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

Community Showcase Game Development
61

Weekly Report - 50

Although this week’s update is a little smaller than the last few, we’ve finally had a to get a few programmed features integrated. We’ve had these in the works for a while, and these new features are mostly just a tease of things to come once the village is properly in the game and you get a to see these features on a MUCH larger scale.

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This week’s additions

  • Revised Castor’s Rock Area - As usual, we’ve had our weekly area revision. This time it’s a significant revision to the Castor’s Rock area which sits on the northwestern edge of the Salis’da’coro pass area. The completion of this area leaves only Salis’da’coro Canyon to be revised.
  • Significant Landscape Texture Optimization - The textures used for the landscape were optimized this week, cutting down VRAM and hard drive requirements by quite a notable chunk. We were able to drop down are only 4k landscape texture down to 2k with no noticeable loss in quality. One of the landscape textures was also completely changed.
  • Added: Shields - You can now buy a shield from Ka’tro. When equipped, a shield will significantly enhance your ability to block damage and parry. The animations are still a little off for this while walking, but the gameplay is functional. It’s decently expensive, but it’s twice as effective as using your weapon to block damage.
  • Added: Loot Items - Some additional items were added to the game, such as raw wood (in the form of sticks) and rustlumps. These mostly just exist to add more flavor to the loot game, and provide materials for crafting. Nothing will match your sense of disappointment when you crack open a millennia old container only to find a rustlump (Yep, we’re asshats)
  • Integrated: Disposition - NPC disposition is now in the game. You’ll see this in the form of a little meter under the NPC’s name in the conversation menu. This meter represents how much the NPC likes you, or more specifically how much your character gets the impression that this NPC likes your character. This base value will be adjusted by your character’s Charisma; and can result in better deals in stores, new conversation options and more. You can also drop this number by harming, insulting, or stealing from the NPC, so be careful.s)
  • Integrated: Stealing - Stealing was also integrated. There are now some items around Ka’tro which you can steal. Be careful though. If Ka’tro catches you stealing his items, it will significantly harm your disposition with him, which means his prices are going to be a lot less in your favor. When you look at items, both in the world, and in your inventory, you’ll be given a clear indication of which items don’t belong to you.
  • Integrated: Crime Bounty - The stats menu now also displays your crime bounty. Whenever you are witnessed committing a crime, you will have a price put on your head, in the form of a criminal bounty. The size of the price will be based on the significance of the crime. Stealing for example, is the value of the object plus a percentage. Assault is based on how badly you hurt the NPC, and so on. Your bounty will begin to decay after a few days as people gradually forget about your crimes. Currently this doesn’t have much of an impact, but once the village is integrated, guards will enforce the law by punishing, banishing, or killing you when you commit a crime.
  • Improved: Footsteps - We improved the system which plays footstep sounds and effects, which should result in much more consistent playing of these effects.
  • Improved: Stagger Animations - The stagger animations which play when the player takes a significant amount of damage (especially when unblocked) have been improved. Previously the player would be knocked down and snap back to their feet. This has been corrected and improved with the new animations.
  • Improved: Human Skin Textures - The skin textures for human skin were significantly improved. This won’t -really- have an effect on much of anything, as you can only see human skin in a few places; but this will mean that we’ll be able to bring back skin color selection, and more importantly, it will be much more realistic than it was previously.
  • Improved: Ka’tro’s of having better weapons - Ka’tro will now properly sell the “common” and “quality” levels of weapons, allowing you to improve the weapons your character uses. Previously the of Ka’tro selling these weapons was randomized, with the end result usually being that he didn’t sell the weapon you wanted. This was annoying, and has been vanquished. (If Ka’tro still doesn’t have these weapons, go on an adventure. He’ll have them when you come back.)
  • Fixed, Optimized, and Updated Map (Kinda) - The map will now properly render after it was (intentionally) broken last week. Full functionality has not been restored, as you’re still not able to click and pan. However the map’s graphics were updated to reflect the latest world changes, and the texture it uses was heavily optimized, resulting in less VRAM usage.
  • Fixed: Bodies clipping through clothing - Fixed a bug that was causing male and female bodies to occasionally clip through their clothing. The game was rendering the wrong body underneath the clothing. The game should also run a little faster now that this has been corrected.

Next week we’re going to focus on cleaning up the last of the fallout from the 4.11 update, and then hopefully get back on track with finishing up the code for the Village and it’s many NPCs – and after that, we’ll work on getting armor and outfits integrated into the game.

Once Salis’da’coro canyon is done being revised, we’ll likely spend one more week revising all the caves – and from there we’ll be focusing the many hours that would be spent on terrain on both finalizing the village and getting more quests and NPCs into the game. After the village is in and we have a good number of quests, we’ll go back to adding more terrain to the game.

Of course, once the village is fully done, we’ll be able to spend some time making art for quests as well, which will be very exciting, as we’ll be able to start doing more complicated quests.

There’s a lot of exciting stuff coming in the near future; and Vizaris is about to start taking some significant steps forward. We’ve got a hefty improvement to the launcher coming very soon, despite significant issues on that front in the past. We have a new group working on finalizing the work.

–Luke

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You can play Vizaris right now by going to www.VizarisGame.com/play - Every dollar goes to supporting the development of the game, meaning more content at a faster rate. It’s like our Kickstarter or Patreon, but you get instant access to the game! Free press access available! Questions, comments, help, and feedback welcome!

