Dec 14, 2017

Boundless - vdragon

Internally we’ve been calling this our “Creatures and Combat” release in which we’ve been focusing on adding to the excitement of exploring and hunting. We’ve been improving the feel of combat with making the responsiveness and physics of shooting better, as well as improving the way we deal with hits and damage in an online, potentially high-latency game. The creatures themselves are much more accurate and dangerous, and have a huge number of new attack types and special moves for you to deal with. We’ve also added a new feature - Conduit Meteorites - which crash down onto the planets ripping out uncontrolled portals through which waves of creatures pour. Defeating all the waves of creatures allows the meteorites to be harvested for large amounts of conduit-fused Oortstone.

The next releases will continue to build on this work, with a full balance of damage and skills to ensure that different play styles are supported in combat and for other areas of the game. Also the addition of new features such as Rage and Focus, Stamina and reviving. We’re not just focusing on combat though – we’re also planning changes to the recipes in the game, and a lot more resources to collect from exploration, hunting and mining.

If combat isn’t your thing, then don’t worry - Boundless will be equally playable by players who want to avoid all combat.

Please checkout the ever awesome Jiivita’s video that explores and introduces the new Meteorite combat events:

Meteors, Creatures, and Combat! | New Feature Intro | Boundless

Important:

This release contains a significant networking optimisation for sending player input to the game server. The aim of these networking changes is to make the game more robust against variable and poor quality local network connections.

Please report how these networking changes perform for you in comparison to earlier Live versions. Hopefully there should be reduced latency and rubber banding. We’re particularly interested to hear how the game performs for players who have experience consistently bad connections in the past.

Please share feedback on the combat and drop balance. It’s a work in progress.

Release Notes:

Art + Animation + Assets:
- Creatures:
  - Added new spitter and cuttletrunk attack animations.
  - Added new cuttletrunk beam attack VFX.
  - Scaled down and reshaped the spitter projectile model so it’s more realistic.
- Conduit Meteorites:
  - Added meteorite signal VFX so the meteorite site is visible from a distance.
  - Improved meteorite effects.
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
- Changed light cube so it can be shaken while the light is on and increased light time to 10 seconds.
- Slingbow projectile physics adjusted to allow make their flight travel through the cross hairs and be easier to aim.
- Raw and Cooked Starberries now recover an additional 100 hit points each.
- Food and brew consumption speed has been adjusted depending on the healing amount.
- Master Beacon Controls:
  - A Beacon Control can now be set as the Master Beacon Control.
  - This defines the location of the Beacon for warping into. This allows players to control the entry point of their beacon.
  - The location of a Settlement on the compass is now defined by the location Master Beacon Control of the Beacon with the highest prestige. Allows players to better define the “centre” of a Settlement.
  - The Master Beacon Control can only be destroyed if there is only 1 plot left in the beacon. It’s now no longer possible to have a beacon without a beacon control.
  - It’s not possible to unplot the plot containing the Master Beacon Control.
Creatures + Combat + Characters:
- Creature combat overhaul. Creatures are being updated to be more competitive in combat and to have a lot more variety between their tiers and worlds. Please be aware that combat is going to get a lot more challenging if you do not have the right attributes before entering the current moon or ring world. This is an initial pass on the spitter and cuttletrunk species and you can expect further changes to the other creatures, balance changes to player and creature attributes as we continue to make combat more fun and interesting. We intend to add options at a later date which will make combat easier to avoid for people who have no interest in it. There is a skill in the skills menu (Shadow Effect) which makes you harder for creatures to detect.
- Wildstock charge at their target multiple times. Added a short pause between charges.
- New Creature Generation Rules:
  - When a creature is generated for a world it is assigned a random bundle of attacks. This means creatures on world-A may not use the same attacks as creatures on world-B.
  - Elemental spawning has been changed to a fixed percentage chance making it more consistent between the worlds and tiers.
  - Exotic creatures distinguishable via the presence of decals will have different attacks to creatures without decals.
- Creature Behaviour:
  - Spitters and Cuttletrunks have various weapons to select between and can perform different actions in combat such as dodging, attacking or flanking.
  - Each power tier is now unique and has different behaviours and weapons for you to discover and conquer.
  - Creatures can now apply status effects to themselves to improve their defence and damage potential. There are ways to prevent the creatures from using the status effect, see if you can figure out how to.
  - The dodge speed and distance has been updated so smaller creatures move slower but larger creatures move faster.
- New Creature Weapon Types:
  - Spread – Creatures can now fire multiple projectiles in a horizontal, vertical or spread format in a single attack like the player’s slingbow.
  - Rapid – Creatures can now fire bursts of projectiles.
  - Rate Of Fire - The speed of each rapid attack has been balanced with its own rate of fire time.
  - Arc – Creatures can now fire any projectile in a sweeping horizontal arc from one side to another.
  - Shotgun – A large projectile which deals damage and knocks the player back.
  - Homing – A player seeking projectile which can move fast or slow and damages the player on impact.
  - Beam – A continuous laser beam attack which deals damage to the player when they are in the beam. They can be used as a sweep or directly at the player.
  - Bombs:
    - Explosive Bombs – A projectile which explodes on impact and deals an area of effect damage to nearby players.
    - Timed Bombs – A projectile which bounces off the surface and explodes after a period of time dealing an area of effect damage to nearby players.
    - Sticky Bombs – A projectile which sticks to the surface and explodes after a period of time dealing an area of effect damage to nearby players.
    - Cluster Bombs – An upgraded sticky or timed bomb projectile which fragments into multiple bombs on detonation.
  - Lobbed – Creatures can fire their projectile along a vertical arc in addition to the current direct shot.
  - Please note: Some weapons do not currently use the intended model or visual effects.
  - Please note: Some of the attacks do not use the correct audio.
- Creature Combat Balance:
  - Damage for Spitters and Cuttletrunks has been adjusted to account for the new weapons.
  - Each creature weapon has been balanced individually for combat orientated players.
  - Please be aware that further adjustments on player and creature attributes will be made during development, so you can expect to see big changes to your attributes and the creatures’ in future.
  - Made spitter projectiles slightly less accurate.
  - Spitter movement speeds have been adjusted. Low tier spitters are now slower and high tier spitters are now faster.
  - Tier 1 spitters do not have the 3 shot rapid attack by default. A special spitter with decals is now required.
  - Wildstock charge attack speeds have been adjusted, Low tier wildstock now charge slower and high tier wildstock now charge faster.
  - Roadrunners now use their immense speed to help them run on water.
- Creature Attack Improvements:
  - Creatures now have a cooldown for each attack to prevent them from using their best attack too frequently.
  - Creatures have certain conditions which need to be met before they start using certain attacks. For example, the number of attacking players, the amount of health remaining on the creature, weapon used and a few others for you to discover.
  - Creatures will sometimes perform a tell animation before they perform certain attacks. Look out for these if you want to avoid powerful attacks from a creature.
  - Improved the shot accuracy of projectiles fired by creatures. The projectile attacks will now be able to hit you very accurately, so you need to be much more nimble to respond to the projectile once it has already been fired instead of being able to easily trick the AI into firing wildly far from you.
  - Projectile sizes have been adjusted to match the new projectiles and to make dodging creature attacks easier because of the improved creature accuracy.
- Creature prowl:
  - Creatures will now give up on a target that they haven’t seen for a while.
  - They are still aggressive when prowling and if they see you they will attack straight away.
  - While prowling creatures will make fewer sounds (so less annoying when you are inside).
  - The Hopper will not whistle while prowling.
- Conduit Meteorites:
  - Meteorites will now occasionally aggressively impact nearby to players.
  - They can be found more quickly by exploring.
  - Creature portals spawn around a meteorite and drop creatures who will try to protect the meteorite.
  - Once all of the creatures have been killed the meteorite can be mined.
  - Inside the meteorite blocks is a meteorite core that can be looted for drops!
  - The more players in an area at the start of the event the harder the meteorite will be to beat.
  - Harder meteorites will have better loot.
    New drops have been added and the amount of drops depends on the size of the event and the type of drops depends on the world difficulty.
  - The amount and power of the creatures spawned has been altered to make it easier for solo players and more challenging for groups.
  - Meteorites will not spawn within 64m of a beacon.
- Drop Rates:
  - Removed Oort Stone from all creatures except the Roadrunner as the new meteorite system is intended to be how you collect Oort Stone.
  - Lowered the drop rates of certain items as the items were being dropped too frequently and in very high quantities.
- Creature General Improvements:
  - Hoppers will not explode on the other side of a wall to their target.
  - Hoppers now have an additional delay on explosions they should always whistle for 1.5 seconds before they can explode.
  - Creatures’ power level is now represented with a name rather than a number.
  - Improved projectiles fired by creatures, their projectile attacks will now be able to hit you very accurately, so you must be much more nimble to respond to the projectile once it has already been fired instead of being able to easily trick the AI into firing wildly far from you.
  - Improved behaviour of Hopper explosions and any other relevant damage that is not (and should not) be predicted by the client so that its effects are delayed and distributed to the client to coincide with the time-point in which the client observers the Hopper (or whatever is otherwise causing the damage) to be in the visual state where the damage would be applied… aka you receive damage when the Hopper explodes visually on your screen. This also means the Hopper cannot magically hurt you even if you had moved away from the point of the explosion from your perspective.
  - Fixed an issue leading to rubber banding if a Hopper jumps at you just before exploding where you would be pushed away from the Hopper and then rubber banded back to where you were before once it explodes.
  - Fixed a bug where the client would mispredict hitting a creature if the projectile hit the creature at the end of its range just before it would have vanished from travelling too far.
  - Full support for creatures to throw timed bombs that can start their fuse on contact, and for projectiles that explode on contact, and that can be set to bounce off the ground and only explode on contact with entities.
  - Projectiles and bombs fired by creatures will ignore dead bodies lying on the ground, firing/moving through them. But client projectiles will still interact with them so that you can gather the loot.
  - Can now give entities different hitboxes when dead, stopping strange interactions with players who are dead on the ground, but also giving us scope to improve more interactions with dead creatures too. Prediction systems extended to support this.
Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
- Changed it so that you can warp any distance with any size of Warp (skill limit still applies). No more frustratingly large Warps required. The ultimate aim is to encourage Warps constructed in the worlds rather than using the emergency Warps in the Sanctum.
- Health gains from Vitality reduced to start slower, and then accelerate towards 100%.
- Threat and Aggression
  - Shadow Effect is now a multiplier rather than a subtractor.
  - Rebalanced Shadow Effect.
  - Rebalanced Threat Modifier.
GUI + HUD:
- Mastery effect on tool and weapon speed tweaked, and represented in the GUI.
- Fixed filter categories in machines and the knowledge screen.
- Recipe and item lists in machines and the knowledge screen are now more usefully categorised and filtered.
- Some GUI optimisations that reduce the cost of adding new combat messages.
- GUI buttons are more consistent in colour.
- Added a new tool tip to explain meteorites and how you need a beacon to play certain blocks.
- New notifications have added to better explain how to remove the new master beacon control.
- Improved GUI performance.
- Defeated text has been made more consistent.
- Unified Entity Health Bars 2.0:
  - Modified the health bar presentation to improve health ranges and progression presentation.
  - All creatures, blocks, entities and players now share a consistent and unified health bar across all worlds.
  - The health bar gradually steps up to a higher scale as the health of the entity geometrically increases. This is to keep the presentation tight and more relevant to the scale.
  - The scale is consistent across worlds to help players understand the relative vitality of new creatures they discover.
  - As an entity’s health decreases the health bar will step down through the geometric scale.
  - For players where the maximum health is relevant the health bar will not step down through the scale. This helps players understand how far their health is away from their maximum.
- Status Effects:
  - Added a New Citizen status effect for new players. Players with this effect will not be attacked by creatures (unless provoked!).
  - Added a new Interstellar Stasis status effect for players who are not authenticated by the server. This is to indicate when you cannot perform certain actions until the server has verified your character after walking through a warp or portal.
  - New general icons and status effect icons have been added.
- Wear Update:
  - Wear is now presented as total values rather than fractions of percentages.
  - Different machines have different wear totals.
  - Different spanners repair different amounts of wear.
- Contextual Messages and Notifications:
  - A message box now appears on the HUD to display contextual messages and notifications.
  - Notifications are presented to the player when important information needs to be displayed. These are mostly used to highlight the status of your builds and alerts you when your Beacon or Campfire is nearly out of fuel or it has expired.
  - Contextual messages are general pieces of advice which are used to highlight information to the player.
  - Contextual messages appear when certain actions are performed and are removed when the action is complete or after a certain period of time has passed.
  - Contextual messages will appear a certain number of times before they are no longer displayed.
  - Contextual messages have cooldown which prevents them from showing up repeatedly in a short period of time.
  - Contextual messages can be disabled in the settings menu at the bottom of the Game tab.
- Damage Types Update:
  - Renamed melee, projectile and impact damage to be kinetic, impulse and falling.
  - Creature attacks assigned to kinetic or impulse.
SFX + Music:
- New meteor sounds.
- Further meteor sounds.
Engine:
- Fixed a couple of server and client memory leaks.
- Minor server tweaks to assist with performance diagnosis.
- Fixed a rare issue where a player could get locked onto a world and was unable to rejoin the game until a server was restarted.
- Fixed a potential server crash where a user was able to interact with a new character in an unexpected way before the server was alerted to the character creation.
- Rendering performance:
  - Set level of detail distances for effects and meshes to improve performance in busy areas.
  - Added graphics option to set object detail level, which scales effects and meshes draw distances.
  - Added graphics option for ‘target minimum fps’ that will dynamically alter the detail levels if the frame rate drops too low. Defaults to 20fps.
  - ~5% speed increase in complex scenes on all platforms.
  - Additional ~10% speed increase in complex scenes on Windows.
- Client now sends all game inputs to the server over UDP instead of WebSocket. This should hopefully mean that people suffering from packet loss can play the game much more smoothly. The “Disable unstable network” option is now defaulted to “on”. Data about this traffic has been added to the debug screens and to the latency screen.
- New version check code to spot client running on the wrong version.
- Fixed drop shadows sometimes looking incorrect.
Bug fixes:
- Fixed an issue where it was not possible to complete all requirements for the objective ‘Add A Member To Your Beacon’.
- Fix for Cuttletrunk pull attack effect playing after the pull attack has finished.
- Fix for Hoppers exploding multiple times and not dying.
- Fix for camera flicker when sending chat messages.
- Fixed other players being able to grapple your item pickups from creatures.
- Fixed dead creatures with their items collected blocking player shots and grapples.
- Fixed mispredictions sometimes when interacting with the world if there were players/creatures walking around in front of you, and fixed the interaction with blocks to be consistent with the GUI, so that you cannot interact “through” players/creatures to a block.
- Fixed camera not resetting when creating a new character.
- Fixed missing held items on Mac version.
- Fix for hoppers continuing to play their steam whistle even after calming down.
- Fix for some effects not playing on the meteorite (flames, smoke).
- Fix meteorite crash landing audio playing multiple times.

