Out now on the experimental branch only. To opt in to the experimental version, right-click on Kenshi in your Steam games list -> properties -> betas tab -> then choose “experimental”. If opting in, please be aware of bugs and instability.

Please report any bugs or feedback to either the Steam or Lo-Fi forums

• Fixed deleting saves from new save location

• Fixed bar squads not spawning in Heng due to multiple towns in one zone

• Fixed issue with initial player health if race was changed during character creation

Hi there, here comes another community update on Kenshi. In this update, we’ll go over the decisions and changes that were made on the Discord server, Kenshi's milestone, and introduction to Lo-Fi’s team members, followed by some visual sneak peeks on what to expect for Kenshi 2.


As some of you may have known, Caliburn (Sam) who has been keeping the community up to date and was leading Lo-Fi's marketing has moved on which resulted in some internal reshuffles that we hope have gone unnoticed.

The most significant decision that was made in the past weeks was the ownership of Kenshi's Community Discord server that has now gone back to the community led by Seth Knight who was voted to the admin role by the group of moderators. For those who have not been aware, there has been an ongoing discussion on Community Server's ownership and its purpose, but they are now set at rest, and the server is back in good hands.

Kenshi's Community Discord server has always been a place to share ideas, creation, and experiences of all things Kenshi by the community, however, it was not designed as a means to communicate with the developer. Now with the growing Lo-Fi team who are involved in different aspects of the game development, we have decided to set up a new official Discord server for the team to interact and receive feedback from the community. We will work closely with Seth and other moderators to ensure that the community's requests are reflected, and there will be more opportunity for us to work together on things such as online events. We will announce the launch of the official Discord server once it is ready.


After 12+ years of development and less than 2 years of the official release, Kenshi has hit a milestone of 1 million global sales. We wouldn't have made it this far without the support of the community who's been there from the very early stage and have continued to come back to Kenshi throughout the years. Proceeds gained from Kenshi are now invested in developing Kenshi 2, with the expanded team of 15 and a new office in Bristol.

Keeping everyone safe is our priority with COVID, so we are taking time setting up the office with only those who are comfortable to come in for work. Considering where things are heading in the UK, it will be a while when we can fully kit the office and show some pictures in the blog, but we are fully intending to do so in the future!


In the last update, we've introduced several new team members who have joined the studio for the development of Kenshi 2. We'll continue the introduction of 3 members this month on who they are and what they are up to outside of work.


I'm Christopher, a concept designer and illustrator from Germany. I have been working on Kenshi 2 for the last 5 months and recently moved to Bristol to work at the Lo-Fi Games office. I'm involved in the creation of various visual elements of the project and strive to make the world of Kenshi more immersive with every design I create. The main focus of the last few months has been the design of various props; refining and improving the visual language set forth by Kenshi 1.

(Some of the light-fixtures I designed further below as a taste of what's to come)

Life Balance:
Outside of work I spend a lot of time on things that keep one inspired, like traveling, reading, movies, or playing games (thou there isn't any traveling going on right now).
But the majority of my free time is spent on improving my skills as an artist, and working on personal paintings.


(Image of my personal painting)

Above is a digital painting I did some time ago, I still have a long way to go before I can be content with this and other paintings, but if you're interested you can see more of them on my Instagram or Twitter. I only recently set up social media profiles, but I will post more of my creations in the future.


I’m Paul Crilley, and I’m a Scotsman who has been adrift in South Africa for twenty-something years (and I’m still not used to the heat or humidity). I recently joined the team to work as a writer on Kenshi 2 and am having an absolute blast.

Over the years I’ve worked in television, novels, computer games, and comics. My most recent series, Poison City, and the sequel Clockwork City, about a supernatural police force based in Durban, South Africa, has been optioned for television by Jerry Bruckheimer Productions and CBS. Whether it goes into production or not is another matter entirely.

I was one of the contract writers on Star Wars: The Old Republic back in the day. On the comics front, my most recent work was Star Wars Adventures, for IDW. I also planned out a comic book mini-series for IDW called, X-Files: Conspiracy. The mini-series brought together Mulder & Scully, The Crow, Ghostbusters, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the Transformers. I wrote 3 of the 6 issues of that series. I also adapted the characters I created for the Wizards of the Coast D&D setting Eberron (the fantasy detectives Abraxis Wren and Torin) for comics, also for IDW.