@Strikegames](https://twitter.com/StrikeGames) - Strike Games Facebook

62

This is so cool! It’s mind boggling to me that this is developed by only 3 people. Good job!

I’m too busy with development of my own game to actually play your game, but I love the direction and style. Can I just donate instead of signing up?

63

@Archimodes

Thank you for the words of support! It means a lot to me and the rest of the team.

There’s currently no way to directly donate to the game.

I’d like to know, as this would be very useful information to me… why don’t you just buy the game and not play it instead of donating? Do you have security concerns?

We don’t have a patreon or kickstarter, as the only thing we’d be able to give in return is the game itself, and the only thing it would pay for is more development on the game - so we always just decided to just sell the game directly. It doesn’t hurt that it costs the same as your typical minimum level donation to Kickstarter, Patreon, or Twitch Subscription. :slight_smile:

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Weekly Report - 51

This week we’ve got a ton of fixes for little annoyances, as well as some significant performance gains once again. This week should clean up the last few problems caused by the UE4.11 update. We’re also learning how to really squeeze extra performance out of Unreal 4.

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This week’s additions

  • Revised: Salis’da’coro Canyon (East) - As usual, we have our regular revision. This time we’ve revised the eastern half of Salis’da’coro canyon. Make no mistake, even though it’s just the eastern half, it’s a very large area – nearly the size of the last two area revisions. This revision also isn’t entirely complete yet – as we have plans for a handful of visually dazzling additions once the whole canyon is revised.
  • Temporal Anti-Aliasing - These week we adjusted some bad settings Fix the Unreal Engine’s Temporal Anti-Alaising, so that it does not have atrociously bad ghosting while in motion. As a result, that allowed us to enable Temporal AA which many visual features in UE4 take advantage of. Temporal AA is the best AA solution you can have for Unreal Engine, aside from the performance murdering super sampling.
  • Optimized: Reflections - We were able to tweak and improve the reflections to be significantly more efficient, while maintaining quality. This results in a 10 – 15 percent FPS boost on our development machines in most cases. Which is enormous, considering that was almost 10 FPS in some cases, regardless of whether or not reflections were on the screen or not.
  • Optimized: Scene Captures - The Scene Captures for the Map and Inventory item preview were also more heavily optimized, resulting in a 5 percent performance improvement on our development machines.
  • Improved: Rock Meshes - Several of the rock models used throughout the world received a high poly upgrade, removing obvious vertex peaks, and reducing instances of texture stretching. These rocks were also given significantly more aggressive LOD settings, which improves general performance. Due to the dithered LOD transitions added recently to the Unreal Engine, these LOD transitions are much less noticeable, allowing us to more aggressively reduce detail.
  • Crafting Sounds - Items will now make sounds when you craft them. Hooray for audio feedback!
  • Fixed: Workstation Activation Distance - Workstations can now have unique activation distances, which means you no longer need to be as close as physically possible to the furnace in order to activate it.
  • Fixed: Hotkey for Crafting Prompt - The keyboard hotkeys for the crafting confirmation prompt are now properly functional. Now you can craft to your heart’s content, without needing to use the mouse!
  • Fixed: Player Blocking with Low Stamina - The player will now stop blocking after running out of stamina while blocking rather than constantly starting/stopping as they regen stamina.
  • Fixed: Controller Support for Container Menu - You should now be able to properly navigate containers and access the player’s inventory via containers with a controller now. Previously navigating to the player’s inventory from the container menu using a controller would cause a whole host of problems, chiefly that you would be forced to navigate the container’s items, rather than the player’s. This fix also applies to stores as well.
  • Fixed: Significant Game Hitches - Fixed some incorrect code which was causing pretty significant game stutters every second. This was mostly visible in the player’s cape, as the hitch would cause the physics solver to fail, and snap the cape back and forth in an amusing but annoying sort of way.
  • Fixed: Inconsistent Movement - Fixed a bug that was caused by UE4.11 changing the way it handles root motion in character animation; which was subsequently causing the player to have inconsistent movement speeds. This problem was a gigantic pain to track down the cause for and solve, but was conquered by persistence and expertise.
  • Fixed: Fall Catapulting - Fixed a bug that could cause the player to be catapulted at high speeds if they walked angled into a wall and started to fall. This was related to the conditions for the player entering into the “I’m Falling” state, likely exasperated by the previous two bugs.
  • Fixed: Broken Map and Inconsistent Coordinates - FIXED the broken map. Now you can properly click and drag to move around the map again, The coordinates and icon hovering was also fixed. These issues were caused by a change in the way UE4 handles mouse to 3D world projections.
  • Backend: Conversation Maker Improvements - While you will never see this, you will certainly see the results of this. A bunch of improvements were made to our custom tool for creating NPC conversations. These improvements allow us to much more easily add disposition checks for dialog options, as well as more quickly iterate on adding new conversations to the game. This generally means more dialog, and more DYNAMIC dialog and NPCs.

So with that, we’ve got this week’s update ready to download. Performance improvements are always good, and these bug fixes help keep the foundations of the game stable as we continue to add more content. The 4.11 update messed up a lot more things for us than we would’ve liked. Ordinarily the day or two it takes to transition to a new version took us almost 3 weeks to not only transition but squash all of the issues that cropped up from it.

With everything on the right track now, we’re definitely getting back to new gameplay content this week; finishing up all of the code that’s necessary for the entire village of people. The village provides an excellent launch pad for all of the new long-form quests we’re going to add – as well as the perfect environment to introduce many new, non-combat related features. The new improvements to our conversation creation tool will make it even easier for us to make more content quickly – which ultimately means more content for you to enjoy.

