Additions

• Added Faction list after joining a server and when respawning.
  
• Added new Utahraptor bite attack ALT + LMB.
  
• Added the Dryosaurus class as a playable.
  
• Added Dryosaurus Special Ability (Dodge using RMB).
  
• Added Dryosaurus AI. Runs from players bigger than itself, will fight back against juvenile creatures. Still WIP - see our roadmap for the current progress.
  
• Added grouping system (Use 2 call to group with other players. The groups are persistent and each species has a different limit to the amount of players in one group - please let us know feedback on them!)
  
• Added group members damage reduction (10%).
  
• Added group chat for the new system.
  
• Added moving graze mechanic.
  
• Added fall damage.
  
• Added river PP volume
  
• Added 5 second cooldown to close settings when applying changes (to prevent players exploiting the few seconds that foliage is invisible.)
  
• Added loading screens in various places.
  
• Added prediction to AI targeting.
  
• Added a hint for eating, drinking and interacting.
  
• Added a solution for Listener Location be set to Camera when overlapping water bodies.
  
• Added "Hide Full" and "Hide Empty" server filter options.
  
• Added a small camera shake when damaged.
  
• Added more spawn points to Spiro.
  
• Added ????? ????? (Transmission Received: Exploration Recommended).

Enhancements

• Server and client performance improvements. (WIP)
  
• Improvements to footprint scent performance.
  
• Improvements to pack scent performance.
  
• Updated max zoom distance.
  
• Reduced decal render distance.
  
• Made rest ability cancel safe logout properly.
  
• Corrections to environment resources.
  
• Refined AI movement around players to be more stable.
  
• Pounce improvements and initial new mechanics. (WIP)
  
• Made scars more visible.
  
• Improved ragdolls when carried.
  
• Improved corpse dragging (WIP)
  
• Made Utahraptor alt bite damage multiple targets.
  
• Made post process volumes deactivate when leaving water.
  
• Made falling deal damage to the pouncer.
  
• Adjusted water sound for the ocean.
  
• Made sprint stay enabled if shift is tapped for a short time, to disable press again or come to a stop.
  
• Made puke decal visible above footprints.
  
• Corrections to character materials.
  
• Adjusted pounce to avoid going too high.
  
• Made grazing only give food to 20% max hunger.
  
• Mouth blood decal saves when relogging.

Balance

• Adjusted all dinosaur speeds to be slower.
  
• Lowered Tenontosaurus juvenile max health.
  
• Added stamina cost to new Utahraptor alt bite (4%).
  
• Made Tenontosaurus claw deal damage while turning.
  
• Updated hunger and thirst decays so that players can't reach adult without eating or drinking.

Bug fixes

• Fixed chat showing the incorrect mode if typing in another channel.
  
• Fixed water PP persisiting after respawn.
  
• Fixed Tenontosaurus claw attack being blocked from turning.
  
• Fixed footprint scent cloud instances not disappearing if the footprint actor is destroyed by fading out.
  
• Fixed footprint scent cloud deforming away from origin.
  
• Fixed issue with activating scent while footprints are fading out.
  
• Fixed aerial collision not working.
  
• Fixed saves not being loaded sometimes.
  
• Fixed not repossessing unsafely logged out characters.
  
• Fixed scented footprint decals disappearing after the highlight effect fades.
  
• Fixed eating causing an input lockup while corpse dragging.
  
• Fixed extra animation after drinking.
  
• Fixed piece of meat from eating not replicating.
  
• Fixed swallow animation not working sometimes.
  
• Fixed player entry duplication when pressing tab/end many times.
  
• Fixed eating plants not ending correctly.
  
• Fixed an issue where the title menu wouldn't appear for the client.
  
• Fixed river scent particles coming from the wrong place.
  
• Fixed several UI elements.
  
• Fixed being able to eat corpses that were dragged away.
  
• Fixed collision of some plants.
  
• Fixed abilities being activated with admin panel opened.
  
• Fixed server name filter not showing any servers sometimes.
  
• Fixed player search on player list being misaligned on widescreen monitors.
  
• Fixed "Scanning All Frequencies" disappearing if refresh was clicked while it was present.
  