Home setup:
My home setup is a mishmash of books, a cluttered desk, a whiteboard, and walls entirely covered in movie posters and old calendar pictures from over the years. (Lord of the Rings, Discworld, GoT, etc). I cannot stand bare walls and need to be surrounded by the clutter I have collected. I have a desktop PC for gaming, and the novel and scriptwriting work gets done of the MacBook.





Life Balance:
It’s difficult finding a balance when you work from home. Nothing has changed during lockdown on that front, as I’ve worked from home my whole professional career. What *is* difficult is working from home while having a five-month baby demanding so much attention. I find that I get more work done at night. (I’ve always been a night owl.) So I do a few hours during the day in-between feedings and putting the little terror to sleep, but from 6pm onwards, when he’s down for the night, that’s when my writing day really starts. I usually go on till about 1 or 2 in the morning, with probably one brief feeding for the baby. I need to get back into gym again, as they only recently opened up again, but finding the time to do that is going to be a challenge.


I'm Meg or Gumstar, and I've been working behind the scene for Kenshi on Japan for a few years. With the departure of Caliburn, I've stepped in to help out the team on PR & Community Management.

Life Balance:
I live in London near several parks, and I walk or run every morning to breathe fresh air and declutter my mind. I've always been a city-dweller, but somehow this lockdown has made me crave for nature like never before.
I've been observing a family of swans since early spring when the parent swans started to incubate. With 'The Ugly Duckling' being one of my favourite childhood tales, it’s been fascinating to see the development of cygnets, when they looked nothing like swans in spring to now when they are perfectly shaped grey swans. They'll soon shed their feathers and will become indistinguishable from their parents. As elegant as they are, I can't help but notice how they look like the distant cousins of certain Kenshi creatures when they thrust their heads into the water :)




Kenshi 2 goes back 1,000 years from Kenshi 1, and it was undoubtedly a different world from what we are familiar with in Kenshi 1. Some inhabitants would have changed over the years accompanied by transformation in social and cultural dynamics, something that is inevitable given the timespan.

In the past updates, we've shown some concept art from Calum Alexander Watt representing some initial thoughts on the world of Kenshi 2. Now that we are further along in the world-building stage, Christopher, our Concept Artist and Illustrator has been busy working out the details on props that are used by Kenshi 2's inhabitants in their daily life, as in the external light fixtures below.



Kenshi 2 is developed with Unreal Engine, which allows further details in visual appearances and animation that would not have been possible in the technical setup used by Kenshi 1. We are happy to reveal an example of a creature that lived over 1,000 years with their uncanny survival instincts.



We've been late with this month's update, but we love to hear your thoughts, especially on our visual reveals on Kenshi 2. As ever, you can join us on Twitter and Facebook, and if you'd rather receive this blogpost in a non-Steam way, they are available on our website and via our mailing list.

Hi all. As with previous posts, I’ll start by recapping a few things going on with the continued support for the first Kenshi. For this blog’s special section, we’re catching up with some of the team at Lo-fi to find out what’s keeping them sane in isolation before finally getting to development news on Kenshi 2.

In the past month we’ve once again been making use of the experimental branch, most notably around an issue users reported with saved games following the latest windows update. Many players had stated they were unable to save, load, or experienced crashing when they tried. In Kenshi’s latest v1.0.50 update saves default to the Windows user directory, fixing any potential issues linked to system permissions. Please keep in mind that if you wish to edit a saved game the new location to check is
C:\Users\<YourUsername>\AppData\Local\kenshi\save.

Hinted above, after consulting with the forum mods we’ve made some overdue changes to bug reporting flow – namely better collating more widely popular bugs, cleaning up a number of older topics, and providing a more visible response to new ones. This will likely mean pushing for a stricter adherence to the bug reporting format as I work to ensure they can be reproduced and turn them into meaningful notes to the programming team to progress. The end goal here is to keep fixing issues for in Kenshi 1 in a more transparent way, giving users more feedback on if it’s feasibly possible to fix and where we’re at with their reports. For a more worded explanation of the changes check out the pinned topic here.

