Vizaris - Open World, Co-op/Mp, Role Playing Game

[str-Luke]

Weekly Report - 36

This week a lot of stuff simply didn’t come together the way I was hoping, so the update is going to be a little smaller than normal; and for that, I apologize! A lot of things got half-baked or even finished, but not soon enough to make it into this week’s update.

If next week isn’t as much of a foxtrot-fest as this week, we should be able to make up for it with a more substantial update. Several of Murphy’s Laws makes this unlikely, but we’ll see!

This week’s additions

• Improved Map – Panning and Zooming - This week pretty much all of the programming time was dedicated to improving the map, as a result, it is now possible to pan around, and actually zoom in on the map, making it easier to take advantage of the doubled resolution map image from last week

• Improved Map – Mouse Coordinates - We’ve also added the ability for you to see the map coordinates under the mouse, in addition to the old ability to see the coordinates of the player. With any luck this will be useful for a variety of things, such as coordinating movement, pinpointing locations of interesting finds, and so on.

• **Added Foliage to the Ro’to Gap - **Foliage was added to the Ro’to Gap. As the Ro’to Gap was just recently revised, it didn’t need to have any substantial overhauls to its design. However, the plants which populate the Ro’to Gap are of a different variety than the ones previously seen.

• Rebuilt the Ro’to Gap – Da’te’coro Canyon Junction - The three way junction between the Ro’to Gap, Da’te’coro Canyon (South), and Da’te’coro Canyon (North) was heavily revised, and populated with the new foliage. The revisions to the landscape also pushed a little bit into Da’te’coro Canyon (South), though the revision of that area has not been completed.

• Proper Sticky Stamina Bar - Last week we updated the health bar to be sticky (Indicating the amount lost for a brief moment), but in the process we removed our old sticky stamina bar, which wasn’t very well made. This week we updated the stamina bar to use a new system to better indicate the stamina lost from things like attacks, jumping, sprinting, dodging, etc.

• Footstep sounds and effects are more accurate and scale to speed - We rebuilt the system which produces footstep effects and sounds. This system is now independent of the animations (Before, it would require special makers every time the left or right foot hit the ground). In addition, footstep sound, and effect size now dynamically adjusts it’s size based on the speed of the player. I have plans to later adjust this system to use entirely different sounds for walking vs running.

• Optimization – Object Preview - We also performed an optimization of the item previews. The game code is now more keenly aware when these previews are rendering, and makes certain optimizations when they aren’t on screen. The benefit of this is a notable boost to framerate when outside of menus. Hooray!

• Fixed: Dead characters sometimes making idle sounds - Fixed a bug which was causing dead characters to occasionally make their idle sounds. Surprising and terrifying some players into thinking they’ve been ambushed by a retaliating force.

• Backend: Map Markers - The vast, meaty portion of this week’s programming work was spent on creating map markers for the map, which required a massive, and deceptively complicated overhaul to the entire way we did our maps. Unfortunately, the work wasn’t completed soon enough for us to have any functional map markers in the game, but next week, you’ll now be able to discover locations in the game world, and have them automatically marked down on your map.

• **Backend: New Combat Animations - **The footstep revision seems like an arbitrary addition to this week’s code, but we’re in the process of integrating a massive amount of new combat animations, and the improved method of detecting footsteps was a byproduct of this new integration. Ideally, as soon as next week, we’ll have a bevy of new and more suited combat animations!

Behind the scenes, as I mentioned last week, we have new dolfog animations, new clothing, and some heavy improvements to the launcher and subscription system coming down the pike. There was some notable progress on the subscription system today (Which unfortunately, demanded my attention for such a long period of time that I wasn’t able to finish one of the features I wanted to add today… but of all the reasons for not getting a feature done, this is one of the best reasons)

The half-baked and finished features that didn’t make it into this week’s update will fold over into next week’s update.

–Luke

[str-Luke]

Weekly Report - 37

This week we’re hoping to make up for the smaller update last week, by having a pretty big update this week. We’re continuing the theme of last week with adding more features and improvements to the player map as a focus. Barring a few minor tweaks and improvements, this will pretty much end the upgrades to the player map, as we move on to new features for this coming week.

This week’s additions

• **Map Markers - **Our map marker system, as alluded to in last week’s update, has been integrated into this week. There’s over 50 locations to find in your explorations, with more still to come. When you find these locations, they will be added to your map for reference in the future. These are not fast travel markers.

• Map Camp Display - The map will also now show where your current camp is located. Now you need to remember even less while playing the game! Yaay!

• Map Player Direction Display - The map now displays the current direction each player is facing, making it easier to get a proper sense of direction while navigating via the map.

• Map Player Icons - The map also now displays different player icons for ‘You’, ‘You as Host’, ‘Other Player’, and ‘Other Player as Host’

• Map Markers and Player Icons now react - Now, in addition to displaying text when you hover over map markers, the markers themselves will now become highlighted and play a sound.

• Map Icons scale at a different rate than map - This should prevent the player icon and other icons from dominating the map at close zoom levels.

• **Map Marker Filtering - **You can now toggle the display of a certain types of map markers, such as the player icons, campfire icons, last death icons, and regular map markers.

• **Revised Da’te’coro Canyon (South) - **In keeping with the current plan of updating the old canyons to utilize all the latest advances, Da’te’coro Canyon (South) has been completely revised, including a new layout, foliage, and more.

• New Quest – Dolfog Delicacies - A new quest was added, Dolfog Delicacies, which has you doing some special hunting of a specific creature for the town’s butcher.

• Improved Post Process Clarity - A few small tweaks were made to the post processing to improve clarity which was being lost due to Unreal Engine’s built in FXAA. This has the effect of making the entire image look somewhat more detailed, without introducing aliasing artifacts.

• **Only barter in the root of conversation menu - **The game now only displays the barter icon for merchant NPCs in the root of the conversation. It was done to improve the clarity of options when asked to make conversation choices.

• **No more camera hitch when changing view modes - **The F key (by default) is used for focus mode, while in third person. However, double tapping the key is also how change between first and third person. Previously, when you would double tap the F key, it would enter focus mode for a split second causing a camera hitch. This is no longer the case.

• Mouse wheel for first/third person transitions - It’s now also possible to transition between first and third person by using the mouse wheel now. Simply zoom all the way in while in third person to switch to first person, or zoom out while in first person to enter third person.

• First person camera sync improvements - Synced up the player body and camera in first person, preventing you from being able to catch a glimpse of your back if you turned around at high speed and low framerate. This makes the first person camera more reactive.

• **Experimental First Person Camera Collision - **Added camera collision for first person view mode, eliminating most cases where you could put the camera through objects. This has caused a slight change in the feel of the camera, and we may end up disabling or changing this.

• **Combat timing reticule improvements - **The combat timing reticule indicator now stays on screen for a few moments after clicking the second time, and uses color to indicate success. White for success, orange for a whiff, red for failure.

• Fixed: Canyon Dolfog Pelts - Fixed a bug/mistake that was causing Canyon Dolfogs to always spawn with ancient pelts.

• **Fixed: Low Quest Rewards - **Quest awards were not adjusted to the right values after the wealth adjustments a few weeks back, causing them to be lower than intended. This has now been fixed.

• Fixed: Map Glitch Bug - Fixed a bug which could (and often would) cause the map to glitch and become unusable. If you opened the map, zoomed in, exited the map, moved, and opened the map again, there was a moderate of breaking the map.

• Fixed: Certain AI Animations in Multiplayer - We fixed a bug which was causing humanoid enemies to not use their agro animations on clients in multiplayer.

• Fixed: Multiplayer Loading Crash - Fixed a fatal crash in multiplayer where if a client landed on a LandscapeProxy or a non-networked actor on game spawn a function would fail to be networked properly and cause a crash

Next week I’m hoping to focus on Enemy AI. In previous weeks, we overhauled combat feel and combat mechanics; and now it’s time to make some AI which will take advantage of that. I’ll of course continue my work to overhaul the old landscape, and our artist is going to be focusing on making some environment set pieces.

Three’s an important announcement coming within the next few hours about the new checkout system we’ve been working on for a couple weeks now.

–Luke

[str-Luke]

Weekly Report - 38

This week we have an exciting new first taste of a new combat personality system, some continued progress on the landscape revisions, and some critical bug fixes.

