Beasts of Bermuda News

Sorry for the delay the last few days regarding the mini patches, for those curious, they were attempts to fix the crashes.
We're deploying another patch that was previously supposed to be another crash fix, but we ended up adding several bug fixes and balance changes to the patch as well.
Here are the notes:

Added Skins:
-Blue Whale Elasmo by BananaBae & Mugman
-Death Mosa by Misha & BananaBae (redone files hopefully don't cause crashes like before)
-Bearded Mosa by TwilightWolf

+Players of different species can no longer gain friendship grades beyond C
+Increased time values to obtain all friendship grades, with the higher friendship grades now taking substantially longer
+Asphyxiation now causes you to subtract a percentage of the other player's breath bar, rather than a fixed value.
+Significantly reduced the time requirements to acquire enemy status with other, nearby players that induce stress
-This is to combat mixed packing issues we've seen on some of our servers
+Reduced the amount of speed the Swift Flippered talent grants to improving Kronosaurus' lunge.
+Kronosaurus lunge now consumes both stamina and ability power, with the stamina consumption equating to 50% of the ability power consumption
+Mosasaurus swimming walk speed is now 800, down from 900
+Elasmosaurus swimming sprint speed is now 1750, up from 1700
+Elasmosaurus swimming walk speed is now 800, up from 700
+Split the "Aqua Affinity" talent into two separate talents, one for terrestrials and one for aquatics. The aquatic version has weaker modifiers.
+Elasmosaurus now increases both speed and stamina past growth 1.0, at a rate of 0.25% per 1% growth.
+Friendly Fire reduction from B, A, and S grade friendships now only apply while in a group
+Maybe fixed: Mosasaurus can no longer, occasionally, instantly kill other players with fall damage by grabbing them under some conditions
+Increased Parasaurolophus growth speed by 25% below Elder
+Swapped the location of Pressure and Weather Resistance on the Ichthy talent tree
+Fixed: Breath bar timers now continue to function beyond 300 seconds
+Fixed: Players of the same species now properly accrue negative friendship points while near one another, if either is a carnivore.
+Fixed: Talents such as Keen Senses should no longer occasionally appear on juveniles that should not have these talents
+Fixed: You can no longer get fat from the Fleshgrazer talent, greatly hindering Velociraptor combat
+Fixed: Being overweight now properly visibly scales the creature mesh in the lateral direction

NEW
+Added Glimmer Mosasaurus by Soals - for Menacing Mosasaurus donors
+Added Speckled Elasmo by Twilightwolf
+Added Seawolf Mosa by Twilightwolf
+Added Kingfisher Acro by Twilightwolf
-Removed Abyssal because it was the same as Orka.
-Removed Gazelle because we have Gazelle V2 (renamed GazelleV2 to just Gazelle).
-Made Krono's Mouth recolorable.
+Various fixes on Rival Shores
+Work on some islands on Rival Shores
+Added a new config variable, GlobalCarcassSizeModifier, which multiplies randomly spawned carcass sizes
+AP Optimizations / Jungle improvements

BUG FIXES
+Fixed: Bruiser now properly deals injury damage on tail hits when the player has taken 3 talent points
+Fixed: Elusiveness now works regardless of net relevance when the ability is activated
+Fixed: Lightning no longer can kill players who have 3/3 weather resistance
+Fixed: Ability power now increases properly past elder for certain animals
+Fixed: Fish hitboxes should now be much more generous
+Fixed: Caves not being climbable by velociraptor
+Fixed: Lighting in caves being pitch black.
+Fixed: Lighting should now work properly on Forest Island and Rival Shores
+Fixed: Rocks and terrain mesh should now be climbable on Rival Shores
+Fixed: Elasmo can no longer spam LMB to attack between attacks
+Fixed: Ability and stamina are no longer consumed upon failure to lay a nest due to terrain slope
+Fixed: The server should no longer crash due to group-related issues
+Fixed: Bleed now properly reduces when players have friendship-based friendly-fire reductions
+Fixed: Group invites should now work for players who are not net relevant to one another
+Fixed: Asphyxiation now works properly
+Fixed: The Swim Speed Increase talent now properly mitigates against thalassophobia comfort loss
+Fixed: Secondary attacks now subtract air from aquatics
+Fixed: Lurdu, Para, and Apato can no longer stomp while grabbed by a Mosasaurus
+Fixed: Rain particle effects now properly attenuate while inside
+Fixed: Nests now properly have twigs
+Fixed: Creatures no longer grow while on the dino selection screen
+Fixed the extra color boxes that were appearing for some skins on acros customization screen.
+Fixed: The probability function for generating egg damage while stressed and gestating now works properly
+Fixed: The GlobalCarcassSpawnRateModifier variable now works properly

