Should you buy the game right now? Unless you are interested in playing with the editor I would wait for awhile. Once I redo the start of the campaign would probably be a good time. This is a long-term project that will take awhile to get to a beta early access level. Please check in every once in awhile to see how it is progressing.
Changes
- Upgraded from using Unity 2017.4 to Unity 2020.3 This improved load times but caused a lot of bugs that had to be fixed.
- There is no longer a resolution dialog when starting the game. You can now set the resolution from the settings inside the game.
- You can now select the window mode in settings. You can choose FullScreenWindow, ExclusiveFullScreen, MaximizedWindow, and Windowed.
- There are new options for anti-aliasing. They are None, Fast, Subpixel, and Temporal. Temporal can sometimes cause weird blurring in the distance.
- When an exception occurs a window will pop-up showing the call-stack for the exception. Instructions on how to report the bug appear on this dialog. Previously on an exception the game would just become unresponsive.
Fast travel changes
I have a made a lot of changes to fast travel and the map to make the game less of a walking simulator and more like other open world games.
- You can now fast travel from any place on the map to any location that you have already discovered by opening the map.
- When you are near a location that you have discovered a symbol will appear on the compass to help you find the location instead of having to keep opening the map.
- Only fast travel locations and portals require all players in co-op to be nearby before traveling, other locations can be traveled too independently of other players.
Gameplay improvements
- Now shows a message about carrying too much when you are over your carrying capacity. Used to you would just go slower until you stopped without knowing why.
- When extremely overburdened you move very slowly instead of coming to a complete stop.
- Added new inventory filter category and item type for crafting ingredients. Previously they were considered food for filtering purposes.
- Added pickax item. This is required to be in your inventory in order to mine ore.
Editor changes
- Added spawn area regions to location points of interest so that they can be used for fast travel.
- Added ability to change attributes through the ChangeStat action.
- Added quest taker and quest receiver to quest status
- Quest taker and Quest receiver are now targets for many requirements and actions that have a target property.
- Add support for speedtrees. Added two environmental object properties to support speedtree. Has billboard which allows the use of speedtree billboards and LOD 0 dynamic which supports making LOD 0 dynamic instead of instanced so that speedtree wind works correctly.
- Added picking requirement to and picking not allowed message properties to environmental objects. This is used to make it so you can only harvest coal and ore if you have a pickax.
- Added Owner property to crafting stations. If a crafting station has an owner the player cannot use the crafting station unless the owner has shared ownership with the player.
- Portals no longer have icons that represent them on the map. Now points of interests should be placed near portals to see and travel to their locations on the map.]
- Added RandomNumber action and CheckRandomValue requirement to be able to add randomness to brains.
Gameplay bug fixes
- Fixed issue where sometimes traveling between dungeons and islands would freeze the game.
- Fixed issue where sometime the AI would get stuck trying to close distance with the player.
- Fixed issue where iron armor was much heavier than other armors.
- Fixed issue where non-speedtree tree billboards would be at the wrong scale causing some objects to change size when switching LODs.
- Fixed issue where colliders for dead spawned enemies would be active after loading from a save game.
- Fixed issue where trading with an NPC would make the game become unresponsive if they had an invalid item in their inventory.
Editor fixes
- Fixed issue where saving databases when one of the folders does not exist causes the application to stop responding.
- Fixed issue where grass was not being generated for islands when generating biomes for a level if one or more of the biomes had a a clear grass operation.
- Fixed issue where looking at a harvestable object in the environmental object editor causes going into player mode to make the editor unresponsive.
- Fixed an issue where generating and island would sometimes make the editor unresponsive.
- Fixed an issue where selecting an object would sometimes make the editor unresponsive.
- Fixed issue where not finding a module directory when saving cause cause the editor to become unresponsive.
Coming next
The next update will probably be within 3 months of this update. This will be a big content update.
- Researching Dynamic occlusion culling. Hopefully this will greatly increase performance especially with more complicated islands and dungeons.
- New campaign start at the center of a new and a slightly bigger starting island that is more open for exploration.
- Will start in a fort overlooking a village.
- Several quests to teach you the mechanics of the game including how combat works.
- Several optional side quests.
- More open and less linear quest line.
- Wider variety of foliage and biomes.
- Adding new and more traditional monsters.
- New dungeons.
- More story.
- Several merchants and trainers near the beginning of the game in the village.
- Adding more perks and spells.
- Start working on switching to UMA and mecanim for characters and animation. This is a long term project.
Here is a test of the new island. Still a lot of tweaking of the biomes to do.
Kevin