• Fixed admin panel not auto updating when a player was kicked.
  
• Fixed players becoming stuck in the "V-tree of doom".
  
• Fixed issue where holding Shift in mid-air would cause stamina to drain.
  
• Fixed dragged corpses sometimes disappearing.

It is important to note that the bugs encountered by QA whilst testing the new mechanics have not been listed here. These issues mostly pertained to the new grouping system, AI, Performance, fall damage and the Dryosaurus playable.


List of our high priority issues. Report additional bugs here: https://forms.gle/ufXDnxNfhRhZ7CCi8

• Server bans still a WIP.
  
• If server FPS drops too low, players will drop suddenly while swimming.
  
• AI will sometimes swim facing the wrong direction.
  
• AI can sometimes spawn above trees. They do not have fall damage as a countermeasure for now.

Filipe - Lead Programmer

It has been a while since our last devblog, but that doesn't mean we were any less busy. In the last week we’ve been occupied with bug fixes and performance improvements. Servers in general were having CPU performance hits to process all the game logic and replications, creating lag that isn't related to bandwidth, but simply the time the server takes to process what is needed. Besides that, clients were encountering several performance problems, which the most common is an over time one, that some people refer to as “Memory Leak”, but in fact, it was a combination of problems in the rendering process and collisions.

For both the Server and Client we managed to make improvements such as increased server stability and processing, significantly reducing the “lag”, client rendering improvements and much more stable over time performance. During this time we also managed to introduce some new mechanics, which the other programmers are going to talk about, as well as additional dinosaurs that are coming soon and faster.

We’re aware that we still have some issues to resolve, especially related to UI and pounce for example. Some of the problems with pounce were related to actors teleporting, which we’ve managed to reduce with the performance improvements, but pounce is a work in progress mechanic and will be changed heavily in future updates. Remember we will continue to optimise performance throughout the development process to allow for even more players and mechanics. For those asking about those new things, check out our realtime roadmap!

dmIV - Programmer

After releasing the safe log mechanic I continued with tying it to a sleeping state. It’s an extension to the rest ability we already had in place, so adding it was relatively simple. The original fade out I made was pretty basic and we wanted to improve it. The team looked at several different visuals and we went with a UI-based approach. I feel satisfied about how the whole thing looks.

Not a month can go by without improvements to the scent mechanic. This time I made footprints be managed separately from other scentable objects. This allowed for increasing the scent range significantly, while reducing it for just footprints. Thus you can smell food and water from much further away without footprint detection reducing the performance. I also finally got around to optimizing the way footprint effects appear. Originally there was a noticeable FPS drop when the effects fade in and out, now that’s a thing of the past. Newly scented footprints will still fade in gradually. Each character has a number of footprints they can leave, so when that number is reached we remove the oldest footprints. I made that fade out smoothly as well. We had various other issues with footprint scent as well that I finally got around to fixing, so it’s a huge relief to finally put those behind me.

I also implemented a pack scent mechanic, that you might have already seen in game in the form of orange clouds. It’s our way of combating large or mixed packs. When too many dinosaurs gather in an area they become detectable from far away. Different species have different pack ranges and dinosaur counts, with young dinos contributing less to the pack size. The system can be configured separately for dinosaurs of different species, so a mixed pack can show up with much less members than same-species groups.

I worked on the programming side of making water post processing functional. The ocean and swamps were fairly straightforward and came together in a short time, but rivers were more challenging. They needed a different implementation both in terms of just making the effects work and programming logic to support it. We are close to the finish, though, so expect pretty rivers in the near future!

We know you were disappointed about AI not making it to the last patch, so we worked hard on improving performance to support it. Most of the network usage comes from movement. Faster characters also need to use more data to avoid jittering/teleportation. I made the server dynamically change the individual characters’ update rates depending on their velocity. This results in significantly reduced bandwidth being spent on slow/idle characters and that bandwidth can be spent on something more important.

We also had huge FPS drops when a large crowd of dinosaurs gathered tightly. I looked into why that was happening and fixed it. All the changes we made add up to provide you a smooth gameplay experience.