In past blog posts we’ve mentioned hiring a number of new team members to expand the studio for Kenshi 2. Over the next few updates, since we’re focussed on an important Kenshi 2 subproject (details further down) I’m taking the opportunity to catch up with different team members and share a little bit of who they are, what they’re up to outside of the studio, and how they’re doing working from home.

I’m Guy, a concept designer with a background in graphic design, illustration and advertising. I joined the team in November 2019 and have been working on concepts for the architecture, furniture, and characters that inhabit the world of Kenshi 2.

For my home setup I recently purchased a Wacom Cintiq Pro 24, replacing my Wacom Intous 3. After spending 12 years with the Intuos 3 (which is still going strong) it’s a big upgrade. I initially thought it was going to take a lot of time to get used to the switch but I’m already really enjoying it and using it every day. The Cintiq is connected to my MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015) which works pretty well running things like Photoshop.

I am quite used to working at home and have got into a good routine over the years. I do miss working in the office though, it’s much easier to talk through different areas of the project with everyone in the same room, much less typing!

I have been spending the lockdown back in my hometown near East Yorkshire by the coast. Running and walking are the main things keeping me going. I’m also doing some yoga in the mornings, I’m rubbish at it but enjoying it anyway.

In my free time I’ve been working on several of my own illustrations, such as the album covers for three different electronic artists that I finished recently.



Other freelance projects I’ve worked on that people might recognise include art for mud-and-lasers RPG ‘Lancer’ and a cover for the gritty future comic ‘The Hand Unseen’. Right now, I’m working on some posters based on my favourite Studio Ghibli films which follow on from other personal projects like last year’s Akira poster.

I’m Victor, or Mr4Goosey. I’ve been doing indie-dev on my own projects for over half a decade, and I’ve spent part of that doing it for a living. I got fed up of running my own business and decided to look for a full-time job in the industry, leading me to Lo-Fi. I wanted to combine my love for making pretty things with interests in logic and programming, which is why I’m now a technical artist.

I’m running a custom PC with a Ryzen 7 2700X and a GTX1080. For peripherals, I’ve got a Decus mouse and a Razer Blackwidow (Green switches) both with lovely wrist-rests. Finally, for screens I’m running a 34” LG Ultra-wide which I’m looking to replace with something less bulky and a 27” AOC monitor on the side.

Thanks to past projects I’m used to working from home, so it’s really not that special to me, ironically being in an office will take more getting used to. It’s nice to be in my own place and have access to my stuff, but when everything happens in the same room it’s easy to lose sight of the boundaries between work and life. It can also be hard to get to know the team properly when we’ve not properly met. All in all, I’m looking forward to being in-office; working from home feels less efficient and enjoyable than being together with people, plus it gets lonely and boring.

I’ve started another gamedev project in my spare time, though I’ve been trying to get away from my computer too. Out of my new interests the main one that helps is blacksmithing. Unfortunately, I don’t have a forge yet – that’ll probably have to wait until I’ve moved to the UK, but as I’m mostly focussed on armouring, I can do quite a lot anyway. It’s a steep learning curve, but it’s really cool to produce something like a piece of armour out of nothing.



I’m also just getting into electronics and robotics. It’s something I’ve been putting off for as long as I’ve been doing gamedev, but I’m hoping to get started on it properly now. First steps are reading up on basic electronics (I wouldn’t be able to give you a definition of a “servo”), because that’s the main part I’m lacking. I’m hoping I can get the hang of that then get properly stuck in!

Lastly, I’ve been doing more gamedev. I’ve recently started playing around with Phyronnaz’s Voxel Plugin for UE4, and I’m currently trying to make a small, relaxing game in which you build a low-poly eco dome with cute animals in it. Not sure exactly where it’ll be going, but I’m hoping to release it on Steam for a few bucks at some point in a similar vein to Islanders.

I’m Boodals, the programmer who was hired back in November. Up until now I've been working on remaking the GUIs from Kenshi 1 in Unreal Engine, but now that we've hired Craig, I can shift my efforts onto less urgent tasks, such as code cleanliness and stability. I won’t go into too much detail, but I'd call it more of a support role, making the other programming jobs easier and faster, and discouraging code which could be unstable.