–Luke

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You can play Vizaris right now by going to www.VizarisGame.com/play - Every dollar goes to supporting the development of the game, meaning more content at a faster rate. It’s like our Kickstarter or Patreon, but you get instant access to the game! Free press access available! Questions, comments, help, and feedback welcome!

@Strikegames](https://twitter.com/StrikeGames) - Strike Games Facebook

65

Hey Luke,

That’s a good point. Truth be told I was a little leery due to the fact that I thought I may forget about the subscription and let it go for ages (haha) but on second thought, I’m going to download it and play it too. I’ll be signing up and checking everything out. I can’t miss out on this - it looks quite amazing.

While we are on the topic of security, however, I would like to ask some questions (I’m a web architecture engineer so I deal with this stuff for huge-name clients frequently - please don’t take offense to the questions). Do you store CC information in your own database or does your payment processor / gateway store it? What kind of hashing/encryption do you place on the client passwords? Not trying to be nosy here, just making sure before I sign up :slight_smile: I assume everything is done using best practices but I must be sure for my own peace of mind.

Again, well done to you and the other two! I’m very impressed.

66

@Archimodes

Absolutely reasonable questions which I’m happy to anser. We designed the system with security and privacy in mind. When the user registers, they only need to provide a username, password, and email. Your password is salted and one-way-hashed using a blowfish ciper. Your password is unrecoverable, and cannot be gained by hackers, and even -we- don’t know it. Once you get to the payment stage, we don’t interact with ANY payment information. ALL payment is routed entirely through the third party gateway, using reputable sources. PayPal, Amazon, and Stripe for Credit cards (And the alternative payments those systems allow) and Bitpay for Bitcoin. If hackers somehow did gain access to your account, we don’t store any payment information, and they would be unable to access or even charge additional subscription time.

It’s also worth noting that your email is just for account management purposes. We do not currently have the setup, nor any plans to send news letters or other spammy messages. Even if we did eventually add this, it would be entirely optional and opt-in - because honestly, who likes that stuff anyway? :slight_smile:

In the near future, we’ll likely be moving to the Xsolla platform for Payments, which is a service used by many corporations, including Twitch. This will correspond with a new launcher for the game which will download the game and updates off the Amazon Cloudfront CDN. The updates will also be much more streamlined and efficient. (Be advised, your game download will most liekly be slow until then. Distribution has been by far the largest hurdle to overcome (Valve confirmed that we couldn’t do what we wanted to do on Steam, which is why we’re doing it custom) - but we’re about to introduce a major upgrade to the system.

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Good deal. Sounds like you’ve got a great setup.

So it sounds like you use AWS. I’m a huge geek and I’m curious about all these kinds of things. Are you presently using Gamelift by ? I’ve never used it and as such I’m curious how it is.

Do you already have Cloudfront setup and ready for your new launcher?

Not trying to pry, feel free to ignore me :stuck_out_tongue: I like to see how people overcome the same hurdles we are in the process of dealing with.

Regards,

Nate

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Weekly Report - 52
The big five two! That’s a year’s worth of weekly updates for Vizaris. In some ways it feels like yesterday, in other ways it feels like a lifetime ago. This week we’ve got another set of little tweaks, additions, and improvements, as most of the time spent was working on the village.

We’re really looking forward to adding the village to the game as it represents such a major leap forward for the game. Unfortunately, because most of the time was spent of the village, there wasn’t any time for any major area revisions of the landscape, but that’s okay – the village will be a much better addition.