This week’s additions

• Combat AI - The vast majority of the code work this week was spent on developing a new combat AI / personality system for the NPCs which will help to give them more unique and varied combat behavior. This is a massive task, and certainly can’t’ be fully completed in one week. The only difference you will be seeing in the game this week is a modification to how enemies can approach you , and the possibility for enemy NPCs to surrender or flee from combat. The different aged dolfogs will exhibit different personalities based on how old they are.
• Revised Da’te’coro Gap - In continuation with our work to revise the older landscapes and bring them up to par with the latest techniques, the Da’te’coro Gap has been completely overhauled. Featuring foliage, and much more significant rock overhangs (and maybe some treasure).
• Revised Da’te’coro Canyon (North) - Da’te’coro Canyon (North) was also revised. Because Da’te’coro canyon was fairly recently added to the game, the revision for this area wasn’t as significant as it was for other areas. Simple modification to the landscape and the addition of foliage was enough to bring it up to the standard.
• **Revised Sa’le’talo Canyon (The Eastern Half) - **The eastern half of Sa’le’talo Canyon was also revised with new landscape paint, new foliage, and some additional rocks. Keep in mind Sa’le’talo canyon does not have an East/West distinction ingame, but the eastern half of the canyon itself was revised (The canyon was expanded eastward a few updates ago, so it’s already using a newer style, while the western half will take more work to revised.).
• **Rotated Copper, Silver, and Gold coin previews - **We added some code to the game last week which allowed us to rotate the angle that objects are displayed. This was used to make copper, silver, and gold coins display their faces, rather than their edges.
• **Updated ‘Take Damage’ Screen Effect - **Some modifications were done to make the screen effect which occurs when the player takes damage a little more distinct. This effect was also modified to change intensity based on how much the damage the player took (as a percentage of their total health)
• New screen effects for low Vitals and Needs - New screen effects were added for when the player is low on health, stamina, hunger, or thirst. Most effects have a primary effect which begins fading in at P, and a secondary effect (aside from stamina) which begins fading in at lower values. Stamina, being the most frequent to be drained, has the most subtle effect.
• Mousewheel camera zoom speed increase - We increased the zoom in/zoom out speed for camera distance when using the mouse wheel by @, making it a little less annoying to change camera angles.
• **Fixed: Item Previews not Rotating - **That code we added last week for changing the angle of the object preview also happened to break object rotation in the preview. This has been fixed.
• **Fixed: Mousewheel View Mode Toggle Fix - **Last week we added mousewheel zooming for first/third person toggling. Unfortunately, this new ability wasn’t properly triggering the standard first person toggle code, causing the player character to become visually glitched when leaving first person.
• **Fixed: Ingame Time Handling - **Fixed a bug that was causing time to be improperly handled in the back end of the code causing minutes ingame to pass at different speeds from one minute to the next. Now all time should be stable at 5 seconds per ingame minute.
• Fixed: Conversation Check Bug - There was a fairly major bug which was uncovered last week which was causing conditional conversation checks to improperly return the wrong value. This was very damaging to the functionality of the quests, as once one conversation option appeared, it had the potential to make some or all of the conversation options appear.
• Backend: AI Personality System - As mentioned at the start of the changelog, there was a massive amount of work done on the AI personality system this week. There is much more to come as the system was only just getting started. Most of the work done this week didn’t make it into the game in any way that would affect the player.

This coming week we’ll continue terrain revisions, combat personality work, and a few other small improvements here and there. We got our first looks at the new dolfog animations, and they’re glorious – we’re really looking forward to seeing them ingame, along with all the new functionality they’re going to bring.

We’re moving forward with some new and exciting things behind the scenes, including a new focus on making unique scenes for Vizaris (not to mention finally getting the village into the game), as well as a new marketing push, upgrades to our content delivery system, and much much more.

–Luke

[str-Luke]

Weekly Report - 39

This week we’ve taken advantage of the work on the personality system done last week, and used it to push a much larger variety of combat personality and functionality for both humanoid and non-humanoid (creature) NPCs. We’ve also significantly improved the visual quality of the game by adding the new distant landscape, along with the standard update to one of the older game areas.

This week’s additions

• **Distant Terrain - **This week features another substantial improvement to the visual quality of Vizaris. This time in the form of distant landscape. In previous updates we added LOD meshes to the existing game world, allowing all the other levels to be loaded in one form or another into memory. However, we only included the south western corner of the planned first area of the game, as including the rest of the game world would’ve added several gigabytes to downloads with no real benefit. With this week’s update however, we’ve added a low resolution render of the rest of the game world, along with an even lower resolution 10 kilometer skirt in each direction around the game world. This allows distant mountains and landscape to be visible while exploring the world, and helps to significantly improve the visual quality of the game, with no significant cost.
• **Recalibrated Fog (For Distant Terrain) - **Because of the new distant landscape, we had to completely recalibrate our fog system. In the process, we updated it to produce more realistic and quality results. This slightly affects the ambient lighting of the game world, pushing it to be slightly less red/orange.
• **Revised Sa’le’talo Canyon - **The western half of Sa’le’talo Canyon was revised this week, and also slightly expanded with a new higher ground area. The western half of Sa’le’talo canyon was very dense, and a significant amount of new objects were added to the area, notably changing the feel of the area.
• **NPC Taunting - **Some additional work was done on the NPC personality system. Now, depending on the personality of the character, they will now taunt the player. This is actually done almost entirely for the player’s advantage, giving you openings to attack NPCs, as often the NPCs will be attempting to block and prevent you from landing an attack.
• **NPC Recovery - **It is also now possible for NPCs to perform recovery actions which will leave a temporary opening while they attempt to heal themselves. Most of the NPCs in the game don’t really take advantage of this very often, but it’s now possible for NPCs to do this.
• **NPC Positioning - **NPCs now also have more advanced positioning and movement patterns. Slowly advancing on the player, strafing, backing off etc. This makes for much more dynamic and interesting combat, as opposed to two damage sponges meeting up and mauling each other until one of them dies.
• **Better Moonsinger Glow - **The special weapon Moonsinger, a quality sword with a magical glow, has had it’s glow tweaked to be both more useful and less annoying. It now creates substantially less lens flares off the blade, making it much more easy to use in a dark cave.
• **Looping Creature Surrender Animation - **An update was done to the creature surrendering from last week, allowing non-humanoid NPCs to loop their surrender animation. None of our creatures currently have surrender animations to make use of (Unlike the human enemies), but they will loop one of their idle animations until we have something more concrete to replace them with.
• **Creature Dodging - **Creatures will now actually dodge as well. The system fully supports both animation and movement driven dodging, allowing NPCs to quickly back off the player to avoid attacks. The likelihood of them doing this is of course driven by their personality and base stats.
• **Creature Power Attacks - **Creatures will now also power attack. This is especially vicious with regards to the dolfog as the power attack takes the form of a sudden and violent leap forward. These attacks, similar to player and human power attacks can stagger and even knock down the player, so keep your guard up if you don’t want to be a tasty morsel.
• **Creature Blocking - **Creatures will also now block (Again, depending on their personality), which can cause the player to stagger when using a regular attack on the blocking creature. Players can use power attacks to punch through the block. Of course, since our creatures generally don’t have blocking animations yet, there’s a little bit of debug text that appears on the creature to indicate whether or not they’re blocking.
• **Agility Virtue now affects Creatures - **The Agility virtue now affects creatures, modifying their movement rate, attack speed, and attack animation speed.
• **Updated Map Icon Colors - **Map Icons were updated to have a slightly different color, and generally be brighter, hopefully making the map a bit more legible.
• **Fixed: Salis’da’coro Ascent Cave Lighting - **Fixed a bug caused by the Salis’da’coro Ascent Cave being too far underground in certain places to receive a shadow at all times. This could cause the lighting to brighten when the player looked down (away from the landscape above), and overall was very messed up and glitchy.

Behind the scenes, quite a bit of new art is being constructed for the game, with the purpose of FINALLY getting the village ingame. It should tell you a bit about the significance of the village based on just how much art and effort is going into its creation. The Village is a nexus for so many of the gameplay features we’re going to be adding, not to mention the hub and temporary home of the player. The village will be a continual source of quests, and a location you return to time and time again to purchase upgrades, ditch gear, and refuel for additional adventures. The village is also where we plan on debuting most of our non-combat oriented gameplay features – not to mention the dialog which will provide more insight into the world of Vizaris.

New animations are being made for the dolfog, which will be integrated into the game in a few weeks. Next week should see some final cleanup work on the AI personality system, before we shift back to getting some other smaller features out of the way, before pivoting to -non- combat related AI personality and functionality (For both the village and general use)

–Luke

[str-Luke]

Weekly Report - 40

This week I was unfortunately struck with a bit of an illness which prevented me from putting in as many hours as I would’ve liked to. We’ve still got some pretty cool additions this week, including the usual area revisions, gameplay updates, unarmed combat, new features, and more.

