Weekly Dev Update: 2016 May 13th - World Regeneration, Emotes, Extra GUI and more

Devlog Dev Update
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This week was a sad week. A civilization was wiped from the Boundless beta version but we are very excited to see a new civilisation rising from the ashes using the new blocks and slopeable block types. Thanks to new boy @AndyD we also managed to get emotes into the game (resulting in an excited @gerryjacobs).
As mentioned before, we have been working on Machine crafting so that you can craft loads of goodies. We have also started working on storage (chests), and we are hoping that we can release a first version in July. The main features will be ready before then, but @ben’s shiny new GUI will take time to implement.

Also coming along nicely are the updated World Builder and Resource Generation. If everything goes well you will be able to play with it sometime in June. At this point we’re going to start making “final” worlds, and we really hope you will help with that.

Finally, we are thinking about making the development (C++) version the default version on Steam, thanks to the community’s feedback on the question.

Stayed tuned for more updates.

Code
This week we worked on three releases of the development branch on Steam, with bug fixes along with the new features.

The machine work has hooked together the power cores and pipes. The GUI for the machines and crafting continues. For the GUI we are also working on adding the 3D meshes in place of the text. We have also begun work on dual wielding.

We are continuing the shader pipeline work, with DX11 and OpenGL working and PS4 in progress. In the back end we are also updating some of the server software to for future deployment. We also completed a task for persistent entity relationships.

Design
This week was mainly wrapping up the jobs of last week. The recipe data is now being exported into the game using the proverbial big red button. Also the design for how creatures will be generated and spawned is pretty much done. The creature generation and spawning takes into account variation and difficulty for different worlds, so by setting a “threat” level for a world we will get an interesting set of creatures spawned that match the desired level of threat. Of course this is all paper design at the moment, so the coders are yet to get their grubby mitts on it – there’s nothing more likely to break a good design than someone trying to implement it…

Also we’ve been trying to nail down the high level design for Protectors and the other player races, so that @Minyi can start concepting them. We’re early in this process, so there’s a way to go before we have final concepts, but they’re key parts of the game and it will be fantastic to see them coming together in the coming weeks. Watch this space.

GUI
This week sees the GUI art blossom from boring flat assets into bevelled slabs of stone. Functionally, this more complete styling helps increase contrast and readability. Stylistically, it helps make the UI feel more solid, weighty and tangible, adding that final bit of visual polish without any noisy texture effects. Here’s a mockup (as always, don’t read too much into the content):

gui.png1301Ă—778 404 KB

Art
This week we’ve worked on the block types for Ancient Corruption, Tangle and Thorns.

We’ve integrated these emotes: yes, no, shrug, point, salute, wave, mexican wave, clap, slow clap, laugh, facepalm, insult, intimidate and sit. See them all here:

We’ve also produced concepts for:

  • The Guild Control prop which symbolises all the knowledge and history of your guild.
  • The Mannequin where you can display your wearables collection and enjoy some light customisation.
  • The Location Signal which you place as a marker on the map.
    More to come on the forum regarding all these soon.

Concepting tools and weapons has continued – we’re now happy with our basic tool set, slingbow, grapple and the progression language concepts to follow.
We’ve also been looking at how technically to produce our special materials - Oort Stone, Blink, Dark Matter and Rift.
More on this soon.

We’ve also been providing animation support for the integration of the dual wielding in 1st person. Can’t wait to show this off.

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YES. have been suggesting that since we had the old forum.

I look forward to getting the crafting into the game.

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Looks like a good week for you guys. Could you please answer some questions regarding to this

How many races do you plan ? Do you plan on different racial skills / benefits like you suggested a long time ago (eg. one race is higher or smaller than the other, some might jump higher and so on)

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They dropped that concept a long time ago :frowning: (there is a very small chance they’ll implement it later though [afaik])

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Very exciting news!

What’s funny is that there are now ash blocks in the game. :smile:

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The world regeneration restores everything outside of a beacon to the state it was when the world was originally created, apart from “resources” (metals, gems etc). Resources are restored in a later pass so that the exact locations are not the same, and we can balance rate and amount of regeneration to keep the economy stable. It’s not completely random though, if there were lots of Rubies on the side of a particular hill last week, there are likely to be Rubies there this week, just not in exactly the same places.

