Hello and welcome to the 31st CardLife DevBlog,
And so it begins! The first major step towards adding our core gameplay loop is live in Patch 34 - Crafting. Lots of other news to share as well so let’s get to it:
Patch Notes 34
Patch 34 has gone live today and can be downloaded via the launcher. Here are the major changes:
- Crafting has been added in its basic form allowing you to craft the four tools (spade, pickaxe, hatchet and sickle) via the inventory
- To access the inventory press ‘I’
- You can then drag a resource (wood, stone or ore) into a crafting slot
- The crafting item list will then update to let you know what items have that resource as an ingredient
- You can then select an item to see what it needs to be crafted
- If nothing else is needed it will show a green tick and you can press the craft button to create it
- The new tool will then appear in your inventory or hotbar if you have space
- Please note the crafting interface is heavily work in progress
- All four tools can be crafted out of multiple materials (with each material making the tool stronger/faster):
- Wood
- Stone (any stone)
- Copper Ore
- Iron Ore
- Gold Ore
- Cobalt Ore
- Tungsten Ore
- Thorium Ore
- Meteorite Ore
- Carborundum Ore
- Titanium Ore
- Mythril Ore
- Protonium Ore
- Please note crafting recipes are currently placeholder
- Saving is not currently implemented and so your crafted tools will be gone the next time you login - this is coming soon
- New 1st and 3rd person on-screen alerts have been added for when you consume items i.e. eat berries
- General feedback improvements to cutting holes in the CTD interface
- You now spawn in a random location
Ongoing Work: Crafting
As mentioned above the crafting interface is very much work in progress and we still have lots to do. The next two main tasks are saving, so that the game remembers what tools you have made and linking the crafting to the Connect the Dots so you can draw your own tools. We also have several general improvements/features that we need to implement such as scroll bar and tool tips.
Ongoing Work: Ore Distribution
Although we have ore in the build now, it’s currently just randomly spawned with each ore having an equal chance of appearing. Ed has spent this week implementing a system that allows us to tweak the ore distribution across the four stratas (Upper Mantle, Lower Mantle, Outer Core and Core) - which means we can set the depth at which an ore should appear and its density.
Upcoming Features: Collision
When we profiled the game a while back we noticed that a large chunk of performance was being taken up by the creation of the collision mesh as you ran around the world. This meant that as you loaded a new cell of terrain there was large framerate drop which was unacceptable. Neil has now begun work on creating our own collision system that is much more efficient for our purposes. This will be a long running task but we should see a real performance gain once this is done.
Upcoming Features: AI and Combat
As I touched on last week AI and Combat were two tasks that we were going to work on next. Aldo has now started work on the AI and we already have a wolf walking forward in the build that is being controlled via the server, which is very promising. He is now starting to work on the steering so the wolf will steer around obstacles such as trees. Alessio has also begun to implement the combat with the aim of getting PVP combat up and running as soon as possible. This will mean that you will be able to craft a weapon and attack other players for their nice juicy loot :)
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As always if you have any feedback, questions or comments please feel free to contact us at any of our social portals: Facebook, Twitter and our very own Forums.
Cheers,