Odd Realm News

Hello and happiest of Fridays to you!

I was hoping that today I would be switching the beta branch over to the live branch. Sadly, I ran into a lot of tuning/progression stuff that I wasn't comfortable pushing live just yet. Today's patch should fix a few things that stood out to me, and I'm sure they stand out for you too.




I've altered how bandits, and other threats get activated. Previously, I activated threats based on how much time had passed. As well, to get certain threats such as bandits, you'd have to settle a 'bandit' tile, or some such. I felt that this was rather tough to tune, and didn't seem that organic. Plus, it doesn't quite align with how I want interactions in the world to play out in the future. Now, to move the design in that direction, threats will activate more often as you acquire wealth. For now, I'm only looking at Ren, but, later, I will factor in other items, especially rare unique artifacts. I know some of you don't want ANY threats to appear, so I've also added a setting in the settings menu to change the threat frequency to 'never, low, normal, or high.'

In addition to that, I've done some work to improve the loadout generation of baddies. Items and attributes NPC's start out with will now be generated based on the player's average settler level. Before, the entities would pull from a pool of items that were predefined. This wasn't terribly accurate to the player's progression. With items/attributes generating based on settler level, the threats should be much more challenging while still being fair.


You'll notice a few new things to build in the patch notes. I definitely didn't want to add new content to this patch as I only want to move beta to live, however, there's a bit of a gap in the early game content, that I felt needed addressing. Without unlocking the wood research, you were pretty limited to in what you could build. I've gone ahead and added some new things to build with wood and plant fiber, to help fix this. There's no end of things to add, but I think this should be a good small addition.


This patch also has a significant merchant item value change. I noticed that you could quite easily acquire Ren, so I'm making things much more expensive in addition to lowering the price things can be sold for. Wealth should be slowly acquired, and your settlement should earn it by working hard to fabricate and find valuable items. Please let me know if you find ways to easily acquire Ren by cheesing the game. I'd love to know, so I can tune things.

Notes:
-Fixed a bug where changing priority on a started job might remove it.
-Added extra tooltip info for block traps. Entity capture size (for cages), and general trap functions are now displayed.
-Tuned research costs to be a bit cheaper.
-Added blueprints to recycle tomes back into paper.
-Tuned lighting color overlay back a bit to make things easier to see.
-Fixed a bug where tree leaves weren't changing color on season change.
-Tuned merchant prices.
-Enemies will drop their items in a stoneleaf bag upon death. This bag will disappear when emptied.
-Wood Plank block now drops 1 wood plank instead of 1 wood log.
-Added a wood log block to make with wood logs.
-Added a thatch roof platform to make with plant fiber.
-Added a wood beam block to make with wood logs.
-Added a Threat Difficulty setting in the settings menu.
-Dangerous events ("Threats") will now use the player's settlement value to determine frequency. The higher a settlement's value, the more often the player will encounter threats like bandits. The threat frequency can be changed from the settings menu.
-Entity threats will now use the average player settler level to determine item and attribute loadouts.
-Fixed a pathing bug where entities could get stuck after logging trees.
-Added entity size to entity overlay.
-Natural plant growth will no longer happen in rooms.
-Auto job blueprints are now ordered with those that can be built at the top.
-More optimizations to improve FPS.

Ok, I'm going to let this new patch test over the weekend to see how things play out. I'll probably have some small fixes and tuning changes to patch in early next week, but the build is just about ready to be live. I will update you all next week! :)

Thanks!

W

Hello!



This is a shorter list of patch notes today as I focused a lot of last week fixing up and adding in-game events. There are quite a few fixes related to combat in there as well. Plus, I've done some optimizing related to a GPU bottleneck some players might have been experiencing.

Regarding events, I've gone through a bunch that were disabled for the beta and have enabled them and fixed issues that kept them from working properly. As well, some of the game's bosses are now quite a bit more involved and powerful. Each has their own special set of abilities. As you can see in the above gif, the Dweller shoots a beam of energy at nearby player entities, carving out any terrain (or critters!) in the way. I won't spoil the other bosses and their abilities, but be careful! They're out there.

