DevBlog #56

It’s been another busy month with a primary focus on the new playables like the Tyrannosaurus Rex, Triceratops and Allosaurus. The T-Rex’s signature mechanic, Crush, is nearing completion, with only a few animation adjustments left to finalize.

Another mechanic for sub-adult and older tyrannosaurs is a short, but effective speed burst to aid in ambushes. It has worked fairly well during internal tests, but we’ll be continuing to monitor its impact after release. We may also extend this ability to other animals, depending on its performance and balance, otherwise removed if deemed problematic.

In addition, I’ll soon be wrapping up the Throw ability for the T-Rex. This is primarily a gore-focused mechanic rather than a damage-dealing one, allowing players to throw corpses or enemies that are already guaranteed to die once released, which is an extension of the Crush ability but for smaller prey.

I also worked on Spawn Codes, which allows you to invite your friends to spawn alongside you. This feature is already available in the ongoing Hordetest. The Cannibalistic mutation now comes with unique skin colors. Once the mutation is active, your chosen skin will be overridden by a specific color set that indicates to others your dietary preference.

Besides that I also added an option to swap asset sex from within the skin creator panel, which has been a long requested QoL change that became necessary with the introduction of spawn codes.

Thermals and Slipstreams are also finalized and are exclusive to flying animals. While these systems could have even more uses in future, we currently have no plans beyond their current intended functionality.

To wrap things up, I’ve implemented new admin commands, made various improvements and fixes to pounce (including collision and animations), addressed animation issues for Triceratops, and resolved various other bugs across different areas.

See you next time!

Hello! Most of the last month I’ve been working on AI which includes Carnotaurus, Tenontosaurus, Omniraptor, Dryosaurus and Deer along with a new behaviour debugging tool that works with the new AI logic system. I also spent some time working on an extension of the engines navigation system for pathing around water and dynamic obstacles.

Bug fixing for the Psittacosaurus and its object carrying feature. I’ve been prototyping a new system for grass trails which are basically just flattened or grass being pushed down as characters walk through it. There are lots of challenges with this in terms of replication, culling and performance. I’m looking forward to finishing the production version of that soon.

I’ve also been working on the new replay filters which are designed for replays to give a more cinematic or immersive feeling to replays. Reworked some of the audio for animals to have “attenuation” meaning instead of fixed distances for an animal to “hear” a player the perception adheres to the sounds actual attenuation, This also comes with the advantage of more granular control of when and how audio is played. Investigations are also underway for various issues and server performance on hordetesting.

I’ve also added a small QoL change that’s worth mentioning, If you are disconnected for some reason or the game crashes you can now reconnect without needing to queue again. This is entirely dependent on how long you take to restart the game, if the game detects an active session when you get back to the main menu it will prompt you to reconnect.

This month I’m happy to reveal our next, massive structure on the island. The original and monstrous DTA (Dinosaur Transportation Area). While it’s been a large undertaking, it is now ready to be used in-game, and it features almost twice the size of our regular dock DTA. It is meant to house the largest of the dinosaurs for further transportation and has massive fences and sally ports to keep everything contained.

Next up, I’ve been working hard with Jace on some minor river fixes that came with the new waterfall area, however, most importantly I was and will be on the GUTS assembly for the interior to finally bring it full circle to life. I won’t go too much into detail right now but rather give you really nice snippets of what we are building here, in which all of the areas and hallways will connect to various hubs and GUTS parts.

That is all for this month, I hope you enjoy the snippets. Until next time.

At the beginning of this month after a bit of time away at the end of January I finally finished off Maiasaura with a new pinned vocalisation that better shows the distress with more visceral screams throughout the animation.

I spent some time readjusting footstep attenuation ranges to travel to more appropriate ranges for each size and speed, giving crouch and sprint their own ranges opposed to sharing with walk and trot respectively. The ranges have been reduced slightly to work together with the introduction of new audio for moving through foliage. With the reduced footstep ranges this will give more opportunity for stealth play to be a viable tactic, if you are considering how you approach. The foliage sounds will have a range that carries further so you will need to be aware of how much noise you and others around you are producing in highly vegetated areas. This will also play nicely into the Gallimimus’ paranoia mechanic so it is harder to tell whether the sounds you are hearing are real or not.
After recording a large amount of foliage source material I have created an audio system that dynamically changes the sound of foliage based on the size and speed of your Dinosaur, small crouching dinosaurs will produce a light rustle of leaves whereas large sprinting dinosaurs will create a cacophony of snapping stems and thick swooshing. The snapping sounds will also change based on whether the plant you are moving through has a wood or plant based trunk or if it even has a trunk at all.

For the rest of the month I have been working on Triceratops. Starting with adding in the legacy vocal call sounds as placeholder so it is not silent until its new vocals are complete, as well as adding footstep sounds to its basic locomotion animations. Next, I did a preliminary pass on animations adding more footsteps where necessary as well as foley sounds for all animations. As vocal sounds are introduced for all the various mechanics and animations these foley sounds will be methodically tightened up in terms of sound quality, volume, sync etc.