Amar0k - Programmer

Heyo, I feel like these dev blogs are every week not every month... Time flies. Not a lot to talk about this time around. Although it's been a busy month fixing issues with AI and looking heavily into performance for server and client, Lots of really good improvements are being pushed into QA at the moment. AI was delayed due to some issues with performance and optimization. I won't bore you with the details but when AI is not rendered by any character it goes into a sort of sleep mode which was having unexpected results however all of which seem to be resolved. I'm hoping by the time this goes out AI is either with you or coming very soon.

I have also been busy working on grouping over the last few days so you can enjoy playing with friends in a team again. Original concept was to use a multi-wheel however we felt adding it for a single feature didn’t feel right. So the initial implementation is 2-calling(Friendly Call) near other players and they will receive a group invitation they can accept or decline. You have to be next to each other and you can block further requests to avoid spam. I know a lot of people have been requesting this so hopefully it gets through QA in a timely manner.

I know some people have been asking why I haven't been streaming. I think most of that is pretty self explanatory. I do plan to start again in the coming weeks though. So hopefully I can help keep everyone up to date on what’s being worked on. We have a nice new realtime roadmap where you can also check out what's to come!

VisualTech48 - Environment Modeller

Hope you all are doing well, had a pleasant chat recently with the community, and as I said something might come up of mine this patch, it most likely will.

This month I’ve been focusing on props and the Modular system for the Utility /Ranger buildings, and doing a lot of prop work, starting with the possible “big prop” you’ll be seeing soon, a radio tower. Pushing mostly prop by prop to be properly done and to look pretty great, like the AC Unit you might have seen while doing the high poly, and the Vent System which we streamed not so while ago.

The Modular system as well is going on its course, with an addition of some textures we might bet soon to testing it out how it stacks and if all of the modules are properly working for a construction of semi small/middle sized buildings which would be found in the wilderness. But all models parts of the kit except the windows are done.

Along with this there has been a lot of work on my texture game, as in, there are a lot of tweaks and additions for the new Utility/Ranger outpost, and I’ll be doing a new trim for the kit as it’s very specific.

Thirdly, I’m slowly importing my stuff in game which, as I said, means that we are 1 step closer to getting something in, most likely starting with the Radio Tower. This along with the Utility/Ranger buildings would bring another cool dimension of mystery for both the humans (at some point) and dinos so I can’t wait to put this stuff into the game.

dinosauriac - Sound Design

With a new playable dinosaur coming in the near future, the past couple of weeks have been a lot of mixing and experimentation to find the voice for Oviraptor. An excitable little thing, their speech is mostly made of short bird-like chirps and trills, which they produce in melodic sequences. Animation and I decided to give it a musical personality to set it apart from a lot of the other dinosaurs in-game...

Some of you will have no doubt seen that some old friends are returning to the game if you've looked at our roadmap, so I have also started touching up the Carno, Dryo and Stego vocal sets in preparation for their reintroduction. Their entire range of calls were remade last year, and are now higher quality with greater variation. Now comes the final task of implementing them into the game along with their new animations.

One thing I've been working to make sure of during "Evrima" is that everything is set up in such a way that it would be relatively easy for others to make their own dinosaur vocal sets further down the line. There are soundcue templates and attenuation presets I've created for the different "weight classes" of creatures, for the sake of consistency among the game's species and to reduce iteration time when making new content. These are more rough guidelines than strict rules, something Utahraptor-sized or below is usually considered "Small" whilst the average hadrosaur such as Maisaura would fall into the "Medium" bracket.

Since there are creatures in this game that go from the size of a mouse to the size of a house, we've had to work out a lot of fairly complicated transitions to have dinosaurs swap out Small effects sets as they grow big enough to require Medium and Large effects over time (e.g. Tyrannosaurus juveniles have completely different requirements than their adult forms). This is still being perfected, but most areas from vocalizations to footsteps are accounted for and easy enough to make variations of when using the core presets as a starting point.