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This week’s additions

  • **Significant Sky and Lighting Update - **We changed updated and improved the sky and fog once again, this time in preparation for adding more variable weather events to the game. The new sky system comes with some significant color and lighting improvements, and includes cloud shadows, better moon-light, and more.
  • **Time of Day color tinting - **We also added a system which slightly adjusts the post-process tints to be cooler during the night and morning hours, and warmer at mid-day and evening.
  • **New Dolfog Sounds - **The Dolfogs were giving a completely new compliment of sounds, which give the creature a significantly new and different feel.
  • **Crickets at Night and Evening - **The soothing sounds of crickets trying to attract a mate now plays at evenings and night time, just to remind you that it’s definitely night time. Just in case you couldn’t tell by the missing sun. Such ambiance!
  • New Exploration Music Track - We added another music track which plays while the player is exploring the overworld. This should help provide a little more musical variety while playing the game.
  • Tweaks to Player Movement and Collision - Some minor adjustments were made to player movement, collision, and speed, which should make the player feel a little more grounded in the world.
  • Improved: HUD Text removed behind menus - HUD text, like “Press E to Activate” no longer appears on the screen while menus are open.
  • **Improved: HUD Ping Text - **The display for HUD Pings, such as when you discover a location, have been significantly improved, making them more readable, and more noticeable, without being annoying.
  • **Improved: Personable Conversation Menu - **Further tweaks were made to the personable conversation menu, helping to better frame the NPCs, and reduce screen movement. Previously the screen would track both the player’s head position and the NPC’s head position, making it quite barfy. Now it only tracks one head, making it more stable.
  • **Fixed: Respawn Button - **The respawn button will now properly function all the time. After the controller support update, this button could, and often would get stuck, and leave the player unable to properly respawn.
  • **Fixed: Multiple music tracks playing at once - **Fixed a bug that could allow two or more music tracks to start playing at one time under a certain scenario.
  • Fixed: Tab Key - Fixed an interface bug related to the way the Unreal Engine handles the TAB key and menus. The TAB key being the most easily accessible way to open the inventory/UI Shell, other than pressing the I key.
  • **Fixed: NPCs remain in focus when bartering - **NPCs will now remain properly focused with the “personable conversation menu camera” while the player is bartering. Previously the camera would move back to default position.
  • **Fixed: Conversation menu properly opens after barter - **The conversation menu will now properly re-open after closing the barter menu.
  • Backend: Interactable Doors - We now have the code to properly open and close doors. It might not sounds like a big deal, but the reason we added these doors was for the Village, which currently needs doors. Previously we didn’t need doors, because it was a seamless world and we were the only ones walking around the village – but as the village draws nearer to release we need to put in doors for the sake of both players and NPCs.
  • Backend: Conversation Checks - Expanding on last week’s improvements to the conversation system, it’s now possible for us to easily add virtue checks to conversations. So for instance, we can now allow additional conversation options if the player is really smart, or really strong. The ability to do this quickly and easily is crucial, as that ultimately means that we can add more of them to the game.
  • **Backend: Conversation Greetings - **We setup support for NPCs having a variety of greetings, based on their current disposition with the player.
  • **Backend: Calendar - **The game now properly has support for a calendar system, which more importantly means that it understands the concept of an ingame date. This will be useful for all sorts of things eventually, such as changing seasons, holidays, weekend events, and so on. The length of a Vizaris year was designed around gameplay, so the length of seasons and a year was setup so that eventually it’s all very predictable and gameplay friendly; rather than the real world where seasons drag on for too long and then you starve during winter. You can see the current ingame date in the upper right corner of the UI shell.
  • Backend: Work on NPC Schedules - A significant amount of work was done on NPC schedule setup. This feature it’s fully complete yet as it’s very significant, but it’s one of the last major obstacles for the addition of the village to the game. The schedule system allows NPCs to move around the village at different times of day. Go to work, take a lunch break, go back home in the evenings, meet their secret lover for a tryst at 3am, and so on.
  • Backend: Work on Village - Work on the village consumed all of the level design work this week. Some pretty significant advancements were made, with several thousand objects being placed. The exterior of the village is nearing completion. This coming week, more work will be done in this area.

And that concludes this week’s update. Programming and level design is going to continue to focus on the village, which means next week’s update will likely be more of the same as this week. We’ve got a bunch of interiors to fill with objects, a bunch of NPCs to finish writing and giving schedules to, and a ton of little cleanup tasks.

That being said, I really, -really- want to get the village ingame, so we’re likely going to be focusing one hundred percent on finishing up the village this month. It will mean so much to the game once it’s added, and so much more moving forward.

–Luke

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You can play Vizaris right now by going to www.VizarisGame.com/play - Every dollar goes to supporting the development of the game, meaning more content at a faster rate. It’s like our Kickstarter or Patreon, but you get instant access to the game! Free press access available! Questions, comments, help, and feedback welcome!

@Strikegames](https://twitter.com/StrikeGames) - Strike Games Facebook

69

@Archimodes
Sorry for the late response, I forgot that you had asked these questions.

Yes, we’re transitioning over to AWS; however we have no plans to use Gamelift. Streaming technology isn’t there quite yet - and I believe Gamelift is currently intended for Amazon Lumberyard.

We’re in the process of setting up cloudfront for our new launcher. The Cloudfront CDN requires a seed server which distributes the files to the various CDN servers around the world; and for that we’ve acquired a very powerful, high speed server located in Colorado.

Setting up the backend for distribution and payment has without a doubt been the most difficult and time consuming part of the process. The weekly work on the game is much more enjoyable.

In our specific case technical engineers at Valve confirmed that we couldn’t do what we wanted to do with Steam… but for any game with normal distribution requirements - I would almost certainly recommend going with Steam. One of our previous games was on Steam, so we were able to communicate closely with the Valve technical team. With Vizaris, we specifically wanted to link the monthly subscriptions to access to updates only (And by extension, multiplayer, as all users need to be at the same update level to play together) and not actually use the subscription to gate access to the game itself.

What that means is that the $4.99 buys you Vizaris and one month of updates. If your subscription expires, you’ll keep access to the game at it’s current level.

Unfortunately, on Steam, subscriptions are a simple on/off switch, meaning if your subscription expires, you lose access to everything.

70

Weekly Report - 53
This week we have a pretty small update, as all hands were focusing on getting Ro’to Village. There almost wasn’t an update, but I figured a small one was better than none. This update will be deceptively big, as it contains a lot of art files which have been added for the village, such as interior props and furniture, and exterior decorations.