Since we started working from home, I've been using my own PC for most tasks. We do all have laptops to work on, but I don’t have the desk space to fit mine. Using my PC also allows me to test the GUIs I previously spoke about on a 4k screen to make sure everything functions correctly at higher resolutions.

Working from home is pretty great, mainly due to lie-ins and easy access to snacks (ha-ha), but it does come with its downsides. Not being able to quickly speak to other developers or show each other what we're working on makes it harder to get stuff done. We're exploring several apps and programs to minimize this, but you can't beat being in the same room.

Outside of work, the lockdown really hasn't affected me too much, as I'm one of the lucky ones who isn't bothered by being locked in. I moved house just before the lockdown started, so I've been hanging out with my new housemates and their cat, whom I pay tribute to in the form of pets every time I pass through Her domain (stairs, hallway, kitchen…)



The team have been hugely busy this month working on a ‘vertical slice’ of Kenshi 2, which I have the pleasure of sharing snippets of today.



For those unaware of the terminology, a vertical slice is a portion of near-finished quality game which then allows a studio to visualise some of what they’re up to. It’s traditionally distinct from a prototype in that the quality is much higher leaving less room for flexibility but for us we’re blurring that line a bit and using it primarily as a tangible design tool. Internally nicknamed ‘Concrete Neon’, it’s about having a space to test and iterate on some of Kenshi 2’s ideas by taking them away from a design document and experiencing how they might actually be played.



Sharing some thoughts on our first major milestone, Chris compares Concrete Neon to founding Kenshi’s Holy Nation and his hands on approach to game design: “Anyone who played the [Kenshi 1 early access] map in it's earliest incarnation will remember that only a small area around the holy nation was active, the rest was greyed-out and you couldn't go there, because it wasn't finished. This gives us a test bed to get everything working early on so we can play the game and experiment. I'm not a very formal designer, my technique is iterative because my ‘special skill’ is playing a game for a while and then going "hunger needs to be 0.8x slower and strength needs to raise 1.12x faster instead of 1.08x". It's also better that way because I can approach the design as a player rather than as a game designer. I don't like game designers.”

---

This month’s blog post was intended for last so ran a little late, but we’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments – with so many players following different game development projects it’s a great place to reflect. As ever you can join us on Twitter and Facebook where we still have an upcoming creator competition to announce once we’ve worked out the prizes... If you’d like a none-Steam way to keep up with the studio, blogs are available on our website and via our mailing list.

Cheers,

Update 1.0.50 is out now! This moves a number of fixes including the new option to change saved game location to the main branch. We'll be continuing to monitor the quality over the next few weeks so please include feedback below.

Features:

• Due to recent windows updates causing even more save issues when the game is installed in the C:/Program Files/ folder, Saves can now optionally be stored in the user directory instead of the install path. It can be set in the options. (Default save location is now: C:\Users\<YourUsername>\AppData\Local\kenshi\save)
  
• Added Stun Recovery Rate and Robot First Aid Speed constants to FCS

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed FCS 'xp rate athletics' constant doing nothing
  
• A crash fix for rare situations resulting from missing meshes

Out now on the experimental branch only. To opt in to the experimental version, right-click on Kenshi in your Steam games list -> properties -> betas tab -> then choose “experimental”. If opting in, please be aware of bugs and instability.

Please report any bugs or feedback to either the Steam or Lo-Fi forums

Bug fixes:

• Fix for Stun damage recovery rate being 10x too slow
  
• A crash fix for rare situations resulting from missing meshes

Out now on the experimental branch only. To opt in to the experimental version, right-click on Kenshi in your Steam games list -> properties -> betas tab -> then choose “experimental”. If opting in, please be aware of bugs and instability.

Please report any bugs or feedback to either the Steam or Lo-Fi forums

Bug Fixes:

• Fix for importing saves that was broken in last update (1.0.48 experimental)

Out now on the experimental branch only. To opt in to the experimental version, right-click on Kenshi in your Steam games list -> properties -> betas tab -> then choose “experimental”. If opting in, please be aware of bugs and instability.

Please report any bugs or feedback to either the Steam or Lo-Fi forums

Features:

• Due to recent windows updates causing even more save issues when the game is installed in the C:/Program Files/ folder, Saves can now optionally be stored in the user directory instead of the install path. It can be set in the options.
  
