs (i.e., making better items, or critically failing things), and more events.

That's all for now! Hope you are all well. Thank you for your continued support, feedback, and kind words.

Waylon

Hello!

I just uploaded 0.11.0.21 and a day or so ago I uploaded 0.11.0.20. They include fixes for a few more serious bugs. Here are the patch notes for the two of them:

[h2]0.11.0.20[/h2]
-Bug Fix: Some players had trouble saving their games.

[h2]0.11.0.21[/h2]
-Bug Fix: Sometimes the unreachable job/item notification would not activate correctly.
-Bug Fix: Entities would not do jobs because less important jobs like hauling to stockpiles would reserve the items. This would cause entities to not eat/drink/build.
-Bug Fix: Entities would sleep on the ground instead of their beds.

Thanks to everyone that reported these!

Waylon