DevBlog #74

Filipe - Lead Programmer

Outside of implementing the last of oviraptor and trying to resolve the remaining few of its bugs, this month was almost entirely focused on fixing issues found in HordeTest. Some standout issues that had to be fixed were zones breaking when toggling to individual or species migrations, icons not showing correctly for migration area types, plants sometimes spawning inside one another and food would on a few occasions respawn when it was not supposed to (which was related to the coconuts not respawning at all). Also fixed some nutrient issues when inside or outside a migration zone.

More work was done with the entomb character saving to fix persistence issues with skins and prime growth scales. Adjusted eggs to be only eaten if dino is an egg eater (only oviraptor for now). Also fixed some hatchling interaction issues and female-only mutations being inherited by males. Last is the work done for footstep sounds and VFX transitioning seamlessly based on size and weight is done. Now we are moving that tech to update the slide and hillslides, with the inclusion of snow surface type. See you!

Ariel - Programmer

This month I was mostly looking at oviraptor and fixing issues for the hordetest. Unfortunately not much to talk about for a lot of it. There was the implementation of the oviraptor dodge and then a small update to the speed calculations for it to make it work properly for all growth stages. The tenontosaurus hillslide was one of the rare instances of something that worked in editor, but always broke in builds. It took some time to track down but it is resolved now. There were also changes needed for migrations and other locations with scent, which now actively update on the compass without players having to repeatedly scent for updates.

Amarok - Programmer

I’ve been busy on bugfixes and working on a few new tools for the team. A lot has been done with water. I created a new tiling system for the lakes and oceans to make them easier to work with and it also tremendously cut down on rendering. It also has inclusion/exclusion volumes to make sure water that may be inside of a cave or structure doesn’t get ignored.

Sounds should now accurately change when your camera moves above or below the water’s surface. Also, water volumes have had their blends updated where they meet one another to have a natural transition Pickup for schooling and elite fish should now be fixed (occasionally they didn't register on the first try). Schooling fish were occasionally deciding they could fly. Their pilot license has been revoked: schools now stay in the water where they belong.

I’ve continued building out the AI nesting system. AI pairs will now construct nests, lay eggs, raise their young, and actively defend their mate/nest/hatchlings from threats. The hatchlings themselves experience hunger and thirst, begging their parents for food and being guided to nearby water sources. But there is also a chance for abandoned nests to spawn that may still have eggs in them. Good news for any lucky egg thieves.

Arborburst tree tests were created and placed in the world to make sure they could save and render consistently. They are built from different pieces, where the trunk is given anchor points and rules for scale/size/rotation/offsets, and scale consistently with one another so they can be painted down by hand or generated without repeating the same look or killing performance.

I cleaned up some problems with cycling between interaction targets that would occasionally get ignored by the server. There’s been general improvements and responsiveness to how interactions pick/line up with targets and should be much smoother moving forward. Small final mention is I’ve added a way to switch tree destruction on and off per server.

VisualTech48 - Environment Artist

This month has almost solely been taken by the largest transit truck. It’s a massive vehicle with its accompanying trailer, that will be the hallmark of how everything across the island was transported. Yes, upwards to the largest cages as well.

Getting this from concept into a proper 3D model was quite a challenge, especially with its size. There was a lot of pre-planning to ensure it is as optimized as it could be during the low poly and texturing phase. A lot of stuff is standardized and reused as much as possible without sacrificing any of the fidelity or parts of the truck that need to still be unique.

I’m at the texturing stage which is the biggest hurdle. The UV-s and the planning of materials is done, so what's left is to fix any issues I find with those, texture it, and then make sure it's game-ready with collision.

Considering its size, this semi-truck won’t be drivable (we have some coming to remedy that), but with how players often do the unintended, I’ve made sure that mechanically the transit truck makes as much sense as you’d want in game, from suspension to gearbox, differential, etc…

Here are some screenshots of the process:

And for the finale, the UV map, carefully assembled, and reused as much as possible:

Oh and besides the truck, I made a parachute!

See you next month!

Tapwing - 2D Artist

Now that we’ve gotten a good baseline down for colour palettes among our current roster, I’ve had the chance to do a little work on skin concepts again since we’ve recently gotten some flexibility back into the kind of skins we can make. You’ll get to see more of the new “simple” skins and other old favourites make their way into the roster.

Besides skins, I get to create additional variations of our ‘Isle’ skull logo! The end goal being to have a themed design for each of our playable creatures. This of course comes with its own challenges, particularly when it comes to dinosaurs with very similar skull shapes. For instance, how do you make Kentro and Stego’s shapes unique when they have arguably the same skull?

Most times I’ll draft multiple versions of the themed logo; side facing, forward facing, finding a way to incorporate other parts of the animal’s body or abstract amalgamations of the animal’s defining features without letting the design get too busy, while also keeping to the overarching theme of the original T-rex logo; the spear, the skull and that nice grungy landscape element that ties everything together.