I have also been working on new designs for its adult stages’ calls maintaining the essence of the legacy calls but giving them the usual glow up. However, some changes are being made to the overall design principle, giving the adult stage an emphasis on a booming quality to really sell its stature and power and keeping the higher elements of the original sounds for its subadult phase. I’m looking forward to hearing these out on The Isle!

I’ve been busy with a few things lately. Outside of some icon and logo edits or variations, the modeling/concept team and I have been chipping away at the elder designs for our dinosaur roster, trying to make sure each one has its own little characteristics so not all the elders age in exactly the same way.

Outside of the dinosaurs, I’ve gotten a chance to tackle updating one of our older legacy concepts; the tissoplastic reaper!

This was one of my favourite concepts from before I joined the team, so I very much wanted to keep the overall character of the reaper, with its needle laden skin and bat-like appearance.

One feature that didn’t quite make the cut though were the scythe claws that used to protrude from the side of the hands. While it did make for a neat silhouette, its existence just started to look impractical, particularly from a mobility standpoint where an oversized spike coming out of the hand is simply begging to get caught on everything in any remotely tight space. Besides, with talon-like claws and forearms loaded with thorns, it has everything it needs to rip its prey to shreds if it gets the jump on you.

I did try drawing up a smaller “collapsible” version of the scythe claw, but it remains to be seen if it will make the cut.

Scythe-claw aside, we didn’t want to just take away a feature from the reaper without putting something back. After some thought, the idea of adding a membrane to the underarm was pitched with the idea that we might try giving it a gliding ability to allow the reaper more range for surprise attacks from high up places.

I hope that you are all enjoying the first iteration of the spawn code system, which was proving to be a bit of a pain to get to work initially, but it seems it’s finally almost there. During this time, we’ve been looking at feedback on how this mechanic can be improved and we’re constantly making changes to it. Speaking of, just recently Filipe made it so that Stream Mode hides the spawn codes from being visible (while still able to be copied), which should hopefully assist your favourite streamers against those pesky snipers!

QA have spent the majority of this month with a large focus on some of our most anticipated playables to date, the Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops are very rapidly becoming ready to be moved over to our horde testing branch. As you may have heard, we will be staggering the introduction of these characters, first testing the Triceratops on its own, then the Tyrannosaurus on its own, before finally testing them simultaneously. The reason for the staggered approach is to have our full-focus on one playable at a time, increasing the number of people testing the individual species, resulting in more bugs caught and for ease of balancing against the rest of the roster. Here’s just a handful of issues that we ran into:

Troodon causing Rex to grow even larger:

Rex taking head fracture to the next level:

Rex turning other characters into a skipping rope:

Omniraptors shrugging off Triceratops horns:

Triceratops abomination:

Thank you to all of those that are participating in the latest horde test, reporting issues using our community bug form, and continuing to assist us with making the experience as smooth as possible – we couldn’t do it without you. Here are a couple of highlights from the community reports:

Gallimimus turning upside down when falling with a fractured leg:

Bouncy waterfalls:

So there’s Hordetesting going on this month. Thank you to everyone that has participated. There’s some additional content that will eventually make it into hordetesting over time but for now we appreciate your feedback.

We’ve been making some tweaks to playables across the board that will slowly start appearing over time. Some changes from mild to wild, in no particular order for ceratosaurus, herrerasaurus, omniraptor, troodon, maiasaura and others. All of that is alongside the trike and rex sparring which is looking quite nice. Hopefully we can get some visuals going on that for you guys. We’re trying to preserve the ability for the trike to also be able to spar with the diablo at various lifestages even if at certain sizes it becomes no contest. But until those sizes, who “wins” is up in the air.

I’m very pleased with the work our animation team has been churning out. Trike and Rex have some filler animations I’ve been creating as testing dictates. The visuals we want to use and the visuals we need to use are not always the same thing unfortunately, so I have to make sure the visuals are lining up with the mechanics as best they can and within time constraints, which takes a bit of trial and error. For instance, what animations the creatures transition into and out of based on what abilities they used prior and which they use next. It’s a whole thing.

The rest of the animation team has been cooking with gas. Not only have they knocked out their contributions for tyrannosaurus, triceratops, allosaurus, austroraptor and kentrosaurus but they have also made quick work of a new roster wide feature that will be coming soon enough. Provided it works the way we want it to. Should help some of the tricky terrain less tricky. If that weren’t enough, they have also begun animating the baryonyx which I’m so excited to see come to life.

Do keep in mind though that animation is but one rung on the ladder of completion. So being animation complete is not the same as being production complete and not indicative of a release. Skin, material, tech animation, sound, programming and balance setup all contribute heavily to the completion of a playable. So lots of support for the other departments as they are all important.

Speaking of departments, I’ve got a few things I can share: