WolfQuest: Anniversary Edition News

[h3]IMPROVEMENTS[/h3]
* New physics system to improve collisions for player-wolf and NPC animals. This should eliminate major problems like getting stuck in tight spots, and overall should be a much more robust system for rocks, cars, stairs, etc. Player-wolf also now slides around small obstacles like trees.
* Lost River: Dispersal wolves come from various packs specific to the area, instead of from packs around Amethyst Mountain.
* Adjusted lighting in main menu to match Amethyst and Lost River lighting (it previously had lower ambient lighting, making it harder to see wolf eye color)
* Adjusted sunlight in deep winter to be whiter, less yellow, for a better wintertime feel.
* Some refinements to snow-dust kicked up by running animals.
* Meat chunks now glow in scent view.
* Tweaks to Amethyst pond water colors.
* Added some notes to Game Settings: Graphics panel.

[h3]BUGS FIXED[/h3]
* POSSIBLY FIXED: Ungulates and foxes occasionally grow to enormous sizes.
* Unable to bite elk calves in deep winter season.
* Eagles that should be on dead trees branches instead spawn on the ground below.
* Can get stuck in objects after you bite another animal.
* If you rename your mate, their scent readout doesn't show new name until you load a saved game.
* Bull moose carcass lacks antlers.
* Occasionally wolf howl has no audio if howling right after another wolf howls.
* Carcasses don't turn gory until you've eaten a fair amount.
* Occasionally the fur texture breaks, and the animal skin is smooth and shiny. (Generally when switching between scent/headcam and/or photo mode).
* Some placeholder terms displayed in Game Help entries.
* Occasionally vegetation appears in front of dream images.
* Sometimes some animals and carcasses don't have a scent-color in scent view.
* Sometimes carcasses are invisible in scent view.
* Sometimes early morning fog in the Lamar Valley forms too quickly.
* Emote menu can be enabled while sleeping.
* Minor music glitches.
* Cougar walks on water, fights in water.
* Mismatched cliff meshes on Basic graphics mode.
* Wolf walking issues (audio too fast, tail too impatient)
* NPC animals get stuck at top of Two Step falls.
* Wolf doesn't play swimming animation sometimes when in water.
* Refinements to water effects on Lost River creek.
* Audio issues with upper Chalcedony creek.
* Lost River: Elk can sometimes spawn inside Floppy's enclosure.
* Lost River collider tweaks: Walkway on big gas tanks, police car, behind yellow trailer, many others.
* Lost River: Trees growing out of houses.

[h3]To get the beta build:[/h3]
1) In the Steam app, go to your Library, then right-click on the WolfQuest: AE name in the left column and choose Properties.
2) Then go to the Betas tab and select the WQ current Beta option in the pulldown. No password is necessary. Steam should then start downloading it. Later you can switch back to the public version in that Betas tab, by selecting NONE in that pulldown.
* Lost River: Glass in claw machine doesn't respect fog.
* Lost River: Mate glitches when player is on one of the fuel tanks.

Which of these pack names are your favorites? Pick up to a half dozen or so from the list of finalists...

We are asking for player input for some new pack names for Lost River's stranger wolves. See last week's video to learn more: "Name the Lost River Packs (and updates)"

Thank you to everyone for your suggestions. So many great ideas!

Here are the finalists:

Back Forty Pack
Calamity Pack
Delta Pack
Desolation Pack
Eclipse Pack
Elements Pack
Ghost Pack
Persistence Pack
Renegade Pack
Requiem Pack
Salvage Pack
Shadow Pack
Solace Pack
Stardust Pack
Stargazer Pack
Stormcloud Pack
Tumbleweed Pack
Windstorm Pack

We’re looking for your ideas! One of our longtime players (DinoDogDude209) pointed out that the dispersal wolves that you meet in Lost River come from the same packs as those you meet in Amethyst Mountain — which doesn’t really make sense, since Lost River is quite some distance (nobody knows just what distance) from Yellowstone. Changing that so Lost River can have its own set of packs for dispersals was quick and easy — but then came the hard part: What should those packs be named? We’d love to get suggestions from players for those packs. What would be suitable names for wolf packs from this area? They could be geographic (like most packs in Yellowstone), but some might have more….creative…names that fit the strange place that is Lost River. So if you have an idea, post it below!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

In other news:

We’ve got a good number of new players in the past month — welcome! If you need help about gameplay, be sure to check the “Game Help” material (via the button in the Pause Menu), which you can also access on the WolfQuest website here: https://support.wolfquest.org/help/wolfquest-anniversary-edition-gameplay-tips. Plus lots of technical support in that knowledge base as well. And JayPlays has produced several “tips and tactics” videos which area chock-full of good suggestions to improve your game.

