This week, we’ve brought down the servers for several hours to migrate the way the game is stored and to update the resource distribution throughout the Boundless universe. Now the game stores data more efficiently and the game will be much more scalable. Also, it should be a bit easier to find gold now although there are now many portals that are connecting all the worlds. The downside is that it is now much harder to find gems. The resource balance will continue to change in future releases.
We have also implemented the underlying system for the Beacon Prestige and collective Settlement systems but they are not yet visible to the players as we have yet to complete the GUI. But they will be public soon.
In the next couple of weeks we plan to have the following in the game.
- Updated Tutorial and Objectives including weekly objectives.
- New Objective and Achievement GUI screen to allow you to activate certain objectives.
- HUD and GUI updates for the Beacon Prestige and Settlement systems.
- More SFX integrations
- Updated 1st person tools, weapon and held items animations.
- Character skill tree screen (stretch, maybe…).
Lance support is on going. We’re refactoring sections of the animation system to allow for more interesting progression on tools and weapons.
Code
We’ve spent quite a lot of time on the major release this week, completing the features and addressing the issues around it. It was a major update with the backend world servers upgraded to use the database backend as well as the full world resource regeneration. Each world now stores it’s entities and chunks in a local database. Player information is ultimately stored in a single universe database. This will hopefully allow the game to continue to scale linearly.
We are updating the first person animations in preparation for the lance work to begin integration. As part of this we fixed the glitches that can sometimes occur when using items.
The GUI skinning continues working on a new tooltip system, held items and smart stacks. The Objective HUD is also being updated to support the new variations. The back end for objectives and tutorial also added daily and weekly objectives.
Effects for impacts in mêlée have been added as well as the creature responses. You may now feel very guilty killing wildstock. The mêlée impacts still need to be updated to support client side prediction.
The error message the user sees when there are network issues have been revamped to make it more obvious what the issue is. We completed the chunk caching for PlayStation 4.
Design
This week we updated you on two areas of design.
@luke-turbulenz posted about Objectives and Experience (actually that was last last week, but it wasn’t included in the update):
… and @olliepurkiss posted about Beacon Persistence:
Please contribute to the conversations.
Ollie has also been working with Andy on getting the attributes hooked up and polished for damage, durability, speed and movement. There is a fair amount of behind the scenes work on this, but once it’s done it will enable the skills / progression to drop in and you can all make the characters that you want to make. He’s also been working with @dave and @gerryjacobs on weapon and tool animations and how they behave.
Luke has also been working with Andy, getting the tutorial and objectives integrated, so that the beginning of the game and beyond will be really fun and challenging. He’s also been checking the resource balance with @lucadeltodecso and making sure it’s going in the right direction.
As well as working with @OortSimon and Marc on getting the new GUI look in, Rob has been working on the crafting GUI, mainly to do with how the various fuels are used and communicated. He’s also worked out improved GUI for beacons and the new campfire, as well as starting an audit on all the icons in the game with a particular view to getting graphics ready for the Skills and Skill Trees.
Art
This week the art team have been busy across a wide range of areas of Boundless: campfire and beacon concepts, wildstock, creature tiers, items and also polishing the final 1st person tools and weapon animations.
Amanda’s latest cool concepts for the Beacon Control and temporary beacon Campfire:
She was also tasked with differentiating between the buying and selling plinths. We’re keeping one of the plinths but have designed a completely new second asset:
Jess has completed the set of Wildstock models with all decals in place. When Michael has made some necessary changes to the character exporter we will use the Wildstock as our benchmark test for the creature tiers system.
We’re working on hitting the screen position sweet spot for 1st person that celebrates each equipped weapon whilst providing necessary gameplay feedback (power level, ammo selected etc). We are also minimising camera distortion so that the proportions of our models aren’t deformed. To achieve this we have a separate in game camera for the tool and weapons with a fixed field of view of 65 degrees.
Gerry has been polishing the final 1st person tools and weapon animations to address these goals so expect an update on this soon.
We’ve continued production on our items, props and creature tier assets. All are tintable.
Creatures - Hunter Tier 4:
Creatures - Hunter Tier 4 Elemental
Creatures - Spitter Tier 4:
Creatures - Spitter Tier 4 Elemental:
Creatures - Roadrunner Tier 3 with decals:
Creatures - Roadrunner Tier 3 Elemental:
Items/Props - Blood, Plague, Petals, Bark, Bag of Bombs, Chair.
As mentioned last week we’re continuing building a library of earth-like prefabs.
Please help Boundless by making sure you’ve given it a review on Steam. Positive or negative there is a badge going this week:
Thanks for that. I can say is that i’m really waiting for the beacon prestige update.