[p]Hey Exanimates,


It's been a very hectic month working on many different things, but also a nice change of pace from endlessly working on a single huge game or engine system. We're trying to get all the new content ready for release, and there's a lot.

The Gardens is the largest map yet and also the most complex, varied and unique. There's a lot of new nature and other assets and additions to the terrain which we're currently polishing and optimising. With so much work on terrain, we also made some nice improvements to our tools. Good content creation tools are always a big part of our development efforts, we think they are extremely important, we plan to continue making content indefinitely and also releasing the tools to the community. Optimisation has been a particular concern, as vegetation is notoriously expensive because of the complex 3D models with many layers to render. Usually this is featured outdoors where the lighting is simple, but in this case we also have to deal with many local lights and shadows, multiplying the cost. We wanted to maintain good performance without sacrificing the visuals, and while our engine is very well optimised, this is just a much bigger rendering workload than we've ever had it deal with. Making sure all assets are well optimised is part of what we're doing, but we've also been trying to squeeze even more performance out of the rendering engine.

We did a thorough investigation of performance bottlenecks, not really expecting to find much we could do, but when we looked at the results we started having some ideas. When something is already well optimised, even small optimisations can make a relatively large difference. Beyond optimising various special cases, we went looking for approximations. Real time rendering in general is all mathematical approximations of the real world, and often approximate versions of the expensive mathematical functions doing those approximations. Basically there's always some wiggle room in how approximate your approximation of an approximation is. Combinations of these can have a compounding or mitigating effect on each other, one approximation could help correct the error of another, or make it worse. After a bunch of experimenting we came up with various things that could perform much better with minimal detriment, or that might make the lighting look a little bit different, but not objectively worse. This helps us alleviate the expensive nature of the new area, but as a result we have improved performance in general. We can use these on lower settings to boost performance with minimal visual compromise, or even on higher settings for elements where the difference is just not noticeable, such as grass and most vegetation.

Speaking of grass, we've been overhauling our 3D grass and small plants to improve them visually and to support larger and more realistic plants for dense undergrowth more efficiently. As part of the terrain system this level of vegetation is subject to some special optimisations and careful procedural generation that can realistically produce better results than someone placing thousands of little plants by hand, while saving lots of time and rendering performance. This becomes increasingly important when producing and maintaining large natural environments. Being procedural also means we can easily scale back the density of this vegetation for lower end systems if necessary. We've also made other visual improvements in revisiting some of the rendering, an important one being better support for the detail shadowing with lower or disabled supersampling settings. Detailed and immersive visuals with smooth performance are very important to us and we're genuinely excited about how our latest efforts have come together in the new content.

Still on the topic of vegetation, while we don't consider this an urgent feature, we are also working on plant physics. Everything in Exanima interacts with physics, and plants should be no exception. We don't want plants to just wiggle and rustle when touched, but to bend and push back realistically. We considered various approaches here, and as usual performance is a big concern, but also with our very small team we can't be creating detailed physics models of every plant. We're still early in its development, but we've come up with a way of automatically generating accurate simplified physics structures for plants that can be simulated and deform them efficiently. This likely won't be featured in the earliest releases of the Gardens, but we are actively working on it.

On a totally different topic, we've been trying to finally tackle some important physics related issues that have been discussed recently in the community. This stemmed from a discussion on a functional unstuck feature, but it's relevant to several problems with positioning characters. A case some of you are probably familiar with is finding NPCs in weird spots, stuck inside something or each other, or reacting violently to some unseen force somewhere nearby. This happens for example when characters are repositioned while you're unconscious or away, and if they are colliding with something in the new position all sorts of bad things can happen. Identifying a collision free position for a character to occupy is a difficult problem, but is also needed for a good unstuck feature and for NPCs to move away from other characters or dynamic objects around them. But this alone isn't enough or always possible, we also need to pose characters to avoid near objects and gently nudge them into the space without disturbing objects and causing violent reactions or other issues. Not the most glamorous aspect of development, but these are some of the challenges we face with the game's complex physics and scope.

We have of course also been working hard on the new thaumaturgy domain. We have a few fully functional powers now, we've finalised all sorts of mechanics and visual interactions, done the sound design, figured out some new control and other mechanics for players and also started working on the domain tree images. This one is a bit more fleshed out than Energy, and there's a cool surprise in there. If you're wondering why we'd put effort now into player mechanics and UI, that's because we've decided to introduce the acquisition of powers from others when they are defeated in this update. If you weren't aware, the domains you start with are your "innate" ones and you naturally learn their powers, but when you witness the death of another shaper you might unlock powers that are from their domain, as well as absorb some of their "potential". This can be invested in powers to make them and their domain stronger. We still want to introduce more progression and reward mechanics, and these are some important ones. With the big core engine and game systems developed as they are now, we're finally really switching focus to enriching the gameplay experience, with things that are relatively much easier to develop, but add lots of perceived value.


Best,

Bare Mettle[/p]