Tapwing - Concept Artist

At the time I was nose deep in a number of sketches and cleanups, it was a welcome opportunity to tackle a painting again. Art for a wallpaper was called for and I was given free reign on what the subject could be (though still limited to our revealed creatures at the time). At first I wasn’t sure which dinosaur to feature, but after some thought, an old unfinished painting crept into mind. Something that was inspired a while ago by videos of Jaguars hunting crocodiles and originally featured an old fan-made strain of mine.

Well I saw no reason why the half made painting couldn’t be repurposed. The fan-strain was replaced by a Utahraptor and the originally full grown Deino was shrunk down to a juvenile. This still left the piece a bit awkward looking, particularly with the original composition being as close up to the two subjects as it was. Both either looked smaller or larger than they were supposed to, so the piece was going to need more context. To that end, we decided to blow it up and fill it out, fleshing out the forest, populating it with more Utah’s and adding the angry mother Deino for a proper size comparison.



We all knew the ankylosaurus was going to be a challenge. It’s an infamous tank of a dinosaur - sturdy and solid - the only problem was the silly thing had the mobility of a brick with legs. For the animal I’m sure it worked a treat, but for our game - with the map as large as we plan to make it and with the other animals as speedy as they are - Anky was going to need to evolve the ability to run a little. Fred led the charge with the designs, coming up with really nice concepts for armour plating and what would be the final concept for the face. I experimented with the tail and toyed with ways I could lightly break the ankylosaurus’s anatomy into doing things it probably couldn’t do. (Mostly running and being able to bend and twist it’s back some) One of the main references I used were rhinos. As they filled a few categories I was looking for, they had a wide ribcage, armoured looking skin and could run.


Heyo everyone! This time around the team has been concentrating very hard on bug fixing and stability. But in addition to that ongoing process, I have shifted everyone’s focus to the roadmap. There you will find a comprehensive guide to what we’re working on (that we want you to know about) at any given moment. The dryo has at last gotten it’s special ability which we’re excited to send to testing. For the moment, it will not be burrowing as we’re going to revamp how that ability works in general. But as I stick to my word where I can, we will still allow the dryo to enter burrows and potentially refurbish them. Think warthog. We still may not allow you to create one from scratch. That is to be determined. With the addition of the dryo’s new special ability, creating burrows may overload it’s kit. Time and playtesting will tell. So we’ll look forward to your feedback on that as time goes on.

Stegosaurus has been rounded out and will be making its way to QA as AI for testing. I may want to add another attack for it but that will come later. With each update we’re trying to insert more and more life onto the island without creating a massive power imbalance amongst players. That being said, we’re gearing up to add new playables to the roster. The Hypsilophodon and the Carnotaurus. The hypsi is well on it’s way animation wise and since it’s a little guy, it’s a lot faster and easier to animate than the larger dinos. Smaller creature, smaller frame range to complete an action. WooHoo! I’m rounding out it’s vocal animations as of this blogpost and will then move into some more exciting animations. So be on the lookout in the Phase Two channel on discord for clips of it’s progress. We’re currently looking into dynamic solutions for it’s brow feathers etc in-engine so Bryan and I do not have to hand animate those things in max. Not the most difficult thing in the world if we have to do it by hand. But definitely more tedious. While we can do a dynamic simulation in max, I want it to have more complex motion than being a limp string in the wind. I want it to more dynamically react to the motion driven from the base. Similar to ribbon twirling. So during all of it’s vocals and actions, the creature is as expressive as can be. Cross your fingers.

The Carnotaurus is earlier in development than the hypsi as it is going to be reanimated from scratch for the most part. The carno, as well as a few of the other older dinosaurs have/had extraordinarily outdated rigs that do not allow for the kinds of actions we need our animals to perform in this new iteration of the game. So unfortunately for the nostalgic, we have to reanimate them. We may keep the same flavor of the older animations though. We’ll see. But fortunately, for the forward thinking, we’re going to be able to do a lot more with these animals than we ever could before. Things we wish we could have done years ago with the animations that we can finally do now. The carno will make it’s return in a big way. Careful this speedy hunter doesn’t sweep you off your feet!

I also have the concept team working on a few things that we’ll reveal to you all at a later date so stay tuned, be kind and be safe! Toodles!