This week’s additions

• Revised Sek’ra’coro Slope - Continuing our standard pattern of revising an area of the game each week, this week, the Sek’ra’coro Slope has been revised. With new foliage, objects, attention to detail, and even a new map marker or two. The top of the Sek’ra’coro Slope is one of the highest currently accessible parts of the game, so be sure to take a look at the view once you get up there.
• **Unarmed Combat - **This week we added basic unarmed combat, or in other words, combat without a weapon, to both players and NPCs. The regular attack alternates between left and right punches, while the power attack alternates between a left and a right heavy kick. Unarmed combat relies on your character’s strength to determine how much damage you’ll deal with each hit. Finesse will affect how much stamina is lost on each swing, with characters that have higher finesse loosing less stamina per attack.
• **Fixed: Broken login for passwords with specific characters - **Last week, with the help and patience of a couple of users, we were able to identify and fix a problem with the Vizaris game code that was preventing you from logging in if your password contained certain special characters. We apologize for the difficulty any of you may have had with logging in to Vizaris.
• **Improved Health Dot Work - **Some moderate improvements were made to the functionality of the Health dot in combat, including a larger size, longer duration and a pseudo lock-on system for keeping the health dot of your current target on the screen. Some back end code was also added to the system that will allow us to add some additional features next week.
• **Improved NPC Surrender Checks - **NPC Surrender checks were also improved, making them health based, and notably less likely to occur with braver NPCs. The more cowardly an NPC is, the more they are affected by losing health, whereas NPCs with more Bravery can be barely affected at all by losing health.
• **Tweaked Blood - **The appearance of blood was tweaked to be significantly less reflective. Previously, as you may have noticed, at certain angles you could be blinded by the sun reflecting off a pool of blood.
• **Temporarily removed dolfog power attack - **We temporarily disabled dolfog power attacks, pending the addition of new dolfog animations, as the old animation was causing visual issues in combat.
• **Reduced Dolfog Health - **Dolfog health was reduced by a quarter, as they were proving to be too strong under many circumstances; with the new combat tactics of blocking and timed attacks, they were already significantly more challenging, and we lowered their health to compensate.
• **Early revision work on Sek’ra’coro Canyon - **Because Sek’ra’coro canyon is such a large play area, I opted to get a head start on it, by working on its revision this week; don’t expect any significant changes ingame yet, but the area will look slightly different to those with a keen eye. Sek’ra’coro Canyon will be revised in the coming weeks
• **Fixed: Friendly NPC Hit Reactions - **As one of our players spotted last week, if you attacked friendly NPCs they still had their old physical impulse system enabled, causing them to wildly flail about after being hit. This physical reaction has now been disabled.
• **Backend: Initial Integration of Temple Assets - **Progress on the village continues to steam along. This week, in preparation for the coming addition of the village to the game, we’ve added a significant amount of new art assets to the game dealing with the interiors of several key structures in the village. There’s only a handful of external art assets left to be completed for the Village before we’ll -finally- be able to put it into the game.
• **Backend: Loose Items - **Work was also performed on another new major system for the game – the Loose Item system. This system is made out of several moderately complex systems, but the short story is: It allows the player to take and manage specific portions of very small items, liquids, semi-liquids, and more. Once complete, the current system used for water containers will be replaced with the new system.

As mentioned in the changelog, a lot of work is going into the completion of the village. It’s currently the primary focus of our artist, and one of my largest focuses as the level designer. Ro’to Village, aka the Rock Fortress Citadel, is a highly complicated, very compact location, with a significant amount of vertical layout. It has many key locations, including a player home, a grand temple with a school and hospital, a town feasting hall, the grand well, a large market area with interior and exterior shops, a decent sized tavern, a stable, and much much more.

Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, we’re still going to open up the village to players before it’s fully complete. The bright side is, you’ll be able to explore the village much sooner because of this. The primary aspects that will be missing is NPC Diversity in appearance/animation, and the ability to enter every interior right away.

There’s still plenty to be excited about though, because with the addition of the village to the game, that allows our weekly work on the village to actually go into the changelog, and get into player’s hands. It’s definitely something we’re really looking forward to getting into the game.

–Luke

[str-Luke]

Weekly Report - 41

This week we’ve got quite a list of little changes, tweaks, and improvements, including some new sounds, music, animations, and some refined gameplay.

This week’s additions

• **Revised Sek’ra’coro Canyon - **Sek’ra’coro Canyon was revised this week, in keeping with the schedule of revising play areas. Sek’ra’coro was one of the newer areas, so the most significant differences are just in the landscape textures and new foliage, a fairly limited amount of new rocks were also added. With the completion of Sek’ra’coro, we’re now over two thirds done with the revision of the landscape.
• **Added 2 new music tracks - **A new exploration music track was added this week, helping to keep exploration novel; we did some significant improvements to the music system in general allowing us to do unique music for different areas of the game, and due to this, a second music track was added for the exploration of caves.
• **Combat Aiming Angles - **A modification of the combat system was made so that the angle of the player’s torso is now linked to the angle of the camera, allowing you to hit smaller than average, and larger than average targets much more easily. No more pesky ankle-biting dolfog pups that you have to dispatch with power attack… now you can slice and dice at any angle!
• **Virtue Penalties on hunger, thirst, and low sleep - **We added a level of virtue penalties which begin to accrue as your primary needs of food, water, and sleep go unfulfilled. These virtues are moderately affected if your needs are below @, and more severely affected if those needs are below . Different needs affect different virtues. Hunger lowers Strength, Finesse, and Agility, while Thirst lowers Charisma and Intellect, and finally a lack of sleep impacts Endurance and Willpower.
• Experimental Timing Bar Changes - Some experimental changes were made to the timing bar this week. Clicking the 4th section of the timing bar is no longer a whiff which barely penalizes you, but instead immediately launches your second attack. With good timing you can now perform attacks much more quickly. Clicking in the 2nd quarter of the timing bar will also allow you to attack more quickly.
• Timing Bar Sounds - The timing bar now also plays sounds for good, bad, and perfect timing, giving you a little bit more feedback when attempting to use the timing bar.
• New Block and Perfect Block Sounds - Blocking and perfectly timed blocks were also given more specific and unique sounds this week; it’s much better than the old sounds which was a re-purposed metal resource pickup sound, and a money pickup sound.
• **New Dolfog Animations - **We were able to implement our new dolfog animations this week, giving the dolfog a higher quality of animations, and more specific animations. Not all of the animations were used yet, as many of these animations will be used to extend the dolfogs capability. The capabilities of the dolfog will then be used as a starting point for getting more creatures in the game (Creatures which at this point are really only missing animations)
• **Tweaked Medium Sized Rocks - **All of the medium sized rocks received a slight modification to their textures to make them not share the exact same texture as the rest of the rocks (or more accurately, the same texture in the same spot)
• **Tweaked the fog (Again!) - **Once again we overhauled the distant fog. This time creating a much more gradual transition which comes closer to the camera. I noticed after the fog update two weeks ago that it was getting difficult to tell really close rocks away from moderately far rocks, because the distant fog didn’t start taking effect until 3/4ths of a map tile away from the player. This recalibrated fog should help provide more clarity to the player, without making it look like a bad day in Singapore.
• **Improved Menu - **We added music to the menu, and we also modified the new-game character studio a bit to have different lighting.
• **Exhaustion sound now stops when dead - **The exhaustion sound will now stop playing once your character dies. No more breathless corpses!
• **Reduced health icon display time from 5 seconds to 2 - **The changes that we made to the over-enemy health icon last week were a little to extreme. We reduced the time the icon remained on the screen after looking away from the enemy from 5 seconds down to 2.
• **Slightly shrunk health dot size - **We also slightly shrunk the health dot size as it was a little too large, after the changes made last week.
• **Unarmed ready / unready animations - **The animations for readying and un-readying unarmed combat were made more specific. No more reaching for a weapon that isn’t there, and no more sheathing your fists!
• **Backend: Loose Items Finished - **The backend work on Loose Items was also finished last week. This is a major new system that will completely change the way the player interacts with certain types of objects, and it will allow us to introduce quite a few new cool gameplay features. The actual gameplay which uses this code hasn’t made it into the game yet as it still needs a bit more work, but the actual code is done barring a few refinements in the future.

Today, the exterior stairs for the village were completed; This is important and notable because that is the last critical exterior art asset necessary for the village. Now we just have to finish assembling everything and put in some finishing touches. We’re going to be focusing on non-combat related NPC capabilities in the coming weeks to make sure that our village is as lively as possible.

With the completion of the Sek’ra’coro Canyon Revision, I’m now going to push down south to the final third of the map which needs to be revised. These sections of the map are the oldest, and will likely see extremely significant changes, especially as I continue to move further south towards and eventually into Salis’da’coro Canyon. After that, the caves will be revised, and then I’ll go back to creating more landscape – but there probably won’t be any -new- new landscape until after the village is ingame.

–Luke

[str-Luke]

Weekly Report - 42

We’ve got a pretty hefty list of changes this week, including a massive overhaul of combat which should dramatically improve the feel of the game. Last week we had some issues with some old code being removed making dolfogs extremely dangerous (even the little one in the tutorial cave), but all of that should be resolved this week.