GAMEPLAY BALANCE
+The talent Comfort Increase now improves comfort by 5%, 10%, and 15%, up from 3.3%, 6.7%, and 10%
+The talent Damage Increase now improves damage dealing capablities by 6%, 13%, and 20% at talent levels 1, 2, and 3, down from 10%, 20%, and 30%
+The talent Health Pool Increase now improves maximum health by 6%, 13%, and 20% at talent levels 1, 2, and 3, down from 10%, 20%, and 35%
+The talent Speed Increase now improves sprint speed by 5%, 10%, and 16% at talent levels 1, 2, and 3, up from 4%, 8%, and 13%
+Velociraptor now has Flesh Grazer in place of Bruiser as its tier 5 talent
+Reduced the foliage grade on large seaweed such that juvenile lurdus can eat them, but increased their spawn timer
+Performing attacks while underwater now subtracts from your oxygen bar at a rate of 0.25 seconds of air per ability power spent
-The Breath Bar Increase talent reduces the oxygen spent while attacking underwater
+You can no longer attack underwater while out of breath
+Lurdusaurus now consumes 19 ability and stamina when darting, up from 14
+Lurdusaurus now consumes 19 air when darting, up from 0
+Ichthyovenator now consumes 14 air when darting, up from 0
+Lurdusaurus stationary turn rate is now 110, up from 100
+Lurdusaurus sprinting turn rate is now 80, up from 75
+Lurdusaurus swim sprint speed is now 850, up from 800
+Animal locomotion speeds while swimming now behave differently
+Aquatics now have significantly more stamina in hatchling, juvenile, and subadult forms, and no longer continue to gain stamina past adulthood
-As a fresh spawn, you now have 50% more stamina than adults of your species
-This change was to give young aquatics a better chance at evading predation from larger ones
+Aquatics now move more quickly while in the juvenile and subadult growth stages than before
+Aquatics now gain ability power as they grow past adulthood at a rate of +0.25% per 1% growth
-Screenshots by Soals-

screenshot courtesy of Mr.Beardie.

Greetings, beasts! This patch changes Unreal Engine's version, expect a big download, up to almost the entirety of the game's files.

Major Changes from Unreal Engine migration from 4.18 to 4.21

• Net code was reworked to support larger player counts, which was done to accomodate their game "Fortnite". However we are still looking into these changes. It will allow us to replicate more actors, therefore opening the doors for a more dynamic environment.
  
• Lighting is now handled physically
  
• Various optimizations to character movement and movement replication
  
• and a lot more. See UE's patch notes 4.19,4.20 and 4.21 for the details.
  All in all, we are hoping this will improve the overall server's performance when the population gets high, that would mean less lag, and less rubberbanding.
  

NEW CONTENT

progression has been a little slow for the past few weeks, there are several reasons for this.

• We've been in the tedious process of upgrading our engine from Unreal 4.18 to Unreal 4.21, and testing the implemented mechanics during the process to make sure things work like they should / better. After discussing with other friend developers, they recommended us to upgrade, as Epic Games updated their entire Net Code (server/client related) to support their game "Fortnite", along with several other things. Furthermore, that's admittedly something we should have done sooner.
  
  
• We're hoping this will address lag-related issues from collision updates, server-side, that's been the majority of the lag source: server ticking slowly for large player counts due to updating every player's collisions.
  
  
• We're adding a first pass on the aquatic live birth - that means no more "nest" required to nest as aquatics.
  
  
• We've re-coded several things related to players and creatures, removing code that was added between the acro patch, which was crash-less, and the egg thief patch, which introduced the crashes. This code could potentially have been the source of the occasional server crashes when players log out. This is the kind of problem we're pretty much unable to test outside of the public branch, despite our efforts at trying to reproduce it with our testers.
  
  
• Along with this, game's lighting is being revisited with the new engine's version, and is a first pass for the process of upgrading our creature's shaders, and the overall look of the game. This, of course, will come in due time and improved through several future patches.
  
  
• Thanks to resources we did not have before the game's Early Access release, we're looking into talents to help work on mostly animations. Once we are in contact with artists capable of pulling off the quality we're looking into, we'll be updating/doing proper animations for most of the new creatures (acro, megalo, para, pachy, orycto, krono... And any other new creature model requiring an update), along with various texture and/or model updates.
  
  
• Pteranodon will be fully recoded soon, with fresh, pure c++ code. Should run faster, and work better. We're very aware of its current issues!
  

We believe to have found a resolution to the server crashes that have been plaguing the game for the past week or so. It took us a while to track it down, but we have a patch ready to deploy that should fix the issue. It also has a few other minor things in it too.

+Hopefully Fixed: The crash problem occasionally happening upon a player's death, which has been a major nuisance
+Fixed: Steamauth called twice when a player leaves the game, instead of once.
+The eggs now make cute peep sounds when you press vocal keys
+Misc fixes on AP / FI
+Minor optimizations for server performance
+Fixed: Favorited servers / servers with a creature will now save properly.
+Fixed: It should no longer be possible to bite, sit up, etc, while chatting.
+Replaced the megalosaurus run, and all sit and laying animations
Short and to the point. Elasmo will probably be coming out this week.