Hello again renowners, its Mr. Z speaking here with an update on what we've been up to lately. KZ and I have prepared a short explanation of what we've been working on lately as launch approaches. KZ has been very hard at work preparing the art side of things for launch, specifically there's been an optimization pass, an external walls rework, and stability fixes. In his words:

A big chunk of time has gone into optimizing the map. Ive been tackling texture memory usage, cleaning up LODs, utilizing static mesh instances, and making sure key points of interest are running smoother across the board.

The goal is to ensure we squeeze out every bit of performance without sacrificing visual fidelity, by using the tools the engine has provided us with.

[img src="https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images/40614988/fd5a6282c564f79dd98c0e15fe58b2f6157d7476.jpg"][/img]

The exterior castle walls are now fully functional and finalized. Its been a long road getting them just right. However, theyre now in and working as intended. I'm just fixing up the last touches before another patch. We have a set of High walls and Low external walls now, each with their own advantages.

The Backer content is nearly ready! All the backer statues, headstones, and skins are being implemented and polished to ensure everything looks great and is in place for launch. Thanks again to everyone who supported the project your in-game presence is coming to life.

[img src="https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images/40614988/7e44b319976d996197b062403f765b4e6bce390c.jpg"][/img]

My main focus right now is getting the client stable and polished for launch. That includes art bug fixes, performance improvements, and making sure the experience is as smooth as possible for everyone on day one.

Thats all for now back to the grind. Appreciate everyones support as we push through these final stages.

As for my section I will be discussing a few things, Namely: The engine upgrade, code improvements, New animations, Combat overhauls, Localization, customization overhaul.

As many know, I've been working very hard towards upgrading the engine version to the latest version of Unreal. Unfortunately, the engine upgrade was not successful. We ran into many new unknown issues with the way the Steam SDK works with that version of Unreal. We also had many plugin incompatibilities that caused us to lose key functionality.

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Every time we made progress with the engine upgrade we were met with new issues to resolve. Ultimately the new version of Unreal had too many fatal crashes and incompatibilities and so we had to roll back to 5.3. This means we'll be missing out on some useful optimizations we were going to take advantage of but, ultimately optimizations are not useful if the game no longer functions.

This cost us a lot of time but now we're back to normal and updates will resume very shortly. Lately we've been backporting the work we had done on the newer version of Unreal and we've almost completely wrapped up recovering all that work.

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During the engine upgrade I spent a lot of time improving the code base of Renown. Many pieces of code have been optimized. Specifically a lot of the subsystems that run in Survival mode have been made to run much faster on the server which should help improve server stability. There has also been a lot of code clean up that should reduce the CPU time on the client as well.

One very highly anticipated thing that's been in the works is new combat animations. During our last demo we were short on time and released some new combat animations prematurely.

Unfortunately the state of those animations worsened the combat feel quite noticeably and we humbly apologize for that. We have a new and improved set of animations on the way for 2 handed swords coming very soon. After that you can expect to see a new set for 1 handed weapons and their shielded variants.

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On a similar note, there has been much work done on overhauling the combat mechanics themselves as well.

Animations and the combat systems are very tied together so they're being overhauled together. Specifically there's a new system for server side melee hit detection, this should noticeably improve parry responsiveness. The point of view of the defender will be more accurate essentially, which should lead to less missed parries that looked correct on their screen.

Many players complained during our last demo, that the movement was too sluggish, so its now been made more snappy like it was in the past. Timings for attacks and parries are being fine tuned currently, so we will be starting combat playtests again to really nail down the timings for launch very soon. Finally, the way shields are used will be getting a final pass once the animations are completed.

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Last but not least, the customization system has received full overhaul. The UI most importantly, has been redone to facilitate a much better user experience. You can now customize armor that is currently equipped and be able to visualize it accurately in the preview.

There has been changes to differentiate between "skins" and "templates". Skins are essentially a raw version of a new model for an item, while templates are a skin with the additional customization saved locally for ease of use. In the future we'll make it possible to share "templates" with your friends so you can create and share matching clan outfits for example.

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There was support added for Steam Item dependent skins, so all skins will no longer be unlocked by default. What this means is that the backer reward skins will be getting distributed very soon so keep an eye out for when we announce that. Of course backer rewards included weapon skins, so naturally, we now have support for weapon skins as well.

With all that out of the way, you may be wondering whats coming next for Renown. We'll begin again to do internal playtests with our backers, to try to iron out all the issues we can before launch. Specifically we need help testing; combat mechanics, building mechanics, and a quality pass on the points of interest on the main map. We'll be announcing shortly some playtimes for when we'll be doing these tests so stay tuned for that. Our immediate goal is to get the game ready for a large survival playtest before launch.