Mar 16, 2020

Kenshi - Caliburn

In this month’s community update we wanted to acknowledge teaming up on the trailer, share some important news regarding the recent Korean translation, and provide some more details on what’s going on with Kenshi 2.

New Trailer

At the end of January we contacted Kokoplays to work with us on a new video that would coincide with our latest patch. The main aim was to give potential players an honest look at the game and an overview of what publications and users think of it. If you missed it, check it out below:

We’re incredibly pleased to see all the positive comments about the result, making it a notable entry for our new YouTube channel which also offers Japanese, Chinese and Korean versions of the same video. In future we’d like to do more collaborative projects with members of the community, level up awesome ideas that might otherwise stay on the drawing board, and celebrate alongside the fans that make Kenshi great.

Korean Translation update

At the end of last month we pushed a patch with a number of bug fixes alongside the official support for Korean language text, thanks to detailed user feedback and the assistance of a freelance third party to verify, we’ve been made aware that the quality of this translation hasn’t met a standard we’re happy with.

Our current plan is to revisit this translation with a much stronger emphasis on context and error checking to update it as soon as possible, current projections put this at around 10 weeks. Unfortunately this has also lead us to reconsider Korean social media efforts. In the meantime, Korean Twitter and Facebook coverage is set to continue for at least another month, keeping users updated on the status of the translation.

Korean Wiki – looking for editors

On a more positive note, due to the popularity of Wikis in eastern gaming communities we worked with a member of our existing English Fandom Wiki team to start up a Korean version, mirroring a number of key pages to assist new users.

With the initial setup out of the way we’re now looking for Korean community members to take over. The Korean Wiki can be found here

GUI Development

In the interests of shedding more light on the Kenshi 2 progress from the technical team, this month we’re sharing some thoughts on the ongoing work underpinning GUI development directly from programmer Boodals:

“Hey, I'm Boodals, the newest programmer at LoFi. Ever since I was first hired in November, I've been working on remaking the GUIs from Kenshi 1 in Unreal Engine for Kenshi 2. Its too early in development to know everything that the GUIs need to be able to do, so we're just copying the designs (graphics & layout) from K1, and focusing entirely on getting the functionality working so we can test things. That means they currently look like uglier versions of the K1 GUIs, so there's no point in showing any pictures yet, somebody will make them look pretty at some point in the future.

The GUIs in Kenshi 1 were made using a programming library called MyGUI, which allows modders to reskin GUIs, and move individual GUI elements (buttons, text, sliders, etc) around by changing specific files. However, the GUI's functionality was hard-coded in the game's source code, which cannot be changed by modders. This means you cannot make a mod which adds a new button, only change what every button looks like, or move existing buttons around.

For Kenshi 2, we are using Unreal Engine which comes with it's own GUI system called Unreal Motion Graphics, or UMG for short. UMG is tied closely to Unreal's Blueprint scripting system, which is used to give the GUIs functionality.

We don't entirely know how modding will work for K2, but when we looked at other Unreal games that allow modding (such as ARK: Survival Evolved), both UMG and Blueprint is completely available. So in theory, modders will be able to change the game's GUIs, and script them to be able to do just about anything. This is in addition to the Forgotten Construction Set, so mods that add or change weapons, armour, items, buildings, and most other things in K1 will still be possible.”

Harrison first took up coding to make mods for various games before pursuing it as a career choice, which gives us another great point of insight as we make a conscious effort to support the community’s efforts again in Kenshi 2.

Materials Research

Elsewhere in the programming team, there’s been an ongoing investigation of Unreal’s material system which governs a huge number of visual elements and object interactions. Ranging from basic properties such as colour and transparency to complex physics based lighting and weather functions. We’re not just aiming to step up the visual quality in Kenshi 2, it also gives us a great opportunity to make the world itself feel more dynamic (which is part of what’s pushed us to search for a full time technical artist).

Finally, there’s a whole lot more going on behind the scenes with other members of the programming and art teams for Kenshi 2; all of which would be working closely with the successful applicants for each of the roles we’re hiring for. On the topic of abstract studio stuff, we also fixed some of the stranger behaviour with the sign-ups for our mailing list meaning we’ll look for more excuses to use it in the near future, also making it a great alternative way of getting these news posts for fans of Kenshi that prefer to stay outside of Steam’s ecosystem.

Feb 12, 2020

January Community Update

Kenshi - Caliburn

It’s a new month and I am once again asking you to read a developer update. In addition to pushing another sizeable patch to the main branch, we’re adding a new official language soon and sharing a small peek into what’s going on with Kenshi 2.