We’ll have the next patch coming out soon, which includes a lot of small and a few bigger bugfixes, plus a new physics and collision system — our lead developer Tommi has redesigned and rebuilt this to better handle the odd objects in Lost River, and particularly the complex rocky outcrops that’ll be in Slough Creek. Of course, some bugs are inevitable in such an underataking, and you can enjoy one captured on video by our beta tester Sass at the end of today’s devblog.

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We have released the first episode of WolfQuest 3: Anniversary Edition (Amethyst Mountain) for PC/Mac on Steam and itch.io, as Early Access. While in Early Access, we are updating the game frequently with more features, multiplayer, and ultimately the Slough Creek episode with pups. The mobile version will come after the game is completed on PC/Mac platforms. We’ll then resume development of the next episode, Tower Fall (DLC).

It's time for the monthly contest to win a free copy of WolfQuest! Lucky winners will receive a free copy of WolfQuest 2.7 (and PC/Mac users will also get WolfQuest: Anniversary Edition Early Access for PC and Mac)! Winners can choose to get any version of the game (Mac/Windows, Android, iOS, Kindle). Or you can also choose the WolfQuest Soundtrack and Music Extras if you already own the game.

[h2]This Month's Contest[/h2]
Email your username and your answer to the question: "What are three interesting facts about wolves?" to [email protected]

[h2]Deadline[/h2]
All entries must be received by midnight (Eastern Daylight Time) on Wednesday, April 22, 2020.

[h2]Random Drawing[/h2]
Winners are selected randomly from complete entries. Please enter only once in each monthly contest. Each complete entry will be assigned a number. We will then use a random-number generator to generate three numbers. The entries bearing those numbers will each win a free copy of the game.

We are making good progress with multiplayer. Today’s video features snippets from the dev team’s test session this week, which shows both overall progress and some new bugs arising from parallel development of a new physics/collision system by Tommi and Mikko’s work on multiplayer movement.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

I asked Mikko to summarize some of the core challenges in WolfQuest multiplayer development. Here are his thoughts:

"An unfortunate fact of multiplayer games is that due to network latency things can never be synced quite perfectly. It gets worse the faster motion and more sudden changes there are. My principle here is that appearance is more important than accuracy to an extent. That's why I developed the movement algorithm which, while not 100% accurate, attempts to produce pleasantly smooth movement paths for animals. I prefer syncing things at a higher level, because knowing the intent of an action in advance makes it easier to reproduce the same action on other clients.

"That movement algorithm is probably he largest single piece of work in WQ multiplayer so far. I guess another challenge which is constantly present (to my detail-oriented brain at least) is various performance aspects. C# does a good job of hiding memory management, but unfortunately it also hides the costs incurred by it. Various APIs like BitConverter will happily return dynamically allocated arrays without concern for performance. Closures are another thing where it's easy to accidentally allocate memory. Not to mention various Unity APIs - did you know that the Vector3.zero property creates a new Vector3 every time it's called?

"One multiplayer-specific thing is making sure that things get synced in the right order. Animals need to have a flock, so the spawn event for the flock should be sent before that of the animal. Carcasses need some data from the origin animal, so the spawn of the carcass needs to be sent before the despawn of the animal. When a new player joins the game, care needs to be taken that various events regarding pre-existing objects are sent exactly once. That last one still needs a bit of tuning; if there are already at least two players in the game and another one joins they will get a duplicate spawn message for their own wolf (but the duplicate gets safely ignored, so it's mostly just an annoyance for me).

"And then there's the actions which require some kind of confirmation from the other party. Like picking up a chunk from a carcass needs a request to the host to spawn the chunk. The existing code expects that it can get a result immediately, and at least in the chunk-spawning case there's no suitable special value to indicate that it's not yet ready. So I created a network future system where a request is sent over the network and a future object is returned which encapsulates the result together with the readiness state. The caller can then poll that object for readiness and continue with the operation once the result is available."

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While MIkko works on multiplayer, Tommi is focusing on Slough Creek, so we’re making progress on both simultaneously. Which will be released first? Whichever one is ready first!

______________
We have released the first episode of WolfQuest 3: Anniversary Edition (Amethyst Mountain) for PC/Mac on Steam and itch.io, as Early Access. While in Early Access, we are updating the game frequently with more features, multiplayer, and ultimately the Slough Creek episode with pups. The mobile version will come after the game is completed on PC/Mac platforms. We’ll then resume development of the next episode, Tower Fall (DLC).