That wraps up the August Devblog, we hope that you enjoyed the insight into our development process and look forward to all of your thoughts & feedback! Speaking of feedback… A few days ago we released our new and improved development roadmap, built using significant community input, if you haven’t already I’d suggest giving it a look, it’s another step forward in our mission to increase both transparency and community interaction.

Check it out here: https://trello.com/b/G5tsb4XI/public-roadmap
See you all next month for September’s Devblog! - Punchpacket

Hey Islanders, a couple months ago we released our initial roadmap via the form of the Dinosaur Batch System, which we received a significant amount of feedback for which we've digested and used to help shape the new and improved roadmap that we're now excited to share! We've opted to go with a public trello board for ease of use and accessibility. Therein, you'll find cards that outline our intentions for each update push we have planned. Which include but are not limited to playable characters and their features, AI, new mechanics, new locations, story elements etc. Below I'll outline some features of the new roadmap and how to utilize them:

Roadmap: https://trello.com/b/G5tsb4XI/public-roadmap

We'll use the Utahraptor AI card for our example.
- Above the name of each card you'll see a selection of colour-coded flairs, which you can expand by left clicking on. These flairs are a quick way to indicate the progress of a specific item without having to click on the card itself and upon doing so will also expand the flairs underneath every card.

- Left click on the image or text of a card to open it, from there you can see a description of the feature which describes our design intentions. Scrolling down you can see that each card comes with a checklist indicating where that feature is in our pipeline, allowing everyone to follow along with development as things progress. Now you'll know where and what we're working on, hopefully serving as a useful indicator as to when an update may be nearing release. Do note that some of the items in the checklist involve multiple elements. Due to that, it will only be checked off if all of those elements are complete.

I'd also like to mention that our Phase 2 posts will continue, besides our social media channels it's the perfect place to showcase gifs, images and other tidbits that otherwise wouldn't fit on our roadmap. Thank you all for your patience and we look forward to your feedback!

Hey Islanders! It's been a little while since our last update and we would like to thank you all for your patience and continued feedback.

A lot of this past month for QA has been testing the new AI in development by amarok. Unfortunately, however, the AI has to be delayed for this patch whilst we work to resolve some significant issues. The main reason for this is because the spawning system they currently use seems to have a huge performance hit on servers, resulting in players being unable to interact with each other (pounce stops working entirely, for example) and characters teleporting around. As well as this, we have run into a few issues which include, but aren't limited to, the AI occasionally being invisible in various circumstances, the AI losing aggro very quickly if it cannot reach a player, and the AI becoming stuck in water sources, making for easy and unrewarding kills.

Whilst we know that AI is a long awaited addition, we believe that performance should always come first in these scenarios, especially given the time it has taken for the update to be prepared for release. We'll do our best to keep you all updated on the status of those issues as we diligently work to resolve them. Thank you for your understanding.

• Added new Tenontosaurus claw attack when stationary.
  
• Added fast get up feature. Press any movement key while resting to stand up quickly at the cost of a portion of your stamina.
  
• Added sleeping safelog mechanic. Hold H while resting to begin sleeping, which will initiate a logout timer. When the timer reaches 0, the player will automatically be logged out. This is the only way to initiate your safelog now - using Escape menu to logout will only result in a quick log and leave your character in the server for 5 minutes.
  
• Added local and global chat options for servers. More will come with future additions, such as grouping. (press tab to toggle modes while chat is open)
  
• Added pack scent mechanic. When many dinosaurs gather in an area they start emitting scent, which gives away their position.
  
• Added locked health system. After taking damage, a portion of that damage becomes locked from your maximum health, causing scars that take significantly more time to heal. (Sleep, wallow and rest are going to affect this in the future)
  
• Added underwater post process to ocean. (Rivers coming soon)
  
• Added tooltips when hovering over stats whilst the chat is open.
  
• Added tooltips when hovering over the growth bar in the dino profile.
  
• Added distinct sounds for small dino movement on sand.

• bEnableGlobalChat=true
  
• bGlobalIsSpeciesOnly=false
  
• bLocalIsSpeciesOnly=true
  
• LocalChatRange=20000.f

• Adjusted ingame screenshot key to F6 from F9 so that the hide chat input didn't overlap.
  
