Hello and welcome to the 39th CardLife DevBlog,
Exciting times this week as we release our very first AI creature. Read on for more info:
Patch Notes 39
Here are the major changes:
- Wolves have been added to the game:
- Please note - They are very much a work in progress at the moment (crude movement and attack etc) but this provides us with an opportunity to test our AI architecture across the live server
- Wolves currently spawn around the player but we will eventually tie their spawning to the world location
- The Wolf will wander around it’s spawn area and if you get too close it will attack
- You will be able to fight the wolf and on death it should drop some placeholder Springberries
- The wander and combat behaviours are very simple at the moment and we will improve these in future releases
- Wolves currently have no texture
- We have also released a few optimizations to the game (to do with the terrain generation) that should also improve the overall performance
Ongoing Work: Server Resets & Saving
So as you may have noticed we had to reset the server a few times this week as we encountered a few issues. Each time we reset the server it wipes it back to its original state without any of your buildings. At the moment this is our only option but we have begun work on the saving of the terrain and buildings and this will be coming in a future update that will mean you won’t lose your creations or edits to the world. But in recognition of those that have fallen here are some of our favourite buildings from before the reset:
Ongoing Work: Dev Tools & UV's
Cian has paused his work on the building system this week to work on a few dev tools that the Art team have been waiting for. The main one being an icon exporter which batch exports the icon thumbnails by loading a model (i.e. Pickaxe) into a preset Unity scene and then taking multiple screenshots with all the available craftable textures (i.e. Stone to Protonium). Obviously as you can imagine this reduces the amount of manual work they have to do which means they can spend more time on actually creating new assets. Cian has also started to look into the UV’s of the models as they are exported through the Cardboard Exporter tool as some of them were being scaled incorrectly. Once this has been fixed he’s going to jump straight back onto building.
Ongoing Work: Performance
Neil is taking a well deserved holiday next week so this will pause the work on the collision system for a while but we did a very promising test this week. We enabled all of the new collision system, Ed’s new ores and caves system and all of his local optimizations that he has been working on to do with terrain cell generation. The results where a huge step in the right direction as it drastically improved the performance of the game across all machines with low end PC’s gaining double to triple the framerate which is very encouraging. Once Neil gets back from holiday we will wrap the remaining collision tasks (that I talked about last week) and push the new systems live.
Ongoing Work: Art Update
So while the Code team has been busy implementing the core gameplay systems (building, combat, AI etc) the Art team have been in beautification mode. Mike has been creating the final assets for the ores to replace the current placeholder versions and they are starting to look very cool in my opinion. We have been really keen on keeping the theme of the progression (from stone age to the space age) across the materials so the later ores will be much more futuristic than say the earlier Coppers and Irons.
Ryan has also been working on an awesome shader that simulates the look of cardboard at a distance. This means that we will hopefully alleviate some of the visual differences between Lod 0 which is actually made up of cardboard slats and the lower Lods which are smooth.
Ongoing Work: Networking
In anticipation of an upcoming launch that includes all of our core gameplay systems we have started to lay the foundations to scale our server infrastructure so that we can support multiple official servers with more capacity than the current 15 or so and allow you to create your own single or multiplayer servers.
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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,