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This week’s additions

  • **New Art for Cave-dwellers - **The Cave-dwellers (Bandits) were completely overhauled this week with new art that fits the new bodies which were added a few weeks ago. They’ve also had their loot tables completely overhauled. You can generally find Cave-dwellers in the surprising location of caves, and occasionally out and about in the landscape in pairs.
  • **3 New weapons for Cave-Dwellers - **Cave-dwellers were also given 3 new improvised weapons. Each one corresponding to the archetypes of blade, blunt, and axe. You can take these weapons from them, though generally they’re pretty crappy for the player to use, as they were intended for low-level, high-strength cave-dwellers. This also causes the Cave-dwellers to do significantly less atrociously high damage.
  • **Better unarmed damage balance - **Unarmed damage now scales a little better with strength, making lower levels of strength slightly weaker, and higher levels of strength more powerful.
  • **Improved shadow appearance - **There was a slight improvement to shadow biasing and sharpness, leading to nicer, more accurate shadows with no performance impact.
  • **Improved moon - **Improved the moon’s texture to be a little more proper. An improperly saved file was causing the moon to not have the right appearance.
  • **Fixed: Dead Humanoid NPC Collision - **Fixed a bug with dead humanoid NPCs causing them to have strange physics around the head after death. This issue could cause the player to be unable to step over the NPC, and could result in the humorous, but improper, launching of the NPC’s corpse at high velocity.
  • **Fixed: Landscape Layer Bug - **Fixed a visual bug that was causing one landscape layer to slightly overlay over all the others, giving pretty much every terrain slightly muddled colors.
  • **Backend: Village Clutter - **Over a hundred pickup-able items were added to the game, mostly in the form of decorations for the interiors of the homes of the village. This is not even close to all of the items that will be added, as there’s still two more sets to be integrated, and another two sets to be built and integrated. The point is, a lot of new stuff is going to be in the Village. This update includes the files for all the recently integrated files.
  • **Backend: NPC Schedule Code - **The code for NPC schedules was also completed, meaning it’s now possible for NPCs to have fairly complicated daily schedules, which will really give the village the feeling of being alive, which is of course, very very exciting! This will play into gameplay in interesting ways, such as only being able to talk to NPCs at certain times, store hours, guard patrols, and so on.
  • **Backend: Relic Weapons - **There were another 3 weapons added to the game which haven’t quite been introduced yet. As with the improvised Cave-dweller weapons, there is an Axe, Blade, and Blunt weapon. These weapons are significantly stronger than the improvised weapons, and will eventually be found on Cave-dweller elite.

The month of May should see the introduction of the Village into the game, so there isn’t long to wait to see all of the new and exciting content we’ve been working on for several months now. Ro’to Village, like Vizaris itself is likely never going to be considered fully complete, as long as it’s the hub of the game (Which it will be for at least a year). We’ll be constantly adding new features, content, and unique elements to the village. The important factor is that it’s a launching platform for us to much more easily introduce new content, objects, quests, and gameplay features into the game (Especially non-combat features)

In all likelihood it will also mean larger, or at least more significant updates, as instead of the village siphoning off a portion of each week’s update time, that same time will go into new playable additions to the village which are added every week

–Luke

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[HR][/HR]

You can play Vizaris right now by going to www.VizarisGame.com/play - Every dollar goes to supporting the development of the game, meaning more content at a faster rate. It’s like our Kickstarter or Patreon, but you get instant access to the game! Free press access available! Questions, comments, help, and feedback welcome!

@Strikegames](https://twitter.com/StrikeGames) - Strike Games Facebook

71

Good work mate :slight_smile:
I noticed the desert valley lacks ponints of interest to motivate the player to explore it because there is only rocks. Will you add some other villages or some temples and dungeons ?

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@Galeon

Yes, absolutely! We only have one artist, and right now, he’s focused on all the art for adding the Village. However, both him and I are interested in adding “set pieces” to the world, as locations for us to tell stories and provide quests and opportunities for the player. Entire areas such as ancient ruins and dungeons, down to smaller points of interest like enemy campsites, forgotten statues, a lone buildings.

In the world of Vizaris, this area was home to an advanced (for their time) civilization which was wiped out a thousand years prior to the game. Scattered around the landscape will be many remains of this civilization. Fortunately, when it comes to Vizaris, creativity isn’t the limiting factor, but the flip side of that coin is that there’s only so much three people can do. Once the game has enough content to really convince people to start supporting it, we’ll be able to build much more content, much more quickly - which I’m very excited about!

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Good. On the same idea, will you bring special places with specific vegetations and perhaps special grass or is the theme desertic first ?

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@Galeon

Absolutely. The world of Vizaris is vast and varied. We chose to introduce the game with a desert setting because there aren’t a lot of Fantasy RPG games in that environment, and with survival being a core aspect of Vizaris, the desert theme seemed appropriate. Even within the desert biome, there will be a lot of variation and sub-biomes within the area, due to the specific back story of the area in the game. Colder, lusher, and wetter environments can all be expected over the course of time. Over the life of the game, you can expect to have virtually every biome represented in the game world, but for the near future, especially while we’re just getting started, it will be mostly desert with different areas having different vegetation.

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Weekly Report - 54
It’s week fifty four of the Vizaris weekly updates. This time we’ve finally improved an issue we’ve had for a long time, which is the handling of interior-exterior transitions. Because of the seamless nature of Vizaris we’ve always had some issues getting the lighting to work right during transitions from inside to outside and vice versa. With this week’s update we’ve been able to largely solve this issue, and put us in a good position to improve it even further in the future.