New language – Korean:

We’re now in the final stages of introducing support for one more language to Kenshi – Korean, which we expect to include in a patch toward the end of February. Adding Korean to Kenshi follows a hugely inspirational community effort to localise the game client, paired with the help of our external translators to see it through to the finish.

Huge thanks to Jeffrey Jeoung for helping us to officialise his translation mod, as well as BusanDaek, Byunghyun An, Son Byeong-gwan and all others who worked hard alongside him on the fan translation.

Korean players can follow along with the press releases onNewsWire and Ruliweb. Additionally, join us as we trial run our Korean social media channels for Twitter and Facebook.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel:

On the topic of new content channels, we’re also finally graduating from using Chris’ personal YouTube. You can now subscribe to the official Lo-Fi Games YouTube channel for video content directly from the studio and to ensure this tweet ages poorly.

Merchandise – Not quite for sale:

As nearly everyone is aware, there have been a number of precautions taken to limit the spread of the coronavirus across the globe, particularly in China. As our merchandise partners use manufacturing facilities in China this has understandably lead to a delay in creating Kenshi products. We’ll have an update on the status of merchandise in a future post once things are back to normal.

The continuity teller:

Following the announcement of Kenshi 2 the speculative flood gates opened on feature lists and lore questions, specifically how various topics in Kenshi might be explained in the events of Kenshi 2. As before, our answers will remain limited allowing each user to explore the world and come to their own conclusions (unless we have to end any more astrophysics arguments…). What we can share is some of the thoughts behind it all, directly from Natalie:

“I’m currently working on the foundations of Kenshi’s story and content, which means a lot of switching between open world design and writing world lore (... I may or may not have ended up with my own endless encyclopedia of Kenshi lore at this point). First up I’ve had to map out the ruins which need preserving from kenshi 1, comparing three different timelines to make sure the layout and history are consistent.

This takes a huge amount of time, essentially working on two different world timelines as I go back and delve more into Kenshi’s ancient history. It all helps in keeping the explorable ruins nice and interesting, plus it helps to work out the evolution of its current factions, making for some really original cultures. So my working map right now has a bunch of overlays from the different timelines, plus the current faction’s territories, their safe(ish) zones, danger zones, wtf?!? zones, wildlife and enemy territories.

I’m constantly working back and forth between fleshing out the main faction lore, making a list of squads in that territory, mapping out the town locations, working out the individual town conflicts and stories, plus figuring out all of their gameplay roles, goals, motives, and traits. After a rough placement around the world, I’ve begun concentrating on a 1/6th of the map portion (one of the safer zones) and fleshed it out with any split off groups that may have conflicted with its main faction, any dens, bases and other more interesting POIs. Spider diagrams have become my best friend at this point :’)

It’s been a slow process. The map is… considerably bigger than Kenshi 1’s; it’s a challenge to fill it with interesting content as well as balance it for a desolate, wild atmosphere. I’m conscious of not filling the world with shallow or empty content, instead focusing more on the individual towns and their micro-cultures. Admittedly I have to keep reigning myself in from overcomplicating the whole thing - this is a sandbox game with subtle, environmental story-telling, not a heavily story-driven RPG.

It feels like I’ve had to scrap a lot of ideas so far but I’m starting to pick up some momentum as everything finally clicks nicely into place. World building and writing is a lot like sculpting a statue or painting, you have to constantly add, tweak, delete, repeat… it takes some patience but it’s all part of the process!”

For some additional musings on the inner workings of Kenshi such as NPC dialogue and world building, check out Natalie’s blog entries on Gamasutra.

The quiet sounds of progress:

Last month in addition to continuing our search for a tech lead, our programming team have been working on a number of systems to help in creation of the game. This includes everything from basic camera controls and map markers all the way to physics events such as building collision. As we’re still very early in development a lot of their time is laying the groundwork for certain elements of Kenshi 2 that are still under wraps, undoubtedly users will have a lot of fun speculating over this in the comments and we look forward to revealing more about this in a few months time.

Finally for any fans agonising over what to do for their special somebody this valentines day, why not tell them how to sign up for the Kenshi mailing list before treating them to a gourmet meal of the finest foodcubes and a glass of grog (assuming you’re old enough). If that doesn’t win them over then at least it should slow them down for when the skin spiders eventually turn up...

Jan 22, 2020

Kenshi v1.0.44

Kenshi - Caliburn

Bug Fixes:

Removed the "Disable civilians in towns" option as it was causing some issues with things like Waystations being unpopulated, and no longer made a noticable performance gain.
Fixed use cursor appearing on player built tables.
Stealing backpacks from animals now correctly flags as stealing.
Fixed building town allocation when placing town markers.
Fix for animals walking into buildings.
Additional fix related to previous ragdoll crash.
Fixed translations, fonts and audio when kenshi install path contains non-ascii characters.
Fixed restricted food tooltip potentially missing some races.
Fixed a few minor dialog bugs.
Fixed texture loading error handling - with invalid textures (eg from file corruption or a broken mod) you now just get black, instead of a crash.
Fixed crash with the restricted food tooltip for some mods.
Fixed character editor crashing if character model fails to load from a mod.
Fixed interior layout editor mod tracking (level editor).