• Adjusted mud parameter time to be the same length as masked footprints.
  
• Adjusted camera distance to scale with dinosaur growth.
  
• Adjusted scent range to go further.
  
• Adjusted ragdolls, making them more stable when dragging and better animation blending.
  
• Adjusted footprint scent effects to look and perform better.
  
• Adjusted ambience sounds.
  
• Adjusted Spiro landscape features.
  
• Various performance improvements

• Fixed players being unable to join servers on a port that wasn't set to 7777.
  
• Fixed being unable to eat corpses that were in water.
  
• Fixed pressing E on the ocean causing an input lockup.
  
• Fixed an uncommon crash that would occur if the player stayed on the main menu for a long duration then pressing the quit button.
  
• Fixed the player input locking up when attempting to eat while in the corpse pickup animation.
  
• Fixed players being able to logout midair and log back in midair.
  
• Fixed Tenontosaurus input being locked up if attacking while wallowing.
  
• Fixed safelogging sometimes not removing the player's character from the server.
  
• Fixed eating animation continuing briefly when moving immediately after the player stopped eating.
  
• Fixed the Utahraptor pounce becoming stuck on a Tenontosaurus if the pounce key was tapped, rather than held.
  
• Fixed a rare occurrence where relogging would create a duplicate character.
  
• Fixed Tenontosaurus eating animation sometimes not looping correctly.
  
• Fixed the player being able to swim in various locations where water was not present.
  
• Fixed Utahraptor not producing walking sounds during a specific growth stage.
  
• Fixed scent compass not appearing if the player was not in range of scentable assets.
  
• Fixed an issue where pouncing a Utahraptor head on would cause the player to lockup and become stuck to the other player.
  
• Fixed the player's own footprints showing after masking their scent with wallowing when they shouldn't have been.
  
• Fixed Tenontosaurus being able to graze on corpses.
  
• Fixed Tenontosaurus being able to graze off living players.
  
• Fixed consuming a hatchling Utahraptor causing the player's stats to plummet until they died.
  
• Fixed crouching while walking making less noise than crouching while trotting, even though crouching was the same speed.
  
• Fixed Utahraptor not holding dead juveniles in their mouth properly if they pounced them to death.
  
• Fixed Utahraptor juvenile basic attack being delayed if the player pressed the pounce button first.
  
• Fixed Tenontosaurus vocals "stopping in place" from where they were played.
  
• Fixed Utahraptor grabbing affecting corpses that were behind the character.
  
• Fixed corpses dropping automatically when they collided with another asset.
  
• Fixed footprint plumes from scent appearing even after your scent animation had finished.
  
• Fixed the skid when landing a pounce as a Utahraptor only showing clientside.
  
• Fixed players being able to use scent and drink water at the same time. Cheaters.
  
• Fixed being able to drag a corpse at the same time as another player.
  
• Fixed an issue where logged out players would sometimes appear on the admin scoreboard without names.
  
• Fixed Tenontosaurus sometimes being able to drink from mud instead of wallowing.
  
• Fixed Tenontosaurus occasionally becoming stuck when eating from a plant.
  
• Fixed Utahraptor locking up other players by swallowing them before they respawned.
  
• Fixed the heal admin command not preventing starvation/dehydration if the player was resting.
  
• Fixed the hunger UI flickering from red to green when starving.
  
• Fixed Tenontosaurus sliding forward at sprint speed after landing a jump while sprinting.
  
• Fixed players not being able to hear others out of render distance when they should have been. All sounds will travel much further now.
  
• Fixed footprints not being highlighted by scent but the "plumes" still appearing.
  
• Fixed tapping the wallow key playing the quick get up animation instead of the regular stand animation.
  
• Fixed logged dead players' corpses disappearing if teleported to immediately after they died.
  
• Fixed an issue where pressing the grab button as a Utahraptor while sprinting would slow the player down.
  
• Fixed corpse physics breaking if the player pressed the grab button while jumping.
  
• Fixed being able to instantly clear mud from wallowing if the player wallowed twice.
  