Resolved Known Issues:

The following items were known issues in previous releases and have now been resolved.

Choosing Return to Sanctum option briefly displays ‘wrap error’ text on screen.
Clicking the Craft button very quickly may close the active recipe.
Damage indicator circle can sometimes remain on screen even when no damage is received.
Number of available feats is incorrect.
Objectives & Feats - Some tasks are not being tracked correctly.
When Beacon fuel is nearly full, adding extra fuel will display a message saying that there are no consumable fuel items.
When selecting a skill, if the Cancel option is overlapping it, the skill will be unselected.
Z-fighting with some items (workbench and other machines) when placed underwater.

Known Issues:

The following items are known issues in this release.

(new) ‘Supply & Demand’ Trader feats are not working.
(new) Breaking any machine during crafting will destroy the ingredients in use.
(new) Camera is sometimes stuck after exiting GUI menus.
(new) Cannot mine blocks when standing in the same position as a torch.
(new) Creeping on top of chiselled blocks does not prevent characters from falling off.
(new) Current world filter on Locations Tab includes other world locations.
(new) Distance climbed feats (Mountain Climber I, Mountain Climber II, Ain’t No Mountain High Enough) are not working.
(new) Explorer Feats ‘No Going Back’, ‘Collaborative Travel’ and ‘No Warp Too Far’ are not working.
(new) Fog can linger inside closed buildings.
(new) Grapple tools not working correctly when winding grapple up or down after grappling block drops.
(new) Hitting blades of grass after hitting soil blocks resets block damage.
(new) It’s possible to get stuck between two walls of blocks when using a grapple tool to swing through a portal.
(new) Left hand sometimes constantly triggers input when inside the sanctum.
(new) Machines sometimes stop crafting after reaching 0s from the Currently Crafting list.
(new) Minus/negative XP may sometimes appear on screen.
(new) Natural crystal base doesn’t have a mesh and can stick out from storage.
(new) Other players sometimes appear to not be have any items in their hands.
(new) Signs float after destroying blocks they have been placed on.
(new) Sometimes it’s not possible to return to the sanctum after losing all health.
(new) Sun effects are visible through planets.
(new) Terrain Detail on lava is inconsistent depending on the setting used.
(new) Text cursor goes off screen on signs after pressing the Up key when there is more than 4 lines of text.
(new) The message ‘You have been defeated’ can sometimes remain on screen after returning to a world from the sanctum.
(new) Torches on sloped blocks have the wrong hitbox.
(new) Water can flow through closed doors.
Entity rendering will not always work correctly when there are multiple warps very close together, or where a warp opens up to a location very near where the entrance is.
GUI rendered incorrectly on Intel HD graphics (and some AMD / GTX laptop GPUs) on Windows.
If the game (loader) fails to start on Windows 7 and 8 you may need to install https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/2999226/update-for-universal-c-runtime-in-windows
Item placed into Request Basket will disappear when placing the same item into storage.
Item wanted is completely different to what was placed there before on the Request Basket.
Items may unequip themselves after adding a stack of items to a smart stack.
Items will occasionally be unable to smart stack with other items that belong in the same smart stack category.
Menus may constantly reappear on screen after closing them.
Opening or closing doors and trapdoors when standing too close to them will restrict player movement. To get out of the situation, interact with the door or trapdoor again.
Region names may not be displayed correctly after discovering one.
Request Baskets (previously Buying plinths) that had wanted items set before v151 have unset them. Sorry. Going forward they will be fine.
Shift-clicking any inventory item on the Furnace GUI when ingredient slots are full will cause that item to disappear. To retrieve that item, break the Furnace.
Skill descriptions are not final.
Some interactive blocks (crafting table, machine, and beacon control) have become corrupted during the migration. This will result in at best those blocks not being able to be interacted with, at worst the game crashing when interacting with those blocks. To fix the issue the block(s) in question need to be re-placed. In the case of anything other than a beacon control the block can simply be broken, picked up, and then re-placed. In the case of a beacon control this will work, although it would result in all the plots having to be re-placed one at a time and during that process the contents being unprotected. A better workaround for a beacon control is to craft a new beacon control, place that, and then break the old one, which will keep the beacon’s plots placed throughout the process.
Speech bubbles may still be displayed above players after going through portals.
The recipes are not final.
When expanding a smart stack offered by another player during trading, it will be empty.

Release 184.1:

Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
- Gravity has been removed from the grapple projectile. Expect more balance changes in the future.
Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
- Forced a player skill reset to allow players to recover skills lost when they were renamed.
GUI + HUD:
- Added new log messages for invalid player interactions.
- Improved the warning log messages presentation.
Engine:
- Tweaked the configuration of networking on Mac OS X to improve performance.
Bug fixes:
- Fixed an issue where you couldn’t withdraw coin from a plinth.

Release 184.2:

Creatures + Combat + Characters:
- Improved the estimation of players who will attack a meteorite. Players should now see the larger meteorite types more often.
Server:
- Added logging to try an debug a server crash when world regeneration tries to remove machine blocks.
Bug fixes:

Release 184.3:

Re-enabled world regeneration after working around a recurring crash on Elopor (still working on a permanent fix).
Fix for client crash when being shot at by a Spitter then walking through a portal.
Fix for rare client crash when a server shuts down.
Fix for dead creatures showing up on the compass.

Release 184.4:

Added logging to help debug a crash when firing a grapple.
Added logging to help debug a crash when removing meteorite effects.
Blacklist corrupt chunks from regeneration on server failures. Chunks will be analysed to determine fixes.
Fix for Spitters getting stuck prowling when their target is closer than 18m.
Fixed issue choosing a spawn location.
Fixed issue from cuttletrunk beam attack.
Fixed issue when backing up player status.
Fixed rare character manager crash.
Prevent GUI client crashes in RecipeScreen, InventoryScreen, TradingScreen, PowercoreScreen and MachineScreen.

Cross posted from Devlog Forum

Dec 14, 2017

Release 184: Meteorites and Combat!

Boundless - vdragon

Art + Animation + Assets:
- Creatures:
  - Added new spitter and cuttletrunk attack animations.
  - Added new cuttletrunk beam attack VFX.
  - Scaled down and reshaped the spitter projectile model so it’s more realistic.
- Conduit Meteorites:
  - Added meteorite signal VFX so the meteorite site is visible from a distance.
  - Improved meteorite effects.
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
- Changed light cube so it can be shaken while the light is on and increased light time to 10 seconds.
- Slingbow projectile physics adjusted to allow make their flight travel through the cross hairs and be easier to aim.
- Raw and Cooked Starberries now recover an additional 100 hit points each.
- Food and brew consumption speed has been adjusted depending on the healing amount.
- Master Beacon Controls:
  - A Beacon Control can now be set as the Master Beacon Control.
  - This defines the location of the Beacon for warping into. This allows players to control the entry point of their beacon.
  - The location of a Settlement on the compass is now defined by the location Master Beacon Control of the Beacon with the highest prestige. Allows players to better define the “centre” of a Settlement.
  - The Master Beacon Control can only be destroyed if there is only 1 plot left in the beacon. It’s now no longer possible to have a beacon without a beacon control.
  - It’s not possible to unplot the plot containing the Master Beacon Control.
Creatures + Combat + Characters:
- Creature combat overhaul. Creatures are being updated to be more competitive in combat and to have a lot more variety between their tiers and worlds. Please be aware that combat is going to get a lot more challenging if you do not have the right attributes before entering the current moon or ring world. This is an initial pass on the spitter and cuttletrunk species and you can expect further changes to the other creatures, balance changes to player and creature attributes as we continue to make combat more fun and interesting. We intend to add options at a later date which will make combat easier to avoid for people who have no interest in it. There is a skill in the skills menu (Shadow Effect) which makes you harder for creatures to detect.
- Wildstock charge at their target multiple times. Added a short pause between charges.
- New Creature Generation Rules:
  - When a creature is generated for a world it is assigned a random bundle of attacks. This means creatures on world-A may not use the same attacks as creatures on world-B.
  - Elemental spawning has been changed to a fixed percentage chance making it more consistent between the worlds and tiers.
  - Exotic creatures distinguishable via the presence of decals will have different attacks to creatures without decals.
- Creature Behaviour:
  - Spitters and Cuttletrunks have various weapons to select between and can perform different actions in combat such as dodging, attacking or flanking.
  - Each power tier is now unique and has different behaviours and weapons for you to discover and conquer.
  - Creatures can now apply status effects to themselves to improve their defence and damage potential. There are ways to prevent the creatures from using the status effect, see if you can figure out how to.
  - The dodge speed and distance has been updated so smaller creatures move slower but larger creatures move faster.
- New Creature Weapon Types:
  - Spread – Creatures can now fire multiple projectiles in a horizontal, vertical or spread format in a single attack like the player’s slingbow.
  - Rapid – Creatures can now fire bursts of projectiles.
  - Rate Of Fire - The speed of each rapid attack has been balanced with its own rate of fire time.
  - Arc – Creatures can now fire any projectile in a sweeping horizontal arc from one side to another.
  - Shotgun – A large projectile which deals damage and knocks the player back.
  - Homing – A player seeking projectile which can move fast or slow and damages the player on impact.
  - Beam – A continuous laser beam attack which deals damage to the player when they are in the beam. They can be used as a sweep or directly at the player.
  - Bombs:
    - Explosive Bombs – A projectile which explodes on impact and deals an area of effect damage to nearby players.
    - Timed Bombs – A projectile which bounces off the surface and explodes after a period of time dealing an area of effect damage to nearby players.
    - Sticky Bombs – A projectile which sticks to the surface and explodes after a period of time dealing an area of effect damage to nearby players.
    - Cluster Bombs – An upgraded sticky or timed bomb projectile which fragments into multiple bombs on detonation.
  - Lobbed – Creatures can fire their projectile along a vertical arc in addition to the current direct shot.
  - Please note: Some weapons do not currently use the intended model or visual effects.
  - Please note: Some of the attacks do not use the correct audio.
- Creature Combat Balance:
  - Damage for Spitters and Cuttletrunks has been adjusted to account for the new weapons.
  - Each creature weapon has been balanced individually for combat orientated players.
  - Please be aware that further adjustments on player and creature attributes will be made during development, so you can expect to see big changes to your attributes and the creatures’ in future.
  - Made spitter projectiles slightly less accurate.
  - Spitter movement speeds have been adjusted. Low tier spitters are now slower and high tier spitters are now faster.
  - Tier 1 spitters do not have the 3 shot rapid attack by default. A special spitter with decals is now required.
  - Wildstock charge attack speeds have been adjusted, Low tier wildstock now charge slower and high tier wildstock now charge faster.
  - Roadrunners now use their immense speed to help them run on water.
- Creature Attack Improvements:
  - Creatures now have a cooldown for each attack to prevent them from using their best attack too frequently.
  - Creatures have certain conditions which need to be met before they start using certain attacks. For example, the number of attacking players, the amount of health remaining on the creature, weapon used and a few others for you to discover.
  - Creatures will sometimes perform a tell animation before they perform certain attacks. Look out for these if you want to avoid powerful attacks from a creature.
  - Improved the shot accuracy of projectiles fired by creatures. The projectile attacks will now be able to hit you very accurately, so you need to be much more nimble to respond to the projectile once it has already been fired instead of being able to easily trick the AI into firing wildly far from you.
  - Projectile sizes have been adjusted to match the new projectiles and to make dodging creature attacks easier because of the improved creature accuracy.
- Creature prowl:
  - Creatures will now give up on a target that they haven’t seen for a while.
  - They are still aggressive when prowling and if they see you they will attack straight away.
  - While prowling creatures will make fewer sounds (so less annoying when you are inside).
  - The Hopper will not whistle while prowling.
- Conduit Meteorites:
  - Meteorites will now occasionally aggressively impact nearby to players.
  - They can be found more quickly by exploring.
  - Creature portals spawn around a meteorite and drop creatures who will try to protect the meteorite.
  - Once all of the creatures have been killed the meteorite can be mined.
  - Inside the meteorite blocks is a meteorite core that can be looted for drops!
  - The more players in an area at the start of the event the harder the meteorite will be to beat.
  - Harder meteorites will have better loot.
    New drops have been added and the amount of drops depends on the size of the event and the type of drops depends on the world difficulty.
  - The amount and power of the creatures spawned has been altered to make it easier for solo players and more challenging for groups.
  - Meteorites will not spawn within 64m of a beacon.
- Drop Rates:
  - Removed Oort Stone from all creatures except the Roadrunner as the new meteorite system is intended to be how you collect Oort Stone.
  - Lowered the drop rates of certain items as the items were being dropped too frequently and in very high quantities.
- Creature General Improvements:
  - Hoppers will not explode on the other side of a wall to their target.
  - Hoppers now have an additional delay on explosions they should always whistle for 1.5 seconds before they can explode.
  - Creatures’ power level is now represented with a name rather than a number.
  - Improved projectiles fired by creatures, their projectile attacks will now be able to hit you very accurately, so you must be much more nimble to respond to the projectile once it has already been fired instead of being able to easily trick the AI into firing wildly far from you.
  - Improved behaviour of Hopper explosions and any other relevant damage that is not (and should not) be predicted by the client so that its effects are delayed and distributed to the client to coincide with the time-point in which the client observers the Hopper (or whatever is otherwise causing the damage) to be in the visual state where the damage would be applied… aka you receive damage when the Hopper explodes visually on your screen. This also means the Hopper cannot magically hurt you even if you had moved away from the point of the explosion from your perspective.
  - Fixed an issue leading to rubber banding if a Hopper jumps at you just before exploding where you would be pushed away from the Hopper and then rubber banded back to where you were before once it explodes.
  - Fixed a bug where the client would mispredict hitting a creature if the projectile hit the creature at the end of its range just before it would have vanished from travelling too far.
  - Full support for creatures to throw timed bombs that can start their fuse on contact, and for projectiles that explode on contact, and that can be set to bounce off the ground and only explode on contact with entities.
  - Projectiles and bombs fired by creatures will ignore dead bodies lying on the ground, firing/moving through them. But client projectiles will still interact with them so that you can gather the loot.
  - Can now give entities different hitboxes when dead, stopping strange interactions with players who are dead on the ground, but also giving us scope to improve more interactions with dead creatures too. Prediction systems extended to support this.
Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
- Changed it so that you can warp any distance with any size of Warp (skill limit still applies). No more frustratingly large Warps required. The ultimate aim is to encourage Warps constructed in the worlds rather than using the emergency Warps in the Sanctum.
- Health gains from Vitality reduced to start slower, and then accelerate towards 100%.
- Threat and Aggression
  - Shadow Effect is now a multiplier rather than a subtractor.
  - Rebalanced Shadow Effect.
  - Rebalanced Threat Modifier.
GUI + HUD:
- Mastery effect on tool and weapon speed tweaked, and represented in the GUI.
- Fixed filter categories in machines and the knowledge screen.
- Recipe and item lists in machines and the knowledge screen are now more usefully categorised and filtered.
- Some GUI optimisations that reduce the cost of adding new combat messages.
- GUI buttons are more consistent in colour.
- Added a new tool tip to explain meteorites and how you need a beacon to play certain blocks.
- New notifications have added to better explain how to remove the new master beacon control.
- Improved GUI performance.
- Defeated text has been made more consistent.
- Unified Entity Health Bars 2.0:
  - Modified the health bar presentation to improve health ranges and progression presentation.
  - All creatures, blocks, entities and players now share a consistent and unified health bar across all worlds.
  - The health bar gradually steps up to a higher scale as the health of the entity geometrically increases. This is to keep the presentation tight and more relevant to the scale.
  - The scale is consistent across worlds to help players understand the relative vitality of new creatures they discover.
  - As an entity’s health decreases the health bar will step down through the geometric scale.
  - For players where the maximum health is relevant the health bar will not step down through the scale. This helps players understand how far their health is away from their maximum.
- Status Effects:
  - Added a New Citizen status effect for new players. Players with this effect will not be attacked by creatures (unless provoked!).
  - Added a new Interstellar Stasis status effect for players who are not authenticated by the server. This is to indicate when you cannot perform certain actions until the server has verified your character after walking through a warp or portal.
  - New general icons and status effect icons have been added.
- Wear Update:
  - Wear is now presented as total values rather than fractions of percentages.
  - Different machines have different wear totals.
  - Different spanners repair different amounts of wear.
- Contextual Messages and Notifications:
  - A message box now appears on the HUD to display contextual messages and notifications.
  - Notifications are presented to the player when important information needs to be displayed. These are mostly used to highlight the status of your builds and alerts you when your Beacon or Campfire is nearly out of fuel or it has expired.
  - Contextual messages are general pieces of advice which are used to highlight information to the player.
  - Contextual messages appear when certain actions are performed and are removed when the action is complete or after a certain period of time has passed.
  - Contextual messages will appear a certain number of times before they are no longer displayed.
  - Contextual messages have cooldown which prevents them from showing up repeatedly in a short period of time.
  - Contextual messages can be disabled in the settings menu at the bottom of the Game tab.
- Damage Types Update:
  - Renamed melee, projectile and impact damage to be kinetic, impulse and falling.
  - Creature attacks assigned to kinetic or impulse.
SFX + Music:
- New meteor sounds.
- Further meteor sounds.
Engine:
- Fixed a couple of server and client memory leaks.
- Minor server tweaks to assist with performance diagnosis.
- Fixed a rare issue where a player could get locked onto a world and was unable to rejoin the game until a server was restarted.
- Fixed a potential server crash where a user was able to interact with a new character in an unexpected way before the server was alerted to the character creation.
- Rendering performance:
  - Set level of detail distances for effects and meshes to improve performance in busy areas.
  - Added graphics option to set object detail level, which scales effects and meshes draw distances.
  - Added graphics option for ‘target minimum fps’ that will dynamically alter the detail levels if the frame rate drops too low. Defaults to 20fps.
  - ~5% speed increase in complex scenes on all platforms.
  - Additional ~10% speed increase in complex scenes on Windows.
- Client now sends all game inputs to the server over UDP instead of WebSocket. This should hopefully mean that people suffering from packet loss can play the game much more smoothly. The “Disable unstable network” option is now defaulted to “on”. Data about this traffic has been added to the debug screens and to the latency screen.
- New version check code to spot client running on the wrong version.
- Fixed drop shadows sometimes looking incorrect.
Bug fixes:
- Fixed an issue where it was not possible to complete all requirements for the objective ‘Add A Member To Your Beacon’.
- Fix for Cuttletrunk pull attack effect playing after the pull attack has finished.
- Fix for Hoppers exploding multiple times and not dying.
- Fix for camera flicker when sending chat messages.
- Fixed other players being able to grapple your item pickups from creatures.
- Fixed dead creatures with their items collected blocking player shots and grapples.
- Fixed mispredictions sometimes when interacting with the world if there were players/creatures walking around in front of you, and fixed the interaction with blocks to be consistent with the GUI, so that you cannot interact “through” players/creatures to a block.
- Fixed camera not resetting when creating a new character.
- Fixed missing held items on Mac version.
- Fix for hoppers continuing to play their steam whistle even after calming down.
- Fix for some effects not playing on the meteorite (flames, smoke).
- Fix meteorite crash landing audio playing multiple times.