• Added Stun Recovery Rate and Robot First Aid Speed constants to FCS

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed FCS 'xp rate athletics' constant doing nothing

Hi all, it’s past time for another instalment of Kenshi development updates. As our second entry while working from home and with several new members of staff joining the team there’s been a significant amount of ‘onboarding’ this month. To start I wanted to go over two ongoing major localisation projects and a recent virtual event for Kenshi. Lastly, we’re sharing updates on Kenshi 2, taking this month to talk a bit more about the narrative and technical sides of building a large sandbox.

In the past we’ve spoken about our passion for providing Kenshi in other languages, but we’ve rarely delved into exactly what that entails. As two major languages are still due to be re-released, along with this month’s progress update it’s a good chance for us to touch on the concept of translation vs localisation.

As any animation or foreign cinema fan would attest to, finding the nearest equivalent word to throw on a subtitle track is a very hit and miss experience. Often when a language is spoken, we use sayings and euphemisms to communicate a certain meaning that resonates with one culture but, even if translated, might be completely meaningless in another. On the simpler side, for anyone in their mid-20’s that grew up with the English dub of Pokémon here’s a ‘jellydonut’.




Except that’s actually onigiri or rice balls. As the western audience would have been unlikely to eat rice balls a decision was made to dub them as donuts and call it a day. A much closer cultural equivalence would have been something along the lines of a sandwich, dumpling, or pasty. None of that covers the visual side of what fans see on Ash’s adventure so at best it’s still a very crude way of trying to relate that Brock was nice enough to pack some lunch for their journey. If you understand that and are now thinking what they could have done instead then congratulations, you just took a crash course in localisation.

In Kenshi’s upcoming Japanese localisation, a lot of corrections have been made to dialogue that baffled Japanese players. For example, currently some ironies are translated with opposite meanings which leads to confusion when players need to make dialogue choices. Similarly, Meg has been replacing nonsensical direct translations with their Japanese equivalent phrases, e.g. the current 'eat boots' is now correctly translated as 'kick your ass'. Work is also being done to change proverbs that made no sense in Japanese culture. Players won't see 'out of the frying pan' in the middle of conversation (referring to 'out of frying pan into the fire') and will instead find a Japanese equivalent saying for a worsening situation. All this amounts to a near complete rewrite of our current Japanese text and requires a degree of thoughtful research - it’s a very time-consuming process.

Meanwhile, for the Korean localisation, we’ve recently released a major update. As we mentioned before we revisited it with a different team, but we also decided to collaborate with fan Jeffrey Jeoung to assist with quality assurance. This helped us by breaking through the language barrier which prevented us from otherwise checking on the quality of translations.

A quiet side effect of the ongoing current pandemic is the effect it’s having on live events across game development, whilst not as pressing of a concern as many other topics it’s easy to forget we’re in the middle of the busy season for live expos.

Lo-Fi is excited to share, following the positive outcome of our last physical event in Shanghai, we worked with PLAYISM again to take part in our first digital event – Indie Live Expo 2020.




Hosted by the famous Ryu’sOffice in Japan, live streams were broadcast in English, Japanese and Chinese with aims ‘to promote friendship, fellowship, and enthusiasm through the medium of video games.’ A cause we were more than happy to add weight to.

The event covered a range of different indie titles and initiatives including personal messages from beloved industry figures ZUN (Touhou Project), Toby Fox (Undertale, Deltarune) SWERY (The GoodLife / White Owls Inc.) and KazuyaNino (TYPE-MOON).




Finally as many of the Kenshi Discord community can attest to, I’m also a huge Evangelion fan so it’s incredibly exciting mention that in advance of ‘Thrice upon a time’there’s an ongoing Evangelion inspired game jam which was announced during the event.

Where to watch: YouTube (EN)/ YouTube (JP) / Twitch (EN) / Bilibili (CN)

For more information check out the Indie Live Expo website.

Similar to the real world, Kenshi 2 is going to be pretty big. Previously when talking to Nat she confirmed that whilst we still don’t have a marketing friendly measured size to rally behind, it’ll be bigger than Kenshi 1. This raises two important questions: how do we make it feel alive and how will it work from a technical standpoint? Below Nat touches on the first point and the magic of the ‘narrative bark’.