Wedge - Sound Designer

The other members of the audio team have been making consistent progress on Avaceratops vocal sounds as we move towards completion. For me, it's been a month of improvements and housekeeping. I have meticulously gone through our entire suite of dinosaur vocal sounds, overhauling the older vocals from sound cues to metasounds in preparation to introduce an attenuation system that is more robust and adaptive. This change includes more control on how attenuation scales over growth, an introduction of further attenuations for non-call vocal sounds & improved listener focus; meaning it will now be easier to identify when a vocal sound is coming from behind, below or above you.

Idles, breaths and passive vocals will maintain a very tight attenuation as not to involuntarily give your position away whilst maintaining the level of detail they provide. However you will now have to be much more conscious about the vocalisations you produce when attacking or being attacked as well as other mechanics such as courting as you are now more likely to be heard by either friend and foe. Consequently this will procedurally add more life to The Isle with more sounds carrying further and going through our new spatial processing effects to blend with the ambience.

I have also been testing out a new audio debugging tool created by Amarok which has been incredibly useful for testing these attenuations and will help us identify issues with sounds much more easily and quickly in the future. We have identified the cause of the audio stutter which now has been fixed alongside a bunch of other audio bugs.

Director’s Commentary - While we believe the audio bug to be fixed, my paranoia reigns supreme. You’re approved for causing a ruckus once per Hordetest build if the audio bug isn’t resolved just so you know I’ve seen it and am aware.

hypno - QA Lead

As we’re nearing our release of oviraptor, a large focus for this month has been prioritising both client and server performance. We’ve identified a lot of the issues, including some weird quirks like a rare pterodactylus spawning that would completely pause the game for a few seconds for some users. This is, of course, an ever ongoing effort and there’s still plenty of work to be done in that regard to make sure everything is running as smoothly as possible.

An area that’s received a lot of focus recently is our sounds in-game. As changes to these systems have occurred, so has the introduction of new issues with them. We’re very much aware of the audio stuttering problems that have been happening on hordetest and it is currently one of our highest priorities to troubleshoot and fix before we can release this update.

Director’s Commentary - Just posting for clarity. The above post from Wedge does talk about the audio stutter being fixed. Hypno wrote this before the audio stuttering fix was patched in and I am leaving it just in case… paranoia reigns supreme.

We’ve been putting additional effort into testing the interaction assist recently, and I’m happy with the progress made so far. While there are still a few kinks to iron out (such as the occasional frustration when trying to open a body as a carnivore), the ability to cycle between interaction options has already made the system much more efficient. Going forward, we’ll be looking at ways to build on this by having the interaction assist better account for nearby environmental elements, such as prioritising gastroliths over nearby food when appropriate, to make selecting the intended interaction more intuitive. This would also include removing it from things that don’t really require it, such as when the player is trying to lay eggs in their nest.

Another major focus for us has been testing the new individual and species migration systems. We’ve received reports of players not receiving migrations at all, as well as instances where the nutrient rewards aren’t being applied correctly when a migration zone has been assigned. We’ll need to continue investigating these issues over the next few hordetests to identify the causes and get everything working as intended. As we’ve seen with other systems in the past, something can appear to work perfectly during our QA testing, only for it to crash and burn upon impact with a full server.

On a brighter note, we’ve also been refining how individual migration zones will be shared between group members once the system is working as intended. After being grouped together for 15 minutes, group leaders will be able to share their individual migration zone with other members through the character menu. Once shared, the system will enter a cooldown to prevent potential exploits. This will allow herbivore players to stay together and benefit from the same migration zone, making it easier for groups to travel and migrate as a unit.

Overall, a lot of the changes we’re working on are focused on laying the groundwork for future mechanics. These improvements will be particularly important when introducing systems like body dismemberment, which would add a number of body parts for players to cycle through on top of the existing gore pieces, and items for humans to loot.

KissenKitten - Animation Supervisor

Let’s see, pending a few more changes, the oviraptor is gearing up to leave Hordetesting. I think there’s a few lingering things left. After that the baryonyx will take its place. I threw down the tree clawing prototype for programming so I’ll be testing that out soon. The rest of the animation team has been clearing the parasaurolophus off of our plate. I think we’ve got about a good 40 or so more animations left to do before it’s complete. That’s light work for us, so it’ll be animation complete as soon as the rest of the locomotion is done. As you can see in the clips, some of the team has already completed their para animations and moved on to spinosaurus.

We’re going to explore a sort of tortured strength for the spinosaurus. This animal is by no means a “natural” specimen. It has been created from a variety of proprietary genetic sources, some of which may be at odds with one another from time to time, so I want that to show up in its movements here and there. I also want to make sure the spinosaurus feels particularly brutal for animations that can support it. It takes quite a cocktail to achieve a behemoth such as this and I want that displayed. The spinosaurs will be very capable on land when it chooses a favorable territory and beyond capable when in the water. I’m aiming to have the visual characterization change for the spinosaurs from land to water so you can really tell just by looking at it when it’s in its element.

Since the shantungosaurus has been rigged, I’ve been creating poses and test animations for it to track down any rigging issues. Thankfully, those have been quite minimal so the giant cow is on its way to stomp some heads on the island once more. I’ll be doing animation assignments pretty soon. Like the para, I expect this creature to go pretty smoothly. Fingers crossed.

Outside of all that the rest of the month has just been bug fixing. See ya next month. Bye Bye!