Odd Realm News

Hey everyone!

Now that I'm moved and all that is out of the way, I've been working hard to wrap up the rest of this next update. It's coming along super well. As per usual, I don't want to promise any dates, but I'm feeling great about almost being done.

Currently, I'm rounding out the tech tree which is new in this update. I'm adding in a bunch of new weapons, tools, and gear which you can unlock. Plus some you'd find from events.



You can look forward to some new projectiles like spears, bolas, rocks, and so on. I never had these before because I had no 'throw' animation. Only a bow firing one. The throw animation lets me add in a lot more projectile options for obvious reasons, so that's fun. I'm also adding in more options for the Ancients, such as Summons. I'll keep those under my hat until the update is ready.

I've also been reading a bunch of feedback and suggestions so you'll see some quality of life additions. Namely, I've added the ability to click items in the top stats bar. This will take you to the respective world point. i.e., clicking the idle settlers count will iterate through them. Clicking on raw food will do the same for items. When you're taken to a settler it selects them and follows them, and, for items, I have a highlight effect to indicate the point as it's hard to tell otherwise.



As well, I've made a change so that the stats which you manually track show up on the top stats bar as well. You can right click them here to untrack them or left click to have them go to the next iteration point.



Within each toolbar menu, I've added a toggleable list panel to show: active jobs, auto jobs, active zones, and active rooms. Active jobs let you remove jobs or go to their positions (much like the top stats bar would). Auto jobs let you see jobs which the game will automatically create for you (like harvesting mature plants) and you can toggle these if you prefer to assign them manually. Active zones are pretty much the same as active jobs. Active rooms show you which rooms are placed, their state (empty, needs requirements, full, etc) and also provide an easy way to select that room to add more points to it or just open it's management screen. All these lists don't have to be open but are there if you want to see that stuff.



Lastly, I've added an overlay panel where item tracking used to be. This is where you'd enable/disable visual settings for temperature, block counts, rendering the current layer only, highlighting settlers, and so on.



Alright, time to get back to it. I genuinely hope everyone has a fantastic holidays and stays safe.

Best,

Waylon

Hey friends!

Quick post to let you know I've put out a hotfix to the game. I noticed some load issues and wanted to put out a small update to address these. Here are the notes for it:

• Enabled additional error printing in the Player.log file.
  
• Fixed a bug where loading the game could sometimes get stuck in winter.
  
• Fixed a bug where the resolutions list wasn't showing options lower than 800 width. 768 should now be the lowest option to support the game's lowest resolution of 1200x768.
  
• Fixed a bug where players weren't able to mine upwards.
  
• Fixed a bug where certain blocks weren't being deconstructed by the clear/remove job and would then cause the block to not be assigned any clear/remove job again.
  
• Added additional text for the initial game boot to indicate loading. Some expressed that they thought the game was stuck here because it shows just a black screen.
  

Thanks and have a nice remainder of your week!

Waylon

Hey folks!

Hope you are all doing spectacularly!

I'm still trucking along on this update and I'm starting to get close to a beta build candidate.

This month I finished up the core system improvements I mentioned in the last post. That was a real slog but hugely improved performance and I'm happy with the state it's in.

I had to take last week to fix up the tooltips in the game because they were driving me nuts. They had lots of weird positioning bugs and the under-the-hood way they updated was super confusing. I also wanted to do a pass on the entity tooltip as I have always felt it was poorly done. This is the expanded version (holding ctrl) of the entity tooltip:



And collapsed (hovering over a target entity):


As you can see, it's much more organized but there are a few additional elements. Namely, the player can see an entity's equipment now. I've also moved all the command options over to here (you see them when an entity is selected).

Tooltips now support multiple targets, meaning you can have an entity selected but also see the block your cursor is over. Whereas, before, you'd only see the entity.

I spent some time unifying the overlays for jobs, zones, etc. Plus, the overlay is way clearer regarding whether blocks are in the air, an obstruction, covered, etc.



You'll also notice I've re-organized the hud. The toolbar has been moved over to the right and merged with the overlay window button panel. I've gotten rid of the utilities toolbar menu, and all utilities can now be accessed from that bottom right bar. This takes one click step out of accessing them. Plus they now have their own hotkeys.



All the toolbar menus (i.e., jobs, blueprints, plants, zones, rooms) have access to the search panel. So you can now use SHIFT+'Char' to narrow down the buttons there. Players can also now click the search panel to enter search text rather than holding shift.

