[p]Hey Exanimates,


We're very close to beginning closed testing of the full 0.9.5 update. This will be mainly for the new area, encounter types, new items and thaumaturgy. While there have been some engine changes such as rendering optimisations and the new grass and race systems, it's mostly content and the big changes were already thoroughly tested in the testing branch. We don't expect this to last long or involve difficult technical issues. Originally we hoped to begin testing a bit sooner, but of course we ended up making a few more improvements and additions.

The new race system we discussed in the last diary is up and running, and while switching everything over to it we improved many things. We won't repeat all things it was designed to support and how it improves our creature and animation workflow, but we immediately saw benefits and took advantage of some of the new features. In configuring animations with the new tools and making new animations for the new encounters we ended up improving many of the older animations too, sometimes because of what the new tools allowed, and sometimes because we noticed some weren't working very well. The walk and run cycles is something that we improved on particularly, but while updating those we had some issues with characters losing balance, which led to a long investigation which finally ended in improving how characters balance during locomotion. This means there's now a lot less falling over or stumbling for no good reason while walking and running.

In animating the new creatures (and some new armour) we ran into another production bottleneck that has been a particular annoyance throughout development: skinning. Skinning is a term for how characters and whatever they're wearing deform as they move. We use a peculiar system of our own design which is optimised for our extremely modular and dynamic armour system and also to give us very fine-grained control over the behaviour of things like the articulation in armour. Designing these deformations however is a very lengthy and tedious process, made much more tedious by our reliance on 3rd party modelling programs for most of the work and basically not really being able to see what we're doing. We recently overhauled our apparel system, and a big part of this was a new skinning solution for clothing specifically which is almost completely automatic and give much better results, but for articulation of armour and whole new creatures this doesn't work. Faced with this big skinning workload, Madoc again decided it was time to improve and invest in our tools, so we can now design the deformations and even skeletal structure of creatures directly in our engine with much better tools designed for this purpose, and interactive results. These tools represent a big step for a lot more than just skinning though, as they are essentially the foundation of our in-house modelling tools, which will solve other problems and importantly allow us to better use a lot of other engine specific features. This includes some big new environment design features we've been working on. It's too much to get into right now, but we'll probably do a showcase of these later on as they're a pretty big deal.

The game has a lot of unique features and a unique engine and this means a lot of unique problems to solve and just difficult technical development. It is what it is, we're not just developing the game, but the entire platform it is developed on at the same time. We're moving in a different direction to everyone else so we have to figure out a lot of stuff that no one else has tried to figure out yet. Sometimes we have to make a difficult choice between the quickest way to do something now and the best way to do it now and in the future too. We made the wrong choice many times early in development, and doing things better, not quicker is a lesson we wished we would have learned earlier and that would have saved us a lot of time. We don't want to make that mistake again.

Anyway, no more developing new tools and systems before the update is out, we promise! At this point we're really just wrapping things up and at most we'll be touching up the content while testing is ongoing.


Best,

Bare Mettle[/p]