The Ancients now have a bit more challenge as I've added a faction called the Ancient Hunters that may appear. They see Ancients and magic as a threat to the world and have devoted themselves to finding and eliminating all Ancients. After all, magic was used to cause the Fracture. I've always intended for Ancients to have a bit more threat from other factions to help balance out their easier playstyle.

Here are the notes:
-Optimized rendering performance.
-Re-enabled several scenarios.
-Upgraded boss scenarios to provide more of a challenge.
-The 'Game Saved' overlay should appear before the save to make it more noticeable.
-Fixed a bug where entities weren't attacking.
-Fixed a bug where ranged attackers could attack enemies if they didn't have the same pathing room.
-Improved combat behavior and entity control.
-Fixed an attack timing bug that caused projectiles to be fired at the beginning of an animation.
-Fixed a bug that kept fire from updating while on water or in the air. This would keep it from disappearing.
-Updated the game's loco art assets.
-Fixed a bug where battle music could continue playing after re-loading a save.

I'm very, very close to moving the current game out of beta and into production. This week, I'm only going to be tuning and testing. By Friday, it should be ready to move over.

Last, but not least, I am very excited to tell you all that Matt Creamer, the talented composer behind Odd Realm's music, is working on a bunch more music tracks for the game. Currently, there are only two tracks that play while you manage your settlement, so he'll be working on making more to fill that gameplay. I want to extend a special thanks to the Patreon supporters for helping bring these new tracks into the game. All the money raised in the Patreon has gone towards that! :)

Thanks everyone!

Waylon

Hi everyone!



Phew! This one took me a bit longer to get out the door because I had to get my hands dirty with a bunch of pathfinding stuff. Thanks for waiting patiently for me to put this one out. :) Also, thank you to those of you that were sending me builds and helping me find issues. Your help is so appreciated!


You should notice some improvements to the pathfinding speed. I went through and optimized several things, but I also worked on how paths are prioritized. Entities with the shortest paths or the most urgent paths (i.e., given a move order) should be calculated first. Also, NPC's are prioritized last, giving the player first dibs on pathing. In 0.10.0.17, you'd see a lot of entities hang up when given a move order, and that's because they were waiting for someone ahead of them to calculate a huge path. That should be much better. Now, having said that, you'll probably still see entities with the 'Routing' state, especially with a higher population or massive distance to travel. I've got a couple more things to add to reduce this wait for them, but, at the end of the day, it's either wait to calculate a long path, or tank your FPS. I'll continue to improve as we go.


Ok, so I needed to make this change to help with an issue where entities couldn't craft things if carry was disabled. Now, haul jobs use the carry skill and are issued by stockpiles, and gather jobs are used by crafting jobs to collect required items. Just like the equip item job, gather uses the survival skill. That's a temporary solution until I implement some code to assign the same skill as the job issuing the gather job, but I didn't have time this week!


As I was testing this week, I noticed that a lot of carry jobs were chilling while perfectly capable settlers sat on their hands. This would happen when a settler with a lot already on their plate was issued some carry jobs by a stockpile room. I've added in new code that checks to see how long a job idles, and, if it exceeds a specific time threshold, it un-assigns the entity (the one that's busy) from the job. This lets other entities pick up the slack. Hopefully you see some efficiency improvements as a result the next time you play.


I've fixed an absolute ton of combat related things BUT I wasn't able to get them all. I will continue to polish that up for the following patch. However, I was able to implement some line-of-sight logic for ranged fighters. You should no longer be attacked through the ground, and entities will try (as long as they aren't in a hold position order) to get closer if they don't see their target. I am going to add an overlay option that displays a line connecting an entity to their target. It will indicate line of sight and who's targeted.


Some entity notifications have been re-enabled. You should see them when you don't have a settler assigned to a profession, when a settler becomes an adult, when a settler is stuck, and when a settler can't reach a job. My suspicion is that these might be somewhat annoying at first, and will need some tuning. Do let me know which ones bother you, if any.


As this patch is mostly about bug fixing, tuning, and performance improvements, I don't have too much else to share, so here are the notes.

