Hello mates! The Baron here and it's time for another little progress check with U6. U6 was intended to be a solely SDK and tech related update, but KospY was particularly off the radar these last two weeks and when that happens it is usually because he is cooking up something good. This was indeed the case and outta nowhere he has hit us with some cool new features! So, soon coming to Update 6, I present to you -


Climbing 2.0

https://youtu.be/IeeZPRYMnZs

I was pretty surprised to see this! With climbing 2.0 it is now possible to latch onto things with your grip rather than having to make fists and hoof yourself around like some kinda of savage, haha. Best of all, this will be available for people who have the Valve Index knuckles, but also normal controllers! So no worries Rifters, you are not locked out. There is nothing special about the map to allow climbing by the way, meaning custom maps will be climbable too - Since it's physics based and not some hidden property attached to special parts of the terrain to make them grippable, this means you can latch on any surface that has a grippable point that makes sense. So you could grip onto a jutting piece of wall, but not a flat wall for example. (Although kospy has a "spiderman mode" hidden in the code, just in case he feels like releasing it for fun, lol.) Oh and before anyone asks - the map in the video was just a test map. Though KospY was toying with the idea of adding a "KospY's Tower" bonus map for fun. :)

So you may be asking, where is this all coming from? Well remember, B&S is an early access game and the is much that will evolve. Remember the naysayers who said B&S wont be more than a tech demo arena game? Well this climbing mechanic is setting the stage for future dungeons, where the player will have to climb at certain points to figure out how to traverse the map.


As a little bonus, climbing will have some foot snapping, which is.... well... something. xD

Foot snapping

https://youtu.be/QooIWz_3b8g

The idea being if you look down you will see your feet snapped to the wall so it will look cool, but a little janky (for now!) in 3rd person haha. KospY's comment on this - "It's far from the assassin creed animations, but it's better than nothing xD"


Oh and another nice little bonus! No more pushback when in climbing mode!!! Yay! You might recall some jankiness with climbing enabled, particularly with 2 handed weapons, where you feel a little "pushback" when trying to stab. Well now the system is climbing physics will be disabled when the player has 2 feet on the ground. In a way you could consider it like an auto turn on/off that is context based. :)


The last physics related thing to mention is hand collisions, which is essentially the hands will now be an interactable part of the world all the time. KospY didn't have time to go into this much but I believe the implication here is that it sets the foundation for some possible future Knuckles stuff that involves individual fingers. Will post more info on that when I have it.


What else... oh weapons! Our weapons man has been hard at work with some cool new goodies. If you missed my last post from reddit and discord, I mentioned we already have confirmed:

Claymore



Comparison to longsword for scale



Revamped Dual Blade Staff



Comparison to the original model - although it's gonna be even longer than shown here. The final blades should be as long as the originals. The longer shaft will hopefully make it more staff-like to operate.



But we have two more things to hopefully look forward to in U6. Just to temper expectations however, it has not been 100% confirmed to me that these two new weapons will make it into U6 in time, though I think it's likely. But anyway, they are:

Maul



Push Blade (assassin's creed style)



Speaking of weapons, hopefully you are all enjoying the vast array of custom weapons that the modding community have been churning out. It is now confirmed that when the U6 SDK drops, all mods will be moved from the Discord to https://www.nexusmods.com/bladeandsorcery/. Some modders are already migrating, which is excellent because they wont be caught off guard. Nexus will be a million times better than Discord for organization, searching, images, checking what's new released, what's most popular, avoiding obsolete version confusion, etc. If you are a modder I recommend you start making the move now (you can still post your nexus link on discord). Of course no one has to use nexus to host their mods, but I encourage it for your own visibility sake, as that is the official location I will be sending people who ask where mods are hosted.


Last of all, there is now a rough ballpark for U6 release! The ballpark for U6 is late June, which is approaching fast, folks. ;) That's it for now! Hope you all have a lovely week. Cheers!

Just a small update to fix some new issues included in the latest patch (5.2).

Changelog:
- Force game to windowed mode (1920x1080) to prevent a performance issue in full screen (default resolution can be changed in the Options.opt file)
- Fixed an issue causing infinite loading when the game try to load a modded weapon from the save file that doesn't exist anymore
- Fixed neck collider staying disabled for new NPC after some beheading
- Reduced hand scale
- Added a note for the warzone III wave specifying that it's only for high-end configuration (20 NPC!)

For this update, I worked on the much needed performance optimization and managed to reduce CPU time by 20-50%, the game should play better now especially with multiple NPC :)

Below the changelog:

Enhancements & Changes
- Improved inverse kinematic
- NPC eyes follow target
- Increased potion cork snap radius
- Hand scale is now static and is disabled in the character customization menu
- Health overlay adjustements
- Increased heart beat volume on low health
- Slightly increased NPC arms resistance when parrying
- Increased arrow damage
- Removed max alive NPC option (moved to wave definition)
- Wave selector display max alive and total NPC for each wave
- New warzone waves with more than 10 NPC (for high end configuration only!)