“Hello! For the last few months, I've been working on the little pieces of information that subtly unfold the various histories and cultures of Kenshi's world. Writing for a sandbox game can be a little different to other RPGs where the developers normally have more control over what the player hears and sees (and even what the NPCs do!). So, for Kenshi, I need to reflect the necessary information differently while also making sure the world feels alive and immersive.

A few months back, I talked about roughly structuring our first factions' layouts on the world map, but now my job is to zone in on the individual cities and their own mini conflicts. I've been planning out what I like to call the 'Carrots' - the local goals or tempting secrets for the player to explore. I then list out all the possible ways I can convey that information, using in-game item descriptions and different dialogues, or visually with assets. We're strictly against traditional quest systems in Kenshi, so it's important for me to tell the player what they can do indirectly through the environment instead, planting seeds in your minds and making you want to do things for yourselves.

One of those 'dribbles' of information involves writing dialogue Barks. Barks are the short bits of dialogue that NPCs blurt out either in reaction to something, or just completely ambient comments - the ambient comments are the ones that I've been writing and they're perfect for breathing life into a world, reinforcing goals and lore, and simply interacting with the player to really make them feel part of the world. BUT... I have to write a lot of those suckas while actually keeping them interesting and nonintrusive. They can be a bit mind numbing to work on but they're one of my favourite methods to paint a picture of a town via gossiping and general musings from citizens.

If you'd like to read more about my process with writing barks, I've written a much more in-depth article on gamasutra or you can follow me on Twitter”

As readers already know, Kenshi 2 is in development using Unreal Engine 4 which is a major jump from an aging implementation of OGRE. Following on from the narrative elements of the world, Victor, our technical artist, has kindly offered to answer some questions about the technical aspects.




Starting with a major pain point then, moving across large areas in Kenshi 1 leads to lots of ‘loading’ pauses. How does Unreal handle huge maps and will that help with this?

“UE4 has a system called World Composition - it allows us to divide the world into cells which are then automatically loaded as the camera approaches them. It can do that asynchronously, meaning it doesn't lock up the game; it's loading the data as a background task. We can divide buildings and such over these cells in order to keep them unloaded and have them automatically come in when needed. World Composition is also built to work with Unreal Engine's Landscape system.

Unfortunately, the stock Landscape system isn't explicitly designed for a world as massive as Kenshi 2. While we still intend to use world composition, there’s additional exploration going into third party options for the landscape system to go even further. It’s important for us to get this right as currently Kenshi 2's world is expected to end up even bigger than Kenshi’s ~1000km2.”

That’s pretty huge, I can’t think of that many other games with similar scale. I appreciate it’s not your field, but will World Composition mean no more units running into the sky?

“Ideally, but this also relates to pathing. We haven’t finalised exactly how pathing will be handled in Kenshi 2, but our current expectation is that we'll be working with Recast (UE4's stock navmesh which is well-tested and reliable). So tentatively, no more people walking off into the big blue yonder.

UE4 and Recast allow us to generate the navmesh where we need it with a large amount of flexibility, and it should, theoretically, handle our world really well. Either way, I'm confident we'll have a lot less weird pathing going on than we do in the original game.”

You’ve mentioned streaming bits of world in and unloading it on the fly but let’s talk about building larger spaces. In talks from Unreal Fest it seemed like developers can make presets for objects or types of buildings, set the area boundaries then let the engine create an entire city for them to edit. Do we have anything like that helping us with Kenshi 2?

“Things like city-spawners are something that we can use, but because of the oddities about Kenshi's world and a bunch of specifics, we also can't rely on a generalised system. If we do want to end up using things like generators, we’ll be developing a tool internally. One other big problem with these sorts of things is that if it’s relied on too much then the world ends up feeling ‘same-y’.

On the other hand, while it’s a lot of work for an artist to go through and manually put all the buildings and pots and pans in the right spot, it means they really are in a spot that does them justice. We do use modular (re-useable) pieces where we can, but we’re being careful with not overdoing them, after all we want Kenshi 2’s world to feel unique and distinct.”

What about when adding details to natural biomes?

“Natural environments are a lot easier to automate with those kinds of tools – at least for the menial stuff like grass placement. Of course, we could manually position every blade of grass, but that would be a nightmare. What we actually do is procedurally place grass in the right spots determined by our level designer.