Resolved Known Issues:

The following items were known issues in previous releases and have now been resolved.

Choosing Return to Sanctum option briefly displays ‘wrap error’ text on screen.
Clicking the Craft button very quickly may close the active recipe.
Damage indicator circle can sometimes remain on screen even when no damage is received.
Number of available feats is incorrect.
Objectives & Feats - Some tasks are not being tracked correctly.
When Beacon fuel is nearly full, adding extra fuel will display a message saying that there are no consumable fuel items.
When selecting a skill, if the Cancel option is overlapping it, the skill will be unselected.
Z-fighting with some items (workbench and other machines) when placed underwater.

Known Issues:

The following items are known issues in this release.

(new) ‘Supply & Demand’ Trader feats are not working.
(new) Breaking any machine during crafting will destroy the ingredients in use.
(new) Camera is sometimes stuck after exiting GUI menus.
(new) Cannot mine blocks when standing in the same position as a torch.
(new) Creeping on top of chiselled blocks does not prevent characters from falling off.
(new) Current world filter on Locations Tab includes other world locations.
(new) Distance climbed feats (Mountain Climber I, Mountain Climber II, Ain’t No Mountain High Enough) are not working.
(new) Explorer Feats ‘No Going Back’, ‘Collaborative Travel’ and ‘No Warp Too Far’ are not working.
(new) Fog can linger inside closed buildings.
(new) Grapple tools not working correctly when winding grapple up or down after grappling block drops.
(new) Hitting blades of grass after hitting soil blocks resets block damage.
(new) It’s possible to get stuck between two walls of blocks when using a grapple tool to swing through a portal.
(new) Left hand sometimes constantly triggers input when inside the sanctum.
(new) Machines sometimes stop crafting after reaching 0s from the Currently Crafting list.
(new) Minus/negative XP may sometimes appear on screen.
(new) Natural crystal base doesn’t have a mesh and can stick out from storage.
(new) Other players sometimes appear to not be have any items in their hands.
(new) Signs float after destroying blocks they have been placed on.
(new) Sometimes it’s not possible to return to the sanctum after losing all health.
(new) Sun effects are visible through planets.
(new) Terrain Detail on lava is inconsistent depending on the setting used.
(new) Text cursor goes off screen on signs after pressing the Up key when there is more than 4 lines of text.
(new) The message ‘You have been defeated’ can sometimes remain on screen after returning to a world from the sanctum.
(new) Torches on sloped blocks have the wrong hitbox.
(new) Water can flow through closed doors.
Entity rendering will not always work correctly when there are multiple warps very close together, or where a warp opens up to a location very near where the entrance is.
GUI rendered incorrectly on Intel HD graphics (and some AMD / GTX laptop GPUs) on Windows.
If the game (loader) fails to start on Windows 7 and 8 you may need to install https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/2999226/update-for-universal-c-runtime-in-windows
Item placed into Request Basket will disappear when placing the same item into storage.
Item wanted is completely different to what was placed there before on the Request Basket.
Items may unequip themselves after adding a stack of items to a smart stack.
Items will occasionally be unable to smart stack with other items that belong in the same smart stack category.
Menus may constantly reappear on screen after closing them.
Opening or closing doors and trapdoors when standing too close to them will restrict player movement. To get out of the situation, interact with the door or trapdoor again.
Region names may not be displayed correctly after discovering one.
Request Baskets (previously Buying plinths) that had wanted items set before v151 have unset them. Sorry. Going forward they will be fine.
Shift-clicking any inventory item on the Furnace GUI when ingredient slots are full will cause that item to disappear. To retrieve that item, break the Furnace.
Skill descriptions are not final.
Some interactive blocks (crafting table, machine, and beacon control) have become corrupted during the migration. This will result in at best those blocks not being able to be interacted with, at worst the game crashing when interacting with those blocks. To fix the issue the block(s) in question need to be re-placed. In the case of anything other than a beacon control the block can simply be broken, picked up, and then re-placed. In the case of a beacon control this will work, although it would result in all the plots having to be re-placed one at a time and during that process the contents being unprotected. A better workaround for a beacon control is to craft a new beacon control, place that, and then break the old one, which will keep the beacon’s plots placed throughout the process.
Speech bubbles may still be displayed above players after going through portals.
The recipes are not final.
When expanding a smart stack offered by another player during trading, it will be empty.

Release 184.1:

Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
- Gravity has been removed from the grapple projectile. Expect more balance changes in the future.
Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
- Forced a player skill reset to allow players to recover skills lost when they were renamed.
GUI + HUD:
- Added new log messages for invalid player interactions.
- Improved the warning log messages presentation.
Engine:
- Tweaked the configuration of networking on Mac OS X to improve performance.
Bug fixes:
- Fixed an issue where you couldn’t withdraw coin from a plinth.

Release 184.2:

Creatures + Combat + Characters:
- Improved the estimation of players who will attack a meteorite. Players should now see the larger meteorite types more often.
Server:
- Added logging to try an debug a server crash when world regeneration tries to remove machine blocks.
Bug fixes:

Release 184.3:

Re-enabled world regeneration after working around a recurring crash on Elopor (still working on a permanent fix).
Fix for client crash when being shot at by a Spitter then walking through a portal.
Fix for rare client crash when a server shuts down.
Fix for dead creatures showing up on the compass.

Release 184.4:

Added logging to help debug a crash when firing a grapple.
Added logging to help debug a crash when removing meteorite effects.
Blacklist corrupt chunks from regeneration on server failures. Chunks will be analysed to determine fixes.
Fix for Spitters getting stuck prowling when their target is closer than 18m.
Fixed issue choosing a spawn location.
Fixed issue from cuttletrunk beam attack.
Fixed issue when backing up player status.
Fixed rare character manager crash.
Prevent GUI client crashes in RecipeScreen, InventoryScreen, TradingScreen, PowercoreScreen and MachineScreen.

Cross posted from Devlog Forum

Nov 13, 2017

Weekly Dev Update: 2017 October 6th to November 10th - 6 Weeks of Rage and Focus

Boundless - vdragon

Since our last Weekly Dev Update we’ve released some significant features and improvements:

There are still a few more improvements to come in the Portal and World loading systems. We’re also starting to focus on the rendering performance.

The main gameplay focus has been across 2 large areas: Creatures & Combat and Recipes & Resources. These domains will makeup the main changes in the coming feature releases.

Code - October 6th:

We are adding the Creature Spawn Events where hordes of creatures will attack a random player every half an hour or so. We are adding the Rage and Focus for players that allow them to use skills in combat against creatures. We’ve continued on the player resurrection code, which is like to become more helpful as creature become tougher as they are evolving a new range of attack abilities.

Work on in game Signs continues, further polishing the GUI and adding smaller sign support to give you more options to leave messages in the game world. Whilst you’ll see changes to the HUD with an added stamina bar and further information displayed in the combat log, both should make it easier to see how much damage has been dealt to creatures and to your Citizen.

Machine refactoring is now complete, addressing scalability issues for larger contraptions and introducing Machine wear. Now, Machines will need regular maintenance to stay functional. Machine pipes will now show whether they are powered or not by Spark Cores and an vfx is displayed when Engines connect to a Machine allowing a smoother Machine experience.

The Windows full screen update is completed and out in the Live version. We’re adding support for automatic crash dump collection so we can more efficiently analyze crash data.

