Weekly Dev Update: 2017 February 17th - Portals, Character Customisation and Flowers

There were no Live or Testing updates for Boundless this week. But we have been busy. The following features will be coming in the next release:

  • GUI rendering, update and animation optimisations to increase game performance.
  • Tweaks to the Player damage indicator in the HUD.
  • Improved Creature AI, including creatures not falling off cliffs, avoiding obstacles and searching for routes to track you.
  • Early version of Location Markers on Planets in the HUD.
  • If we are lucky, we might be able to release the new portal! Wish us luck.

The foundation work on the unified Attributes / Stats / Progression System is almost done. This will allow the designers to easily modify game balance across Creatures, Tools, Weapons, Buffs, Bombs and Player Progression.

Thank you to all the YouTubers posting their Boundless videos. We have been learning lots and our designers have been making changes to the game including the tutorial / objectives to make the game flow smoother and more intuitive. The new users will see these changes soon.


Code
Portals are in the last stage of the implementation and being tested to shake out functionality and usability issues. Portals can be created between and within Worlds. Opening and maintaining an open portal both cost resources. Currently this is balanced to make it much more resource efficient to maintain open portals.

A new creature drop system has being implemented where you have to hit a dead creature to extract and collect the drops. Each player can extract and collect their own drops. The creature will still de-spawn after a fixed time. This system stops vulture players from stealing drops, and also makes the drops easier to find especially if a creature was killed from range. The perceived down side of players getting drops for free is IMO offset by removing the option for griefing by stealing another player’s drops. Also drop stalking players still need to survive in the environment where the drops are appearing.

The attribute system is being worked on, with the health system being the first system to be updated. The damage, explosion and impact feedback is being hooked up and will be updated to support the new damage types. This includes elemental and physical properties.

The HUD will now displayer a player’s location markers on remote planets when they’re holding the Totem. This includes your own markers, friends beacons, your guilds locations, cities and the capital.

We’ve been fixing up a number of GUI issues for the next release. We also spent time investigating issues for the corrupted GUI and controller lag people have been reporting. Additionally we also worked on the PlayStation 4 TRC.

Design
This week @luke-turbulenz has reworked the Sanctum, with a view to implementing a more comprehensive tutorial and new user experience. Once integrated new players will be learning about the game, and choosing their starting world in a slick and engaging way. He’s also worked out how creatures will choose targets based on a “threat” system.

@olliepurkiss has been generating lots of data for the attributes system, which covers player progression, creatures and how they are generated, and items and how they work with a character’s attributes.

Rob has been working on the final bits for the HUD, including what information is shown when looking at blocks and interactive entities. The per block HUD elements will help you understand: what is in a beacon, what is outside, what is locked, what will regen, and what it shared with other players. He’s also been working out the information that is shown about Warps and Portals. And finally working out the details of what is shown when looking up at a planet in the sky.

Art

This week the art team have been busy working on all aspects of improving our game visually. In particular we’ve been delving into concepting our characters and looking at the full breadth of customisation aspects that we’d like to see in the near future. Here’s a first glimpse of this working process where we eventually aim for you to be able to choose your face, skin and head shape in a fully interchangeable way.

The current flowers of boundless have also been getting a bit of polish and loving attention. We’ve increased the visual fidelity of the mesh to allow a more crafted and detailed end outcome. Here’s a few images of the stages of progress done under the hood, behind the scenes.

Finally we’ve also been ploughing on ahead with our Hunter with a series of patrolling and attacking animations. Tune in next week where we’ll be able to update the animation Hunter dev post with the full set of animations. Until then, @jesshyland has created the Tier 3 model of the Hunter in aptly themed Valentine’s day colours!


:walking:

30 Likes

Oh my goodness! This next update will be tremendous! I cam hardly wait for portals

6 Likes

OMG!!!

OMG! On the picture a Portal can stay open for days. Awesome. Can just the owner of a Portal open it with fuel or everyone else too? When I’m off for a week but other people want to travel through my portal to another world, is there a way? Sorry for asking, we’ll see this soon on our own. But I can’t wait xDDD

Wonderful art. I love them all.

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First off … Whoop! Portals!! Hopefully they’ll make it into the release :smiley:

I really like the sound of these changes to the creature drop system … so many times I’ve had drops fly off into the distance when I’ve shot a creature at range, and then spent some time (occasionally unsuccessfully) trying to locate the dropped items in long grass.