Changes:

Added 'character limit reached' message when buying animals.
Added error number to CRASHDUMP FAILED log message (description was garbled).
Cleaned up list of races that can eat restricted food in item tooltip.
Backpack contents marked as stolen when you steal a backpack.

Translations:

Chinese updated

Special thanks to 'Victory Forever' for spotting the issue around disabling civilians and waystations.

Jan 12, 2020

December Community Update

Kenshi - Caliburn

Now that the holiday season is officially behind us and Michael Bublé prepares to return to hibernation, there’s a lot to look back on in 2019. It’s important to remember though with a lot of time away from the studio December was a slower month overall.

(If you’re just here for the latest Kenshi 2 gossip, scroll down a bit)

A Year of Updates

First and probably most importantly, in December 2018 Kenshi made it to version 1.0 marking the end of a long trip as one of the original titles in Steam Greenlight. As of writing it also looks like we’re fated to be the last to graduate.

Taking our place as torch-bearers for Valve’s first foray into pre-release support, we’ve pushed a huge number of post-release updates and continue to polish Lo-Fi’s first project. Last month, in addition to highlighting a large patch, we touched on release frequencies – the gist of which is to continue liberal use of the experimental branch and periodic combined releases on the main branch when we’re happy with the stability.

Journey into the East

Another huge focus of last month was our attendance at WePlay as indiePlay awards finalists in Shanghai, China. Chris and Nat travelled across the globe to meet fans, translation partners, and gracefully accept defeat surrounded by a crowd chanting ‘Kenshi!’ right to the end.

Whilst we would have rather taken the crown, losing to Touhou, another game series with a rich history that started as a one-man passion project, feels somewhat poetic. Congratulations to ZUN for realising a high school design idea as an iconic game series and Team Ladybug for taking it in a fresh direction with Touhou Luna Nights.

A slow boat to Japan(ese)

As a final note on last month’s Kenshi progress, fans waiting for updates to the Japanese translation and localisation haven’t been forgotten. Initially we were optimistic that it wouldn’t take long to correct but unfortunately it required a lot more work than we realised. Meg, our Japanese community manager, has been putting a lot of time into this and currently estimates it to be about 80% finished. We’ll share more news when appropriate via the official Japanese Twitter to keep everyone informed.

Recast replaces Havok

Switching to a more modern engine gives us an opportunity to change things in ways that are otherwise difficult for Kenshi, first of which is the technology behind navigation mesh generation (or navmeshes). A navmesh essentially defines which parts of the environment a character can travel through, understanding positions for height changes, terrain types, and obstacles which is fed into systems for pathfinding.

Kenshi 1 used Havok AI™, seen elsewhere in several popular titles and made by the same team behind the well known Havok Physics™. Kenshi 2 will use a different system called Recast, it has a well documented integration with Unreal Engine in addition to being open source allowing us a much greater degree of control and adaptability. Greater control of Navmesh generation is the first step towards better path finding in Kenshi 2.

Additional technical information on Recast can be found on the git project page here.

Level editor v2

As mentioned in our previous update, we’re not just creating brand new stuff – there are a number of important items for us to keep so that modding remains within reach of the wider community. Right now we have a functional version of the level editor ported for Kenshi 2 giving us time to define an appropriate feature set. This approach pairs well with more complicated functions such as terrain editing directly in the Unreal Editor. If this is a tool you use regularly it would be great to hear from you in the comments.

Game Merchandise.game

Also requested by fans, we have a small update on the status of merchandise. Before the holidays we caught up with the team at https://www.merchandise.game/ who’ve been working with us on our first drop of Kenshi gear. As we’re close to production there was some discussion about whether or not we should open pre-orders, in the end we decided it would be a better if we simply wait for initial stock and order more based on the sales. Assuming no issues with the paperwork Kenshi merchandise could be on their store and ready to ship as soon as next month.

We’d like to take the opportunity to thank everyone for an amazing 2019 and wish you all the best of luck with any resolutions you’ve made. To our fans getting ready for lunar new year at the end of the month, don’t forget to sweep before you enjoy the holidays!