Code - October 13th:

Creature spawn events are progressing well, adding multiple portal spawners for creatures to drop into the world. New creature behaviour and attack types are also being added (including homing shots!) Both features will help make combat more compelling for players.

We have been working to make the tutorial feel more intuitive, adding prompts to help guide new users through the early game. Likewise, following player feedback, the way the users add friends is being overhauled to make it simpler. We are also looking at allowing adding Steam friends in game.

The signs continue to be polished with richer font rendering and further GUI polish.

Soon, Portals should start to feel smoother and smarter with a rework of the portals activation logic. A new wobbly fx on open portals replaces the old placeholder gray quad and these are now also visible through portals. The back end of portals are being updated to help prioritise user wanting to join the World, over spectator portals.

For a more immersive experience, further sound effects are being added with elemental explosions variations and projectiles now whizzing past your head.

We’ve also replaced the backend crash logging on Windows to allow users to upload the crash dumps rather than emailing them in. Less time explaining, more time playing!

Code - October 20th:

We’ve made good progress polishing the Portals, working on making them more responsive when opening up, as well as refining the effects. You should have a much smoother time using Portals soon.

A lot of work has gone into Creature Events Spawning over the past few weeks, we are now at the stage of adding support for more Creature types, such as the Cuttletrunk. The overhaul of the Creature Weapons includes creatures now having a selection of weapons and attacks to use.

The GUI is now re-skinning the headers and footers of the screens to add richer information whilst The HUD is adding a newsflash to inform the user of important information. We’re getting close to making sure you have all the information you need at a glance.

Work on Signs continues, with the sign code continuing to be polished up including an updated beveled font rendering.

We’ve also spent time updating some of the backend libraries and looking into memory use to improve server and client performance.

Code - October 27th:

It’s been a busy week over with our Coders (as always) with lots of work going into making your Boundless experience even better. Creature Events continue to be finessed with a Meteorite deposited in world and the drops being able to be collected per user, like creature drops. The new creature attack variations continue to be fleshed out, with homing projectiles.

The HUD newsflash is now integrated into our next release, giving users more obvious information updates at a glance.

We been adding support to allow user to add their Steam friends in game.

We added saving and loading of world physics data on the server to increase the speed that things can move around. This also helps when portals are opened, reducing the occasional stutter; polish continues.

We’ve upgraded the PlayStation memory allocator to jemalloc, an allocator that performs far better in threaded systems. This increase speed overall and reduced frame spikes. We’ve also fixed some memory issues that will increase stability and reduced ram use overall.

Code - November 3rd:

Much of the time was spent on updating the game for the Release 182, polishing up features, balance and bug fixes.

The Event continues to work on the creature spawn rules, aiming to get the most creatures around the meteorite impact. The creature’s combat improvement continues, with further attack variations, such as barrage and timed ‘bombs’ as well as new behaviours.

The HUD is reworking the information for beacons and settlements. The beacon controls is being changed to allow a single Master Beacon Control. This will stop players accidentally removing all their beacon controls whilst there are still active plots in the world.

We continue looking at the client performance in the built up areas to maintain a higher frame rate. As part of this the level of detail ranges for effects and objects have been set, with a new game options to allow the object detail to be scaled.

Further portal polish reprioritized the order that the worlds are meshed to make one being looked at become visible more rapidly.

On the backend we continued design work on scaling up the world generation and universe infrastructure.

Code - November 10th:

The creature combat update continues to polish up the new attacks. The Cuttletrunks are being upgunned with a new death ray to make them even more lethal. The meteor event continues to be expand with mineable resources and the meteor health depending on the creatures spawned.

The HUD has added a new tips feature to help the game features to new users. The beacon GUI has been polished up.

We are looking into the performance in built up areas and are optimizing some of the hot spots. To help performance in very detailed areas we are adding a dynamic level of detail adjustment option so you can help control desired minimum framerates.

We are evaluating the new Amazon C5 instances that offer improved servers performance, especially in network bandwidth.

Design - October 6th:

This week Ollie has been finalising the design and requirements for the new recipes and resources. He has also been nurturing the Rage and Focus system which is being implemented by Andy. Rage and Focus will make higher level combat more rewarding.

Luke has been working on new behaviours for the Spitter and Cuttletrunk to make them more unique and interesting to fight against and to give them fun and varied combat patterns and moves.

Rob has been working with Marc to implement the combat log system as well as refining the stamina UI. Now, he’s on to the list of tasks compiled from last week’s playthrough. Rob likes a challenge.

Matt has changed the telemetry system so we can now get accurate data from players based on their characterIDs instead of usernames. The better the data we collect, the better we can make your time in the game world.

Design - October 13th:

This week Ollie has continued finalising the new items and recipes and has started integrating them into the game. He’s also been supporting James with management stuff and Dave with a fancy creature spawning system.

Luke has continued to balance the Rage and Focus system to make combat at higher levels more interesting and rewarding. He’s also been working on behaviours and attacks for creatures with Andy to give a more unique feel to creature encounters.

Rob’s task for this week has mainly been to improve the profile screen. The aim is to allow players to see each others information and to make it easier to befriend or trade with each other. The last part of the week has been polishing up the Stamina feedback system with Marc along with improving the newflash layout and timings. In between that, he’s started looking at ways to improve the Beacon Control UI to make it easier to see what’s happening with each of your Beacons.

More telemetry from Matt this week. He’s implemented a system which allows us to see all their characters and look into specific stats about that character. He’s also been improving how we gather data as well as fixing issues with the current system.

Design - October 20th:

This week Luke has been polishing up his work on Creature attacks and behaviour as well as his work on Rage and Focus. This will add a greater depth of challenge and fun to Creature attacks and hunting.

Rob has been working with Marc on how to improve messaging in the game, including contextual tips and ‘did you knows?’, the combat / action log and the gain log. All this should make it much easier to understand what is happening, especially for new players. He’s also been working out a better approach for the initial flow around account and character creation.

Ollie has been continuing to work out the new crafting and recipe stuff (no one has attempted to make a real life Boundless Pie yet though), as well as adjusting the tools we use to edit that data.

Matt has been checking and improving our telemetry “rollup” so that we can manage the vast amount of data produced. He’s also been looking at neat ways we can send surveys to get feedback from a wider range of players.

Design - October 27th:

This week Ollie spent some time looking at the tiny interaction distance for signs, which has spread to all interactive items in the game. In a future update the amount of control you have will increase the range at which you can interact with items. Work continues to progress with the new recipes and resources. As well as that, he’s been reviewing and iterating the new creature spawning system with David.

Luke has been continuing his work on creature combat this week with help from Andy. Together they have been creating new attacks, patterns and behaviours for the Spitter and Cuttletrunk species with the aim of making combat more challenging and unique between the different tiers. In addition to creature combat, Luke has been polishing the rage and focus system for players to have fun and unique upgrades to their character for mid to endgame combat.

Rob’s week has been split between multiple tasks as he’s been reviewing a lot of Marc and Simon’s efforts in finalising the Newsflash and Objective presentation, as well as starting work on a new presentation for Beacons and boot flow. The remainder of the week has been finalising the design for the game connection status and updating the UI style guide for game.

Matthew has been analysing the telemetry data this week and hunting down discrepancies in the data and trying to fix the issues he’s found. He’s also been refining how we present the data for members of the team to review.

Design - November 3rd:

A mixture of bug fixing and work on new areas has been the highlight of this week.

Ollie’s week has been split between managing this week’s release and hotfixes as well overseeing the new spawning event being developed by Dave. In between that, Ollie managed to squeeze in time to update the machine repair system and continued working on the new recipes, including the elusive forge.

Luke continues with creature combat this week, with cuttletrunks and spitters receiving new attacks and behaviours depending on their tier. They’re a lot harder to fight now, so further work is needed to make sure combat is fair for the players.

Rob has been working on the entry flow for a new user and existing user on PC and console. The cross-platform feature has caused a bit of complexity with the flow but all areas should now be covered.

Now that we are gathering large amounts of telemetry data Matthew has been going through and optimising it to reduce the amount of data we request. In addition to that, he’s also created a timeline to show how players are playing the game. The timeline shows us how long players are taking to complete feats and objectives, which should help us balance the game and find problems with our progression.

Design - November 10th:

This week Ollie has been busy with project management work. He’s mostly be bogged down with organising tasks for the next release and planning future updates to the game to give the team a clear roadmap for the coming months. Recipe work is still ongoing but it has taken a backseat this week.

The creature combat continues to be refined and polished. Luke has been fixing up several issues with the new Spitter and Cuttletrunk combat behaviours and balancing them accordingly. Thanks to some new weapon set ups and configurations, the creatures have a few more tools up their sleeves in combat.

Matthew has been busy investigating how we can probe players for information by using a target e-mail survey, so you might see one soon. As well as that, he is still checking for bugs with the timeline data and roll up queries. Luckily, his telemetry tasks are beginning to dry up so he’s started looking at a developing new worlds.

https://media.giphy.com/media/3ohjUSc85NBn0OpCV2/giphy.gif

With the entry flow from last week finalised, Rob has been reviewing the rage and focus presentation and has been refining how it is presented to the player. He’s also created several unique icons for some new status effects which will help players to see when a certain effect is applied to them. As well as that, he’s been reviewing a number of screens and figuring out ways to improve them, including the furnace, journal, wear and times on Beacons.

Art - October 6th:

This week the Art team have continued to work on sign, fences, door, beam concepts, more decorative prop modelling and new recipe items.

Amanda has been working on Signs and frames in different materials. Check out her forum post with Sign concepts update below, and yes Rick-rolling is still going strong:

Art: New Signs!

Aside from Signs, Amanda has been looking at concepting fences along with doors and beams for rock/stone to see how they have consistency in situ:

And more door concepts. These are exploring a stained glass style.

Ollie and Luke are working on a final set of comprehensive Recipes for the next larg(ish) release. Jess has taken a look at those Recipes and started to concept some delicious art! Anyone fancy a slice of Boundless Pie?

Between concepting food stuffs, Jess has created even more new decorative pole models:

Jim has been finalising 3rd person held items and providing animation support for the new Spitter and Cuttletrunk ranged attack behaviour Luke’s working on. Both features are looking great.

He has also continued to work on lighting balancing and adding bloom which until now has been fairly non-existent. Adding bloom gives a gentle glow to all Gleam blocks and Lanterns making your builds look even more special.

The ultimate goal is to balance the lighting so torches, Gleam, midday sun - all lighting situations work pleasingly together and don’t blow out.

Art - October 13th:

This week in the Art Team it’s been a mix of finalising props, concepting and getting those Signs prototypes functional.

Amanda has been finalising doors. Here’s the latest material progression concepts. Nearly there!

We’re also looking at the creature totems so Amanda has provided B+W orthos of the Spitter Totem.

Whilst Jess (along with Luca’s coding skills) has continued with the Signs prototype. It’s looking good so far. We have a tileable 1m x 1m sign system and a standalone single smaller sign.

Last but not least, Jim has been working on lighting, specifically torches, in an attempt to fix the current extreme lighting levels. We’re aiming for ambient rather than blinded by the light!

Art - October 20th:

Over in the Art team we’ve been continuing to develop the features we were working on last week doors, fences, Signs and lighting.

Amanda is exploring some great door and fences concepts.

Carrying on with Sign prototyping, Jess has made Stone versions of the Signs which we will be providing for testing soon. The Stone Sign. The stone colour/tint will come from the world stone colour.

Jim has continued working with Luca on balancing lighting and torches and also providing feedback for a new portal effect to be played when multiple open portals are visible.

Art - October 27th:

The art team have been busy on prop concepts and consumable items.

Amanda’s concepts for unique fence types. These will provide more variety for decorating builds in addition to the material progression fences we shared previously.

Ollie and Luke have been working on the list new items and recipes. We have the list of new foods which Jess has been creating.

Art - November 3rd:

This week the art team have been supporting release 182.1 and working on prop concepts and new items.

Amanda has been finishing off Decorative props, posts and beams. See Amanda’s forum post.

Art: Decorative/Hanging/Unique Props and Beams! [BIG POST]

Jess has finished the new foodtuff items with the bean model. She’s moved onto rare creature drops. Collect enough of these and you can craft a cool creature totem as seen in Amanda’s previous post.

Art: Decorative Totems (Trophies?) and Poles Update! [IMAGE HEAVY!]

Jim has been working on particle VFX.

Art - November 10th:

This week the art team has been busy on concepts, item drops and prestige totem pieces.

Amanda has been finalising a set of unique fences

She’s added a Wildstock version to the creature totems.

Jess has been modelling new item drops from creatures. A horn, feather and eyeball. More to come next week.

That’s all folks!

Cross posted from Devlog Forum

Nov 13, 2017

Weekly Dev Update: 2017 October 6th to November 10th - 6 Weeks of Rage and Focus

Boundless - vdragon

Since our last Weekly Dev Update we’ve released some significant features and improvements:

And more door concepts. These are exploring a stained glass style.

Between concepting food stuffs, Jess has created even more new decorative pole models:

We’re also looking at the creature totems so Amanda has provided B+W orthos of the Spitter Totem.

Ollie and Luke have been working on the list new items and recipes. We have the list of new foods which Jess has been creating.

She’s added a Wildstock version to the creature totems.

Jess has been modelling new item drops from creatures. A horn, feather and eyeball. More to come next week.

That’s all folks!

Cross posted from Devlog Forum

Oct 31, 2017

Release 182: Signs and Portals++!

Boundless - vdragon

This update is accessible via the “Live” release of Boundless on Steam.

Please report all issues discovered with the update to this support thread.

Please restart Steam to make sure you get the latest version of Boundless. If the update happens whilst Steam is open it’s unlikely you’ll get the latest version.

Overview:

Get you “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.” - on stand by. This Testing release contains a wide collection of improvements, but most significantly, a first implementation of player creates Signs. Everything from “SHOP” to “Home Sweet Home”.

