FEATURES

• New starting location at the border of random generated and handmade content:
  
  
  
• Forest spawner system part I: It spawns forests, flowers, wheat fields and sunflower fields around roads.
  
  
  
  (House, healing altar and camp lights can be seen from far away to aid the navigation at night)
  
  
• Enemy spawners in landmarks and along roads.
  
  
  
• Improved landmark placement using distance fields.
  
  (the actual distance field)
  
  
  (how it looks from landmark's point of view)
  
  
• Lots of other procedural generator improvements.
  
  
  
  
  
• Road generation has received much more attention:
  - Roads can spawn houses along itself.
  - Each landmark decides what kind of road connects to it.
  For example you have a higher chance of encountering elves if you're traveling to Elven Citadel. Road leading to Goblin Forest spawns lots of goblins etc.
  - The road keeps itself horizontally level so it's easier for the player to walk on it:
  
  (In theory NPC's should be able to walk pretty much any road, though the AI navigation might still get stuck sometimes)
  
  
• Big random generator optimizations to get this new more advanced system to run fast enough.
  
• Very long distance terrain shadows.
  
  (Regular objects can't cast these type of shadows but they can be shadowed by these)
  
  
• Multiple save game slots.
  
• New ranged weapon aiming mechanics.
  Holding the left trigger (right-click on a mouse)
  moves the camera to the over the shoulder aiming view.
  (See this earlier announcement post for GIFs)
  
• Blunderbusses, Pistols and Crossbows have their own
  unique carrying and aiming animations:
  
  
  
• Several body armors which can be switched:
  
  
  
• Falling from heights can kill.
  
• Melee hit detection improved.
  
• Boss variants of wolves and wild dogs:
  
  
  
• Several unique armor variants for NPC's.
  
• Several new tree objects.
  
• New merchant guard.
  
• Handmade landmarks have received more polish.
  
• More characters moved to random generators.
  
• Ground spawning animations for several characters.
  
• Several new world generator nodes: Dilate, Shrink etc.
  
• Distance based generation of terrain tiles. (faster)
  
• New Temporal AA adapted from Playdead's wonderful game Inside.
  
• New better quality and faster bloom effect.
  
• Screen-space reflection quality improved.
  
• Additional distance culling system.
  
• More seamless day and night cycle.
  
• Generation seed is displayed.
  
• Tons of small improvements and bug fixes.

This update went through a pretty long testing period, thanks everyone who helped!

What's coming next: In Release 22 forest spawner will get another big feature. It gains the ability to spawn forests anywhere on the map and also bring much more advanced blue noise based hierarchical object spawning to replace the grid jitter algorithm.

This image explains how part of it works:


Each small image depicts the same forest. Spawning stars from the first row and advances left to right. White dot's represent succesfull spawning and gray dots were rejected due to lack of space or proximity to other existing objects. I won't go it into specifics of all the little details but the end result is much more natural forests. In several places the procedurally generated content is starting to produce more beautiful results than the handmade landmarks.

This is how the end result looks like:



Merry Christmas Adventurers!

FEATURES

• New starting location at the border of random generated and handmade content:
  
  
  
• Forest spawner system part I: It spawns forests, flowers, wheat fields and sunflower fields around roads.
  
  
  
  (House, healing altar and camp lights can be seen from far away to aid the navigation at night)
  
  
• Enemy spawners in landmarks and along roads.
  
  
  
• Improved landmark placement using distance fields.
  
  (the actual distance field)
  
  
  (how it looks from landmark's point of view)
  
  
• Lots of other procedural generator improvements.
  
  
  
  
  
• Road generation has received much more attention:
  - Roads can spawn houses along itself.
  - Each landmark decides what kind of road connects to it.
  For example you have a higher chance of encountering elves if you're traveling to Elven Citadel. Road leading to Goblin Forest spawns lots of goblins etc.
  - The road keeps itself horizontally level so it's easier for the player to walk on it:
  
  (In theory NPC's should be able to walk pretty much any road, though the AI navigation might still get stuck sometimes)
  
  
• Big random generator optimizations to get this new more advanced system to run fast enough.
  