This week’s additions

• Revised Akro Basin - As usual, another game area was updated this week – Akro Basin, which is the area south and south east of the village. Akro basin was one of the older areas (as all of the upcoming areas to be revised) so it has one of the most dramatic updates of any area so far. It was also notably expanded northward towards the village. Once the village is complete, you’ll be able to access the top of the mesa plateau from that canyon.
• Completely Rebalanced Combat - Combat was completely overhauled this week, with player damages and stamina costs, enemy damage, enemy health, and enemy behavior all being significantly modified. The end result is a combat situation which should feel significantly more stable and predictable. More tweaks will be made here and there, but this rebalance clears the table of a lot of clutter that was piling up from the various updates.
• Overhauled Weapons - Weapons themselves also had a major gameplay overhaul as well. Previously we had three weapons of each of the three types (Blade, axe, and blunt), however the difference between these weapons were strictly visual. Not anymore. Now these weapons have been reclassified into ‘Cheap’, ‘Common’, and ‘Quality’, giving you room to progress as you acquire more money.
• Added More Combat Music - We’ve also added a new combat music this week, bringing the number of combat tracks up to par with the number of exploration tracks.
• **Rebalanced Dolfogs - **As part of the combat rebalance, dolfog stats were significantly overhauled, along with their personality. That should make it a little more fun to fight these little demons.
• Further tweaks to lighting, sun, and sky - Also as usual, there was a bevy of tweaks to the sun, sky, and lighting this week; pushing sunlight to be brighter, and somewhat less orange. In my opinion (the only one that matters, har har!) the end result looks more realistic and ideally more pleasing.
• **New Training Dummy - **The dolfog in the starter cave has been completely replaced with a new training dummy model which will react to your attacks. I find it quite stress relieving to attack this dummy.
• Updated Starting Tutorial - And on that note, the starter tutorial has been modified to now talk about the timing reticule, as I can imagine that was a bit confusing for some players.
• Music now fades out on death - Not much else to say for this one. Now you can sit in silence and think about all the mistakes that led you to this point.
• **Updated Inventory Hotkey Display - **The player inventory has been updated to no longer show the favorite and drop hotkeys when no object is selected.
• **Added hotkeys to container inventory - **R can now be used as a hotkey for take all, and 1 and 2 can be used as hotkeys to swtich between the player inventory and the container inventory.
• New sounds when opening and closing containers - Speaking of containers, we now have new opening and closing sounds for all the containers in the game. This is actually code that has been around for a couple weeks now, but we only just now got sounds for this.
• Revised perfect block and timing bar sounds - The sound for perfect block, as well as some of the sounds for the timing reticule were updated to be a bit more responsive.
• Tweaked foliage colors - Various harvestable plants and nondescript foliage models had their colors tweaked here and there to fit in a little better with the world.
• Fixed: Ancient Dolfog Personality - Turns out the rarely encountered mega sized Ancient Dolfogs had completely broken personalities. An oversight in some of the configuration of the ancient dolfog was forcing all of its personality stats to 0, which basically means it was extremely passive, extremely cowardly, and extremely immobile. Not very good for a creature that’s supposed to be boss-like.
• Fixed: Bugs relating to combat tracing and timing - A significant portion of bugs related to combat traces and the timing bar were fixed as part of the combat overhaul, making weapons more responsive.
• **Fixed: Freeze on Certain Keybinds - **Our programmer fixed a small error in the code made it possible to crash the game if you tried to rebind a key to a key that already had an action assigned to it.
• **Fixed: Tutorial Messages - **Those gosh darn blasted tutorial messages in the starter cave were adjusted to only appear once.
• Fixed: Bright Artifacts in the Sky! - A strange bug also cropped up last week which cause bright spots which were nearly as bright as the sun to appear in the North, South, and East. I’m still not sure what caused them to show up last week specifically (UFOs?), but they’re fixed now.
• Fixed: Crafting menu while dead - No more zombie crafting for you, you little rascal!
• Backend: Personality System Refactoring - A bunch of work was done to transition the personality system’s functionality to a new format, with the benefits being the ability to more easily tweak behavior in the personality system, as well as potentially create custom sub-personalities for different NPCs.
• Backend: Item Ownership - Objects, containers, and activators are now also capable of having specific owners (usually NPCs). This is very important for the village, and also very important for this next backend feature.
• **Backend: Stealing - **The game now understands stealing, and is capable of changing visuals and gameplay based on who owns a specific object, container, or activator. This is of course very important for the village, when combined with other upcoming features, as it would break the game if players could just walk into people’s homes and steal their stuff.

The backend work is the first inklings of a comprehensive upgrade to the behavior of NPCs outside of direct combat. This upgrade will include new behavior such as scheduling for NPCs, a calendar system for the game, guards, stealing, crime, bounty, basic stealth, and much much more.

We’ve refocused on these tasks as the addition of Ro’to Village to the game draws closer, we need these features to fully realize the village. These features will provide the foundations for many new layers of gameplay, and the village itself will become a crucial nexus for gameplay in the near future.

–Luke

[str-Luke]

Weekly Report - 43

Another week goes by, and our team has cracked out another list of changes and improvements. Once again, most of the work this week has focused on backend code for the village, so while some of the changes listed under “backend” at the end of the list are technically shipped in the game, they’re not really accessible to the player in any meaningful way yet – as it’s mostly work for the village.

This week’s additions

• Revised Ka’te’coro Basin - As we continue our march south to the completion of the revision of the game world, this time, Ka’te’coro Basin was overhauled, and moderately expanded. It also had some additional ores, containers, and map markers placed. Ka’te’coro Basin also provides us with a very good opportunity to show off exactly how far the game has come in the past year. This early beta screenshot shows the state of Ka’te’coro Basin on February 17th 2015. Compare to the image above.
  
  
• **Dolfog Sounds - **When we updated the dolfog animations, a lot of the timers for the sounds were lost, resulting in not just a quieter dolfog, but a less readable dolfog. With the latest update many of these sounds we recalibrated and added back to the dolfog, which should improve the combat experience with them. We’ll be replacing all of the dolfog sounds soon.
• **Improved Performance - **Gameplay performance should be moderately improved, especially at dusk and dawn; the performance was squeezed out of an issue that was causing shadows from both the Godhand and the Sun to be visible during dusk and dawn. We also removed one of the fog layers, as it was now longer needed.
• Improved Shadows, Lighting, and Fog - Speaking of fog – Shadows, lighting, and fog were further improved. A significant improvement was made to dawn and dusk, resulting in more pleasing, and gameplay friendly visuals. Other improvements come in fixing brightness during day and night, moon orbit speeds, bloom and more.
• Improved Ore Materials - The material for Iron, Copper, Fluorite, Sphalerite, and Sulfur ore nodes were significantly improved, making the nodes look nicer, and make them a little more distinguished from the environment.
• **Revised Ore 3D Models - **The meshes for ore nodes were also completely replaced, with a more visually appealing and slightly more efficient layout. This task ended up taking much more time than expected, as it required the repositioning of 992 of the ore nodes! Turns out, there are a lot more ore nodes spread over the world than even I thought!
• Added new cave music - A new cave exploration music track was added to the game, for some new sweet (or rather, creepy) jams while spelunking… because who doesn’t like jams while spelunking? Nevermind, don’t answer that.
• New sound when advancing time - A new sound plays while advancing time. It’s a small addition, but a fun one.
• Tweaked Interface Hotkeys - You can now press I to open the inventory, and bind opening the inventory to whatever key you want. TAB also still opens the inventory, and can also be rebound. TAB is now more of a interface management key, and in the future will be used to open a more specific all-purpose UI screen, rather than the inventory. The actual result of this change is not much, but you can now use TAB to close some menus.
• **Local Message Improvements - **The local messages have been improved. These messages are now centered and below the crosshair, where you’re probably going to be looking when you get one of these. Their order is now more properly represented with the newest message on top, resulting in less jumpy text as older messages fade away.
• Player Chat Box Shadow - Removed the shadow that would appear over the player/server chat window which has existed since the early days of Vizaris. This mostly just makes the UI a bit cleaner when starting the game.
• **NPC Headtracking - **Head tracking was added to AI, as long as the NPC is aware of the player, and the player is within a specific arc in front of the NPC. This doesn’t have much impact beyond visuals right now, but it will play an important role in the upcoming stealth gameplay.
• Quiet game while loading - Game sounds are now faded out while the world is loading, resulting in a more professional, and pensive game loading experience (Keeping in mind that you only see loading screens when you first load a save, and when you use the Un-stuck menu.)
• **UI Menus are now prevented while loading - **The game now prevents the player from opening certain menus while the game is still loading.
• **File Optimizations - **Extra work was put into stripping out some unused art and unused plugins, resulting in cleaner, smaller folders, and more importantly slightly smaller future updates.
• Disabled FXAA, Disabled Sharpening - Finally got tired of the blurriness, got tired of the sharpening to compensate. UE4 doesn’t have any quality AA solutions yet, and it’s beyond our means to develop. The significant image quality reduction from FXAA simply wasn’t worth the removal of the aliasing. You may still be able to force various different AA solutions using your drivers. The removal of both of these things provides a slight performance boost.
• Fixed: Stamina Costs for Blocking - We fixed an absolutely significant bug which was causing block to use up incorrect amounts of stamina based on the player’s current endurance. Stamina is now properly adjusted based on the player’s endurance virtue, and now drains smoothly, rather than in sudden, large chunks under certain circumstances.
• Fixed: Dummy Material - I was informed by the artist that the dummy added last week had its materials incorrectly configured (by me). So a tweak here, and a modification there, and the dummy should look a little nicer this week.
• Backend: Guards - As usual, most of the code work went into new features which are necessary for the upcoming village. One of these major features is the functionality for guard NPCs. Aside from a handful of specific features and interactions, guards are now fully functional.
• Backend: NPC Awareness - NPC now have a level of awareness of the player, based on the direction the NPC is currently facing. It’s now possible to move close behind NPCs without them noticing you. This is important for upcoming stealth gameplay, and the next feature:
• **Backend: Player Bounty - **Player bounty, and associated crimes such as theft, assault, murder, lock picking, etc is now also functional. These crimes can also now be committed without receiving a bounty, if no NPCs are aware of the player.