-Fixed a bug where the dialogue indicator would get stuck above entities.
-Fixed a bug where tooltips could have repeating text in the Saga window.
-Fixed a bug where disabling the tutorial from the tutorial popup wasn't working.
-Fixed an FPS drop from having lots of inaccessible jobs.
-Fixed some issues where entities wouldn't find a path to far away, usually underground, move points.
-Fixed a bug where entities would start mating while in combat or during a move order. Yep.
-Added 'gather item' job and renamed 'pick up/drop off item' to 'haul item'.
-Void Woken should be a default permitted race in most rooms now.
-Removed the loot skill as it's not used for anything.
-The selection box is no longer shown for right clicks during entity selections.
-Fixed a small memory leak.
-Fixed a bug where orders couldn't be given if one of the selected entities was dead.
-Fixed a bug where entities in hold positions couldn't attack close enemies.
-Fixed a bug where entities would stop moving randomly after being given a move order.
-Archers will now only fire an arrow if they have line-of-sight.
-Fixed a bug where health bar color was incorrect when loading a save.
-Increased landmine damage.
-Fixed a bug where entities would get stuck doing a job if the job they had started was no longer accessible.
-Fixed a bug where unlocking a door didn't open pathing to the room which had been locked.
-Fixed a visual bug where the lock icon wasn't updated on save file load.
-Added a tooltip for the entity state to show the full state display name.
-Fixed a bug where several entity notifications wouldn't show up.
-Fixed a bug where 'Remaining Days In Season' was incorrect.
-Re-enabled the lode overlay. You can see it when holding TAB.
-Ancients now start out with more Tomes of Arcana.
-All Arcana research is much cheaper.
-Fixed a bug where suggested props weren't showing when hovering over a room while placing jobs.
-Auto-job threshold amount to set will now look at queued and active jobs when attempting to queue jobs.
-Fixed a bug where entities in water could not be attacked.
-Minimap input will now stop entity follow if it's active.
-Fixed a bug that would keep some lists from not updating correctly.
-The kitchen now has the Misc skill as a default. That way, anyone with misc can join and do the butcher jobs.
-Added blueprint summon visuals for the Void Imp and Void Woken.
-Fixed a typo where Void Catalyst was shown as Void Crystal.
-Fixed a visual issue with jobs not updating shadows when removed.
-The Wood/Stone Bin can now also hold Refined Materials.
-Entities will now unassign themselves from stockpile carry jobs if the job sits for long enough without starting. This is to help free up carry jobs for other settlers that can do them.


There are still a few bugs to fix and performance improvements to make before I can push beta to production. As well, I still haven't re-enabled a few scenarios that I had planned to this week. I'm going to focus on those things and see where we're at by the middle of next week. I think by then things will be looking pretty good. :)

As always, thanks so much for the support! Have a great day.

Waylon

Hello!

0.10.0.17 has been uploaded to the BETA branch!



There are lots of goodies in this one!


First off, there's a new tutorial. I think it needs a bit of trimming, and some better timing, but it's mostly there. I want to add one or two more tips, but let me know if there's anything you think is missing. I'm also going to make a video tutorial on YouTube because I know some people prefer that. I'll keep you posted on its status.


Another big change is the tuning for entity attribute update intervals. Previously, I was updating attributes every 1 minute of game time, and, now, I'm updating them every 5. I felt that, when a settler started to starve or dehydrate, there wasn't a lot of time to address emergencies. With increased intervals, there's way less pressure on the player to scramble for water and food. We'll see how 5 minute intervals feel. I might even go higher because these higher intervals also give me more room for buff values. Time will tell! Or maybe you will. Let me know what you think.


I've slightly changed how pathfinding works to help with some lag in the later game. The problem was that entities would pathfind all at once, especially once you got more than 25 entities. This would cause some FPS drop as the pathfinding manager tried to process them all. Now, I'm processing pathfinding requests one at a time, and I prioritize closest move targets first. The request also checks to see how long it's taking and it will delay a frame (to let other processes continue), then continue on in the next frame. The downside to this change is that you might see a settler standing there waiting for a path to be found, usually if the path end point is extremely far away. I was playing with some pretty big populations and I didn't notice any serious delays in pathfinding. In fact, I think this system responds faster because I'm delaying using the ms process time instead of the number of iterations a pathfinding process goes through. Of course, any time I touch the pathfinding, there's the chance I've inadvertently broken something else, so do let me know if your people just never move at all.