Please checkout Jiivita’s video that explores and introduces the new Signs:

Signs! | Feature Introduction | Boundless 181

And another video from DanBeforeTime:

BOUNDLESS | SIGNS Are Here! - NEW feature (Release 182)

Great work and thanks from the dev team.

Important:

Your character skill trees have been reset!

All skill points have been refunded. You will be asked to re-skill your character when you first enter the game world. (Don’t forget to learn your inventory expansions!!)

Release Notes:

Art + Animation + Assets:
- Improved scale, rotation and position of objects for storage, plinths, basket and GUI.
- Softened the Warp edge VFX to look more consistent with the Portal VFX.
- Improved the 3rd person take hit small flinch animation.
- Fixed artefacts with rain and snow weather FX caused by horizontal drift.
- Consuming food and brews is now quicker.
- Make Spitter projectile physics smaller.
- Fix Spitter shooting animation to be in-sync with the projectile.
- Fix for characters playing the wrong animation when creeping after running.
- Updated all animations to have a short time to impact for a more responsive feel.
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
- Updated how colour of crafted output items are chosen.
- Randomise the rotation + flip of resource decals on blocks.
- Building:
  - Fix placing torches onto invisible walls when placing a torch whilst selecting a flower.
  - Allow changing the “type” of grass on a block using seeds directly without having to remove the old grass first.
  - Fix that when placing blocks on top of grass that now don’t remove the grass, that the long bits of grass were not at least being removed.
  - Beacon plots can now be coloured from Gleam to help distinguish between your different beacons.
  - Allow more than 25 adjacent storage blocks in any orientation.
  - Update Beacon Plot drawing to be clearer, plus fix not always drawing plot surfaces and not drawing plot when placing beacon control.
  - Allow non-activated portals, and non-locked signs to be broken as individual blocks. Once activated, or once locked, the entity will become breakable as usual as an entire unit together.
- Machines:
  - Machine crafting (including spark-cores and pipe networks) re-worked for performance and stability (was causing a fair amount of server crashes), generally speaking, you shouldn’t notice the difference, except that various restrictions will now have been lifted, such as being more free with placement to put machines that are a different type right next to each other for example. Pipes will now also show correctly whether they are connected to a spark-core with non-zero spark or not so you can see if a pipe is able to transmit spark to a machine. This also fixed bugs if you ever had longer pipes, where the machine GUI would show the incorrect amount of available spark if the spark-core was too far away from you. The one exception to this is spark-cores, which are now constrained to be at most 4 blocks wide on any axis, this may mean that one or more of your spark-cores may be removed from the game, but in locally migrating all the live worlds, this was less than 10 across the whole universe so actual impact is minimal.
  - Machine pipes now have much tighter physics rather than being the full voxel size, and client will do a better job at predicting the changes to pipes and their neighbours when placing and removing them, now being much more important that they have tighter, dynamic physics shapes.
  - Machine engines and advanced engines will now render lightning when connected, and not fully worn, towards the machine that they are powering… not that engines are available just yet for users to actually player with…
  - Machines can now take ingredients from the machine output and players' backpack.
  - Various fixes around durability/wear of machines and sparkcores etc, correctly displaying wear in the GUI and preventing stacking which destroyed the wear state of the machines/cores. Power-cores will now correctly wear out, and display wear in the GUI and must be routinely repaired as machines do. Wear is now correctly applied to crafting tables, furnaces and unreleased engines. When placing spark-cores and machines, the durability values will be combined appropriately to get an average value. Wear will now also be visible in the hud details when hovering over machines, powercores etc.
- Portals:
  - Portal activation/rendering logic update, portals should be much more responsive in terms of starting to load and being rendered when looked at, and will now take into account occluding geometry to not allow the client to start connecting to a portal that he can’t even see which may “sometimes” mean a portal takes longer to load because it waits to start loading until you can see it, but generally will mean far less “pointless” loading of portals just whilst walking around a town.
  - Portal visuals updated when a portal is not being rendered to not just be a flat grey/black colour, but to use the atmosphere colour of that world with a more interesting effect displayed.
  - Portals will now be visible through other portals (always as the above coloured state, no recursive portal through portal through portal through portal rendering nonsense!).
- Signs
  - Initial implementation of Signs.
  - Signs have a display text visible in the world, and a longer piece of additional text that can be read by anyone regardless of permissions if they interact with the sign.
  - The display text on a sign has a choice of regular, bold, or italic font and will auto-scale to try to best fit the sign, the text is multi-line and be left or right aligned.
  - Signs come in two types, a “standalone” sign that is a fixed, sub-voxel size and is like a placard that can be rotated.
  - The other are “combining” signs which are always 1m in size, and will combine with neighbouring sign pieces that are of the same block type, colour and direction, to make up bigger and bigger signs (10x10 at maximum).
  - The combining signs will be placed as “crates” similar to machine blocks, and whenever a valid rectangle is made, will be replaced with proper sign pieces showing it can now be interacted with.
  - Once a combining sign has had text added to it, it will stop combining and will be broken as a whole. Once a combining sign has had text assigned to it you can then rotate the sign text and change its properties.
  - Signs have fixed physics similar to a door piece (but thinner) so will be collided with and walked on top of. The standalone sub-voxel sized signs will still have a fixed physics shape the same as combining ones.
Creatures + Combat + Characters:
- Character now doesn’t start placing blocks until the mouse selects a valid place to put a block. This makes building vertical columns far easier just look down, hold place block and jump.
- Fixed projectiles failing to hit the player often when the player is stood right next to a wall.
- Fix for client misprediction when walking at an entity while killing it.
- Physics:
  - Physics tweaks to prevent the player fitting into half-block gaps consistently now.
  - Physics tweaks to make swimming a bit more responsive and to fix issues of not being able to consistently swim above the surface of the water, and not being able to consistently jump out of the water onto ledges.
  - Prevent edge-climb ability being used whilst attached to a grapple to not conflict with existing grapple-jump behaviour (no more accidentally letting go of grapples when near ledges due to edge-climb)
  - Prevent edge-climb ability, grapple jumps, and jumping out of water from activating unless facing in the direction of the ledge.
- Creatures:
  - Resistance is now a percentage chance to take no damage rather than a damage reduction.
  - Elemental creatures' resistances now consider element class.
    Fix for creature idle animations repeating until the creature moves. Creatures now randomly pick a new idle animation each time they complete an animation.
  - Cuttletrunk projectiles now fire faster
- Death
  - A new presentation has been implemented for when you die. You now need to hold the RMB (right mouse button) to return to the sanctum after you’ve died.
  - A negative status effect is now applied when you have been defeated. The Death Sickness reduces your attributes temporarily.
  - Your health is restored to 25% after you’ve died. You’ll need to consume food to replenish your health.
  - These changes are part of the new resurrection system where players can resurrect other players.
Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
- All skill points have been reset! Visit the skill screen to reallocate them.
- The crafter feats have been split up into the following categories: “Basic Crafter Feats” and “Advanced Crafter Feats” as there were too many for one category.
- Skills
  - Added advanced block placement skill (in the core tree) to allow choice between fully rotational placement and simple placement.
  - Reduced number of mastery skills from ten down to five, and balanced the effects across them.
  - Added chisel skills to allow use of precision chisels (part of the tool mastery tree).
  - Increased the number of skill points gained to be 1200 at level 50. The skill tree and the number of skill points is still a work in progress and will continue to change in future releases.
  - Rearranged Resurrection and Rage & Focus skills in preparation for the release of those features (in the future).
  - Changed the interaction distance to be the same as the block placement distance.
- Objectives
  - The number of items required to complete Hunting Creatures has been reduced.
  - The number of items required to complete Time To Collect Resources has been reduced.
  - The Fire Pit and Crucible objective have been merged into a single objective.
  - The UI for the objectives shown on the HUD has been improved.
  - Added an objective to teach players about adding Friends to their Beacons.
  - Removed the sprint skill – you can now sprint from the beginning of the game.
  - Removed objective claiming to fully complete an objective. Now the objectives autocomplete automatically when the player completes all the subtasks.
GUI + HUD:
- Main Menu
  - Added new Knowledge screen with the information of resources and recipes currently unlock by the player. Press K to access the screen or access it via the Main Menu.
    - Please note the shortcut for friends list has been removed.
  - The Knowledge list expands when you discover new items and recipes.
  - Social section has been removed. You can now find your friends list in the Character section.
  - Improved footer legend information for all GUI menus
  - The completed section of the Journal has been merged into the Objectives section to compliment the new filter system.
  - Social has been removed from the Main Menu. The Friend list is now located in Character menu.
  - The Boundless Characters of all of your Steam friends are now automatically added to your in-game friends list making it easier for new players to connect with their friends already in the game.
  - Improved GUI objective log presentation.
  - Made GUI Field Of View consistent across all GUI screens
  - Added new game options to show/hide gain, combat and chat logs.
  - Show Mastery effects on item detailed info popups.
- Entities
  - The beacon Permission tab now shows all your Characters (as well as your Friends).
  - Added filter bar in machine, knowledge, character, objective and universe menus.
  - Furnace crafting GUI has a perfectly smooth timing bar showing the crafting process, and much better responsivness when starting and stopping the furnace. The GUI now correctly clears the information about what is going to be burned when you remove the inputs.
  - Crafting:
    - Updated recipe lists GUI, separated out Mass and Bulk crafting into tabs.
    - Added reason why something cannot be crafted to Craft button.
    - Corrected text and icon showing skill required to craft ingredients.
  - Fix issues with various GUI screens like the warp screen that occur for a period of time after changing character (like not being able to warp to your location or beacon for a period of time for no particular reason).
- HUD
  - Improved the stamina bar feedback.
  - Updated GUI’s newsflash presentation.
  - Added new newsflash events.
SFX + Music:
- Creature projectiles have audio attached to them.
- Explosions now have elemental variations.
Engine:
- Application Systems
  - Improved Windows client crash handler. If the client crashes there should be a higher chance of generating a minidump to enable debugging of the crash. When the client is restarted after a crash which created a crash dump you will also be offered the chance to submit the crash dump to us, this will upload the minidump and previous session game log to us with the simple click of the yes button when asked (i.e. no more hunting down crash dumps to email to us).
  - Change of log locations. On Windows the log is still found in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Turbulenz\Boundless but is now simply called log.txt rather than boundless_log.txt, we also now rotate the logs so you’ll find log.txt, log.txt.1 etc with up to 4 logs kept. On Mac OSX the log path has now moved to Library/Logs/Boundless/log.txt in your users home folder. As with the Windows version the log is rotated to main the 4 most recent logs.
  - Don’t intercept app command keys to try and fix media keys not working with apps like Spotify.
- Portals and Warps and Worlds:
  - The way the client chooses which meshes to use across different levels of detail has been updated and should remove the vast majority of z-fighting seen whilst waiting for the world meshes to be created, and you should no longer ever find yourself stood inside of low-level detail meshes for the world.
  - Portals/Warps should generally load in much faster than before, with the game better prioritising what to load and create meshes for.
  - Portals/Warps that are open, but not “fully rendered” (showing the “Waiting for Data” message) will now show a progress bar of the loading in the HUD so you can have an idea of how long it will take to fully load and become able to be walked through.
  - The way the server deals with physics meshes has changed, making them a persistent part of the world instead of created on-demand. This means the server no longer has to create physics meshes for the world which would often cause stalling/laggy behaviour when there were more players/creatures on the world due to it being too slow to create them, they are now loaded out of the world data directly and is much more responsive, this should hopefully mean that you never see laggy behaviour when going through portals/falling from heights/speeding around with the grappling hooks on busier worlds.
  - Travelling through a portal/warp should virtually never cause mispredictions or rubberbanding even if changing inputs whilst going through.
  - Travelling through a portal/warp, it was previously quite easy in more confined areas to end up teleporting up out of the ground after going through the portal because the spawn location calculated was inside of the terrain. This should no longer be possible.
  - Reduce chunk data by >50%, giving quicker downloads, better caching and lower RAM use.
  - Added support to allow delivery of chunk data via CDN’s, this will help reduce load on the servers and also allows users to fetch chunk data faster where other users in the same geographical region have previously loaded those chunks.
  - Fixed a controls issue that led to things like “sticky keys” when going through portals to another world if keys were released at the instant moment you stepped into the portal.
- Rendering
  - Fixed issues in updating of Level-of-detail chunks when blocks are modified that would lead to straggling bits of geometry hanging in the air after removing natural terrain, or that would lead to the lack of proper slope-generation in the LODs of user-built structures. This will not affect any issues that already exist in the worlds, but any changes to the worlds from now-on will have proper lodded-geometry created.
  - Increased the accuracy and resolution of block-lighting’s affects on normal mapping, block-lighting should look more “accurate” now in terms of lighting directions. An immediate result, is that the sanctum corridor is now symmetrically lit, instead of having the left side far too dark with strange lighting artefacts.
  - Holding a torch or other light-emitting block in your hand, and placing it onto the ground should now produce very similar results in terms of the characteristics of the light’s brightness and falloff, though holding it in your hand will still produce a “spherical” falloff rather than the “diamond” shapes falloff that lights placed in the world will have so along diagonals, the hand-held light will still reach a bit further.
  - Removed options to disable weather and volumetricFog. These are debug options which persisted into the GUI. The PostEffects option is also removed to simplify the screen as all it did was hide some of the other option toggles. There will be more changes here in the near future.
  - Made liquid simulation more intelligent in the presence of all the new more complex shapes.
    Significantly reduced memory use in the culling mesh and lighting generators. Can save >200mb in complex environments.
Bug fixes:
- Fixed a crash bug when the players travel through portals/warps.
- Fixed the latency graph to sample the max latency every 0.1 seconds rather than the current value every 0.1 seconds.
- Fix being able to bulk craft without the skill.
- Fix crash entering non-ASCII text.
- Fix crash right clicking on items in storage.
- Fix sign colour crafting and placement.
- Fixed an issue where the death penalty reduction skill was actually increasing the death penalty.
- Fixed an issue with remapping the interact button to a key other than ‘E’. NOTE: If you have already remapped the interact button you will need to select “Reset Controls To Defaults” on the Main Menu and redo your button choices before you’ll see a change.
- Fixed memory leak when changing world and moving to new areas.