Performance optimizations
- Optimized inverse kinematic to solve only what is needed
- Inverse kinematic is no more used for each finger
- Pooled ragdolls to prevent a lag spike on spawn
- Optimized facial expression player
- Optimized locomotion ground detection
- Fixed an issue causing the dodge/parry system to check all weapons instead of only the closest ones
- Reduced delay before cleaning dropped objects and dead bodies (15s to 7s)
- Misc performance optimizations

Modding
- FingerPoses are replaced by HandPoses (poses will be moddable later with the BAS SDK)
- Added JSON for facial expression

Fixes
- Updated Unity from 2018.3 to 2019.1 (major update)
- Fixed some visuals in the canyon map
- Fixed head sometimes staying in the air after beheading
- Fixed a rotation issue when sliding along the handle with both hands
- Fixed a rotation issue when holding an handle with both hands pointing at the same direction
- Fixed arrow sliding from axis to back grip
- Fixed NPC not dropping their weapon correctly causing them to pick up two weapons with the same hand
- Fixed bow orientation using main hand rotation instead of the bow/string orientation
- Fixed missing health potions in Ruins and Market
- Misc internal fixes

Known issues
- Post processing doesn't work (broken on 2019.1)
- Kick doesn't work
- Water in the canyon map are not shown with low graphic settings
- Lightning propagate to every cutted parts
- Grabbing a ragdoll and pushing it with a weapon makes you fly
- Running the game full screen can lower performance drastically

I'm happy to announce that update 5 has been released and are now live!

https://youtu.be/3-90-BE8uq8
Below the full changelog:

Features
- Dismemberment (big thanks to Kenamis from the UMA team to make this real!)
- 4 new weapons: Longsword, Dual blade, Dane Axe, Rapier
- New map: Canyon
- NPC disarming
- Physic based climbing (currently experimental and need to be enabled in the options)
- New grappling points on bodies (arms and legs)
- Draw cuts (cut while sliding or press a blade along flesh)
- Weapons can penetrate multiple materials at once (stick enemies on wood, Shishkebab NPC...)
- NPC / Ragdoll collisions (throwing NPC to others will damage them and knock them out)
- Rope sliding
- Enabled dynamic shadows (can be disabled in the options)
- Improved lightning
- Dynamic blood painting on weapons
- Spectator mode

Enhancements
- Damage now take into account the mass and torque of the weapon
- Improved and added some sound effects
- Dying animation now stop relative to impulse force
- Increased arrow snap radius on the bow
- Swords can penetrate tougher material with enough force (head, wood)
- Prevent telekinesis to work when the player is not looking the target
- All physic props (barrels, mugs, chandelier...) has been updated and now inherit the same logic than weapons (imbue lightning on metal, blunt damage, blood painting, etc...)
- Possible orientations for handles are no more limited to 4 (shields and ropes get more handling orientations)
- SteamVR: Opening the steam menu will disable inputs and pause the game
- Oculus: Opening the Oculus menu or removing the headset will disable inputs and pause the game
- Misc weapons balancing
Modding
- Some major structural changes to prepare custom maps and weapons, the downside is a lot of mods should be broken
- Created dedicated JSON class for interactables and damagers
- Holsters, ragdoll grapple point and ropes/ladders handles are now moddable (interactables)
- All prefabs has been updated to use standalone components (in preparation for the future BAS SDK)
- All props are now an item and therefore moddable

Modding
- Some major structural changes to prepare custom maps and weapons, the downside is a lot of mods should be broken
- Created dedicated JSON class for interactables and damagers
- Holsters, ragdoll grapple point and ropes/ladders handles are now moddable (interactables)
- All prefabs has been updated to use standalone components (in preparation for the future BAS SDK)
- All props are now an item and therefore moddable

Fixes
- Updated to 2018.3.11
- Fixed NPC turning their head too much when a target is behind them
- Fixed some issues in the character customizer
- Fixed Pimax controllers not recognized as HTC wands
- Fixed locomotion collider preventing jumping along wall
- Fixed wrong ground textures in the market map
- Fixed cult and mercenary being in the same team
- Fixed jump and kick reverted on the HTC Vive
- Fixed NPC recoil on parry going in the wrong direction

Hey, all! The Baron here with news about Update 5. The Update will be released on April 4th, and if you don't wanna spoil it for yourself before checking out the new trailer, you can watch that here:

https://youtu.be/3-90-BE8uq8

Decapitation
Dismemberment (yes, really!)
Draw Cuts (like throat slitting)
Disarming
Climbing (experimental)
Pinning to wood
Multiple knockdown
More grab points (arms, legs, enemy weapons)
New weapons (Rapier, Dane Axe, Longsword, Double Bladed Staff)
New map
Spectator mode (control camera on desktop with WASD)
Wide HD fov recordings for content creators

Cheers!