Dec 2, 2019

November Community Update

Kenshi - Caliburn

During October we confirmed our focus on Kenshi 2 before covering ways to get your fix of curated and studio-led Kenshi content, existing events and upcoming competitions, merchandise and our ongoing support for Kenshi 1 which has received a number of experimental updates pushed recently. If you missed last month's update you can read it here.

Community Events:

The Kenshi Community Discord team’s Halloween modding competition officially draws to a close with the end of November meaning they’ll be featuring a winner and handing out prizes (read: free games) shortly. If you’d like to take part in future community driven events, be sure to join the community Discord soon as there’s something special coming up for the festive season…

Building Kenshi 2:

As we aim to finish creating Kenshi 2 prior to the heat death of the universe, Lo-Fi Games has been expanding our staff team and working with freelance artists to get Kenshi 2 started. Outside of the studio, eagle eyed users on the Kenshi subreddit noticed Eugenia Peruzzo’s recently shared ‘Samurai Military Guards’ armour set.

This was created following on from concept art by 5518 Studios, which should give a small peek at one aspect of the aesthetic users can expect this time around.

Concurrently, inside of the studio we welcomed two additional members to the team, joining the programmers there’s ‘Boodals’ who’s currently working on GUI and a number of things we intend to keep from Kenshi 1. On the art team, we’re joined by concept artist Guy Warley who’s been drafting incredible buildings and environments that we’re keeping a secret for now. Finally on top of all of that we’re searching for an experienced technical lead and a lead artist to join the team full time.

Blasts from the past:
In our original post about the engine change Chris mentioned that creating Kenshi 2 in Unreal would likely make modding "more powerful but more difficult", though we’d do our best to keep up the trend of allowing users to a relative sandbox in how they modify their playable sandbox (it’s sandboxes all the way down, ideally...). Access to the project and Unreal Editor’s toolkit means we’re expecting to see even more depth to community mods but also raised some concerns about the average player who may want to tweak the game without learning a new and complicated piece of software, regardless of how powerful it may be. To that end, we’ve been exploring what functions can be kept from the Forgotten Construction Set and current methods of map editing. The overarching aim here is to retain a lot of the ability for players to make small modifications similar to what’s popular in Kenshi 1 and fan translations without needing to touch Unreal Editor, though it’s important to stress that it’s too early to promise an exact feature set right now.

The world of tomorrow:
In addition to what to keep from Kenshi, we’re investing a lot of time in understanding what the features in Unreal can add to Kenshi 2. To give some obvious examples, unlike the older systems used for Kenshi, Unreal supports more detailed lighting, expansive weather conditions and more intricate time of day cycles which make sense to investigate as we build the new game. As with above, it’s too soon to commit to specifics but if and when it’s time they would comfortably warrant their own posts to detail how they change character interactions in the world.

Future reveals:
As a firm believer in managing expectations, posting during exploration and investigative stages will leave the initial updates lighter than those further into the project but a monthly schedule will probably seem almost too infrequent later down the line. To that end, we’re sticking with it and things may get a bit more technical for the next few.

Supporting Kenshi 1:

Despite some users loudly decreeing the end of support for Kenshi 1, as mentioned before this isn’t the case and we’re still actively squashing bugs and tweaking gameplay. We’ve deployed a number of fixes across the last month using our opt-in only experimental branch as a means of testing them before merging them into the release build that typical users play, most recently v1.0.40 includes fixes for a number of issues such as several crashes reported on the forums. This also helps reduce the amount of time community members have to invest in upkeep of their modifications and changes to the game as generally the release version updates are better tested compilations of several patches and therefore less frequent.

Kenshi x WePlay: indiePlay awards:

In a previous post we got to test out Steam’s new ‘IRL event’ feature noting that Kenshi is a finalist in WePlay’s indiePlay awards. Making it to the finals prompted us to send Chris and Natalie over to Shanghai, China for a chance to meet another side of the community and, if we win, to accept the award directly. To grab a ticket check out WePlay’s website, our booth will be on the first floor in area I-05 (in the indiePlay area).

Steam Awards:

Those of you logging in to Steam will have seen that the Autumn Sales are here along with the opportunity to nominate games for this year’s Steam Awards, and whilst it’s tempting to shoot for “The Game of the Year Award”, we’re aiming for “The Best Game You Suck At Award” in homage to all of the would be protagonists that met an untimely end fighting everyone’s favourite murderous pseudo giraffe or entered the world for the first time and expected to win a duel against an angry goat. You can help us win by voting here for Kenshi in that category here.

On behalf of everyone at Lo-Fi Games, if you’re a fan from the United States finishing up celebrations of Thanksgiving, we hope you had a wonderful holiday and for everyone else remember – it doesn’t take a special time of year to call friends and family, ask them how things are going and tell them to try Kenshi.