Resolved Known Issues:

The following items were known issues in previous releases and have now been resolved.

Breaking the Campfire during the initial tutorial will reset some objectives and display the ‘Build a Temporary Campfire’ objective again.
Cannot close Inventory when Chat is used.
Changing the Chunk Cache Size in fullscreen mode will disable game functionality.
Game displays welcome message for a world through a portal without going through it.
If you spend a skill point before the tutorial asks you to, you will be required to unlearn and relearn the skill again.
Pressing the Enter key on the Rename Beacon box will disable game functionality. Avoid this by clicking the Confirm option instead.
Some feats are not shown on the GUI.
Using D3DGear http://www.d3dgear.com/ crashes the game on start up.

Known Issues:

The following items are known issues in this release.

Choosing Return to Sanctum option briefly displays ‘wrap error’ text on screen.
Clicking the Craft button very quickly may close the active recipe.
Damage indicator circle can sometimes remain on screen even when no damage is received.
Entity rendering will not always work correctly when there are multiple warps very close together, or where a warp opens up to a location very near where the entrance is.
GUI rendered incorrectly on Intel HD graphics (and some AMD / GTX laptop GPUs) on Windows.
If the game (loader) fails to start on Windows 7 and 8 you may need to install https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/2999226/update-for-universal-c-runtime-in-windows
Item placed into Request Basket will disappear when placing the same item into storage.
Item wanted is completely different to what was placed there before on the Request Basket.
Items may unequip themselves after adding a stack of items to a smart stack.
Items will occasionally be unable to smart stack with other items that belong in the same smart stack category.
Menus may constantly reappear on screen after closing them.
Number of available feats is incorrect.
Objectives & Feats - Some tasks are not being tracked correctly.
Opening or closing doors and trapdoors when standing too close to them will restrict player movement. To get out of the situation, interact with the door or trapdoor again.
Region names may not be displayed correctly after discovering one.
Request Baskets (previously Buying plinths) that had wanted items set before v151 have unset them. Sorry. Going forward they will be fine.
Shift-clicking any inventory item on the Furnace GUI when ingredient slots are full will cause that item to disappear. To retrieve that item, break the Furnace.
Skill descriptions are not final.
Some interactive blocks (crafting table, machine, beacon control) have become corrupted during the migration. This will result in at best those blocks not being able to be interacted with, at worst the game crashing when interacting with those blocks. To fix the issue the block(s) in question need to be re-placed. In the case of anything other than a beacon control the block can simply be broken, picked up, and then re-placed. In the case of a beacon control this will work, although it would result in all the plots having to be re-placed one at a time and during that process the contents being unprotected. A better workaround for a beacon control is to craft a new beacon control, place that, and then break the old one, which will keep the beacon’s plots placed throughout the process.
Speech bubbles may still be displayed above players after going through portals.
The recipes are not final.
When Beacon fuel is nearly full, adding extra fuel will display a message saying that there are no consumable fuel items.
When expanding a smart stack offered by another player during trading, it will be empty.
Z-fighting with some items (workbench and other machines) when placed underwater.

Release 182.1:

Updating objective strings as players are not required to activate objectives anymore.
Changing Difficulty to Mastery Required in the item tool tip.
Adjusted loading/meshing priorities again. Now when looking directly at a portal, the game will choose to prioritise all the area around that portal over chunks and meshes around the current player location, rather just the 3x3 around the portal exit. This means that the game will prefer to fully load the portal you are looking at instead of only fully loading it once the entire world around you has loaded (the idea being, if you are looking at the portal you probably want to go into it soon, so we should prefer to load and mesh it over the current world you are likely about to leave).
Fixed a server crash loading ammo not in backpack.
Fixed balance of held light sources and self light skill range. This will change again in a future lighting balance pass.
Fixed crash on exit on Windows.
Fixed health bar not updating when changing character.
Fixed issue where exceptions could be generated editing sign text.
Fixed issue where ingredients were taken directly from a player’s Backpack when using the Furnace.
Fixed issue where non-gleam items could be QuickMove’d into the Beacon colour slot.
Fixed missing impacts effect from slingbows
Fixed the jump jump height for Jump Height 2 skill from 0.5m to 1.2m.
Fixed various crashes in GUI interactions.

Release 182.2:

Fixed bug that produced empty price list in selling plinth screen.
Fixed charged shot on slingbows.
Fixed client crash when opening a Smart Stack in Storage.
Fixed creature counts getting out of sync (possibly causing creatures not to spawn).
Fixed machine placement ordering, the choice of the 4 visual parts will now be defined by the time at which that machine block piece was placed which should match older behaviour.
Fixed some missing shader parameter sets that would have caused some funky behaviour from held lights / skill-light for fog and weather-particulates.
Fixed unwanted icon behind recipe ingredient meshes, when ingredients are insufficient.
Further fixed and tweaked physics-stuck logic to remove more false positive cases identified.

Release 182.3:

Increased maximum friend limit from 100 to 250
Improve logic that puts the player into 2 high gaps to work with the even stronger jump strengths.
Allow various mesh blocks (but not standard storage that is effectively a full block visually) contain liquids and have liquids pass through them etc, including beacons and storage shelves, machines and pipes.
Allow slab/walls shapes to be either bevel or square chiselled, regardless of which was used to create the slab/wall.
Reduced the prestige value for gleam, crafting tables, fire pits, crucibles and storage.
Tweak water shader to avoid z-fighting in most cases when flowing through bevel/square chiselled blocks.
Tweak portal effect to remove lines near the top and bottom.
Fixed ore-decals from changing their rotation sometimes when neighbouring blocks are changed.
Fixed an issue with bevel-chisels where based on direction you were chiselling, it may not have let you chisel when it should have.
Fixed trap-doors to be symmetrical.
Fixed an issue that allowed trap doors to continue to be placed next to a maximum-length trap door if the existing trap door was opened first (leading to some weird behaviour/visuals).
Fixed having to re-open a location twice in the warp screen to have it correctly refresh, after a few moments the data should now populate and button become usable.
Fixed occasional crash after exiting a portal when creatures were around.
Fixed occasional crash when cuttletrunks appeared.

Release 182.4:

Fixed an issue where the game would freeze when dragging or resizing the game window on Windows.
Prevent a rare client crash when aborting chunk requests which are no longer required.
Improve stability of the client chunk cache to try and prevent a rare client crash.

Cross posted from Devlog Forum

Oct 31, 2017

Release 182: Signs and Portals++!

Boundless - vdragon

Art + Animation + Assets:
- Improved scale, rotation and position of objects for storage, plinths, basket and GUI.
- Softened the Warp edge VFX to look more consistent with the Portal VFX.
- Improved the 3rd person take hit small flinch animation.
- Fixed artefacts with rain and snow weather FX caused by horizontal drift.
- Consuming food and brews is now quicker.
- Make Spitter projectile physics smaller.
- Fix Spitter shooting animation to be in-sync with the projectile.
- Fix for characters playing the wrong animation when creeping after running.
- Updated all animations to have a short time to impact for a more responsive feel.
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
- Updated how colour of crafted output items are chosen.
- Randomise the rotation + flip of resource decals on blocks.
- Building:
  - Fix placing torches onto invisible walls when placing a torch whilst selecting a flower.
  - Allow changing the “type” of grass on a block using seeds directly without having to remove the old grass first.
  - Fix that when placing blocks on top of grass that now don’t remove the grass, that the long bits of grass were not at least being removed.
  - Beacon plots can now be coloured from Gleam to help distinguish between your different beacons.
  - Allow more than 25 adjacent storage blocks in any orientation.
  - Update Beacon Plot drawing to be clearer, plus fix not always drawing plot surfaces and not drawing plot when placing beacon control.
  - Allow non-activated portals, and non-locked signs to be broken as individual blocks. Once activated, or once locked, the entity will become breakable as usual as an entire unit together.
- Machines:
  - Machine crafting (including spark-cores and pipe networks) re-worked for performance and stability (was causing a fair amount of server crashes), generally speaking, you shouldn’t notice the difference, except that various restrictions will now have been lifted, such as being more free with placement to put machines that are a different type right next to each other for example. Pipes will now also show correctly whether they are connected to a spark-core with non-zero spark or not so you can see if a pipe is able to transmit spark to a machine. This also fixed bugs if you ever had longer pipes, where the machine GUI would show the incorrect amount of available spark if the spark-core was too far away from you. The one exception to this is spark-cores, which are now constrained to be at most 4 blocks wide on any axis, this may mean that one or more of your spark-cores may be removed from the game, but in locally migrating all the live worlds, this was less than 10 across the whole universe so actual impact is minimal.
  - Machine pipes now have much tighter physics rather than being the full voxel size, and client will do a better job at predicting the changes to pipes and their neighbours when placing and removing them, now being much more important that they have tighter, dynamic physics shapes.
  - Machine engines and advanced engines will now render lightning when connected, and not fully worn, towards the machine that they are powering… not that engines are available just yet for users to actually player with…
  - Machines can now take ingredients from the machine output and players' backpack.
  - Various fixes around durability/wear of machines and sparkcores etc, correctly displaying wear in the GUI and preventing stacking which destroyed the wear state of the machines/cores. Power-cores will now correctly wear out, and display wear in the GUI and must be routinely repaired as machines do. Wear is now correctly applied to crafting tables, furnaces and unreleased engines. When placing spark-cores and machines, the durability values will be combined appropriately to get an average value. Wear will now also be visible in the hud details when hovering over machines, powercores etc.
- Portals:
  - Portal activation/rendering logic update, portals should be much more responsive in terms of starting to load and being rendered when looked at, and will now take into account occluding geometry to not allow the client to start connecting to a portal that he can’t even see which may “sometimes” mean a portal takes longer to load because it waits to start loading until you can see it, but generally will mean far less “pointless” loading of portals just whilst walking around a town.
  - Portal visuals updated when a portal is not being rendered to not just be a flat grey/black colour, but to use the atmosphere colour of that world with a more interesting effect displayed.
  - Portals will now be visible through other portals (always as the above coloured state, no recursive portal through portal through portal through portal rendering nonsense!).
- Signs
  - Initial implementation of Signs.
  - Signs have a display text visible in the world, and a longer piece of additional text that can be read by anyone regardless of permissions if they interact with the sign.
  - The display text on a sign has a choice of regular, bold, or italic font and will auto-scale to try to best fit the sign, the text is multi-line and be left or right aligned.
  - Signs come in two types, a “standalone” sign that is a fixed, sub-voxel size and is like a placard that can be rotated.
  - The other are “combining” signs which are always 1m in size, and will combine with neighbouring sign pieces that are of the same block type, colour and direction, to make up bigger and bigger signs (10x10 at maximum).
  - The combining signs will be placed as “crates” similar to machine blocks, and whenever a valid rectangle is made, will be replaced with proper sign pieces showing it can now be interacted with.
  - Once a combining sign has had text added to it, it will stop combining and will be broken as a whole. Once a combining sign has had text assigned to it you can then rotate the sign text and change its properties.
  - Signs have fixed physics similar to a door piece (but thinner) so will be collided with and walked on top of. The standalone sub-voxel sized signs will still have a fixed physics shape the same as combining ones.
Creatures + Combat + Characters:
- Character now doesn’t start placing blocks until the mouse selects a valid place to put a block. This makes building vertical columns far easier just look down, hold place block and jump.
- Fixed projectiles failing to hit the player often when the player is stood right next to a wall.
- Fix for client misprediction when walking at an entity while killing it.
- Physics:
  - Physics tweaks to prevent the player fitting into half-block gaps consistently now.
  - Physics tweaks to make swimming a bit more responsive and to fix issues of not being able to consistently swim above the surface of the water, and not being able to consistently jump out of the water onto ledges.
  - Prevent edge-climb ability being used whilst attached to a grapple to not conflict with existing grapple-jump behaviour (no more accidentally letting go of grapples when near ledges due to edge-climb)
  - Prevent edge-climb ability, grapple jumps, and jumping out of water from activating unless facing in the direction of the ledge.
- Creatures:
  - Resistance is now a percentage chance to take no damage rather than a damage reduction.
  - Elemental creatures' resistances now consider element class.
    Fix for creature idle animations repeating until the creature moves. Creatures now randomly pick a new idle animation each time they complete an animation.
  - Cuttletrunk projectiles now fire faster
- Death
  - A new presentation has been implemented for when you die. You now need to hold the RMB (right mouse button) to return to the sanctum after you’ve died.
  - A negative status effect is now applied when you have been defeated. The Death Sickness reduces your attributes temporarily.
  - Your health is restored to 25% after you’ve died. You’ll need to consume food to replenish your health.
  - These changes are part of the new resurrection system where players can resurrect other players.
Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
- All skill points have been reset! Visit the skill screen to reallocate them.
- The crafter feats have been split up into the following categories: “Basic Crafter Feats” and “Advanced Crafter Feats” as there were too many for one category.
- Skills
  - Added advanced block placement skill (in the core tree) to allow choice between fully rotational placement and simple placement.
  - Reduced number of mastery skills from ten down to five, and balanced the effects across them.
  - Added chisel skills to allow use of precision chisels (part of the tool mastery tree).
  - Increased the number of skill points gained to be 1200 at level 50. The skill tree and the number of skill points is still a work in progress and will continue to change in future releases.
  - Rearranged Resurrection and Rage & Focus skills in preparation for the release of those features (in the future).
  - Changed the interaction distance to be the same as the block placement distance.
- Objectives
  - The number of items required to complete Hunting Creatures has been reduced.
  - The number of items required to complete Time To Collect Resources has been reduced.
  - The Fire Pit and Crucible objective have been merged into a single objective.
  - The UI for the objectives shown on the HUD has been improved.
  - Added an objective to teach players about adding Friends to their Beacons.
  - Removed the sprint skill – you can now sprint from the beginning of the game.
  - Removed objective claiming to fully complete an objective. Now the objectives autocomplete automatically when the player completes all the subtasks.
GUI + HUD:
- Main Menu
  - Added new Knowledge screen with the information of resources and recipes currently unlock by the player. Press K to access the screen or access it via the Main Menu.
    - Please note the shortcut for friends list has been removed.
  - The Knowledge list expands when you discover new items and recipes.
  - Social section has been removed. You can now find your friends list in the Character section.
  - Improved footer legend information for all GUI menus
  - The completed section of the Journal has been merged into the Objectives section to compliment the new filter system.
  - Social has been removed from the Main Menu. The Friend list is now located in Character menu.
  - The Boundless Characters of all of your Steam friends are now automatically added to your in-game friends list making it easier for new players to connect with their friends already in the game.
  - Improved GUI objective log presentation.
  - Made GUI Field Of View consistent across all GUI screens
  - Added new game options to show/hide gain, combat and chat logs.
  - Show Mastery effects on item detailed info popups.
- Entities
  - The beacon Permission tab now shows all your Characters (as well as your Friends).
  - Added filter bar in machine, knowledge, character, objective and universe menus.
  - Furnace crafting GUI has a perfectly smooth timing bar showing the crafting process, and much better responsivness when starting and stopping the furnace. The GUI now correctly clears the information about what is going to be burned when you remove the inputs.
  - Crafting:
    - Updated recipe lists GUI, separated out Mass and Bulk crafting into tabs.
    - Added reason why something cannot be crafted to Craft button.
    - Corrected text and icon showing skill required to craft ingredients.
  - Fix issues with various GUI screens like the warp screen that occur for a period of time after changing character (like not being able to warp to your location or beacon for a period of time for no particular reason).
- HUD
  - Improved the stamina bar feedback.
  - Updated GUI’s newsflash presentation.
  - Added new newsflash events.
SFX + Music:
- Creature projectiles have audio attached to them.
- Explosions now have elemental variations.
Engine:
- Application Systems
  - Improved Windows client crash handler. If the client crashes there should be a higher chance of generating a minidump to enable debugging of the crash. When the client is restarted after a crash which created a crash dump you will also be offered the chance to submit the crash dump to us, this will upload the minidump and previous session game log to us with the simple click of the yes button when asked (i.e. no more hunting down crash dumps to email to us).
  - Change of log locations. On Windows the log is still found in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Turbulenz\Boundless but is now simply called log.txt rather than boundless_log.txt, we also now rotate the logs so you’ll find log.txt, log.txt.1 etc with up to 4 logs kept. On Mac OSX the log path has now moved to Library/Logs/Boundless/log.txt in your users home folder. As with the Windows version the log is rotated to main the 4 most recent logs.
  - Don’t intercept app command keys to try and fix media keys not working with apps like Spotify.
- Portals and Warps and Worlds:
  - The way the client chooses which meshes to use across different levels of detail has been updated and should remove the vast majority of z-fighting seen whilst waiting for the world meshes to be created, and you should no longer ever find yourself stood inside of low-level detail meshes for the world.
  - Portals/Warps should generally load in much faster than before, with the game better prioritising what to load and create meshes for.
  - Portals/Warps that are open, but not “fully rendered” (showing the “Waiting for Data” message) will now show a progress bar of the loading in the HUD so you can have an idea of how long it will take to fully load and become able to be walked through.
  - The way the server deals with physics meshes has changed, making them a persistent part of the world instead of created on-demand. This means the server no longer has to create physics meshes for the world which would often cause stalling/laggy behaviour when there were more players/creatures on the world due to it being too slow to create them, they are now loaded out of the world data directly and is much more responsive, this should hopefully mean that you never see laggy behaviour when going through portals/falling from heights/speeding around with the grappling hooks on busier worlds.
  - Travelling through a portal/warp should virtually never cause mispredictions or rubberbanding even if changing inputs whilst going through.
  - Travelling through a portal/warp, it was previously quite easy in more confined areas to end up teleporting up out of the ground after going through the portal because the spawn location calculated was inside of the terrain. This should no longer be possible.
  - Reduce chunk data by >50%, giving quicker downloads, better caching and lower RAM use.
  - Added support to allow delivery of chunk data via CDN’s, this will help reduce load on the servers and also allows users to fetch chunk data faster where other users in the same geographical region have previously loaded those chunks.
  - Fixed a controls issue that led to things like “sticky keys” when going through portals to another world if keys were released at the instant moment you stepped into the portal.
- Rendering
  - Fixed issues in updating of Level-of-detail chunks when blocks are modified that would lead to straggling bits of geometry hanging in the air after removing natural terrain, or that would lead to the lack of proper slope-generation in the LODs of user-built structures. This will not affect any issues that already exist in the worlds, but any changes to the worlds from now-on will have proper lodded-geometry created.
  - Increased the accuracy and resolution of block-lighting’s affects on normal mapping, block-lighting should look more “accurate” now in terms of lighting directions. An immediate result, is that the sanctum corridor is now symmetrically lit, instead of having the left side far too dark with strange lighting artefacts.
  - Holding a torch or other light-emitting block in your hand, and placing it onto the ground should now produce very similar results in terms of the characteristics of the light’s brightness and falloff, though holding it in your hand will still produce a “spherical” falloff rather than the “diamond” shapes falloff that lights placed in the world will have so along diagonals, the hand-held light will still reach a bit further.
  - Removed options to disable weather and volumetricFog. These are debug options which persisted into the GUI. The PostEffects option is also removed to simplify the screen as all it did was hide some of the other option toggles. There will be more changes here in the near future.
  - Made liquid simulation more intelligent in the presence of all the new more complex shapes.
    Significantly reduced memory use in the culling mesh and lighting generators. Can save >200mb in complex environments.
Bug fixes:
- Fixed a crash bug when the players travel through portals/warps.
- Fixed the latency graph to sample the max latency every 0.1 seconds rather than the current value every 0.1 seconds.
- Fix being able to bulk craft without the skill.
- Fix crash entering non-ASCII text.
- Fix crash right clicking on items in storage.
- Fix sign colour crafting and placement.
- Fixed an issue where the death penalty reduction skill was actually increasing the death penalty.
- Fixed an issue with remapping the interact button to a key other than ‘E’. NOTE: If you have already remapped the interact button you will need to select “Reset Controls To Defaults” on the Main Menu and redo your button choices before you’ll see a change.
- Fixed memory leak when changing world and moving to new areas.