I've updated the hotkey settings to allow for modifier keys to be used (as well as fixed a ton of hotkey related bugs). So, now players can change opening the job menu to SHIFT+J or whatever hotkeys they choose. I still have to make mouse hotkeys editable! One day, I swear! xD

With the vast majority of system and UI fixes/changes/additions out of the way, I can finally finish up adding the new content I was working on. i.e., new capture props (cages and such), weapons, gear, etc.

OH, I also found a new place to live and am moving at the end of the month. With that also out of the way I can get back to my regular work schedule. This last month has been really tough to get a lot of work done due to that and current world events. So, thanks for all the kind words and patience.

Take care and stay safe,

Waylon

Hey Odd Realm crew!

This will be a VERY short dev log as I don't have a ton of new things to show off but I wanted to touch base so you know I'm still working away.

Let me take a sec to thank you all for your patience and trust in me. I know this update is taking a long time to put out there. I'm working on things which are complicated and difficult to wrap up and it feels like cutting one's lawn with scissors. However, I am getting closer each day. Also, I'm in the middle of looking for somewhere else to live and that takes up a lot of my attention. But thanks so much for supporting me and the game and being a wonderful community.

As for what I'm working on, I'm still closing out the tasks which I mentioned in the last dev log but I also overhauled a lot of the job systems and world rendering engine. I did this because of some serious behaviour bugs that would appear but also because there was a pretty serious lag when changing layers, panning around the map, and changing the zoom. This lag is gone and the game will now efficiently render the entire world without having to do magic tricks such as hiding offloaded terrain with distance fog. This means players can completely remove the distance fog effect if they wish. I know some people don't like it, so there you go. Otherwise, you can change the distance to your personal taste.

There's lots of other tech changes and improvements I've made which will benefit the game in the long run and I want to stress how important this update will be for reducing implementation time for future updates. Specifically the next Ardyn update. :)

Alright, back to work for me. Thanks again and I hope you are all happy and healthy.

Waylon

Hi friends!

This post will not be that interesting as I'm in the middle of a huuuuuuuge systems overhaul/upgrade and will mostly be about that. Before I get into it, I do want to say thanks for all your patience. Unfortunately, this update has been one which has had a million cascading tasks and is taking me a very long time to complete. I do appreciate all the support, feedback, and kind words. Keeps me going! Ok, enough sap from me. xD

Overhaul and improvements! Essentially, I'm extracting a very old system for entities called, 'behaviours'. It's a system which tries to dictate entity actions whilst also being a sort of status effect tracker and it's incredibly ugly. It causes a ton of weird--heh--behaviours in the game which often conflict with the entity state machine and so on. I won't get into too much of the tech details here because it just won't make sense without me walking through the code. However, the solution I'm putting in place is much cleaner and is only a slight detour from work on the update.

One lovely addition/change that's related to this is that many behaviours now appear as jobs on the map. Whereas, before, they were actions taking place without any feedback whatsoever. A great example is item movement. Now, you'll actually see jobs on items that indicate that they are going to be moved and which settler is doing so. These are 'auto jobs' much like the ones created by the farm room. Not only does this clearly communicate the actions of entities, but also gives players the ability to prioritize jobs--and keep them from being done at all if that is the desire (setting the priority to 0). The job may say something like, 'incorrect zone,' meaning the item is going to be removed from the zone it's in and moved to the correct one. I've added this level of communication to a lot of other entity actions so the player knows exactly what is taking place. i.e., sleeping, mating (wink wink), eating, drinking, putting out fires, etc.

Aside from that rabbit hole of work, I continued to improve the room management flow (this is taken directly from the discord #upcoming channel):

Room TLDR; It's super easy to select/add-to/remove rooms now and they can span multiple z levels OR be placed by another room of the same type.


(The above gif is me placing two new rooms [left-click]+[shift], then selecting the first [right-click]+[shift], adding tiles to it [left-click], selecting the second room [right-click]+[shift], adding tiles to it [left-click].)

Changed the editing of rooms so the same type can be side-by-side and one room can now span multiple z levels. Editing/placing rooms has been streamlined as well. You can easily select a room without using the room list with [shift] + [right-click]. Creating a brand new room, separate from the select room can be done with [shift] + [left-click] or by selecting a new room from the toolbar.
Additionally, players will no longer lose their room names just be adding/removing points.
There's a lot of transferable functionality here that I'm going to use in the future for zones. I want to update the zone system to work more like rooms. So that players can easily designate items, copy old zone groups, and edit at a larger scale. But I'll save that for the update after this one.


(Some quick selecting of rooms with [right-click]+[shift].)

Anyway, hopefully that gives you a good idea of what I'm up to.

Hope you are all well!

Thanks!

Waylon