There are also other procedural tools we can easily integrate into our workflow for natural assets – for example Unreal has native Speedtree integration. Speedtree is a tool that allows us to make foliage “species” and generate as many unique trees in that species as we want. It makes the foliage-creation a lot less tedious than needing to manually model them.”

If everything is going to be nicely dressed up, how do you deal with performance hits for all that extra detail?

“For starters, Kenshi 1 didn't use LODs (dynamic changes in level of detail) which meant operating with a massively constrained tri-budget for near-camera-detail. Kenshi 2 make heavy use of LODs, and we’re massively helped in that area by UE4's semi-automatic LOD generation systems. Essentially, we can have extra detailed meshes up-close, and turn them into simpler low-detail meshes when they’re further away. This all happens without any extra work on the artist's end.”

So that covers some basic software optimisations, what about from a hardware perspective - Kenshi runs an older version of OGRE that’s famously single threaded so what’s the difference with Unreal and Kenshi 2?

“It’s a huge shift here, really. When Kenshi development started, multi-threaded CPUs really weren’t that common yet, nor were the cores nearly as fast as they’re becoming now. For context, at the time Intel’s i3/i5/i7 release scheme didn’t even exist. In development, it’s important to work on systems that help as many people as reasonably possible to be able to play - Back then that meant there was no reason to go beyond a single-thread. It’s an incredibly complicated thing to code so it wasn’t worth the development time.

That’s different now, even the average user runs 4 CPU cores. Unreal Engine, by default, runs its render-thread on a separate core. Kenshi 2 runs almost all of its logic on extra threads, of which there are now more, and they’re faster. The gains made by proper multi-threading are massive at this point. Another thing which makes a big difference is that so many rendering-bottlenecks of the past decade have gone from being handled on the CPU to being on the GPU, which is significantly faster for calculations that need to happen hundreds of thousands of times per frame. GPUs have gotten exponentially faster over the past decade, and that’s power we can properly tap into.”

A lot of this works on paper but what can you do to know if you’re getting it right as it’s being made?

“This sort of thing is for a large part just developing some sort of instinct for what you should and shouldn’t do. If you show me the profiler statistics for a given scene, along with a wireframe, I can generally pretty quickly figure out where any slowdowns are coming from. It’s difficult to explain why in each case, that goes incredibly deep, but you get a feel for the patterns of what works and what consequences certain choices have.

During initial development, you work on rough ideas, generally without hugging tight performance limits for everything. Once something’s working, then it’s time to start looking whether the current cost is reasonable, and where you can easily scrape some frame time off it. The big analytical guns come out when you run into major performance problems. Generally, there’s a certain benchmark you want to hit for acceptable performance at minimum specs. Once you’re unable to hit that benchmark, it’s time to stare at lots-and-lots of numbers – indicators of how costly parts of a scene are – and go through what you can deduce from them. Starting with the worst offenders, you ‘scrape some stuff off’, ever more aggressively. Optimisation’s basically a circle, it repeats as you go. Scenes keep growing and therefore getting more expensive, so you work your ass off to make sure you’re still meeting the benchmark by tearing the existing stuff apart more. The scene grows again and the cycle repeats.

Finally, Epic just announced Unreal 5, as it’s supposedly seamless to migrate there’s talk of us moving along with it. Are there any features that you saw and immediately thought ‘that would be perfect for Kenshi’?

“As a technical artist, I’m incredibly excited to see what Unreal Engine 5 will bring us. If it delivers everything Epic has been marketing so far such as the lighting and geometry changes, it could be a massive game-changer.

That said, we don’t know how the final implementation will turn out so we can’t count on it yet. The promotional material stresses that porting should be easy, and I’m confident it will be, but based on current information swapping from UE4 to UE5 won’t automatically mean much. The major gains with the new tech aren’t user-oriented, they’re things that will make a massive difference for the art creation workflow and we’re already in the middle of that. We also can’t work according to the new idealised workflow either. Obviously, as it wouldn’t be worthwhile to sit here twiddling our thumbs until UE5 comes out and make everything then, the current plan is to just continue developing as before and see what we can do when it arrives.