Resolved Known Issues:

The following items were known issues in previous releases and have now been resolved.

Breaking the Campfire during the initial tutorial will reset some objectives and display the ‘Build a Temporary Campfire’ objective again.
Cannot close Inventory when Chat is used.
Changing the Chunk Cache Size in fullscreen mode will disable game functionality.
Game displays welcome message for a world through a portal without going through it.
If you spend a skill point before the tutorial asks you to, you will be required to unlearn and relearn the skill again.
Pressing the Enter key on the Rename Beacon box will disable game functionality. Avoid this by clicking the Confirm option instead.
Some feats are not shown on the GUI.
Using D3DGear http://www.d3dgear.com/ crashes the game on start up.

Known Issues:

The following items are known issues in this release.

Choosing Return to Sanctum option briefly displays ‘wrap error’ text on screen.
Clicking the Craft button very quickly may close the active recipe.
Damage indicator circle can sometimes remain on screen even when no damage is received.
Entity rendering will not always work correctly when there are multiple warps very close together, or where a warp opens up to a location very near where the entrance is.
GUI rendered incorrectly on Intel HD graphics (and some AMD / GTX laptop GPUs) on Windows.
If the game (loader) fails to start on Windows 7 and 8 you may need to install https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/2999226/update-for-universal-c-runtime-in-windows
Item placed into Request Basket will disappear when placing the same item into storage.
Item wanted is completely different to what was placed there before on the Request Basket.
Items may unequip themselves after adding a stack of items to a smart stack.
Items will occasionally be unable to smart stack with other items that belong in the same smart stack category.
Menus may constantly reappear on screen after closing them.
Number of available feats is incorrect.
Objectives & Feats - Some tasks are not being tracked correctly.
Opening or closing doors and trapdoors when standing too close to them will restrict player movement. To get out of the situation, interact with the door or trapdoor again.
Region names may not be displayed correctly after discovering one.
Request Baskets (previously Buying plinths) that had wanted items set before v151 have unset them. Sorry. Going forward they will be fine.
Shift-clicking any inventory item on the Furnace GUI when ingredient slots are full will cause that item to disappear. To retrieve that item, break the Furnace.
Skill descriptions are not final.
Some interactive blocks (crafting table, machine, beacon control) have become corrupted during the migration. This will result in at best those blocks not being able to be interacted with, at worst the game crashing when interacting with those blocks. To fix the issue the block(s) in question need to be re-placed. In the case of anything other than a beacon control the block can simply be broken, picked up, and then re-placed. In the case of a beacon control this will work, although it would result in all the plots having to be re-placed one at a time and during that process the contents being unprotected. A better workaround for a beacon control is to craft a new beacon control, place that, and then break the old one, which will keep the beacon’s plots placed throughout the process.
Speech bubbles may still be displayed above players after going through portals.
The recipes are not final.
When Beacon fuel is nearly full, adding extra fuel will display a message saying that there are no consumable fuel items.
When expanding a smart stack offered by another player during trading, it will be empty.
Z-fighting with some items (workbench and other machines) when placed underwater.

Release 182.1:

Updating objective strings as players are not required to activate objectives anymore.
Changing Difficulty to Mastery Required in the item tool tip.
Adjusted loading/meshing priorities again. Now when looking directly at a portal, the game will choose to prioritise all the area around that portal over chunks and meshes around the current player location, rather just the 3x3 around the portal exit. This means that the game will prefer to fully load the portal you are looking at instead of only fully loading it once the entire world around you has loaded (the idea being, if you are looking at the portal you probably want to go into it soon, so we should prefer to load and mesh it over the current world you are likely about to leave).
Fixed a server crash loading ammo not in backpack.
Fixed balance of held light sources and self light skill range. This will change again in a future lighting balance pass.
Fixed crash on exit on Windows.
Fixed health bar not updating when changing character.
Fixed issue where exceptions could be generated editing sign text.
Fixed issue where ingredients were taken directly from a player’s Backpack when using the Furnace.
Fixed issue where non-gleam items could be QuickMove’d into the Beacon colour slot.
Fixed missing impacts effect from slingbows
Fixed the jump jump height for Jump Height 2 skill from 0.5m to 1.2m.
Fixed various crashes in GUI interactions.

Release 182.2:

Fixed bug that produced empty price list in selling plinth screen.
Fixed charged shot on slingbows.
Fixed client crash when opening a Smart Stack in Storage.
Fixed creature counts getting out of sync (possibly causing creatures not to spawn).
Fixed machine placement ordering, the choice of the 4 visual parts will now be defined by the time at which that machine block piece was placed which should match older behaviour.
Fixed some missing shader parameter sets that would have caused some funky behaviour from held lights / skill-light for fog and weather-particulates.
Fixed unwanted icon behind recipe ingredient meshes, when ingredients are insufficient.
Further fixed and tweaked physics-stuck logic to remove more false positive cases identified.

Release 182.3:

Increased maximum friend limit from 100 to 250
Improve logic that puts the player into 2 high gaps to work with the even stronger jump strengths.
Allow various mesh blocks (but not standard storage that is effectively a full block visually) contain liquids and have liquids pass through them etc, including beacons and storage shelves, machines and pipes.
Allow slab/walls shapes to be either bevel or square chiselled, regardless of which was used to create the slab/wall.
Reduced the prestige value for gleam, crafting tables, fire pits, crucibles and storage.
Tweak water shader to avoid z-fighting in most cases when flowing through bevel/square chiselled blocks.
Tweak portal effect to remove lines near the top and bottom.
Fixed ore-decals from changing their rotation sometimes when neighbouring blocks are changed.
Fixed an issue with bevel-chisels where based on direction you were chiselling, it may not have let you chisel when it should have.
Fixed trap-doors to be symmetrical.
Fixed an issue that allowed trap doors to continue to be placed next to a maximum-length trap door if the existing trap door was opened first (leading to some weird behaviour/visuals).
Fixed having to re-open a location twice in the warp screen to have it correctly refresh, after a few moments the data should now populate and button become usable.
Fixed occasional crash after exiting a portal when creatures were around.
Fixed occasional crash when cuttletrunks appeared.

Release 182.4:

Fixed an issue where the game would freeze when dragging or resizing the game window on Windows.
Prevent a rare client crash when aborting chunk requests which are no longer required.
Improve stability of the client chunk cache to try and prevent a rare client crash.

Cross posted from Devlog Forum

Oct 9, 2017

Weekly Dev Update: 2017 August 11th to September 29th - 2 Months of Toil

Boundless - vdragon

Below is a big backlog of 8 weekly updates. As of today there is only 1 outstanding for October 6th. Hopefully you’ll still enjoy reading about everything we’ve been working on. Some of the feature have already been released, but there is plenty of stuff still in development.

During this period we’ve released a decent number of Testing, Live and hot fixes updates. (Not bad given many members of the team have taken holidays.)

Code - August 11th
The chisel rework continues, with all the slope shapes complete this is now working through the new chiseled sub-cube square chisel shapes.

The Threat+Aggro mechanic continues its overhaul. That’s just as well since the creatures have been learning how to navigate around the world more effectively.

The multiple character GUI is being worked through, adding switching character support. The compass system update is been working though, especially how to efficiently show other player positions at long distances. The on screen debug information is being reworked with graphs for latency and frame times to help spot glitches.

