WolfQuest: Anniversary Edition News

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!

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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.

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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!

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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).

The upcoming Slough Creek episode (in WQ: Anniversary Edition) will offer a variety of dens for player to choose from, from holes in the ground to tree root hollows to the topic of today’s devblog: rock dens. Drawing inspiration from wolf den camera footage from the Voyageurs Wolf Project* in northern Minnesota, I tried to create such a den for the game. So yes, this video is for those players who have requested a live feed of Dave working…..but for the sake of everyone else out there, most of the video is sped up 2500x.

Each den can take an hour or two to set up (not counting time spent later to tweak it, since it’s never satisfactory when I take another look later). We’re planning to have a lot more dens in the new Slough Creek map than in were WolfQuest 2.7. Not yet decided how many, but there will plenty to choose from. (And how will you find and choose them? Stay tuned!)

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* Check out Voyageurs Wolf Project for lots of great video and research about wolves.
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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).

In today’s patch, we’ve put Floppy back in her enclosure. In the last patch, she decided to disobey the StayHome directives and has been wandering the hills of Lost River for a few days, but for everyone’s safety, we’ve put her back where she belongs.

But where did Floppy come from? In the game scenario, that’s something for wolves to wonder about. In the development of the game, that dates back to 2016, when we added moose to WQ 2.7. Today’s video tells the tale, but in short: it’s a feature, not a bug!

https://youtu.be/35XlTdxTtXc

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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).