• Very long distance terrain shadows.
  
  (Regular objects can't cast these type of shadows but they can be shadowed by these)
  
  
• Multiple save game slots.
  
• New ranged weapon aiming mechanics.
  Holding the left trigger (right-click on a mouse)
  moves the camera to the over the shoulder aiming view.
  (See this earlier announcement post for GIFs)
  
• Blunderbusses, Pistols and Crossbows have their own
  unique carrying and aiming animations:
  
  
  
• Several body armors which can be switched:
  
  
  
• Falling from heights can kill.
  
• Melee hit detection improved.
  
• Boss variants of wolves and wild dogs:
  
  
  
• Several unique armor variants for NPC's.
  
• Several new tree objects.
  
• New merchant guard.
  
• Handmade landmarks have received more polish.
  
• More characters moved to random generators.
  
• Ground spawning animations for several characters.
  
• Several new world generator nodes: Dilate, Shrink etc.
  
• Distance based generation of terrain tiles. (faster)
  
• New Temporal AA adapted from Playdead's wonderful game Inside.
  
• New better quality and faster bloom effect.
  
• Screen-space reflection quality improved.
  
• Additional distance culling system.
  
• More seamless day and night cycle.
  
• Generation seed is displayed.
  
• Tons of small improvements and bug fixes.

This update went through a pretty long testing period, thanks everyone who helped!

What's coming next: In Release 22 forest spawner will get another big feature. It gains the ability to spawn forests anywhere on the map and also bring much more advanced blue noise based hierarchical object spawning to replace the grid jitter algorithm.

This image explains how part of it works:


Each small image depicts the same forest. Spawning stars from the first row and advances left to right. White dot's represent succesfull spawning and gray dots were rejected due to lack of space or proximity to other existing objects. I won't go it into specifics of all the little details but the end result is much more natural forests. In several places the procedurally generated content is starting to produce more beautiful results than the handmade landmarks.

This is how the end result looks like:



Merry Christmas Adventurers!

It's been awhile since the last update, here's information of what's coming next:

• New ranged weapon aiming mechanics. Holding the left trigger (right-click on a mouse) moves the camera to the over the shoulder aiming view.
  
  
• Blunderbusses, Pistols and Crossbows have their own unique carrying and aiming animations. Even though the ranged weapons are powerful they're balanced by limited ammo.
  
  
  
• AI villagers and guards behave in a more fun way to surrounding player inflicted mayhem. The first strike won't make them attack you, though they will warn you to not do it again. Then if you strike them again they'll attack you or flee and call for help.
  
  
  
  
• Road generation has received much more attention.
  
• NPC's have an easier time walking on the roads as they're not too steep anymore - which makes a few important quests possible to complete. Here's some making of shots from along the road:
  
  
  
  
• Support for Minigore 2 (our dual-stick shooter game) style enemy spawners. The system checks with bounding boxes if there's enough room to spawn characters in a specific spot, surprisingly hard problem to solve with a good performance in a procedurally generated 3d game.
  
  
• Falling from heights can damage or kill the player or NPC's. Though it is rumored that a soft landing with a chicken is possible... Though I wouldn't try it, NOPE, never!
  
  
• Day and night cycle improved further. [check the GIF at top]
  
  
• Long distance terrain shadows. In practise that means the terrain shadows will be visible at 2000 meters compared to the earlier 120 meters with Ultra Settings.
  Maybe it's better to show this one with an image comparison as well:
  
  
  
• Temporal Anti-Aliasing, Godrays and Bloom have been largely redone.
  
• Also plenty of location and gameplay polish.

It shouldn't take too many days until the update is ready to roll!