Code development will continue on village features, and other little improvements will continue to be made. If I can find a way to do it cleanly, I’ll try to integrated a limited form of some of these features into the next update. The actual implications for the player won’t be that significant, but it will still give you a good taste of what’s to come.

Clothing is also being made for the NPCs, and the new player customization system (which is also important for NPCs) is currently being worked on. There’s a lot of exiting stuff coming soon.

If you’ve been watching Vizaris for a while, and enjoy seeing the weekly content additions, please consider buying Vizaris if you haven’t already – It’s basically our equivalent to Kickstarter, or Patreon, and puts the whole game into your hands immediately. It also helps us to put food on the table, and updates on your hard drives. The more resources and feedback we have to develop the game, the faster we can add content! Every player, and the feedback they provide is critical to the development of the game. We look forward to hearing from you!

–Luke

[evilgrin]

Does this have the potential to develop into something MMORPGish, open world, pvp, lots of exploring and fighting other players. It looks interesting.

[str-Luke]

@evilgrin;487973

Does this have the potential to develop into something MMORPGish, open world, pvp, lots of exploring and fighting other players. It looks interesting.

Mostly yes, but with an asterisk - For the near future, Vizaris will remain co-op multiplayer / singleplayer. Once people start to buy the game and we get some resources, we’ll lock down the core gameplay mechanics and expand content. At that point the game will look a lot like a multiplayer Skyrim or Witcher. From there, once the world is more developed, and the game already has the planned construction mechanics implimented, we’ll allow larger scale, vs style severs to be created, which will act more like a Rust or DayZ server with multiple players semi-cooperating, but the same sort of refined singleplayer experience.

Perhaps the most interesting thing beyond the straight up development of Vizaris - as a coop, open world RPG, with all the niceties you’d come to expect of a fully fledged RPG, such as character progression and customization, quests, and content for days - will be the use of Vizaris, and the world of Vizaris as a canvas to introduce new, alternative game modes, including a larger scale multi-player mode, and a more ‘game-master’ driven narrative mode, where one player plays god to another player or group of players. However, all of that is very long form, and very much depends on how quickly we can get the base game off the ground and in the hands of more players.

[str-Luke]

Weekly Report - 44

Unfortunately, there’s not going to be an update to Vizaris this week. Several work and personal issues combined to make the update impossible this week, including delays and crashes, doctor’s appointments, vet visits, and an unrelated headcold. With the excuses out of the way, I’m still going to do a bit of a showcase of some of the upcoming creature art in Vizaris.

[HR][/HR]

Creatures

The Dolfog
[sketchfab]2a687c49297947409178d8ea59384261[/sketchfab]

As anyone who’s followed Vizaris is aware, the Dolfog is one of the creatures that inhabits the Qaris’da’te Caldera, a warren of caves and canyons which used to be the bed of a vast inland sea, one thousand years before the start of the game. A cataclysmic event drained the sea, and caused rapid evolution of the creatures in the area. In this case, a fish mutated into the Dolfog. A horrible creature which can vary in size from a cuddly puppy to a gristly charging bull. You generally want to stay away from these guys.

The Pirahken
[sketchfab]cb2b996174234d48b4b165ebe4524331[/sketchfab]

The Pirahken is a very small creature, usually no taller than knee height. They are known for swarming larger prey, an males which are exceptionally boisterous and aggressive, especially during mating season. The inhabitants of Ro’to village domesticate Pirahken, harvesting their egg clutches, and using the creatures themselves as a source of meat.

The Pirahken, along with other two creatures listed below, is one of seven new creatures which we need to make animations for. If you’re an animator, or a animation skinner/rigger, we’d be interested in hearing from you.

The Vython
[sketchfab]92aa91f6564e4f6c951056ad60131bfe[/sketchfab]

The Vython is a large creature, generally about the same size as a dolfog. The vython is known for it’s gaping, tooth filled maw, which is often the source of luminescent jets of acidic water, which it uses to stun, confuse, and blind it’s predator and it’s prey (usually one in the same) and then either devour it’s target, or flee. Unlike other creatures of the Qaris’da’te caldera, Vythons are very rarely, if ever domesticated, do to their frequent and hazardous acid leaks.

The Balgore
[sketchfab]67bbe078ddd446719f1c413ba886b209[/sketchfab]

The Balgore is a large and fairly passive creature, so long as its offspring are safe. It’s known for slowly lumbering around the canyons, usually with a cavalcade of offspring following behind it. Naturally, humans being humans, find these offspring to be quite the delicacy, and often hunt the young balgores around the times of large feasts and festivals. The protective parents won’t have much of any predator, and will likely charge any hunter or predator threatening their babies.

[HR][/HR]

Now, just because I wasn’t able to get an update posted this week, doesn’t mean there wasn’t progress on the game. The player outfits along with some outfits for the villager were completed this week, along with more code for village, including a significant overhaul to conversations, allowing multiple players to participate in a conversation with an NPC, and enhanced behavior for when the player doesn’t have enough money to pay off their bounty, and doesn’t want to die at the hands of the guards. (The player gets exiled, and must do quests to work off their bounty, if they want to get back inside the village.)

For the work outside of code and art – well along with several miscellaneous tasks, including a new high quality pickaxe upgrade and some visual fixes, we’re also working on a complete overhaul to the way the map is loaded, which will result in smoother gameplay, less hard drive space usage, lower ram while running, and yet still provide better visuals. It’s a pretty significant update to the landscape, and by the time for the next update there will be a whole additional week of progress added on top, so the update in a week should be pretty big.

Outside of next weeks update, we’ll hopefully be able to get at least one of these creatures rigged, animated, and ingame. We’re definitely looking forward to more variety in the creatures – but it’s more than just animations, it also requires custom sounds (What does a balgore sound like? You’ll have to wait and see), visual effects, code for unique behaviors, and a smattering of secondary objects like the dolfog has (pelt, multiple meat chunks, etc.)

–Luke

[evilgrin]

@str-Luke;488239

Mostly yes, but with an asterisk - For the near future, Vizaris will remain co-op multiplayer / singleplayer. Once people start to buy the game and we get some resources, we’ll lock down the core gameplay mechanics and expand content. At that point the game will look a lot like a multiplayer Skyrim or Witcher. From there, once the world is more developed, and the game already has the planned construction mechanics implimented, we’ll allow larger scale, vs style severs to be created, which will act more like a Rust or DayZ server with multiple players semi-cooperating, but the same sort of refined singleplayer experience.

Perhaps the most interesting thing beyond the straight up development of Vizaris - as a coop, open world RPG, with all the niceties you’d come to expect of a fully fledged RPG, such as character progression and customization, quests, and content for days - will be the use of Vizaris, and the world of Vizaris as a canvas to introduce new, alternative game modes, including a larger scale multi-player mode, and a more ‘game-master’ driven narrative mode, where one player plays god to another player or group of players. However, all of that is very long form, and very much depends on how quickly we can get the base game off the ground and in the hands of more players.

Sounds fun, I dont like the stuff with no character progression. It just feels so boring after a few weeks. We could run our own rulesets though? There is a game called Darkfall, which was very good, but relied on massive population for fun. I’m looking for a smaller version of that.

[str-Luke]

@evilgrin;488623

Sounds fun, I dont like the stuff with no character progression. It just feels so boring after a few weeks. We could run our own rulesets though? There is a game called Darkfall, which was very good, but relied on massive population for fun. I’m looking for a smaller version of that.

That’s why we’re currently building up gameplay You can’t really have progression until you have gameplay. For instance, being able to increase your magic skills means nothing if you don’t have the ability to cast magic. We’re nearing the point though where we can start adding skill progression.

The ability to run your own rulesets will definitely be a thing, but only once the game itself is more fully formed - for the same reason as character progression. You can’t really change the gameplay, if there isn’t gameplay to begin with. Even long term, Vizaris will never be “done”, it will always just reach tiers of content. There will always be something more to add, even after four, five, six years or more. Once we have the art assets and gameplay code, it would be downright stupid to not start experimenting with alternative game modes, such as larger scale servers, and (separate from MMO) the ability for one player to act as god.

[str-Luke]

Weekly Report - 45

We’re back once again! And with an actual update to the game! You have my profound apologies for the lack of a playable update last week. We were in the middle of a major overhaul to several components of the game, and I personally spent several days out of commission due to non-life threatening medical procedures. This week is one of those weeks, where the changelog looks deceptively small, but has some pretty significant changes to the game.