Hello guys!

I'm mainly working on update 5 currently but I wanted to release a small update today to fix some issues encountered in update 4.

Update 4.1

- Fixed black pixels on characters on some ATI cards
- Fixed arena very easy wave 3 not starting
- Fixed some animations not taking into account the gravity
- Fixed some issues when inverting trigger and grip


By the way, next update is still planned for March and it should be a good one! You can already expect new features and the first batch of content for the game.
More information should come in the next coming days on Discord ;)

Big thanks to everyone for your support!

KospY

I'm happy to announce that update 4 has been released and are now live!
As a result, the beta is now closed.

The changelog below contains all features, changes and fixes I done since update 3.
Enjoy!

Features
- Updated to Unity 2018.3.5
- Reworked hit detection and improved collisions
- Throwed objects can now hit multiple enemies at once
- New animations
- AI will try to dodge incoming attacks
- Reworked wave selection menu and added a scrollable wave list (using touchpad or thumbstick)
- Added new waves: 1 vs 1, Endless, Very hard, Mercenaries vs bandits, Warzone
- Randomized NPC height
- Throwing heavy objects is more reliable and will go through enemy’s defense
- Added legs sweeping for bardiche, claymore, spear and mace
- Added snap turning in character selection
- AI will now stay at distance before engaging into melee if the target is already surrounded (1 to 3 depending of the AI difficulty).
- Prevent AI to attack if a friendly unit is close
- New option: Invert trigger/grip
- New option: Two-handed mode (position, dominant or auto rear/front. Default is auto front now)
- Added footstep particles to the sand surface in the arena

Changes
- Improved weapon handling speed and trajectory
- Two handed weapons will use position of hands or dominant hand for orientation depending of your stance on the handle
- Head is now harder to penetrate/cut
- Slightly reduced mana consumption of lightning
- Increased arms strength of NPC when parrying
- A strong hit will stop the NPC dying animation (relative to weapon recoil)
- Parrying with an arrow will not recoil the attacker
- Improved some wood collision effects
- NPC slow down approching their destination
- Grabbing and throwing a dying NPC will stop the death animation
- Increased slow motion speed (0.5x instead of 0.25x)
- Increased overall physic quality / precision during normal time
- Improved weapon handling during slow motion
- Improved NPC hit reaction
- Enhanced AI parry prediction
- Removed dual wielding for AI (will come back later with dedicated animations)
- Reworked footstep to use the collision and FX system
- Improved melee damage of NPC
- Friends count is now 1/3 the enemies count
- Reduced arrow damage for the player
- Modified hard waves to mix medium and large shields
- Enchanced rubbing and penetration haptic feedback
- Reduced spawn delay
- Misc weapon balancing

Modding
- Prevent obsolete mods to be loaded (added version number to JSON files)
- Waves: Unlimited number of custom waves
- Waves: Added categories and description
- Waves: Custom player and enemy health ratio
- Waves: Loop support (infinite wave)
- Updated UMAPreset version: race field is now a string instead of an enum (sex field is kept for compatibility with the old saves and will be removed later)
- Container and brain overrides defined in a creature tables referencing another creature tables will now be applied (in case of multiple overrides, the shortest one will be applied)
- Added some haptic parameters in Global.json
- Misc new JSON parameters

Fixes
- Fixed crashes
- Fixed haptics issues
- Prevent NPC to grab a weapon in their holster if the weapon has been stolen by the player
- Fixed NPC falling when running on slope
- Fixed brow using hair color
- Fixed home fireplace not being affected by audio options
- Fixed weapons staying electrified after death
- [WMR] Fixed grip and trigger issues on the right controller after going into the menu
- [Pimax] Fixed inputs issues
- Head shadow are now visible from first person view
- Fixed infinite loading when saves are corrupted
- Prevent holstering a weapon handled with both hands
- Fixed character loading issue when a mace is equipped
- Fixed incorrect weapon velocity calculation when moving
- Added game version to log files
- Fixed weapon lightning propagation not working correctly
- Disabled telekinesis spin for potions and shields
- Text corrections (thanks to plato!)
- Reworked VR UI pointer (improved performance and misc fixes)
- Fixed game not loading if the option file is missing
- Fixed wrong hand pose for the bow string
- Fixed market stairs
- Fixed an issue while grabbing an arrow sticked in the same arm as the player hand (could happen while grabbing arrow mid-air)
- Fixed bow string animation issue
- Fixed movement being a bit slower using the HTC Vive (touchpad issue)
- Fixed physics not being the same between normal time and slow motion
- Fixed "right click" to "left click" in the character selection inputs warning text
- Fixed NPC fighting each other after stopping and restarting a wave
- Fixed navigation issue causing NPC to shake
- Fixed some issues happening below 50% normal speed
- Fixed some lightning issues in the arena
- Fixed an issue causing the first 0.25s of an attack animation to be blended/skipped
- Fixed the large shield colliding with NPC arms and torso
- Head rendering optimizations
- Misc perf optimization
- Misc internal fixes

