Vizaris Weekly Update - 43 news

Another week goes by, and our team has cracked out another list of changes and improvements. Once again, most of the work this week has focused on backend code for the village, so while some of the changes listed under “backend” at the end of the list are technically shipped in the game, they’re not really accessible to the player in any meaningful way yet – as it’s mostly work for the village.

This week's additions

• Revised Ka’te’coro Basin - As we continue our march south to the completion of the revision of the game world, this time, Ka’te’coro Basin was overhauled, and moderately expanded. It also had some additional ores, containers, and map markers placed. Ka’te’coro Basin also provides us with a very good opportunity to show off exactly how far the game has come in the past year. This early beta screenshot shows the state of Ka’te’coro Basin on February 17th 2015. Compare to the image above.

• Dolfog Sounds - When we updated the dolfog animations, a lot of the timers for the sounds were lost, resulting in not just a quieter dolfog, but a less readable dolfog. With the latest update many of these sounds we recalibrated and added back to the dolfog, which should improve the combat experience with them. We’ll be replacing all of the dolfog sounds soon.

• Improved Performance - Gameplay performance should be moderately improved, especially at dusk and dawn; the performance was squeezed out of an issue that was causing shadows from both the Godhand and the Sun to be visible during dusk and dawn. We also removed one of the fog layers, as it was now longer needed.

• Improved Shadows, Lighting, and Fog - Speaking of fog – Shadows, lighting, and fog were further improved. A significant improvement was made to dawn and dusk, resulting in more pleasing, and gameplay friendly visuals. Other improvements come in fixing brightness during day and night, moon orbit speeds, bloom and more.

• Improved Ore Materials - The material for Iron, Copper, Fluorite, Sphalerite, and Sulfur ore nodes were significantly improved, making the nodes look nicer, and make them a little more distinguished from the environment.

• Revised Ore 3D Models - The meshes for ore nodes were also completely replaced, with a more visually appealing and slightly more efficient layout. This task ended up taking much more time than expected, as it required the repositioning of 992 of the ore nodes! Turns out, there are a lot more ore nodes spread over the world than even I thought!

• Added new cave music - A new cave exploration music track was added to the game, for some new sweet (or rather, creepy) jams while spelunking… because who doesn’t like jams while spelunking? Nevermind, don’t answer that.

• New sound when advancing time - A new sound plays while advancing time. It’s a small addition, but a fun one. :)

• Tweaked Interface Hotkeys - You can now press I to open the inventory, and bind opening the inventory to whatever key you want. TAB also still opens the inventory, and can also be rebound. TAB is now more of a generic interface management key, and in the future will be used to open a more specific all-purpose UI screen, rather than the inventory. The actual result of this change is not much, but you can now use TAB to close some menus.

• Local Message Improvements - The local messages have been improved. These messages are now centered and below the crosshair, where you’re probably going to be looking when you get one of these. Their order is now more properly represented with the newest message on top, resulting in less jumpy text as older messages fade away.

• Player Chat Box Shadow - Removed the shadow that would appear over the player/server chat window which has existed since the early days of Vizaris. This mostly just makes the UI a bit cleaner when starting the game.

• NPC Headtracking - Head tracking was added to AI, as long as the NPC is aware of the player, and the player is within a specific arc in front of the NPC. This doesn’t have much impact beyond visuals right now, but it will play an important role in the upcoming stealth gameplay.

• Quiet game while loading - Game sounds are now faded out while the world is loading, resulting in a more professional, and pensive game loading experience (Keeping in mind that you only see loading screens when you first load a save, and when you use the Un-stuck menu.)

• UI Menus are now prevented while loading - The game now prevents the player from opening certain menus while the game is still loading.

• File Optimizations - Extra work was put into stripping out some unused art and unused plugins, resulting in cleaner, smaller folders, and more importantly slightly smaller future updates.

• Disabled FXAA, Disabled Sharpening - Finally got tired of the blurriness, got tired of the sharpening to compensate. UE4 doesn’t have any quality AA solutions yet, and it’s beyond our means to develop. The significant image quality reduction from FXAA simply wasn’t worth the removal of the aliasing. You may still be able to force various different AA solutions using your drivers. The removal of both of these things provides a slight performance boost.

• Fixed: Stamina Costs for Blocking - We fixed an absolutely significant bug which was causing block to use up incorrect amounts of stamina based on the player’s current endurance. Stamina is now properly adjusted based on the player’s endurance virtue, and now drains smoothly, rather than in sudden, large chunks under certain circumstances.

• Fixed: Dummy Material - I was informed by the artist that the dummy added last week had its materials incorrectly configured (by me). So a tweak here, and a modification there, and the dummy should look a little nicer this week.

• Backend: Guards - As usual, most of the code work went into new features which are necessary for the upcoming village. One of these major features is the functionality for guard NPCs. Aside from a handful of specific features and interactions, guards are now fully functional.

• Backend: NPC Awareness - NPC now have a level of awareness of the player, based on the direction the NPC is currently facing. It’s now possible to move close behind NPCs without them noticing you. This is important for upcoming stealth gameplay, and the next feature:

• Backend: Player Bounty - Player bounty, and associated crimes such as theft, assault, murder, lock picking, etc is now also functional. These crimes can also now be committed without receiving a bounty, if no NPCs are aware of the player.

Code development will continue on village features, and other little improvements will continue to be made. If I can find a way to do it cleanly, I’ll try to integrated a limited form of some of these features into the next update. The actual implications for the player won’t be that significant, but it will still give you a good taste of what’s to come.

Clothing is also being made for the NPCs, and the new player customization system (which is also important for NPCs) is currently being worked on. There’s a lot of exiting stuff coming soon.

If you’ve been watching Vizaris for a while, and enjoy seeing the weekly content additions, please consider buying Vizaris if you haven’t already – It’s basically our equivalent to Kickstarter, or Patreon, and puts the whole game into your hands immediately. It also helps us to put food on the table, and updates on your hard drives. The more resources and feedback we have to develop the game, the faster we can add content! Every player, and the feedback they provide is critical to the development of the game. We look forward to hearing from you!

–Luke

Vizaris is an open world, fantasy roleplaying game, with singleplayer and 6 player co-op multiplayer. Vizaris focuses on player choice and freedom. New updates at the start of every week!

You can play Vizaris right now by going to www.VizarisGame.com/play , Every dollar goes to supporting the development of the game, meaning more content at a faster rate. It's like our Kickstarter or Patreon, but you get instant access to the game! Free press access available! Questions, comments, help, and feedback welcome!