Dev Update - Happy Halloween and News from our Team Hello Renowners As always a huge thank you to both our backers for their support, and to our community here for being awesome, as well as a shout out to our mod team on our official discord. It's been a little while since we last put out a public update, as weve been incredibly busy working behind the scenes on many different systems. Mr. Z has written an update for you to let you know what weve been working so hard on lately. Weve always tried to make testing fun. What were currently doing is extremely important for the future of the game, but it's not as glamorous as shiny new features. To say thanks for your patience the team (Mostly Mr. Z in his off hours), has created a fun new game mode for you. We present to you: Horde Mode
Currently done up in a Halloween theme, the Horde mode is your classic PvPvE wave survival onslaught of attackers. One player is chosen as the Skeleton Lord to lead the enemy Horde. Living Players attempt to survive until the time runs out. If you die you become part of the Skeleton Army as it grows in size. The last player standing is the winner, but for how long? After they fall, the game starts again. To be perfectly clear, this is something Mr. Z has been working on his own time in the last few weekends. The vast majority of development hours were not spent creating this game mode. That said, it still provides us with useful data, and we hope it will become a fun thing to keep you going! Speaking for the entire team, we hope you have a very fun Halloween. Mr. Z has taken the time to write up some of the majorly important work the Programming team has been up to behind the scenes over the last few months.
Mr. Z speaking, it's time for a general update on how development has been going over the last few months. We've been incredibly busy and highly productive lately on many different things, one of the biggest has been reworking many old game systems. Our goal lately has been to take the gameplay systems we've managed to make and essentially optimize the crap out of it. We've had enough playtests of survival mode to know what has been needed to be changed and we got excellent data on which things had poor client/server performance. Many systems have had a partial/full rewrite, including but not limited to; The saving system, The base building systems, Inventory systems, Networking subsystems, Resource gathering, and more. The goal has been very simple, we want to optimize the game for higher and higher player counts, our goal for early access has always been 50-100 on a server and we're getting very close to reaching it. One core system that had many hours of work put into it was the new base Maintenance system. Bases once built need resources for maintenance upkeep, these resources are stored in the banner's inventory. This is to ensure people don't just leave abandoned bases all over the map, as buildings will begin taking damage once maintenance upkeep payments are missed. Not only that but this mechanic also puts a soft cap on how big bases can realistically get, as you wouldn't want to build a base too big that farming the resources for the upkeep becomes prohibitively time consuming, especially for solo players and small groups.
Melee combat has also received lots of small improvements as I've been trying to spend more time dueling some of our best players to get a feel for what the highest level melee gameplay plays like. When work was still ongoing in the combat alpha, there weren't many people who could consistently beat me in duels and I'm happy to report that has changed. Many mechanics with melee have been tweaked considerably to improve the likelihood of solo players being able to have a realistic chance of winning when fighting outnumbered. As well, the ability to aim your swing paths have been buffed considerably to allow more possibilities to outplay opponents through swing manipulation. Morphs and Feinting has received many changes to be much less of a gamble while still remaining a useful mixup during engagements. In the near future we'll begin implementing the new motion capture animations for melee combat, that work is currently ongoing and we're looking forward to when it's ready to be pushed live.
ItsMoxie has been steadfastly working on a rewrite of many networking subsystems. In our playtests we were hitting pretty big networking bottlenecks so we're converting a lot of game systems to a more optimized networking model. Unfortunately the default networking model for Unreal Engine was optimized for small scale multiplayer arenas like that of Unreal Tournament, however fortunately for us because Epic Games also developed Fortnite we're able to use many of the systems they created for it for the purpose of optimizing large open world games. One of these features that we've implemented is called the "Replication Graph", it helps us support a far larger player count on a large open world map by optimizing the amount of work done by the server to update players in different regions of the map. Thank you again dear folks. Well be putting out an update soon regarding our overall changes to UE5, Animation updates and most excitingly, the various biomes KZ has created for the new map. Weve got big things coming in the near future and were all stoked to show them when theyre ready. Till Next Time Ashur