Hardland Release 19 adds completely reworked day and night cycle and much more.
FEATURES
Day and night cycle completely redone: - Beautiful sunsets and during night you can see stars. - CycleComponent examples: - Certain characters are only active during day. - City lights are lit at night.
Two-phased enemy attack behavior: - Enemies display their alert behavior and change to aggro idle, but don't immediately rush to attack. - As an example, Goblin Fodder is made to not be alerted whereas e.g. Goblin Captain is.
Robust melee weapon hits using the 3d pizza slice technique.
Added critical hits and improved knockback.
Preliminary knockback animations for most enemies.
Added staggered animation for Skeleton Champion.
Reworked the concept of armor.
Throwing characters no longer breaks their physics.
Hardland Release 19 adds completely reworked day and night cycle and much more.
FEATURES
Day and night cycle completely redone: - Beautiful sunsets and during night you can see stars. - CycleComponent examples: - Certain characters are only active during day. - City lights are lit at night.
Two-phased enemy attack behavior: - Enemies display their alert behavior and change to aggro idle, but don't immediately rush to attack. - As an example, Goblin Fodder is made to not be alerted whereas e.g. Goblin Captain is.
Robust melee weapon hits using the 3d pizza slice technique.
Added critical hits and improved knockback.
Preliminary knockback animations for most enemies.
Added staggered animation for Skeleton Champion.
Reworked the concept of armor.
Throwing characters no longer breaks their physics.
Release 18 has been a long time in the making but the day has finally come. This update makes the game open world as it was originally intended.
After one week in the beta branch most of the nasty bugs are fixed. Thanks everyone who helped us track down the bugs!
FEATURES
All major locations moved to the open world
Generated roads use A* algorithm for natural paths
More varied terrain generation and better erosion
New continent with Elder King's castle Root Hall
Queen Ingrid and Castle Snow Peak location
Mountain Sheep Tavern location
Merchant Union City landmark
Cursed Mansion landmark
Western Harbor landmark:
Northern Harbor landmark
Northern Guard and Palace Guards
Undead Knight with three variants
Elder Guardians and their Commander
Wolves (plus the ability to buy a pet wolf)
Travel system for going between continents
Procedural idle look at animations for NPC's to make them feel more alive:
Redone dialogue and quest funtionality
Lots of new items and weapons
More elder villager variants (with more to come)
New quests and dialogue
New story characters: - Priest Holloway (The hat is special...) - General Lupus - Gus Grimaldi - Grand Jester - Merchant Union Leader - Tavern Owner - And many others
New set of masks: - Woman villager - Male villager - Old woman villager - Old male villager - Merchant Fodder - Merchant Lord - Wood Elf Lord
Reynold Von Sparkle boss fight
Ulf The Wolf boss fight
Sir Kuolema boss fight
New consistent damage feedback effects
Better quality shading (removes banding which was visible on large round objects)
Replaced cube maps with real-time solution
Particles have correct ambient lighting
Water doesn't flicker anymore on shores
Better quality depth of field
Much longer draw distance
More background mountains
Boss battle HUD
More object LODs
Improved assets
Camera tweaks
Lots of bug fixes
Fixed launch issue that affected some operating systems
We're already hard at work on the next release, stay tuned!
Release 18 has been a long time in the making but the day has finally come. This update makes the game open world as it was originally intended.
After one week in the beta branch most of the nasty bugs are fixed. Thanks everyone who helped us track down the bugs!
FEATURES
All major locations moved to the open world
Generated roads use A* algorithm for natural paths
More varied terrain generation and better erosion
New continent with Elder King's castle Root Hall
Queen Ingrid and Castle Snow Peak location
Mountain Sheep Tavern location
Merchant Union City landmark
Cursed Mansion landmark
Western Harbor landmark:
Northern Harbor landmark
Northern Guard and Palace Guards
Undead Knight with three variants
Elder Guardians and their Commander
Wolves (plus the ability to buy a pet wolf)
Travel system for going between continents
Procedural idle look at animations for NPC's to make them feel more alive:
Redone dialogue and quest funtionality
Lots of new items and weapons
More elder villager variants (with more to come)
New quests and dialogue
New story characters: - Priest Holloway (The hat is special...) - General Lupus - Gus Grimaldi - Grand Jester - Merchant Union Leader - Tavern Owner - And many others
New set of masks: - Woman villager - Male villager - Old woman villager - Old male villager - Merchant Fodder - Merchant Lord - Wood Elf Lord
Reynold Von Sparkle boss fight
Ulf The Wolf boss fight
Sir Kuolema boss fight
New consistent damage feedback effects
Better quality shading (removes banding which was visible on large round objects)
Replaced cube maps with real-time solution
Particles have correct ambient lighting
Water doesn't flicker anymore on shores
Better quality depth of field
Much longer draw distance
More background mountains
Boss battle HUD
More object LODs
Improved assets
Camera tweaks
Lots of bug fixes
Fixed launch issue that affected some operating systems
We're already hard at work on the next release, stay tuned!