[Shot]http://media.indiedb.com/images/members/1/675/674057/profile/Weekly_Report_-_45.jpg[/shot]

This week’s additions

• **Controller Support - **The biggest addition to Vizaris this week was the near-complete support of controllers to the game. Simply plug in your Xbox One controller, or gamepad of your choice, and for the most part play completely free of a keyboard and mouse. Not all UI screens function with the controller yet, such as screens with text entry boxes. This coming week Controller support will be improved further to be fully functional.
• **Controller Mode - **Vizaris is now aware of when you’re actually using a controller, vs using a Keyboard and Mouse, and will adjust the UI, text messages, and displayed hotkeys to indicate this. That way, you won’t see “Press E” when you’d actually be pressing A to do that action.
• Split game world into smaller tiles - The map itself also received a comprehensive split into quarter kilometer tiles. Previously, the maps were composed of half Kilometer tiles. Objects like rocks were also split from the landscape. What this means is slightly longer load times when you first load your save, in return for significantly less loading hitches while playing, improved performance and framerate, less RAM usage, smaller future update sizes, and better visuals. This also improves distant landscape LOD, makes large distant objects visible, and reduces the size of Vizaris on your hard drive by 815mb. It’s a pretty big deal!
• Added the tunnel to Ro’to Village - In preparation for the addition of Ro’to Village, we’ve opened up the tunnel leading to the village. It’s still blocked off by the gate inside the tunnel, but you can look through the gate to see inside the village for a bit of a teaser. Ka’tro has also had his dialog adjusted to reflect this change.
• Added high quality, durable pickaxe - Added a more expensive steel pickaxe to Ka’tro’s store, which costs quite a bit more, but will last substantially longer than a regular pickaxe.
• **Minor Revision: Ka’te’coro Canyon (South) - **Ka’te’coro Canyon was the first area to be revised in the recent revision of the map, and was missing one of the key steps of the new revision process (Some of the landscape texture painting.) We took the opportunity of the complete replacement of the map files to clean up this area and bring it up to the same standard as the rest of the revised areas.
• **Keybind list is now sorted - **The Keybind list is now sorted – so no more randomly searching the list to find exactly which key you want to rebind. Now keys are grouped generally according to their importance and their type of action.
• Health dots no longer appear for friendly NPCs - No more health dots subtly implying the possibility that you can cut down your friends if you wanted to. We couldn’t do anything about the voices inside your head telling you to do that though. That’s likely caused by a conflict with one of the peripherals attached to your PC.
• Various improvements to NPC head and body rotation - Various improvements were made to the rotation of NPC heads and bodies in relation to the player, including making the NPCs keep rotating towards you after they stop pursuit of you.
• **Shadow Optimizations - **Some moderate adjustments were done to shadow quality. This does reduce the quality of the shadows, but the resulting performance gain is definitely worth it.
• Fixed: Menu not loading for some PCs - Fixed a bug that was causing the Menu to not load on some PCs. This is obviously an egregious bug, but it has been fixed now.
• Fixed: Player Character Normal Map - Fixed a bug that existed literally forever with the Player Character’s normal map that was causing the shading to be incorrect. This was also done for a few other characters. Shame that we’re likely going to replace this character model in a week or so.
• Fixed: Camera Contrast and Saturation - Fixed a bug that was causing Camera Contrast and Saturation to be completely messed up. Prepare for less over-saturated yellow visuals, and more proper colors!
• **Backend: Village Art - **A bunch of exterior art was added to the village, and will now stream onto your hard drives. The work on the village continues as we prepare to add it to the game. One of these pieces of art was the Gatehouse, and other pieces of art include the massive sails, marketplace carts, proper windows, stairs, and more.
• Backend: Player and NPC Clothing Finished - The clothing for the new player character models was completed last week, and would’ve been added to the game had things gone a little more smoothly with the controller integration. The new clothes are very impressive in terms of their visual quality and modularity. This means that we’ll soon be able to introduce the new player models, male player characters, armor, and more NPCs to the game.
• **Backend: Conversation Overhaul - **Although there really isn’t much of a to see it in action, conversations were completely overhauled this week when it comes to multiple players participating in a conversation. Now players which aren’t the leader of the conversation can vote which options they’d like to pick, and can also of their own volition, contribute special benefits to the conversation. The host can see which options the other players would like to pick, and can take advantage of the abilities of other players in the conversation, if those other players are willing to provide their abilities.
• **Backend: Exile - **What happens when you commit a crime in a game that’s promotes consequences to actions, in a game world where it doesn’t make sense to throw players in jail, and in a village that doesn’t actually have a jail? Exile of course! Now when you commit a crime and don’t have the funds or the willpower to pay your way out of it, you’ll be thrown out, and locked out of the village, and given the opportunity to work off your debt to society by getting jobs from the gatekeeper. Of course, you could always just stay outside and get eaten by dolfogs or die of exposure. Your choice.

So as you can see, a lot of backend stuff, a lot of major revisions. You’ve probably noticed of late that a lot of the major code stuff has been going into the village. It’s all part of a major push (separate from controller integration) to get the village operational. Aside from further refinements to controller support, you can expect some additional backend work on NPC Disposition (How much NPCs like your character), Schedules, and refinements to the bounty system before it’s all operational. There’s also going to be even more art, because the village is full of that.

I’ve been harping on this weekly for quite a while now, but the village is really going to take the game to the next level, and provide a stable foundation for virtually every addition to the game for the next several months. I’m looking forward to getting it ingame more than anyone else.

See you all next week!

–Luke

[shot]http://media.indiedb.com/images/members/1/675/674057/profile/45_-_1.jpg[/shot] [shot]http://media.indiedb.com/images/members/1/675/674057/profile/45_-_2.jpg[/shot]

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[str-Luke]

Weekly Report - 46

This week we’ve got a boat load of improvements for the controller support last week. This takes us to about 95 percent compatibility with controllers, and will generally result in a much more pleasing and complete game experience while using controllers. There are also some exciting new developments with art, and some performance improvements. This update is pretty big, so let’s get started:

[Shot]http://media.indiedb.com/images/members/1/675/674057/profile/Weekly_Report_-_46.jpg[/shot]

This week’s additions

• **Revised: Salis’da’coro Pass (Lower) -** The Salis’da’coro Pass (Lower) area was partially revised this week, improving visuals and playability of the area.
  

• ** New Player Model -** We’ve begun to introduce the new player models into the game. Although they aren’t fully integrated into the game yet, most of their art assets have been included in the game, and will be further integrated into the game over the coming days and weeks.

• **Significant Performance Optimizations -** Significant adjustments were made to the lighting system which should result in better performance and less loading hitches.
  

• **Improved Reflections -** Reflections were completely overhauled and optimized, leading to significantly better reflections and lighting on most objects, especially foliage and plants. This also leads to a significant reduction in map size, resulting in savings of over 300mb.
  

• **Tweaked Bush Materials -** The appearance of many of the bushes in the game were tweaked, resulting in a much more natural appearance.
  

• ** Tweaked Ambient Occlusion, Bloom, Tonemapper -** Many of the post processing effects were also completely overhauled this week, resulting in (subjectively) better visuals.

• **Integrated crafting menu into player menu -** The crafting menu was overhauled and changed from a completely separate UI menu accessed from the player’s menu, to a merged UI menu that is integrated INTO the player’s menu. The end result is a more predictable and clean user interface.
  

• ** Improved Focus Mode -** Focus mode was improved to have a slight zoom effect as well as a reduction in the sensitivity of the camera controls. This was done to make it easier to grab smaller items, especially when in third person mode, and while using a controller.
• ** Improved Camera -** The camera now saves view distance, camera mode (first or third person), and shoulder focus (left, right, or center) while saving the game.

• **Improved Camera for Controller -** The basic camera controls were improved for controllers. The right thumbstick now takes the exact tilt into account, allowing lighter tilts of the thumbstick to move the camera more slowly.
  

• **Improved strafing movement mode for Controller -** There were various issues, and one or two outright mistakes that were preventing strafing movement modes (First person, focus mode, combat mode) from functioning properly. These have all been fixed and improved.
  

• **Improved Controller support for Journal -** Controller support was improved for the journal. Several fixes were made, and the journal’s quest switching was also improved.
  

• **Improved Controller support for Scroll Boxes -** Scroll boxes now properly scroll to keep the currently selected item visible.
  

• ** Controller Support: Conversation Menu -** The conversation menu now fully supports controller navigation.

• **Controller Support: Crafting Menu - **The crafting menu also now fully supports controller navigation.
  

• **Controller Support: Player Creation Menu - **The player creation menu now almost fully supports controller navigation. You’ll still need a keyboard if you want to enter your character’s name, but beyond the text entry box, you can now fully use the menu.
  

• **Controller Support: Map Menu - **The map now fully supports controller navigation, including the ability to move around and look at different markers, and use the triggers to zoom in and out.
  

• **Limited Controller Support: Container Inventories -** Container inventories now roughly support controller navigation. This menu isn’t fully functional yet due to some issues related to navigation with the player and container inventory lists, but the container side of the screen is fully functional. This should be fully fixed with the next update.
  