You'll notice now that containers can hold more and that some of them have special permissions. Bins, for example, can only hold seeds and resources, but they can hold up to 150 items. Whereas, crates, can hold any item category, but only up to 75 items. Chests will also hold way more to make up for their cost to build. Lastly, there's a new item category, Books, so you can hold tomes and spellbooks in bookcases.







I've added some extra info to tooltips to show what sorts of benefits blueprints provide. Things like movement speed bonuses, container size/permissions, and decay buffs will now be shown. Oh! And you will now see prop requirements for room tooltips.


There are quite a few fixes in here too. Take a look!
-Entity attributes are now update at 5 minute intervals instead of 1 minute intervals.
-Entity attribute updates are now staggered so that not all entities get hungry all at once.
-Fixed a pathing bug that could cause entities to become stuck.
-Added some prop information to the room tooltips.
-Fixed a bug where entities were getting stuck in an equip item loop.
-Entities that cannot equip items will not longer have uniforms auto created. This should keep cows and chickens from having individual uniforms.
-Fixed a bug where entity intelligence type wasn't being set on load.
-Increased storage capacity for all containers.
-Added item category restrictions to certain containers. The trade off is that a container might hold more, but only be able to hold resources, and seeds. i.e., the Wood/Stone Bin.
-Added an item category for books.
-The bookcase can now hold books.
-Added more info to various tooltips.
-Improved pathfinding performance for larger populations.
-The clay roof is now unlocked with The Basics research.
-Fixed a bug where entities could get stuck in the mating state if they weren't in the same pathing room.
-Fixed a couple places where entities tried to start pathfinding to inaccessible areas.
-Fixed a bug where mating entities could get stuck in infinite move loops as they tried to move to the point the other entity was at simultaneously.
-Search input will now only affect the focused window at the time of search start. This is to avoid windows changing the selected target unintentionally. For example, using search to filter items in the inventory window, then dragging an item onto a uniform, only to have the uniform window change which uniform is selected because of search input.
-Settler search is now more accurate for name searching.
-Fixed an issue where some items would not be removed from rooms that didn't permit them.


This is the home stretch to get 0.10 out of beta and into the main branch. There are still a few behavior bugs and tuning things I need to address, but I also need to re-enable several scenarios. Once those things are done, the game should be stable and ready to go to mainline. I'm aiming for no later than the 20th!

That's all for now. Thanks and have a great day!

Waylon

Hello!

This is a smaller update to fix up some issues that were reported over the weekend.

-Fixed a bug that would cause loading a game to get hung up on, 'Generating World.'
-Fixed a bug where entities weren't starting jobs.
-Ancients now start with Arcane Dust.
-Fixed a bug where Void Crystals required the conjuring skill to build.
-Entities will now eat/drink at 50% (if they can). Additionally, entities will not take damage if they are on their way to eat/drink and are starving/dehydrating.
-Fixed a bug where the wood gate wouldn't open/close.
-Fixed a bug where removing a blueprint would leave ambient shadows on textures.
-Cutting grass should drop at least 1 plant fiber now.
-Holding alt will now place a new room instead of holding control. This is to avoid conflicts with the border select only hotkey.
-Added min/max temp and min skylight to plant tooltips.
-Fixed a bug where plants could grow underground. Mushrooms can still grow underground as they don't need light.
-Fixed a bug where saplings couldn't grow in cold weather.
-Fixed a bug where search lists would lose the search filter if the mouse left the window.
-Fixed a bug where the last toolbar selection wasn't re-selected when the toolbar re-opens if the toolbar was closed with the ESC key.
-Roofs and floors are now easier to build.
-Fixed a bug where a job wouldn't start if its prerequisite job wasn't the same priority.
-Fixed a bug where uniform items weren't being equipped.
-Fixed a bug where trees weren't spawning after the sapling matures.

Thanks,

Waylon