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This week’s additions

  • Improved: Interior-Exterior Transitions - The transition between interiors and exteriors now has some visual effects and lighting transitions. The end result of this is better and consistent lighting in interiors, without compromising exterior shadow quality.
  • Improved: Cave Models - Cave models were also notably improved. They now have smoother geometry and less texture stretching, and should no longer have issues with lighting around twilight hours. All existing caves received the new models. It’s also worth noting that all existing caves will be overhauled like the rest of the landscape in a few weeks.
  • Improved: Cave Entrances - While we were setting up the transitions for each cave, we also took the time to improve some messy geometry and holes around the cave entrances. It should now be easier to walk into caves without needing to jump as well.
  • Improved: Torches - Because caves are now much more realistically lit, torches received a significant increase in their lighting range. They also produce a significantly less orange light, making it less straining on the eyes. Happy spelunking!
  • Resolutions below 1280×720 are no longer selectable - Vizaris was never designed to go below 1280×720. If it does, you receive significant user interface issues, as there simply isn’t enough pixels to display all the information on screen, and much of it ends up getting clipped off. Previously, you could adjust the resolution so low that you would lose the ability to click the buttons to revert resolution. This is no longer possible.
  • Better handling of attack animations - We now handle attack animations more intelligently, which should reduce the chances of some infrequent bugs which could occur when multiple animations are attempting to play, such as being staggered while attacking.
  • Camera FOV no longer changes on Barter - The camera field of view no longer changes while bartering with an NPC, removing a previously disjointed and barfy shift when opening the bartering menu.
  • **Fixed: Placing items into containers - **Fixed a major bug that was preventing the player from putting items into containers under certain circumstances.
  • **Fixed: Overburdened slowdown not applying when weapons readied - **Fixed another major bug which would allow the player to run at full speed while overburdened with items, simply by pulling out their weapon.
  • Fixed: AI states potentially getting stuck - Fixed a bug which could cause NPCs on occasion to get stuck in a certain combat states, such as blocking, taunting, or fleeing.
  • Backend: Loose Items Improvements - We added some extra code to better handle placing loose items in the game world. Loose items are items such as fluid (water, oil) or particles (salt, grain) that require the player to have a container to collect them. The village has several dozen items which act as containers for these items, and the village itself has many containers with these items in them located around the world.
  • Backend: Guard Functionality - Guards, and their reaction to stealing were also finalized this week with some additional functionality. Guards will now confiscate the players stolen items if the player surrenders to them, or the guard kills the player. Confiscated items will be placed in a specific container at the guard post, giving the player a possible to recover the items which they’ve lost. Other improvements were made as well, such as the money the player loses on death being subtracted from their bounty, if they’re killed by a guard; and general improvements to the players ability to surrender to the guard, and how those situations are handled.

The work on transitions, while added to the game this week for caves, was actually developed out of necessity for the village, which has dozens of interior-exterior transitions, including large, cave like transitions. Most of the various code changes were also focused on improving functionality for guards, stealing, and so on. There will be plenty more to come! See you next week!

–Luke

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[HR][/HR]

You can play Vizaris right now by going to www.VizarisGame.com/play - Every dollar goes to supporting the development of the game, meaning more content at a faster rate. It’s like our Kickstarter or Patreon, but you get instant access to the game! Free press access available! Questions, comments, help, and feedback welcome!

@Strikegames](https://twitter.com/StrikeGames) - Strike Games Facebook

76

Weekly Report - 55
It’s week fifty five of the Vizaris weekly updates. This week’s update is pretty minor, as virtually all the work went towards finishing the village. As you may have guessed with all the extra focus being put on the village, not only is it going to be a significant addition to the game in terms of content and gameplay, but it’s also going to be added very soon.

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This week’s additions

  • Improved: Interior-Exterior Transitions (Further) - We’ve improved the transitioning effects when going inside and outside, by adjusting the brightness of the screen. This produces a much nicer and more natural effect when transitioning from the inside to the outside, and to a lesser extent from the outside to the inside.
  • **Light Propagation Volume - **We’re experimenting with the use of some low quality light propagation volumes, which is some experimental tech inside the unreal engine which allows light to bounce off of surfaces and light up the surrounding environment. The result is a more realistic looking image. We’re very likely to modify this effect by the next update.
  • **Skin Color Customization - **You can now select the skin color of your player character in the character creation menu. This was a feature that previously existed many versions ago, but was removed when we updated to the new bodies. These new skin colors should be significantly more realistic.
  • **Fixed: Equipment Effects Bug - **Fixed a bug which could occur when the player un-equips and then immediately re-equips an off-hand item while their weapon in drawn.
  • Fixed: General Equipment Bugs - Generally fixed and improved several other issues regarding equipment and off-hand items.
  • Backend: Door Locking / Lockpicking - Lockpicking code was split off from containers and turned into a more portable chunk of functionality, allowing us to apply the lockpicking mechanic to other objects, primarily in this case, it’s used for doors. This will allow the player to risk breaking into NPC homes in the village; just be wary of being caught.
  • Backend: Sleeping in Beds - Functionality was added to beds that now allow the player to sleep in them. This will relocate their spawn point, similarly to placing and using a campfire. This will allow players to place their respawn point inside a city or other locations which prohibit placing a respawn point via a campfire.
  • Backend: Inns and Renting Rooms - Because the player does not start the game owning a home, we also added the ability for players to rent rooms from an Inn. This gives them a bed, and the ability to place their respawn point in the Inn. As time goes on, this will become more important as sleeping in the wilderness will become more dangerous.
  • **Backend: Many New Objects - **Many more objects were integrated into the game this week. The game now has over 300 unique items. Each one of these items has a description, with several thousand words of description being written. Descriptions are generally either humorous or actually informative. For objects unique to Vizaris, the description will tell you what the object is. For period accurate real world objects which existed several hundred years ago, the descriptions are accurate to the actual object – if you pay attention, you could actually learn from the Vizaris object descriptions in many cases. These new objects are important to finishing the village and adding loot.
  • **Backend: New NPC Outfit - **Another new NPC outfit was added to the game, to add a little more variety to the game. While every outfit in the game is capable of being setup with a variety of different fabrics and colors, this new outfit gives a new shape and profile, further increasing options for variety. Once the games outfit system is complete, players will be able to wear this new outfit as well.
  • Backend: New Masks - Fifteen new mask meshes were made for the NPCs; along with the possibility for different materials and colors to be used with these masks. This allows us to significantly increase the visual distinction between the various different NPCs, which is important for finishing the Village. These masks will eventually be usable by the player as well.