We are planning three races in addition to the one we already have. The choice of race doesn’t effect the gameplay, it is a visual / customisation choice, and also a choice around lore and back-story.

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So no racial-specific passive/active abilities or bonuses or anything?

Also, thank you for adding the rough timelines. I know it’s a risk to announce these, but it means I can focus on getting my time with Overwatch, ESO’s Dark Brotherhood, and WoW’s Legion in before Boundless eats up all of my time :heart_eyes:. Definitely good to get a feel of not only where we’re at, but also “when” we’re at.

Also, @ben, I’m guessing we have you to thank for that absolutely stunning UI?

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Yeah, screw the backer survey results. Who cares about what their backer think anyway?

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A bit harsh :disappointed_relieved:.

I’d say let him clarify/explain a bit before jumping on him hehe.

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Thank you – I’ve put up another post about this: Race Abilities

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I’m definitely going to play with the worldbuilder once it is updated :stuck_out_tongue:

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Wow, lots going on this week, despite the sadness. Really excited for what’s to come gameplay-wise. I’ve added that GUI mockup to the collection.

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I have a question: how are you, guys separate resources between precious resources and common world’s blocks?

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the resources we’re talking about are those that will be found within rock (and glacier) and are treat specially by the regeneration system so that their placement into the world (by resource regeneration) is ignored, and their removal triggers a standard regeneration to the underlying stone type (not to the resource embedded type). The resource regeneration system will be keeping track of resource counts and distributions throughout the world to decide when to embed fresh resources into the world.

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So theoretically if someone would decide to mine a resource and hamstring it, that resource would at some point stop regenerating?

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The way i read it and the way i always have is

-Worlds regenerate precisely as they were before. Problem: Clumps of known resources which can be camped

Sooo Instead its like this

-World materials that are common (dirt, stone, wood) regenerate precisely as it was
-Gems and other rarer materials will regenerate as a common material (gem spot becomes stone)
-Common material will convert to rare material within the general area (You mine 10 gems. 10 stones gets converted to gems. Most likely at certain times)

So. Effectively what happens is that if you look at one part of a cave where there was 10 gems. when it regens there are none. But if you look at the entire cave system itself and there are 50 gems. Then the next time it regens there will be 50 gems again, but in different spots in the game

I must admit it is quite genius and i’m very impressed by it.

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I gathered as much my self from previous dev posts.

I was mostly aiming my hypothetical question at this part of the @lucadeltodecso’s post:

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Ah. Well not to butt in but the way i read it was “The system checks how many resources there are and when there aren’t enough it will put them into the game” which is quite the opposite of regeneration running out. But that is just the way i read it.

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@lucadeltodecso response is compatible with how @Zouls has summarised the entire regeneration process - and how it also works.

Resources will continue to regenerate within that biome as they’re mined.

Additionally (for @zouls):

  1. The world regen and resource regen can run at different frequencies. This would allow a mine in a biome to “dry up” or “become exhausted” and encourage the players to continuously explore for new regions to mine. But the resources would eventually recover.

  2. We have a global control over the resource regen rate, this allows us to slow down or speed up the generosity of the regen to help control the economy of the game.

It’s basically triple genius!

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Do you plan to make it sort of “intuitive” (people go in and there are either gems or there arent) or do you plan to make some dedicated, either slightly or not lore breaking systems to warn players about the current state of the area (AKA going into a mine you can use a device to see it is “overflowing” or “depleted” of materials, or just a pop up if you want it less lore friendly)?

Are all resources completely put together (resource regen for every item). put into groups (Common materials, rare materials) or completely seperate (Topaz, Ruby, Wood, Gems)? So are you able to and planning to adjust the seperate materials when they appear to be lacking? And do you have certain plans or idea when to do it since supply and demand is a huge part of economy meaning that providing more gems when more gems are mined rather than let there be an absence of gems for a while affect the price of gems? (Effectively changing or straining what would else be a dynamic economy) and lastly would you be considering/planning to set different resource rates at different times enforcing supply and demand (For example one month ruby is on 200% regen rate and topaz is on 25% regen rate increasing the price of topaz for that period of) which would make an extremely interesting choice for merchants when to sell and when to save depending on how much of a certain material is in circulation at any given time?

Very much so. Its also a lot more elegant that the normal “materials pop up out of the air” like WoW does with various gathering materials such as ore veins.

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