• **Cursor now hidden when in Controller Mode -** The mouse cursor is now hidden when controller mode is activated. Simply press a key on the keyboard or move the mouse to bring the cursor back.
  

• ** Various other tweaks and improvements to controller support -** There were also a ton of other very minor tweak and improvements to controller support.

• **Death Camera Improvements - **The death camera was improve, with the camera now tracking the player after death in third person, and remaining in first person if you died in first person. Some minor improvements were also made to help prevent the camera from clipping through the ground.
  

• **Fixed: Tessellation Shadow Holes -** Fixed a visual issue where the dynamic tessellation of the rocks would create holes in rocks which were off camera, which would allow light to pass through.
  

• **Fixed: Potential spawn issue on new game -** Fixed a bug which could cause new game saves to not properly load the  world, causing the player to get stuck floating on glitched platform.
  

• **Fixed: Glitchy Dolfog walking - **Fixed a bug that was causing dolfogs to have very glitchy and twitchy walking. They should now move smoothly, as god intended.
  

• **Fixed: Large chest container using wrong open sound -** Large chests were accidentally configured to use the ‘Barrel Close’ sound when opening them. It was very wrong, and very upsetting.
  

• **Backend: More Village Art -** Even more village art was imported into the game. All that’s left at this point are the interior props, which are still being made. The construction and population of the exterior of the village is almost complete.
  

• **Backend: Character Art -** As mentioned previously, character art was also imported into the game. This is a pretty big deal, as it means that we’ll very soon be able to introduce male player characters, customizable player characters, changeable clothing and armor, NPC variety, and much more. Many of these art assets will be integrated into the game in the coming week.
  

• **Disabled: Character Customization -** Because of the changed player model, character customization was temporarily disabled, with the exception of Masks. If you had a customized character, their appearance will now revert to the default new player character model (Aside from your choice of mask). This is temporary until the new character customization system is in place.
  

This week we had planned to get male player characters integrated, but some last minute trouble with the PhysX cloth ended up consuming the time it would’ve taken to get male player characters integrated. So that sucks. Also it was my birthday – I watched “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” with my family. That didn’t suck. The coming week will have the last few tweaks for controller support, before we jump back to code for the village. Art will focus on the creation of internal props for the village. Level design will focus on Village exterior and this week’s landscape revision. Lastly, general work will focus on getting the recently added character art fully integrated.

See you next week!

–Luke

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[Matitos]

Very nice , love how its looking !

[str-Luke]

Weekly Report - 47

Happy Easter to all those around the world who celebrate it! We hope you had a good weekend. This week, Vizaris received a number of performance enhancements, stability improvements, and small-feature upgrades. There are no new major features this week, but the work that was done will improve your entire play experience. From time to time, we’ll spend a week just squashing bugs, improving performance, and tweaking small features. This helps to ensure that the overall quality of the game remains high. When you add too many large features too quickly, the quality of the game can suffer – and weeks like this help to keep things in check.

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This week’s additions

• Male Player Character - We’ve finally added male player characters to the game. Now when creating your character you can choose between Male and Female player characters. Aside from body proportions the outfits are almost identical. Hooray for equality.
• New Villager Art - The villagers which you can find around outside the village received a facelift this week. They’re now using the new bodies, animations, and art which the player received last week.
• Sky Improvements - Blue Skies! The last several updates, especially those with adjustments to fog, have been slowly but surely moving the sky away from blue, to more of a dusty gray color. Well that’s no more! Now the skies are back, and blue!
• Landscape Texture Optimizations - The landscapes received some texture optimizations, which should result in less hard drive usage, and less VRAM usage.
• Made night less harsh - Nights have been getting neglected with all of the latest color changes to the atmospherics during the day, and they ended up being a little too dark, even when the moon was out. Nights have now been made a little brighter, especially when the moons are out. Don’t expect it to be super visible, you’ll still need a torch most of the time, especially when the moon isn’t out.
• Colorgrading - We’ve also added some colorgrading which will make the game look significantly more vivid. Sunlight will be brighter, skies will be more blue, colors will generally be more saturated without being overly saturated, and contrast will be improved without destroying your eyes.
• Player Studio Character Rotation - The player studio now has controls to rotate the player so you can see them from different angles. You can also use the right stick on the controller to rotate the player as well.
• Controller Support: Audio Options Menu - The audio options menu now fully supports controller navigation.
• Controller Support: Video Options Menu - The video options menu now also fully supports controller navigation, and has been updated.
• Controller Support: Tutorial and Popups - Tutorial popups, and other similar dialog boxes can now be properly dismissed with the controller.
• Improved: Light Shafts - Lightshafts from the sun were notably amped up in this build, resulting in some pretty cool visuals, without being blinded by the sun every time you look at it.
• Improved: The Loading Screen - The (and pretty much only) loading screen, which occurs when you load your savegame (or start a new game) has been improved to be more responsive when you first click the button, including removal of a 1 frame visual glitch.
• Improved: Controller Zooming on Map - You can now hold down the triggers to zoom in and out on the map, rather than needing to press them repeatedly. This will make using the maps significantly less annoying.
• Improved: Repeating Inputs on Navigation - Speaking of making things less annoying, now ALL controller inputs refire when appropriate, so now you can navigate lists and menus by holding down the direction, rather than repeatedly pressing the button.
• Improved: Music Looping - Music now loops and repeats properly. Previously, music would not properly select the next track to play, and would result in long periods of silence until a natural music change was called (such as entering a new area or entering combat.)
• Improved: AI Efficiency - AI efficiency was also improved, resulting in a moderate FPS gain any time you are near AI. The more AI, the larger the performance improvement.
• Fixed: Advancing time not updating atmospherics - We also fixed a bug that was causing only some of the atmospherics to update when time was advanced (usually due to resting). This bug would result in slightly off visuals after advancing time for a few seconds, before the atmospherics naturally updated and corrected the issue. Now the atmospherics should properly advance before the screen fades back in.
• Fixed: Glitchy Dolfog Walking (For real this time) - Turns out, the glitchy creature walking was being caused by a whole subset of issues beyond the issue we fixed last week. Last week’s fix removed a specific instance of the issue, but this week’s fix is MUCH more comprehensive and should finally put this issue to bed.
• **Fixed: AI Wandering Failure - **A bug which could cause AI Wandering to break was fixed as well. No more creatures and bandits aimlessly standing in one spot, pondering the meaning of life.
• Fixed: Animation skin on Player’s Cape - We fixed the bad skinning on the (female) player’s shoulders on the cape mesh. Visuals in that area should look noticeably better now.
• **Fixed: Quality pickaxe not working - **We fixed a bug that was actually causing the higher quality pickaxe to not work on most ore nodes.
• **Fixed: Various content References - **A significant amount of content references were fixed. This will actually result in several hundred less micro-files in the install folder, and generally improve the stability of the game.
• **Fixed: Login Screen - **We fixed a bug that was causing the login screen to pop up after trying to load the game from the menu, rather than appear before the menu as it did previously.
• Fixed: Camera Collision - Camera collision was fixed and updated to prevent the player from being able to force the camera under the ground and inside of objects under certain circumstances.
• Fixed: Audio Crash - A fatal crash related to an audio bug was also fixed.
• Fixed: AI Crash - A potential fatal crash related to AI Pathing, which could occur if the AI failed to find a destination repeatedly.
• Removed Tessellation - Unfortunately, this week we also had to remove tessellation due to general Unreal Engine 4 issues with the feature. The engine couldn’t properly handle the enabling and disabling of tessellation, and even when disabled ingame, it still caused a large performance hit. The good news is, if you didn’t use tessellation, you’ll likely get near double the framerate – so the tradeoff is very worthwhile.
• Backend: Bounty Decay - Some additional backend work was done for crime / bounty, which now allows your bounty to decay by 5 percent or 50 Copper (whichever is larger) per day, after 48 hours have passes since your last crime.

So, male characters are -finally- in the game, after all this time. It’s great to finally be able to add them to the game. Now, in terms of practical changes due to this, there aren’t that many. Behind the scenes we’re getting the very complicated art which will allow us to introduce some of the more advanced character customization features, like face sculpting and hair.

All of the new outfits added to the game are modular and designed with the upcoming Outfit system in mind. This means that you’ll be able to switch out different components of your characters to customize their look however you want. The new art is also very efficient, especially when you have a large number of characters in an area, such as the village. We’re really looking forward to being able to put the Village, the Outfit system, and advanced player customization into the game in the coming weeks.

See you next week!

–Luke

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[anonymous_user_759e5c3a]

I really love those creatures! Can’t wait to see where you take this in the future

[str-Luke]

Weekly Report - 48

This week won’t have an ingame update. We’re in the middle of transitioning over to the recently released Unreal Engine 4.11 update, which will bring some noticeable performance improvements. Unlike week 44 where we weren’t able to do an update, this time an update is still being made, we were just unable to get the update game ready for today. Next week you can expect an even bigger update than normal, as it will include this week’s update.