That’s pretty much all for this week. At this point all that needs to be said about the village has been said (until it’s actually added to the game of course) – so if you’re interested in reading about it, please look at previous weekly reports. All hands are working on finishing the village.

–Luke

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[HR][/HR]

You can play Vizaris right now by going to www.VizarisGame.com/play - Every dollar goes to supporting the development of the game, meaning more content at a faster rate. It’s like our Kickstarter or Patreon, but you get instant access to the game! Free press access available! Questions, comments, help, and feedback welcome!

@Strikegames](https://twitter.com/StrikeGames) - Strike Games Facebook

77

Weekly Report - 56
It’s week fifty six of the Vizaris updates. This week has the introduction of a major new gameplay feature, in the form of Armor (and outfits). This is a major step forward for the game in terms of gameplay, content, and player customization. So let’s get into this week’s changes:

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This week’s additions

  • **Armor - **We’ve added the ability for you to equip armor ingame. In order to acquire armor, visit Ka’tro and buy the Scout armor pieces from him. The (visual only) armor has been removed from the player character so they can have their new armor equipped. Equipping armor will reduce the amount of damage you take per hit. This system and code is very important to the development of the village as well, and many outfits and some new armor should be added to the game by the next update; along with further gameplay features relating to armor.
  • World Re-centering - In a major, significant change, we’ve re-centered the world around Qaris’da’te. Previously the north-west most corner of Qaris’da’te was at the center of the world, which put the play area pretty far south, almost at the limits of what the Unreal Engine could handle in terms of world extents. The world has now been moved to put the center of Qaris’da’te in the middle of the game world, making all four corners of Qaris’da’te equidistant from the center of the game world. Existing saves may need to “Wither”.
  • Heavy Level Streaming Optimizations - We heavily adjusted level streaming distance to be more efficient during play. The effect on gameplay is non-existent, however the effect on performance is significant. While this will reduce high detail view distance somewhat, this will only be noticeable in a few select locations, whereas the performance benefits will occur all the time. We’ve also fixed a few instances of some levels being loaded at the wrong distance.
  • Reduced Loading Times - Because less of the world is streaming in at full detail at the start of the game, the initial load time of the world on the first (and only) loading screen should be reduced by a noticeable amount.
  • More Aggressive Landscape LOD - We also much more aggressively reduce the amount of polygons in the landscape as it gets further from the player, which significantly reduces the amount of polygons needing to be rendered at a given moment. This naturally has a positive effect on game performance.
  • More Shadow and Lighting Optimizations - Shadows were also further optimized, bringing in significant performance increases once again. The gains were made at the expense of long distance shadow resolution, which we’ve adjusted to almost completely hide any difference in quality. The end result is distant visuals which are almost the same, but a gain of several FPS.
  • **Added Town Music - **We added the Ro’to Village town music to the game. This won’t play anywhere but Ro’to village. There are two new music tracks specific to the general Ro’to village, along with a specific Tavern music track, as well as a specific Temple music track.
  • Better Music Cycling - We improved music cycling to more properly cycle through different music tracks. Previously the system would rely on you moving from one area to the next in order to cycle the music tracks. Now the system will automatically cycle the music tracks to the next track.
  • Changed Ro’to Tunnel - In order to make way for the coming addition of Ro’to village, we’ve improved the access tunnel to the village to make it more visually appealing.
  • Work-around: CTD on Play - We’ve currently integrated a work-around for an engine bug that was causing (on a small set of machines) crashes to desktop once the player hit the play button in the menu. This issue appears to be rooted deep in the Unreal Engine and tends to pop-up at unexpected times, so we can’t quite claim “fixed” on this one yet.
  • Fixed: A rockslide where you could glitch out of play area - We fixed an area at the start of the game where you could glitch out of the play area (Sorry to all you intrepid explorers, this is the one spot in the game that we -really- don’t want players accidentally getting out of the play area.)
  • Backend: Villagers and Village - Every day, more NPCs are having their dialog written and completed. Completed and fully functional NPCs are the last significant obstacle preventing us from releasing the village. We’re also aiming to have several quests added at the same time, which must be integrated into the NPC dialog.

The addition of armor is part of a greater addition of an “Outfit” system which handles armor, clothing, jewelry, and other accessories, and allows them to be visually displayed on the player and other characters in a meaningful way. While only the ability to buy and equip armor was added this week, the functionality also exists now for NPCs to wear armor, which can then be looted off of their remains and worn by the player.

The player’s days of wearing their current leather armor are now limited, as in the coming week we hope to strip the player down to their undies, and re-integrate their current outfit as wearable armor, along with the rest of the sets of clothing in the game.

In addition, we’ll also be integrating a wear and damage system which will have the armor (and in some cases other items) deteriorate with use. Which also allows us to introduce a repair system for maintaining the player’s equipment.