I’m guessing this also means that there will no longer be pond meat any more? Although that’s probably going to be the case with improved AI anyway. Thinking more on this, would it be possible to release any unclaimed creature drops when the creature de-spawns? That way, if players don’t bother claiming the drops, others can still find the occasional free meat laying around.

Also how will this work if you’re with a group of friends? Will it be a case of the first person to hit the creature will be the only one that can claim drops?

Looking forward to seeing some new faces (literally) in game! :smiley_cat:

All look awesome! Some of these look like they may need to turn sideways to get through a door :laughing:


Also… Do I spy some new blocks behind the foxgloves?

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@james I love everything you posted, particularly the customisability of the toons. I’m just wondering if there is any news on a timeline for the other races to be released?

I think this means that every player has his own “instance” of corpse that he can loot.


Speaking of this new mechanic:

Will we get a knife(ish) tool for this, like in other games with such a loot mechanic?

1 Like

So if I am interpreting this correctly, a player must first damage, then physically harvest a creature, then they each get drops from it? Doesn’t this lead to the possibility of multiplying the drops from a single creature by having several players do a little damage each? I’d much rather prefer the occasional “vulture” grief over possible implications of item duplicating. One could abuse this with multiple accounts controlled by a single entity. Will there be safeguards to inhibit such behavior? Perhaps a loot pool or proportional looting of some sort?

5 Likes

Yeah, it would give groups of players a huge advantage hunting in packs.

Don’t think this should be possible since two players mining together don’t get a drop each from a single block…

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I didn’t want to make the assumption about that… just in case. Although, if I had to assume, I would think that the creature would de-spawn once you had extracted your drops. Which to me, would also mean that others wouldn’t be able to loot it (unless they have their own instance of the dead creature, as you said). As others have stated, this then makes pack hunting more profitable, for which I’m against for the same reasons mentioned.

Hence the reason I asked for clarification :wink:


Just go to town with an axe :smirk_cat:

1 Like

Yeah, I never interpreted it as each different player can all harvest one single corpse.

I read it that if I kill the left one, then only I am entitled to claim it’s meat - and if you kill the right one then only you are entitled to harvest it’s meat.

Always worth asking for clarification though.

Edit: Actually how will this work in guilds? will guilds be entitled to have 1 killer and 1 looter if they hunt as a group?

Will the Workbench Construction bug be fixed in this update?

I am similarly against the idea of everyone being able to harvest a corpse for drops.
I don’t plan on playing alone but I don’t think it is fair to single players that guild groups could kill a couple
spitters and have enough dark blood to mass craft gem tools.
So I hope this is not the case.
In addition this would easily overflow the market on anything that drops from creature kills.
For example: When titans are released there is going to be good creature loot right?? If I am in a really good 30 man guild and it takes say the top 7 players with strong expensive gear to defeat the titan you bet right after we do that we are going to warp in the other 23 players to loot everything freely.
When designing game features I think it should always be assumed the strongest players and guilds are going to do everything in their power to abuse resources for personal gain.

2 Likes

When fueling a Portal (and likely for a Beacon) the current thinking is allowing weeks worth of fuel. But this would be increasable with some skills up to months. This would give invested players more flexibility.

The general idea is to optimise Warps for one off usage, and Portals for long lasting usage. Opening a Portal will be more expensive than Warping, but maintaining the Portal will be much cheaper.

Who can fuel a Portal (and Beacon) is an issue of permissions.

The drops extracted from a creature are person specific. This allows players to improve their harvesting skills.

We could support a default spawn when the creature entity expires, but these drops would also expire. So instead of this additional special case I would rather the creature entities lasted longer. Either way I think this system should be optimised for hunting and not opportunistic scavenging.

All players in a group can harvest their own drops from all felled creatures. Other players can’t even see or pickup your drops.

We’re focusing on character customisations at the moment as I think they gives us the most opportunity for individual uniqueness.

At the moment any tool will harvest the drops.

The number of drops in either system can be balanced to be equivalent.

5 Likes

thanks for the post!

portal hype

Do you mean something like: if 1 person kills it, they get 100% of the drops, if two people kill it, they each get 75% of the drops, if 3, then 50%, etc.

Hello old acquaintances!!
I was wondering if the different faces are planned to be options for the first race or if that’s what the 6 races will look like?

I’d say they’re different faces for the cat race.

Uhh… please just… ignore… those… :flushed: Ahem.

And yes, that’s it. Those six faces will be your options for the first race. We’re planning to add more races later which will have different faces!

7 Likes

I noticed those too but I thought I’d see who mentioned them first :yum:
I’m sure that was a “mistake” given how much you guys like to tease us all :wink: