[Isle News] DevBlog #50

Filipe - Lead Programmer

While hordetesting continues and some fixes are still being allocated, work continues as normal on the main branch of game development. This month I have been focused on finishing some work in progress mechanics and cleaning up the codebase, refactoring some code and data to be more organized and allow the creation of new dinosaurs or future abilities to be far easier.

In that regard, Rex’s crush and throw abilities are pretty much done code wise and have been sent off to QA for the first round of bug finding. The same applies to Migration Patrols and Mass Migration before we move that to a future Hordetest.

Lastly, several core mechanics are getting their final touches. Pounce is receiving additional function to make it more interactive when latched onto targets, including the capability to dismount in all directions (no more being forced to jump off a ledge to your death). Bucking will also no longer be a random war of stamina attrition, and some animals will have the capability to retaliate against whatever is latched on to them. Some of you may have seen the screenshots for night vision, but there is also a visual update we are trying for scent to make it less UI based.

There is soon to be more, but that is all for now. See you!

Ariel - Programmer

A large part of the month was spent working on bug fixes and tracking down various crashes. We upgraded to a new version of Unreal Engine and it came with some changes under the hood, but in the end we were able to figure them out without missing out on too much sleep. One of the more annoying bugs I dealt with during the month was just a small jitter that sometimes happened when jumping into water. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but with this being a multiplayer game there’s an entire system in place to synchronize the player’s location between the server and the client, so that can be tricky to work with, but in the end at least I felt great about working it out.

I made some extensions to our ability system that will be used by some of our upcoming playables. It’s a convenient, reusable way to assign multiple actions on the same key and execute the appropriate one based on whether the key was tapped or held. I also worked on a new tool the team can use to more easily compare dinosaurs at different growths, giving us an overview of all dinosaurs in a conveniently comparable format. This should help a lot with balancing and adding new playables to an existing ecosystem and making sure they’re consistent with what’s already there.

I’m also working on some of the final tweaks for the diabloceratops. It’s not something we want to hold back the update for though, so we’re planning to add the dinosaur to the evrima branch in its relatively current state as it’s in a pretty solid spot right now. After we finalize the other changes we’re planning to add them as a smaller patch to help with some of the disconnect of diabloceratops and its intended gameplay.

VisualTech48 - Environmental artist

We’ve missed a month haven’t we? Well I’m back here to show you what I’ve been doing in that time, starting with the finished enclosures that you’ve seen. This is the next step in large format buildings for human gameplay.

The enclosure kit is complete and semi-modular that can support various standard doorways and unique connections to other structures or interior settings like the GUTS.

Next up is an important gadget of the island's surveillance that’s been behind a few of our videos already: the Trail Camera! I’ve made two versions of this, one fully assembled and the other damaged/destroyed. I believe some of you may have found one that got stepped on by an allosaurus.

I was also tasked with creating our signature Dockyard Harbor Master. It featured some very unique parts of the models, which alongside our kit was really fun to make.

It will be featured in our Dockyard soon enough and is again the next step into our building features we want you to see. I was tasked in making its shell and interior layout of walls.

Next up which took a good chunk of my time is the DTA (Dockyard Transportation Area). This behemoth of a building stands tall at 90m of width and 58m of length, not counting its exterior pillars. It's one of the biggest buildings I’ve made, with partly custom parts for the exterior and the use of our kit for our floorplan.

Such a massive structure was intended to temporarily house various animals that would have been moved to or from an island.

And last and not least I’ve done a lot of minor changes to a whole selection of our modular kit, such as adding trims, new wall types, textures, and much more.

This alongside a great update I’ve made towards our small Dockyard Perimeter fences, which now have broken modular parts that allows anyone to build the fences in a far more organic way with full fence destruction.

Thanks everyone, that is it for these crazy two months. Cheers.

Wedge - Sound Designer

Tyrannosaurus’ audio is starting to come together a bit more this month. I’ve been working on more refinement to its calls, still more adjustments to make to get these really hitting right but they are moving in the right direction.
A lot more work has been done on finishing off sounds for the Tyrannosaurus suite, from its pains and attack cues, a general pass adding filler vocalizations, breaths/foley, and new sounds for its crush/throw abilities and new sounds for its death vocalization. There are also several surprise additions to the Tyrannosaurus vocal suite that you all will hear soon.

I have also had a look at the attenuations used for vocals with a fair few improvements. Call attenuations have been improved – specifically in how vocals sound at distance, increasing the amount of spatial processing that is applied and adjusting the filter curves to get closer to a natural sound which should help judging the distance of the source. I also fixed all vocal sounds having no sub frequencies, even in close proximity, even as the animal producing the vocal sound. Finally lesser vocal sounds such as idles, resting etc. are much tighter now, in addition to breaths and some foley sounds (e.g gore when eating a corpse) this should help with not only staying stealthy while hunting or being hunted but also reduce the immersion broken from the distance they were heard at.

I have designed a new set of sounds for the impact of Herrerasaurus’ pounce attack – an impactful landing to indicate the impact of a collision from height is combined with thick hide tearing and a gory squelch to compliment its claws digging into its prey. The landing animation was previously removed but will be reintroduced – this means in addition to the sound of the attack, the vocal sound as it claims its prey will come back into play. However this will not be making its way into the incoming patch.

Finally a large portion of this month has been focused on a whole heap of bug fixes that came with the engine update, the most notable of which being:

Changes to how sounds that happen very often (i.e footsteps, climbing etc.) are managed in memory.
Alterations to waterfall sounds setup reducing the voice count and how its attenuation behaves – (not on hordetesting)

Added sounds to some animations that had none – Galli nest manage, Troodon flung (knocked from latched pounce), Deino open body and Diablo running flip.

Cheers!

Bryan - Animator

It’s been a good month for locomotion. I've been working at getting a bit more Maiasaura animations done, it can swim and graze now. But the main task at the moment is Triceratops’ sparring. Diabloceratops was just a test run, this is the big boy you just don’t mess with. Triceratops is always a tricky beast to do locomotion for as they have a very unusual gait, something between an Alligator and a Horse.

KissenKitten - Producer

Since I made a pretty hefty post last month this one will be short and sweet. We’ve made improvements across the board in pretty much every department and are working on getting this next update out. In exchange for the brevity here’s some work in progress content. As always and with everything in the game, they are all subject to change.