With the armor system now in place, adding armor to the game is now possible, which gives us a more direct reason to put resources into adding more armors and outfits into the game. Piece by piece Vizaris is gaining gameplay features!

–Luke

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Early examples of equippable armor, being used for legs, arms, and cape.

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[HR][/HR]

You can play Vizaris right now by going to www.VizarisGame.com/play - Every dollar goes to supporting the development of the game, meaning more content at a faster rate. It’s like our Kickstarter or Patreon, but you get instant access to the game! Free press access available! Questions, comments, help, and feedback welcome!

@Strikegames](https://twitter.com/StrikeGames) - Strike Games Facebook

78

Weekly Report - 57
It’s week fifty seven of the Vizaris updates. This week we’ve done several significant improvements to the armor system, as well as a major update to Unreal Engine 4.12.

Technical problems prevented us from getting this build uploaded on Monday and Tuesday. Specifically the upload computer kept getting bluescreens which required the upload to start over from the beginning. Combined with it being a very large update due to an engine update… and well, you get the picture.

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This week’s additions

  • **Updated to Unreal Engine 4.12 - **This update to the Unreal Engine doesn’t necessarily add anything which we’ll be directly integrating into Vizaris. However it does bring some stability improvements as well as some fixes to engine bugs that we weren’t able to fix on our own.
  • Important: Invalidated Saves - Unfortunately, while we had hoped to never have to do this; this week due to substantial changes to the backend of the game, we’ve had to invalidate all prior saves, as they simply aren’t compatible with the changes, and cannot be made to be compatible. This is very unlikely to ever happen again, as it was due to some pretty heavy changes to one of the oldest systems in the game. We value your saves, and if it wasn’t still so early in the life of Vizaris, we would not have done this.
  • Added: Full Outfit Equipping - Outfit equipping has been majorly improved this week, with the player now able to selectively equip parts of their entire outfit. They can now choose which shirt they wear with their pants for example. All the outfits in the game have been converted to use this system, and several more outfits have been added. These outfits are also properly considered by NPCs, so the outfits they’re wearing are actually part of their inventory, which you can remove and wear for yourself.
  • **Added: Underwear - **Because of the newfound ability to equip and unequip various different parts of the player’s outfit, the characters now have a base mesh which is wearing underwear. Hooray for underwear.
  • Added: Two commoner outfits - We’ve converted the existing commoner outfit worn by Ka’tro into a wearable outfit, and we’ve also added an entirely new and different “peasant” outfit. You can mix and match the parts of these outfits for greater customization of your character. You can buy these outfits from Ka’tro
  • **Added: Cavedweller Clothing - **Cavedweller outfits have been converted to the new system as well, so you can now take their outfits and use them for yourself for even more options! The only way to get these outfits is to take them off a Cavedweller.
  • **Added: Scout Leathers - **The original player outfit was fully converted to the new outfit system. The gear functions as lightweight leather under armor which will reduce incoming attack damage. You can buy this armor from Ka’tro.
  • Improved: Outfits now support 3 different layers - Outfits now support three different layers. Under layer, armor layer, and accessory layer. This will allow for much more specific customization of outfits. The under layer is form fitting items, like most clothing. The armor layer is for items which change the player’s silhouette; while the accessory layer will be for items like pouches, and equipment visible on the character.
  • Added: Player Starting Equipment - Because the player can now wear -nothing-, they have to start the game wearing -something-. And so that’s now what happens. Players will start the game wearing the commoner’s clothing.
  • **Player Armor Rating Display - **The player’s armor rating will now be displayed in the UI Shell (The bottom part of the UI visible when any of the primary menus are open). Each point of armor rating represents a %1 damage reduction.
  • Added Music to Menu - The menu now plays creepy cave exploration music.
  • Fixed: Visuals for equipped items not updating when dropped - Fixed a bug that would cause the visuals of equipped items to remain on the player if the items were dropped without being unequipped first.
  • Fixed: Container item transfer crash - Fixed a bug that could cause crashes on container item transfers.
  • **General code cleanup - **Some general work was spent cleaning up the code. Removing unused variables, commenting out unused code, and so on. This is important to the long-term maintenance of the game.
  • Backend: More complicated conversations - We also added the ability to have more complicated conversations which can add and remove conversation options based on states. Previously we had the ability to add conversation topics based on a tag, or remove conversation topics based on a tag… but not the ability to remove tags. Now we can remove tags, which allows conversations to be much more robust.

Behind the scenes, we’ve got some big changes brewing. We’re getting some new environment art done, and we’re headed for a major overhaul of the terrain textures again – unfortunately out of necessity this time, as 4.11 seems to have broken our terrain somewhat. We were hoping for a fix in 4.12 but that didn’t happen.

Thanks again to all those who subscribed to Vizaris, both in the last month, and in the months before that.

–Luke

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You can play Vizaris right now by going to www.VizarisGame.com/play - Every dollar goes to supporting the development of the game, meaning more content at a faster rate. It’s like our Kickstarter or Patreon, but you get instant access to the game! Free press access available! Questions, comments, help, and feedback welcome!

@Strikegames](https://twitter.com/StrikeGames) - Strike Games Facebook

79

Hello All!

We’re cooking up something big over on the Vizaris website - if you want the latest Vizaris info, head on over here to read all about it:

Vizaris Mega-Update

fab1bb1fb678675a772bd3478f1a4028692bbd39.jpeg](http://www.vizarisgame.com/vizaris-mega-update/)

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Amazing guys! Unique and beautiful! Waiting for the update.