Speculating on a hypothetical Kenshi 3 though… I imagine our workflow would be fundamentally different using UE5 as compared to our current art-pipelines, and I imagine it’d be significantly more time-efficient. That’s all very speculative though, so don’t get too excited.”

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This month’s blog was a lengthy undertaking so I’m looking forward to hearing thoughts and questions from the community in the comments. As ever you can join us on Twitter and Facebook where we have a soon-to-be-confirmed creator competition in the works. If you’d like a none-Steam way to keep up with the studio, blogs are available on our website and via our mailing list.

Cheers,

Update 1.0.47b is out now! This deploys a significant update to the Korean translation. We'll be continuing to monitor the quality over the next few weeks so please include feedback below.

1.0.47b

• Korean Language update

In this month’s community update we’re working from home, welcoming several new hires to Lo-Fi and learning a bit more about performance considerations in Kenshi 2.

As represented through parody on our Instagram, we’re encouraging everyone to stay at home if they can and as no exceptions to the rule, everyone at Lo-Fi has been working remotely. It’s taken us a little while to adjust but we’re now fully in the swing of things; our latest series of Kenshi 1 bug fixes have just been deployed to the stable branch and Kenshi 2 progress marches on.

To continue ramping up development for Kenshi 2 we’re excited to introduce some new faces to the team (starting remotely of course). Already hard at work, Victor Goossens, is our new Technical Artist and Sarah Keates, our new Office Administrator – both of which bring more structure to our workflow in the studio. Additionally over the next few weeks we’re welcoming Mohammad Rezazadeh as our Lead 3D Artist and Craig Tinney, as a Junior Programmer, each adding additional talent to push Kenshi 2 forward. Finally, with the popularity of the waterways picture shared in a previous update, fans will be happy to welcome back well known freelance artist Calum Alexander Watt.

Joining us this month, Victor gives a better explanation of what a technical artist does along with a sneak peak of work that would make Bob Ross proud:

“Hi guys! I'm Victor, or Mr4Goosey (after my last name, Goossens)! I’m happy to say I’m Lo-Fi’s new Technical Artist (I’ll call it TA for short, so that doesn’t stand for Teaching Assistant here). Most of you are probably not really sure what that means, though. In a nutshell, my job as a Technical Artist is to be a bridge between the art department and the programming department. I do artsy things that are too technical for the artists, and I do technical things that are too artsy for the programmers.

I’ve been doing indie-development on all kinds of projects for years now. I got into game development as a programmer, but quickly developed a passion for creating beautiful things – bringing me to the specialized niche that is Technical Art.

Most of the work I do relates somehow to what your graphics card is doing while you’re playing games; I handle lighting, all kinds of color-balancing, and most importantly, I deal with shaders, the ‘code’ that tells your graphics card what every pixel on your screen should look like. Having specialized in Unreal Engine 4, a lot of the shader-work I do is actually material-based (using UE4’s node system). That doesn’t necessarily make the job much simpler (you still need to understand how rendering engines and graphics cards work), but definitely a bit easier to understand at a basic level. I also work with artists to work out any kinks in their work flow, as well as dealing with performance-budgets and optimization.

You might now be wondering what that means for Kenshi in the larger scheme of things. As you guys probably know we’ve decided to move to Unreal Engine 4 for Kenshi 2. Having years of experience in UE4, I’ll be working to smooth out the transition from Ogre, helping the team get used to Unreal’s way of working. Unreal Engine 4 has an incredibly powerful and versatile rendering engine – if you know how to work with it, because that power comes at the cost of complexity. The plan is for Kenshi 2 to be graphically above and beyond anything we could ever do in Ogre, and I’m here to make sure that we can actually pull that off. An easy example for that is what I’m actually working on right now:

Kenshi 2’s new Time-of-Day system, and primarily, its clouds! Kenshi’s fully dynamic lighting and environment is a massive challenge to represent properly, and it means things like clouds just cannot be left static. Kenshi’s new clouds grow, move and morph over time – all without melting your graphics card! Next up is just about every other material in Kenshi...”

Last but not least, we’re still searching for a lead programmer to join us, keeping us on track to complete Kenshi 2 before all of this apocalypse malarkey. In the meantime, keep your eyes on our Twitter and Facebook pages for some new events and once again, if you prefer updates directly into your inbox, sign up for our mailing list here.