It's been awhile since the last update, here's information of what's coming next:

• New ranged weapon aiming mechanics. Holding the left trigger (right-click on a mouse) moves the camera to the over the shoulder aiming view.
  
  
• Blunderbusses, Pistols and Crossbows have their own unique carrying and aiming animations. Even though the ranged weapons are powerful they're balanced by limited ammo.
  
  
  
• AI villagers and guards behave in a more fun way to surrounding player inflicted mayhem. The first strike won't make them attack you, though they will warn you to not do it again. Then if you strike them again they'll attack you or flee and call for help.
  
  
  
  
• Road generation has received much more attention.
  
• NPC's have an easier time walking on the roads as they're not too steep anymore - which makes a few important quests possible to complete. Here's some making of shots from along the road:
  
  
  
  
• Support for Minigore 2 (our dual-stick shooter game) style enemy spawners. The system checks with bounding boxes if there's enough room to spawn characters in a specific spot, surprisingly hard problem to solve with a good performance in a procedurally generated 3d game.
  
  
• Falling from heights can damage or kill the player or NPC's. Though it is rumored that a soft landing with a chicken is possible... Though I wouldn't try it, NOPE, never!
  
  
• Day and night cycle improved further. [check the GIF at top]
  
  
• Long distance terrain shadows. In practise that means the terrain shadows will be visible at 2000 meters compared to the earlier 120 meters with Ultra Settings.
  Maybe it's better to show this one with an image comparison as well:
  
  
  
• Temporal Anti-Aliasing, Godrays and Bloom have been largely redone.
  
• Also plenty of location and gameplay polish.

It shouldn't take too many days until the update is ready to roll!

FEATURES

• Up to 40% faster generation time thanks to multi-threading via OpenMP.
  
  
  
  ALL TEXTURES RECOMPRESSED
  Everything looks nicer and actually uses less memory. The effect is most apparent on normal maps. Especially on metal surfaces as demonstrated here:
  
  
  
  Smooth surfaces like skin also look better:
  
  
  That would be 2148 textures in total which have received an upgrade.
  We're using an awesome lib called Crunch to do the texture compression.
  
  
• More robust animation blending system.
  
• First strike on an unexpecting character will stagger them giving the player an advantage in combat.
  
  
• Unique staggering animations for:
  - Ghouls
  - Merchants
  - Elder Guardians
  
  
• Unique walking and shooting animations for Rotten Merchant.
  
• Reliable water traversal effects for player and NPC's.
  
• Slower heavy weapon strike for player.
  
• Added spears to the random generator.
  
• Ice sliding gameplay:
  
  
  
• Moon in the sky during night. (it would be nice if it followed a circular trajectory)
  
  
• Low and medium settings performance should be much better.
  
• Fixed a bug where seeing a large number particles at once
  would always crash the game.
  
• Fixed a bug where large chunks of terrain were
  sometimes missing.
  
• Fixed some sound bugs.
  
• Secret landmark...

Even though Hardland model normals are quite precise there's other kinds of visual artifacts which can and will happen. One of them is this precision issue with shadow maps:
http://i.imgur.com/KeRf6NG.gif

It happens because the shadows start casting too near to the surface.
The opposite of shadow acne is peter panning where shadows start casting too far away from the surface.

Here's a demonstration:

Just remember that good depth bias settings are between Peter and Acne :)


Best Regards,
Timo

FEATURES

• Up to 40% faster generation time thanks to multi-threading via OpenMP.
  
  
  
  ALL TEXTURES RECOMPRESSED
  Everything looks nicer and actually uses less memory. The effect is most apparent on normal maps. Especially on metal surfaces as demonstrated here:
  
  
  
  Smooth surfaces like skin also look better:
  
  
  That would be 2148 textures in total which have received an upgrade.
  We're using an awesome lib called Crunch to do the texture compression.
  
  
• More robust animation blending system.
  
• First strike on an unexpecting character will stagger them giving the player an advantage in combat.
  