City of Snow Peak is the main landmark of the random snow world:
GPU memory usage has been reduced massively due to smarter foliage handling.
LOD system for terrain which reduces the amount of triangles: (Huge performance boost)
6 stylish pumpkin masks that player can wear:
New priest character type.
New cloud system. Affects visible clouds and cloud shadows: (enhances the accuracy of cloud shadows)
Two new small landmarks in random grass world: - Marquardt's grave - Fortuna's grave
House of the Witch landmark redone.
New bush assets and optimized old bush assets.
Terrain texture and ambient occlusion system has been improved:
New snow grass biome and randomized particle system for dropping snow around objects.
Fixed several inventory icons. (thanks for the tips!)
Hires main menu assets. (and x changed to v for clarity)
Minor tweaks.
WHAT WE'RE WORKING ON NEXT:
With the improved LOD systems we can handle bigger worlds so we're working on moving even more locations to the generated worlds. For example Way to Fortuna landmark is in the process of being moved to the Random Grass World which means the game would start in a random world. Snow Peak castle will be expanded with interior.
New characters will be added. Here's the concept art for the Northmen:
And here's a sneak peek of the in-game models of that same character: The Northmen will have a huge shield which will block direct attacks.
City of Snow Peak is the main landmark of the random snow world:
GPU memory usage has been reduced massively due to smarter foliage handling.
LOD system for terrain which reduces the amount of triangles: (Huge performance boost)
6 stylish pumpkin masks that player can wear:
New priest character type.
New cloud system. Affects visible clouds and cloud shadows: (enhances the accuracy of cloud shadows)
Two new small landmarks in random grass world: - Marquardt's grave - Fortuna's grave
House of the Witch landmark redone.
New bush assets and optimized old bush assets.
Terrain texture and ambient occlusion system has been improved:
New snow grass biome and randomized particle system for dropping snow around objects.
Fixed several inventory icons. (thanks for the tips!)
Hires main menu assets. (and x changed to v for clarity)
Minor tweaks.
WHAT WE'RE WORKING ON NEXT:
With the improved LOD systems we can handle bigger worlds so we're working on moving even more locations to the generated worlds. For example Way to Fortuna landmark is in the process of being moved to the Random Grass World which means the game would start in a random world. Snow Peak castle will be expanded with interior.
New characters will be added. Here's the concept art for the Northmen:
And here's a sneak peek of the in-game models of that same character: The Northmen will have a huge shield which will block direct attacks.
We really wanted to get a build ready for Halloween but in the final moments decided it's better to postpone it by a few days so we can finish one very important feature.
That feature is the terrain LOD system and it will improve performance drastically. Short technical explanation of why it's needed: In earlier versions we used to have evenly spaced grid of polygons for the terrain and it has started to cause more and more issues as we've increased the draw distance. The proper way to do it is to have more dense polygon grid near the camera and less dense polygon grids further away from the camera. So Kimmo rewrote the entire terrain baking system with that in mind and as a result we have visually near identical landscape with 4-10x less polygons. (and with even longer draw distances the difference would have grown bigger and bigger)
We really wanted to get a build ready for Halloween but in the final moments decided it's better to postpone it by a few days so we can finish one very important feature.
That feature is the terrain LOD system and it will improve performance drastically. Short technical explanation of why it's needed: In earlier versions we used to have evenly spaced grid of polygons for the terrain and it has started to cause more and more issues as we've increased the draw distance. The proper way to do it is to have more dense polygon grid near the camera and less dense polygon grids further away from the camera. So Kimmo rewrote the entire terrain baking system with that in mind and as a result we have visually near identical landscape with 4-10x less polygons. (and with even longer draw distances the difference would have grown bigger and bigger)