To make up for the lack of an ingame update this week, I’ve decided to do another creature week like week 44, showing off some of the creatures we’ve designed for Vizaris, and teasing their gameplay.

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Creatures

The Ursoc
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The Ursoc (pronounced Err-Sock) is a massive, but primitive beast, standing as tall as a man while on four legs, it’s one of the largest creatures you’ll encounter in Qaris’da’te. Thankfully, they’re Herbivores so they won’t actively pursue you, but don’t think that makes you safe. The desert nomads call these creatures “Water Guardians” as their territory is always centered around hotsprings and other acid oases. They will often splash about in the acidic water, which can be hazardous to nearby creatures that aren’t conditioned to being bathed in acid.

The Fitcher
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The Fitcher is a dog sized creature which is skittish when alone, but in groups can be bold enough to tackle larger opponents. While solitary within their own territory, when encountered alone they will usually bolt, in search of other members of their pack. Their pelts are exceptionally valuable for use in the creation of fine scale mail once treated, but very difficult to acquire undamaged by ranged or melee weapons. Hunters will need to engage in a long chase of attrition to cause the creature to literally collapse of exhaustion – if the hunter wants to collect the pelt undamaged for the maximum reward.

The Tythochs
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The Tythochs, (pronounced Tie-th-ocks) is a muscular, lizard-like omnivore, which is large enough to support two or more men riding it. It is a common beast used for transportation. Wild Tythochs can be very aggressive in the wild, sweeping their large tails in wide arcs with enough force to break bones, and using their arms to grab and restrain their prey – Making an angry Tythochs a foe that you won’t want to fight alone. However, their curious nature can make them easy to be lured with food, and eventually tamed and domesticated.

The Olluhker
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The Olluhker (pronounced oh-luck-er) is once of the most dangerous creatures in the canyons. Standing two thirds the height of a man, and nearly three times as long, it is a nocturnal carnivore which stalks its prey. Even with the full moons, the most keen-eyed explorer would be hard pressed to see the Olluhker before it strikes due to it’s ability to change it’s skin to camouflage itself. The Olluhker has but one weakness, in it’s ability to become transfixed by fire and similar light sources, breaking the camouflage, and potentially paralyzing or starling the creature. So goes the saying: “Never wander at night without a torch to cast bright.”… or you might just find yourself in the belly of an Olluhker before you even know it.

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As with the last batch of creatures, the 3D models is just the first part of a long process to get these creatures ingame. They require animations, sounds, effects, secondary objects like pelts and meat, gameplay programming, and of course, testing, before they can go in the game.

This, along with the week 44 creature report should give you a pretty good idea of the kind of variety and unique creatures that you can expect from Vizaris moving forward. We specifically try to stay away from real world creatures and the regular fantasy creatures to give both ourselves and you a fresh breath of air. Most of the creatures in the Qaris’da’te Caldera were hyper evolved from fish and other aquatic life, which is why they generally share a similar theme – but as time goes on and Vizaris branches out into more biomes, you can be assured that those areas will have their own creature themes and complete ecosystems.

These aren’t all of the planned creatures for Qaris’da’te either – there are still more creatures to come, with many being even more wild and alien than any of the creatures so far!

–Luke

[str-Luke]

Weekly Report - 49

We’re back with a big update, including some significant performance improvements, one of the largest revised areas yet, and some pretty significant additions to crafting. Of course, this week also has a major engine upgrade to Unreal Engine 4.11, which was the cause of last week’s missing update.

This week’s update should provide a generally smoother play experience, as well as some new toys to play around with.

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This week’s additions

• Upgraded to UE4.11 - This was a major and messy transition which was solely responsible for the lack of a playable update last week. Ordinarily engine upgrades for UE4 take less than a day to update to, but this one took over a week. The benefits of this update will be performance improvements, and visual improvements.
• Revised Salis’da’coro Pass - The Salis’da’coro Pass area was further revised this week, including the half-cave path into Salis’da’coro Canyon, and the upper areas around Tenra’s Cave. Many new items and a few secrets were added to the game in these areas. After this week, it leaves only an area directly west of the Salis’da’coro Pass, and Salis’da’coro Canyon itself to be revised.
• **Optimized: Distant Textures - **A couple of the textures used for more distant objects, like the god-hand where more heavily optimized, reducing VRAM usage, and hard drive space requirements.
• Optimized: Coin and Torch Textures - Coins and Torches were also optimized. You’re likely not going to be able to spot a difference visually, but they’re significantly more efficient now, resulting in less VRAM usage and hard drive space requirements.
• Improved: Cave Lighting - The lighting inside several caves was improved. Due to the seamless nature of the Vizaris world, and certain technical restrictions in the UE4 engine, there’s no way to make caves properly dark without some form of a transition in lighting which is difficult to hide. In the latest update we’ve changed the way caves are lit, which results in much better visuals and exploration experience, but will have a noticeable change when you exit and enter the caves.
• Improved: Night Lighting - The colors and general darkness of the lighting at night was improved as well, resulting in a play experience more in line with what we intended.
• Improved: Performance - Other general performance improvements were made to several visual elements, including the landscape, which will result in a notable performance improvement. Our development PCs saw a 10 percent improvement in most cases, in ADITION to the performance improvements from UE4.11
• **Improved: Shadow Options - **Shadows are now properly rendered at the lowest shadow level; and the highest shadow level now renders higher resolution shadows.
• Improved: Shadow Options - Shadows are now properly rendered at the lowest shadow level; and the highest shadow level now renders higher resolution shadows.
• **Reduced metal ore weight by 25 percent - **All rock ore chunks were reduced in weight by 25 percent, allowing you to carry a few more of them at a time.
• Improved: Conversation Menu - The conversation menu was improved to be more personable when talking to an NPC. Now when in third person, the camera will move to show the character you’re talking to. The conversation menu can now also be closed by pressing TAB.
• Added: New Items and Recipes - Several new craftable items were added, including refined versions of all the different ores you can mine. Putting in a little extra work at the crafting station should net you a hefty reward when you go to sell your items.
• Added: Crafting Workstations - The code for this has actually been around for a while, and has now been integrated into the gameplay. Workstations are non-portable requirements for crafting certain items. In the case of today’s update, a furnace is required to create ingots from ore, as well as refine ingots.
• Added: Crafting Tools - Much like workstations, tools are items which must be present in your inventory in order for you to craft certain items. In today’s update for example, buying a Rock Chisel from Ka’tro will allow you to chip off garbage rock from Sulfur, Sphalerite, and Fluorite ore, allowing you to utilize the leftover crystals for crafting.
• Gave Ba’tro new Clothes - Ba’tro has some sweet new colors for his clothing, and a different mask from his brother.
• Fixed: Invisible Torch Sticks - Fixed a bug that was causing lit torches to be invisible
• Fixed: Cave Mushrooms having wrong color from a distance - Fixed a bug that was causing the luminescent cave mushrooms to have the wrong color from far away. This wasn’t noticeable in most cases, but could cause some weird graphics in some places.
• Fixed: Invisible hands on Female PC - Fixed a bug that was causing the hands for the player character to be invisible when playing as a Female
• Backend: NPC Disposition - While not yet integrated into gameplay, a bunch of work was done on NPC Disposition, which is the system that allows NPCs to like or dislike the player to varying degrees. The end result will be different conversation options, store prices, and behavior. The system also properly takes into account the player’s charisma stat, and multiple players in the same world.

Our programmer has some personal obligations this week which will prevent him from doing any code work for the most part. However, despite his obligations he was still able to get in some emergency fixes earlier today for a few last minute bugs that were discovered – so if it wasn’t for his quick response, we actually probably would not have had an update this week.

Barring calamity, there will be an update next week though, as there are still other elements of the game being worked on which don’t need any code work.

Let’s talk a bit about crafting workstations and tools. In the first few instances of these new features, the crafting mechanics aren’t going to be that big of a deal, but long term it will have a significant impact on how crafting progresses. Eventually you’ll need more advanced crafting workstations to create certain items. In order to get access to these better crafting workstations, the you’ll need to build or buy them for your house, get in the good graces of an NPC who owns one of these stations, or potentially find abandoned crafting station which you can use.

Tools will be similar in that you’ll need to build, buy, or otherwise acquire a collection of these over time. They’ll tend to be very specific to the type of items that you’re crafting. Lower quality tools will degrade and break, giving you a good reason to invest in higher quality tools.

The quality of both the tools and the workstations will also eventually have an impact on the quality of the items you produce. If you have a junky workstation and cheap tools, even a character with high skill won’t be able to make the best quality items from that work station.

And of course, we want to integrate all of this into the game with the least amount of annoyance as possible, so as this system continues to grow and see wider use, we’ll also increase the convenience factor, by allowing you to store tools in workstations and have them automatically be considered when crafting items (So you don’t need to perform constant inventory management and lug around annoying tools)

Crafting will continue to grow with the game, as it’s one of the core pillars of gameplay in Vizaris (though like everything, it will be entirely optional). Nearly every player build will eventually want to have at least one crafting skill – and there will be plenty to choose from.

–Luke

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