On the backend we’ve continued on the compressed chunk work. Smaller chunks means faster loading and less bandwidth.

Code - August 18th
The compass system received further polishing up, showing portals and creature threat states. We completed a range of smart stack improvements and are now working on the beacon GUI to support different permission types for other users. The GUI audio is also being updated with material sounds and further click events.

We are continuing with the advanced block shapes, adding the chiseled beveled shapes.
The threat system rework has a been completed. The elemental creatures are now coloured correctly. A player stamina system implementation is underway.

We are working on the backend to support the backer tier features this will allow us to invite the Trailblazers. Without this, all Trailblazers would automatically get the status of Explorer in the game and we’d not be able to differentiate between them.

Code - August 25th
We’ve spent quite a bit of time on the latest Release 172, addressing various bugs the testing version showed up and a few that slipped through.

The beacon permission system and GUI continues to be added while the compass system continued to be polished, adding farther off portals. More audio events are being added to the GUI.

For creatures we have developed a herding mechanic, initially for the wildstock, to keep them grouped together. The spitter targeting has been fixed so again they won’t shoot into walls and will also climb out of smaller holes.

The chiselled blocks update work is nearly complete. We also changed it so that most placed blocks won’t remove grass, removing the patches of soil under machines, etc. We’re continuing to optimise the Boundless server, focusing on reducing memory use, to help increase the number of users per server.

Code - September 1st
A new Stamina system has been implemented and all the GUI bars have been improved to highlight how much they have changed (by use of a trailing and animated bar.) The Combat Log has been improved to show more detailed events and help explain what is happening when elemental creatures interact with elemental weapons.

Various bugs with Objectives have been fixed, as well as bugs for portals, lighting and character management.

The ability to colour Beacon Plots to help distinguish between different beacons has had a first pass ready for design review. Any gleam block inserted into the Beacon Control will change the colour of the beacon visualisation.

The new block shape and chiseling system has finally been merged into master ready for further development, evaluation and testing.

The Live deployed version of the game has been updated twice for a range of bug fixes.

Code - September 8th
A first pass of the new Knowledge GUI screen was finished - this helps players understand recipes and ingredients. The aim is to make sure that players understand the crafting hierarchy. In the future it will be expanded to include details able status effects, creatures and more.

There were quite a few bug fixes in preparation for a new game update sometime next week.

A few more optimisations of the server have been done, so that they can better support more players on worlds.

The Stamina update made it into the master branch of the game so that it could get more testing throughout the development team.
There’s also been some work improving creature projectiles. The aim is to create a wider variety of shots to increase the variation of ranged combat.

Code - September 15th
We’ve started the implementation of in game signs, with a grey box test and skeleton GUI to enter the text. The system allows for large size greater that 1m x 1m. The Beacons are being polished up with new visualisation of plots and the boarders to make them more easily understood.

The GUI is adding menu filters for recipes and the knowledge screens. This will make it easier to filter the large list of craftable items into groups: tools, weapons, etc.

For Creature the herding behaviour has been improve and will now keep groups of creatures, currently wildstock, together. This will be used to make the creature distribution more uneven, and increase the challenge of attacking wildstock - as they look after each other when your threat level increases!

We are working on delivering chunk data via a CDN. This will lower the CPU cost of users joining and moving around the world on the servers and allow users to get the data from (typically) more local CDN servers that should be faster and more reliable. This will be a big saving on the servers and will hopefully result in much faster load times for players further away from the current world servers (South America, South Africa, Asia, etc.)

Further compression of the chunk data continues which will reduce the amount downloaded and RAM used in the Boundless servers. This will make the servers more efficient.

We are also working on the back end to allow Trailblazers to join the game.

Code - September 22nd
The Signs implementation continues, with it rendering the text in world and progressing with the GUI with additional text input functionality.

The creatures spawning has been tweaked to give better per creatures ’score’ for the herd spawning and to allow higher numbers per world. Early work on creature spawn events has begun when many waves of creatures will be spawned in a small area for a period of time. We also been working on a lobbed projectile attack for the spitter to use to hit targets (you!) behind cover.

We’ve been polishing up some of the object locator implementation, this is used to place items in storage, the players hands, in the GUI and on plinths, as well a tweaking the block placement animation.

The CDN support for downloading chunk data is ready for a future Testing update. We worked on the backend to enabled Trailblazers to join the game. Further backend memory savings of the chunk data are being finalised that cut bandwidth as well as server and client RAM use.

Code - September 29th
We’ve been adding a player resurrection mechanic that can be enabled with brews and character skills. This will allow players to be revived with dramatically reduced death penalty and by other users whilst in combat.

The HUD is reworking the damage indicators to show more useful information on what damage is being taken. The work on signs continues adding more of the GUI for editing them.

We are reworking the Windows full screen mode to support borderless windowed mode, so alt-tabbing between applications should be more user friendly.

We’ve been reworking the back end of the machine and pipes to be more robust and scale better for larger contraptions. The updated chunk data compression is in Master which reduces the chunk download size by ~40%.

Design - August 11th
This week Matt has been updating all our queries to use BigQuery “Standard SQL” rather than “Legacy SQL” giving us more flexibility. He’s also been fixing the online and offline events which were being fired every time you went through a portal or warp, as well as re-working the player timeline queries which tell us how much experience, coin, etc you have after each hour of game time.

Luke has done the first pass of design for Brew and Bomb recipes, and worked out a plan for Creature and Plant drops. He’s also prepared for our first visibility round, and created some character skill templates which we can use to test different setups. In addition he’s worked with Ollie and Andy on the improved Aggro / Threat system.

Ollie has been integrating the Elemental Creatures, and making them do the right damage types including some funky status effects, as well as helping out on the Aggro / Threat design.

Design - August 18th
This week has been mainly about polishing and preparing for the next Live release.

Ollie has been working on balancing the tools and weapons, including adding lots of variation to the slingbows including some which fire multiple shots, and making repeaters much more fun. (Although this will all be ripped out in the future and moved to the Forge.) He’s also worked on the balance of creature variation on each world to make the mixture of creatures more interesting.

Matt has been working on improving the analytics for Progression and Experience gaining, both from the code side and the query side. He’s also tested and fixed many other events and queries.

Luke has done more work on the new recipes, and been working with Andy on the Stamina system. He’s also done more balance on the Threat / Aggro system. (Not sure why it’s the Thread / Aggro system this week, when it was the Aggro / Threat system last week.)

Design - August 25th
All the designers were on holiday - slackers.

Design - September 1st
This week Luke has been working with Andy on the new Stamina system which is coming together well. We won’t be releasing it quite yet though, because his other ongoing piece of work has been working out recipes for food, brews, bombs and augments (weapon upgrades), as well as designing a collection of new drops to feed those recipes. There’s still more to work out, but the aim is to release a big collection of new creature, plant and block drops for you to harvest to make these new things. We’ll aim to release the new stamina work, with those new drops and recipes.

Matt has been bringing the analytics up to scratch after the addition of multiple characters, as well as looking at upgrading the “player timeline” query, which maps how much playtime it takes you to hit levels, gain coin and gain XP. This provides valuable balancing information.

Ollie has worked out how the augments will work, these were originally ammo upgrades which we’d called “Crystals”, but will now affect the weapons themselves. They will be particularly useful for customising bombs. He’s also been integrating new chisel types to go with Luca’s additional slope shapes, and building a plan for “rolling up” analytics data into more manageable chunks.

Design - September 8th
Ollie has been working with Simon on delivering a series of updates, whilst drinking lots of tea. He’s been working with Rob to work out the presentation of damage given and received, and adjusted the resistance system to be based on chance to avoid damage rather than a straightforward reduction. He’s also re-worked mastery a little, and added skills for the new chisels.

Matt has been continuing to test, polish and improve the analytics, including preparing for updating a lot of data from our recent changes, and preparing for the data roll-up work.

Luke has been continuing to work out the new recipes, and polishing and testing Stamina.

Design - September 15th
This week we’ve been continuing to focus on reworking the recipes in the game, and adding new things to craft such as food, brews, augments and bombs, as well as the stamina system and adjusted skills. This is building towards an upcoming release where you can play with all of that.

Ollie has been adjusting a few skills, and working with Matt on analytics for XP progression with a view to balancing that system.

Luke has been coming close to wrapping up the recipes and new drops.

Rob has been working on the new Signs GUI, tweaks to the Crafting GUI and rethinking how we present Locations on the HUD.

Matt has been writing a system to “rollup” our analytics data periodically so we are querying a manageable amount of data rather than all events from all time, as well as migrating the item analytics data after Luca’s changes to the blocks which came with the new chisel types. He’s also changed the way we log skill data, and fixed various analytics bugs.

Design - September 22nd
All the designers were on holiday - slackers #2.

Design - September 29th
Ollie was working on the new balance iteration for release 180 which included changes to how much XP you earn for completing actions, feats and objectives. As well as modifying how many skill points and plots are awarded for reaching certain levels, Ollie also made changes to the total number of experience points required for each level. The final part of the week was spent supporting the update and ensuring the hot fixes went out smoothly.

Luke has continued to design and outline new recipes, drops and resources to incorporate the new props, bombs, brews and other items in development. He also started to compile a list of tooltips which should show up in the game when the player performs a certain action.

This week Rob has been looking at completing the intro logic for PC and PS4 as well as looking at improving the feedback for completing objectives after he compiled a list tasks to improve the UI after a thorough playthrough.

Matt’s work with the analytics continues, he’s been working on various bugs with the current information due to the new multiple character system. He’s also worked on improving the tracking of objectives and feats for a more accurate and informative data.

Art - August 11th
This week the art team has been busy on new progression blocks, sticker and door progression concepts.

Here’s Amanda’s door concepts for wood, stone, metal and gleam.

Jess has been concepting and prototyping wood progression blocks. We want to do a bit more exploration before sharing so expect a post on these soon.

Jim has been continuing looking at the world palettes and also corrected the scale of objects like the Crucible and Firepit when dropped.

Art - August 18th
It’s been a quiet week for the art team as Jim is on holiday and Jess was ill at the start of the week. Nevertheless, work continues on Amanda’s concepts for the Sticker system and Jess’s new wood block designs. Jess also did another pass on creature colours to go with the elemental creature work.

Art - August 25th
Jess and Amanda have continued their work on decorative props this week, with Amanda finishing up her set of concepts of Poles, Beams and Fences and Jess starting work on bringing those into the game. The initial exploratory set of concepts for Stickers has also been finished.

Art - September 1st
This week the art team has been busy working on backer item and door concepts and decorative prop grey boxing and modelling.

Here’s Amanda’s post showing her door concepts following the progression we’re using for the decorative poles.

New Doors Concept Art

Jess’s wooden pole models:

Jess has also created a full set of placeholder tints for the creatures which look more pleasing to play with until we implement procedural tinting.

Here’s a cool looking creature (ouch…)

That’s all for this week!

Art - September 8th
This week the art team have been working on backer tool concepts and decorative poles assets.

Amanda has nearly finalised the decorative fences concepts.

Jess has grey boxed hanging assets and modelled the wooden set of poles: Raw, Refined and Decorative poles.

Jim has been polishing up the position, rotation and scales of all items in the game. That’s items when in the GUI, held in 1st and 3rd person, dropped, on plinths, baskets and in storage.

Art - September 15th
This week has been all about decorative props and prototyping signs. More on signs soon! The original sub voxel mesh concepts can be seen here:

Art: Signs concept

We also had a two day bug blitz which we find useful to have every few of months to keep on top of things.

Amanda - Fence concepts WIP. She’s re-working these to provide a wider range of fence themes.

Jess - Final decorative pole models. These are designed to be used in conjunction with blocks and decorative cross beams, decorative props (both hanging and placed) and fences.

Plain, stylish and ornate wood poles.

Plain stone poles.

Stylish stone poles.

Ornate stone poles.

Plain, stylish and ornate stone poles.

Wood and stone together.

Art - September 22nd
This week the art team has continued concepting decorative props, doors and fences.
Jess has been modelling metal decorative poles and made a start on the gleam versions.

Jim (with Andy’s coding help) has been tidying up the position, rotation and scale of all items in storage, on plinths, basket, shelves and GUI. He’ll be tidying the held items in 3rd person next.

Art - September 29th
This week the art team have been busy mainly working on decorative props and signs.

Amanda has created concepts arranging decorative poles, doors and fences in their relevant material tiers. We think they’re looking pretty good.

She’s been concepting signs to fit with the new tiling sign system that Luca has been working on over the past two weeks. The plan is support a range of different thematic font themes and styles for the large signs, as if the text has been chiselled into the stone material. It’s a little experimental so we’ll need to see how they turn out.

Jess has continued modelling decorative poles. Here’s the plain gleam poles in game.

Plain and stylish poles using ruby tint.

Here with an emerald tint.

Jim has provided a 3rd person resuscitate animation for Andy who has been developing this feature this week. He also softened the visual effect around the Warp border to make it more consistent with the portal and also continued working on positioning held items in 3rd person.

That’s all folks!

Cross posted from Devlog Forum

Oct 9, 2017

Weekly Dev Update: 2017 August 11th to September 29th - 2 Months of Toil

Boundless - vdragon

Jess has also created a full set of placeholder tints for the creatures which look more pleasing to play with until we implement procedural tinting.

Here’s a cool looking creature (ouch…)

Plain stone poles.

Stylish stone poles.

Ornate stone poles.

Plain, stylish and ornate stone poles.

Wood and stone together.

Art - September 22nd
This week the art team has continued concepting decorative props, doors and fences.
Jess has been modelling metal decorative poles and made a start on the gleam versions.

Jim (with Andy’s coding help) has been tidying up the position, rotation and scale of all items in storage, on plinths, basket, shelves and GUI. He’ll be tidying the held items in 3rd person next.

Jess has continued modelling decorative poles. Here’s the plain gleam poles in game.

Plain and stylish poles using ruby tint.

Here with an emerald tint.