Next milestone will be update 5 in March. You can already expect more content, new features, and some surprises ;)
Thanks everyone for your support and feedback!

KospY

Good news everyone!
Unity finally fixed the memory leak!
If everything work correctly, it mean that beta 7 should be the last beta of update 4, and the live/stable version will be updated soon. :)

Here is the beta 7 changelog:

• New animations for player
  
• NPC slow down approching their destination
  
• Head rendering optimizations
  
• Head shadow are now visible from first person view
  
• Added invert trigger/grip option
  
• Randomized AI difficulty of endless waves
  
• Added new waves: Endless 1 vs 1, Endless melee, Mercenaries vs bandits, Warzone
  
• Removed christmas tree

• Updated UMAPreset version: race field is now a string instead of an enum (sex field is kept for compatibility with the old saves and will be removed later)
  
• Container and brain overrides defined in a creature tables referencing another creature tables will now be applied (in case of multiple overrides, the shortest one will be applied)
  
• Added some haptic parameters in Global.json

• Updated to Unity 2018.3.5
  
• Fixed the memory leak causing performance issues and crash on exit
  
• Fixed haptics
  
• Prevent NPC to grab a weapon in their holster if the weapon has been stolen by the player
  
• Fixed NPC falling when running on slope
  
• Fixed screen going black when hit on very hard waves
  
• Fixed brow using hair color
  
• Fixed an issue while grabbing an arrow with both hands
  
• Fixed home fireplace not being affected by audio options
  
• Fixed weapons staying electrified after death
  
• [WMR] Fixed grip and trigger issues on the right controller after going into the menu
  
• [Pimax] Fixed inputs issues

Hi everyone!

It has been some time since my last update, so I wanted to keep people informed about what is happening.

Since December, 3 versions of the next update (update 4 - beta 3) have been released on the beta branch on steam.

The current beta addresses some issues and more importantly greatly improves the combat and weapon handling (changelog can be found on the #beta-changelog channel on Discord).

However, this update is a bit special because I upgraded to a new major version of the Unity engine. The use of this version is mandatory for the future as it improves the physic engine, overall stability and will be the only one receiving new updates about the input system I use (I’m mainly waiting the Unity fix about inputs which is not working when the game window is not focused).

Unfortunately, the new Unity version comes with a pretty serious issue in VR that can lead the whole computer to crash, and this problem prevents me of switching the beta to live.
With the Christmas period being over, I’m however confident that this issue will be resolved soon (hopefully this month).

In the meantime, I’m still working on the beta, and the next update (beta 4) should include an overhaul of the combat animations as well as an improved and more aggressive AI.


Most importantly, I wanted to say Thank you to everyone for your support, the game release was awesome, and I could not have expected better! The community on Discord is approaching 10k users and doesn’t stop to amaze me every day! Modders are also doing wonder with the game, I really didn’t expect this to be so quick! I wish I could talk more often on Discord, but I’m still really focused on the game itself.

The current game is only the beginning, with the release success I already increased the scope (check roadmap on Discord) and I’m happy to announce that I should get some help with a dedicated 3D artist and level designer soon 😊.

Thanks again for your support! And Best Wishes for 2019!

Cheers!
KospY

Update 3 released!

Changes
- Added an option to disable the blood overlay
- Added an option to hold grip to grapple (is default now)
- Increased the grappling radius for shoulders and head
- Removed body/object and body/ragdoll collision from the options as it cause some issues (will come back later)
- Experimental: Added an option to change the global weapon handling forces (more or less "floatiness" / "drag")

Modding
- Added a JSON for global parameters
- Moved slowmotion parameters to global parameters

Fixes
- Fixed handle sliding for HTC Vive
- Fixed game stuck in infinite loading when the "My Document" folder is inaccessible (should fallback to appData folder)
- Prevent the arrow in the player bow to disapear when starting a new wave
- Fixed reloading when the player die in the home
- Reworked auto drop to prevent weapon to be dropped when swinging
- Added a maximum force to all physic joints (should prevent some physic issues and potentially some crashes)