  
• Unique staggering animations for:
  - Ghouls
  - Merchants
  - Elder Guardians
  
  
• Unique walking and shooting animations for Rotten Merchant.
  
• Reliable water traversal effects for player and NPC's.
  
• Slower heavy weapon strike for player.
  
• Added spears to the random generator.
  
• Ice sliding gameplay:
  
  
  
• Moon in the sky during night. (it would be nice if it followed a circular trajectory)
  
  
• Low and medium settings performance should be much better.
  
• Fixed a bug where seeing a large number particles at once
  would always crash the game.
  
• Fixed a bug where large chunks of terrain were
  sometimes missing.
  
• Fixed some sound bugs.
  
• Secret landmark...

Even though Hardland model normals are quite precise there's other kinds of visual artifacts which can and will happen. One of them is this precision issue with shadow maps:
http://i.imgur.com/KeRf6NG.gif

It happens because the shadows start casting too near to the surface.
The opposite of shadow acne is peter panning where shadows start casting too far away from the surface.

Here's a demonstration:

Just remember that good depth bias settings are between Peter and Acne :)


Best Regards,
Timo

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.
  
• Fixed this annoying T-pose glitch that happened upon character death:
  http://i.imgur.com/ZLEZLed.gif
  
  
• Treasure chest opening and loot ejection improved.
  - Trap chests can spawn characters properly.
  - Loot randomized.
  
• Starting areas expanded and polished.
  
• Objects can follow the angle of the underlying terrain.
  
  
  
• Improved screen-space reflection quality.
  
• New level up effect and other particle effects improved.
  
  
• Major game engine improvements.
  
• More predicable physics simulation and less CPU spiking.
  
  
• New stone fences, smaller watchtower, larger 4-wheel cart.
  
• Increased Ghoul attack range by adding squash and stretch animation for the striking arm. (ala Battletoads!)
  
• Added more characters to random generator lists.
  
• Larger more dangerous Ghoul variant.
  
• New goblin unit Goblin Bomber.
  
• Visual changes to Goblins.
  
• Added new ground foliage.
  
  
• Gold pull effect improved.
  
• Disabled head-tracking in death.
  
• Health bar is always shown for aggro characters.
  
• Addded support for disc shaped particle emitters.
  
• Graphics config changes and more graphics options.

Here's a short video comparing Release 19 mechanics and fixes to Release 18.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6aGdpW_Jiw

Until next time!

Best Regards,
Timo

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.
  
• Fixed this annoying T-pose glitch that happened upon character death:
  http://i.imgur.com/ZLEZLed.gif
  
  
• Treasure chest opening and loot ejection improved.
  - Trap chests can spawn characters properly.
  - Loot randomized.
  
• Starting areas expanded and polished.
  
• Objects can follow the angle of the underlying terrain.
  
  
  
• Improved screen-space reflection quality.
  
• New level up effect and other particle effects improved.
  
  
• Major game engine improvements.
  
• More predicable physics simulation and less CPU spiking.
  
  
• New stone fences, smaller watchtower, larger 4-wheel cart.
  
• Increased Ghoul attack range by adding squash and stretch animation for the striking arm. (ala Battletoads!)
  
• Added more characters to random generator lists.
  
• Larger more dangerous Ghoul variant.
  
• New goblin unit Goblin Bomber.
  
• Visual changes to Goblins.
  
• Added new ground foliage.
  
  
• Gold pull effect improved.
  
• Disabled head-tracking in death.
  
• Health bar is always shown for aggro characters.
  
• Addded support for disc shaped particle emitters.
  
• Graphics config changes and more graphics options.

Here's a short video comparing Release 19 mechanics and fixes to Release 18.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6aGdpW_Jiw

Until next time!

Best Regards,
Timo

The Open World update is available now!



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!

Best Regards,
Timo

The Open World update is available now!



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!

Best Regards,
Timo