This week's additions
- Mining and Ore - There are now ore nodes located all around the game map. These ores can be mined if you have a pickaxe, and gives you an additional source of income. Ore nodes will expire after a few times of mining. As the game progresses, you’ll be able to use these different ores in crafting. You can buy a pickaxe from Ka’tro.
- Large new game area - A new area was added just south of Salis’da’coro Canyon. This area has a narrow rock canyon leading up to a maze of natural stone columns, which then overlooks a dried up waterfall, which joins back into Salis’da’coro Canyon at the base.
- Significant Improvement to Character Hit Physics - The dynamic hit reactions when players and other characters take damage will now be a little less spazzy.
- Removed Eye Adaption - Removed the dynamic brightness adjustment from the game, as it was exceedingly unstable. As a result, we re-balanced the day time lighting in the game, so as to make it appear more natural. Nights are very dark now when the moon isn’t up; you’ll need a torch to explore.
- Increased Ambient Light - Although it’s slightly unrealistic, we added a very very subtle ambient light to the entire game, making scenes of complete darkness not 0 percent black. It’s still very difficult to navigate in the dark (especially considering potential monitor setups), but now it shouldn’t be completely hopeless.
- Fixed Screen Resolutions not being applied properly - Changing your screen resolution in the options menu should now function correctly.
- Newly created Worlds / Characters now have the game time start at 8 AM - This gives you some a little less visually harsh of a scene when the game starts, and gives you a little more play time before that first night.
- New players start with a weapon and some money - This should hopefully solve the issue of starting multiplayer without a weapon and the means to survive.
- General tweaks to the landscape - Lots of cleanup and improvement to the entire landscape. This includes cleaning up ugly areas, and improving visual quality by adding, changing, or refining objects.
- New Vizaris Activator Objects Code - This new set of programming is what allowed ore mining to function correctly, but it will be the driving force behind massive amounts of new gameplay; from setting off traps, to opening doors, interactive environments, and more!
- Load Distance Optimizations - We halved the load distance for the Dynamic Cells in the game. What this means is that you need to get twice as close to an area before the dynamic content loads into memory (For instance, dolfogs, containers, plants). This should help reduce loading stutters, reduce the games RAM / VRAM usage, and result in more stability overall, with no effect on gameplay.
- Fixed: Inventory Descriptions - Fixed a bug that could cause the descriptions of inventory objects to become offset and incorrect under certain circumstances.
- Fixed: Prevented wealth from ever going below 0 - In certain situations it was possible for wealth to actually go negative. Vizaris isn’t realistic enough to have debt! (Yet :O )
- Fixed: Bandits having broken animations - Fixed (Probably?) an issue that was causing many players to see bandits with broken animations / meshes.
- Fixed: Plants below the ground - Fixed an issue with many plants being partially or even fully beneath the ground.
For the upcoming week, we’re likely going to upgrade to Unreal Engine 4.9, which was just released today. This update should allow us to push the visuals of the game even further, with improved performance! Beyond that, I’m going to try to add a new area to the game, and our artist will make further progress on the village, as well as hopefully add 3 additional ore types to the game (These will be higher end, compared to the current 3 ores, which are more common)
See you next week!
–Luke
