DevBlog #55

Hope you all had a great holiday season with your loved ones. After spending time with family and friends it’s time to get back to work.

The main ability of the allosaurus has received more attention this month. While the main code is the same as some existing mechanics, visually the allosaurus looks very different when performing the action, so some adjustments are specifically made to accommodate this. We are in the phase of getting all the animations playing as they should and then we can move into QA testing and balancing.

The tyrannosaurus also required some additional work. There was some experimentation with mechanics to better balance its movement and hunting capabilities during its different life stages. Keep in mind these are additional mechanics focused on balancing; the pre-existing ones you already know about are unchanged.

Migration and Patrol Zones now support custom shapes, whereas previously they could only be made with generic ones such as Box or Sphere. Now those areas can be customized to just about any shape. This is very useful since most biomes and areas of the map will never be accurate using sphere or box shapes. This will help in making the areas more accurate to the map landscape overall while interacting with the migrations, but also allows all plants to spawn more accurately, avoiding edge cases with plants and trees spawning in areas of no traffic or even unreachable locations.

Lastly, the “Friend Spawn Code” is under testing with QA. I believe the system is close to fully functional, but we are also working on resolving a few possible exploits before it goes out.

See you guys next time!

I’ve been spending pretty much all of January going through the upcoming roster to make sure everyone has their bone meshes and rib meat. And then horribly mutilating them to do the gore morphs.

It’s an Allosaurus so he’ll walk it off and be just fine.

I’ve also started doing the Elder morphs, which have been a long time coming now so you can all reenact the closing scene of Saving Private Ryan together.

Lastly, with animation well under way for Kentrosaurus among the animation team, I’ve started rigging up the Baryonyx.

This month I’ve been focused on making the final assets for the GUTS, and have been working on making smaller kits that fill out some coastal locations.

The GUTS received further additions this month with additional entry types. It features a sally port, a small control center for operating the doors and the security system.

In addition, some love was shown to our older parts of the kit and the new enclosure fence received some much needed 45 inward and outward fencing to make it feel more natural and assist in building.

And finally to top it all off, I’ve been working on the holding pen for sauropods and strains. I’ll hold off on showing until I’m happy with it, but when it’s ready I’ll have it passed through Phase Three. It’s a hulking structure that feels like the interior area could be its own level. And it’s almost, if not, twice the size of the DTA.

It’s good to be back! I took some time over the holiday to get into some playtesting on the official servers to identify many of the current major issues in the game. While this is far from a complete list, here’s a quick rundown of the issues I will be looking to have addressed over the next few patches:

Plants causing input lockups sometimes when eating them.
Plants disappearing but still being scentable.
Persistent rain sounds, despite it being clear weather.
General audio choppiness.
Omniraptors being kicked when dismounting from a pounce. (Fixed as of the latest patch!)
Grappled characters being able to break out from the pounce, even when pinned.
Cannibal mutation not appearing despite conditions being met.
Fish AI not spawning in certain rivers/lakes.
Various replay issues. Timer not going down, replay not being visible, etc.
DLSS screen tearing.
Dilophosaurus hallucinations sometimes being invisible.
Be sure to send in a bug report if you believe I’m missing anything substantial, but the above is what stood out to me the most.

QA has hit the ground running upon returning from the holidays, focused primarily on all of the community bug reports that we amassed during the break; we had over 600 reports to sift through! So, thanks to those of you that took the extra time to submit a bug report, they’ve been a great help as always.

As well as looking at the community reports, we’ve been busy running into our own issues, such as the beipiaosaurus becoming a little too enthusiastic when dolphin diving:

We experienced some difficulty testing a corpse related bug recently due to a certain AI animal. It should be known that while the psittacosaurus is meant to carry small corpses of comparable size, we hadn’t intended it to take ceratosaurus’ corpse bully niche:

Hopefully it doesn’t start chuffing!

Then there’s whatever is happening with this poor soul:

As Filipe mentioned, we’ve just been given access to the new Spawn Code system which is making great progress with each testing session. Being able to spawn in with your friends will be a huge benefit to players that want to group up, while still not disrupting the randomness of spawning that we want to retain. It’s a very simple system that works as follows:

The player joins a server, selects their species, and navigates to their group menu upon spawning.
On the group menu, the player will find a “Spawn Code” which lasts for 5 minutes. They can copy it and send it to their friends.
A friend can navigate to the “Eggs and Spawn Codes” menu and input the code. Upon being accepted by the code owner, the friend will then be able to customize their own character’s skin, before spawning in near the player that sent the code.
The following was taken from the latest QA build, which is still heavily WIP:

Hope you all have had a decent start to the new year. While this month and last month were pretty short, the amount of stuff we’ve been up to is anything but minimal. I spent most of January getting back on the saddle checking in with each department to reassess their needs and having a bunch of meetings on what our first quarter will look like. Some topics of conversation range from rounding out Elder mechanics, spawn codes and more.

We’ve been doing a fair bit of QoL changes and at last returning to work on some of our shelved features for some of the existing dinosaurs, varying in degree. The hypsi and its ability to move about the treetops is a good example. The herrera’s climbing being a bit more dynamic, troodon getting some assistance performing its role etc. I had a bit of time on my hands so I was able to scrounge up some clips. Everything is subject to change of course.

The rex, trike, allo, austro and kentro are all looking pretty good and patiently awaiting their individual debuts. We’re pushing towards a hordetest fairly soon to get some much needed changes in your hands and if luck be on our side, maybe a bit more. The rex and trike need a handful of animations related to sparring before they will be fully ready for testing, the allosaurus needs some setting up and mechanic refinement while the austro and kentro await setup.

If all that weren’t enough, the baryonyx is next. Animation work never ceases.

We also have some minor features that we plan to implement to help the entire roster navigate precarious terrain with more ease as well as a new feature that should allow certain non jumping carnivores the ability to be proficient under more circumstances.

That’s all for now. See you in the hordetest!