• Fixed characters becoming invulnerable if the player quick logs whilst swimming.
  
• Fixed Utahraptor rarely becoming locked up when wallowing.
  
• Fixed Admin Panel not showing Server Name and Max Players.
  
• Fixed unsafe logout players not disappearing from the world.
  
• Fixed Mask boolean being overwritten by owning client.

Here is a list of some of our known high priority issues, not including the other 100+ bugs on our internal tracker. If you have anything else to add, please use the following form: https://forms.gle/ufXDnxNfhRhZ7CCi8

• Huge GPU performance impact caused by footprints decal material.
  
• Wallowing does not mask clientside footprint tracks when scenting, however, it does still mask your tracks for other players.
  
• Global chat will show as LocalSpecies if you are using the LocalSpecies channel. This is a visual issue but shouldn't have any effect on the functionality of the channels.
  
• Two or more players pouncing a single target can sometimes cause one of the Utahraptors to "break" - vocals and attacks do not seem to function after this occurs. Relogging fixes the issue.
  
• Occasionally using the admin command to slay yourself results in your character being completely invisible clientside. Relogging fixes the issue.
  
• Swimming is working a bit wonky at the moment. Players may bounce vertically occasionally.

Hey Islanders, It's been a little while since our last update and our team has been working hard to resolve the various issues reported in EVRIMA version 0.4.3.13. Below you'll find an informative changelog, listing everything we've added/fixed/optimised for this patch. If you encounter any issues or have any feedback you'd like to provide please let us know across our various platforms! We value your input and eagerly look forward to it.

AI is still undergoing vigorous testing from our dedicated QA team and I'll be sure to keep you all updated on it's progress!

• Updated game project version to 4.25.1
  
• Added a new Steam communication system, to allow more options, faster and more reliable processes, fixing some bugs like needing to restart steam and the game to find servers after being kicked or failing to join.
  
• Added an enhanced logout system that requires the player to rest for 60 seconds before leaving the server, to prevent combat logging. Players that do not wait for 60s will leave their character ingame for 5 minutes. Sleeping animations planned for this for the future.
  
• Added a mud effect when wallowing. Fades over time or when swimming.
  
• Added vocal power to the HUD. Shows how out of breath the player is, etc.
  
• Added a knockback effect when the Utahraptor pounces into objects, instead of going through them.
  
• Added Spiro map improvements - more river foliage and additional rock formations.
  
• Adjusted server list menu to only show servers on the same game version as the player's client (this will be toggleable in future with server filters.)
  
• Adjusted the "hide chat" key to F6 from F9, as F9 is used to take screenshots.
  
• Adjusted "tip of the tail" modifier to deal negligible damage.

• Fixed footsteps not causing splashes in ocean water.
  
• Fixed an issue where game would lockup if pressing Enter while chat was hidden.
  
• Fixed character's eyes not being visible if on low view distance.
  
• Fixed pouncing a Tenonto causing jittery sprinting (pausing every few seconds.)
  
• Fixed admin announcements overlapping.
  
• Fixed being able to walk underwater beneath a certain rock bridge in one of the Spiro swamps.
  
• Fixed being able to drag corpses faster while crouching instead of standing.
  
• Fixed adult Utahraptor being able to eat hatchling Utahraptor corpses indefinitely.
  
• Fixed being able to drag bodies larger than the player by setting growth with the admin panel.
  
• Fixed admin panel targeting other players if it had not fully loaded.
  
• Fixed duplicates of servers in the server listing menu when changing the filter.
  
• Fixed Tenontosaurus bucking from affecting a third party's stamina if they had bitten the Tenontosaurus before it began bucking.
  
• Fixed not being able to use vocals while resting.
  
• Fixed Utahraptor being able to eat infinite hatchling bodies without vomiting.
  
• Fixed being able to pounce a single Utahraptor with multiple Utahraptors.
  
• Fixed Utahraptor floating in mid-air if pounced mid-jump.
  
• Fixed Tenontosaurus being able to eat other characters after eating from a bush first.
  
• Fixed an input lockup that occurred from spamming the scent key immediately after wallowing.
  
• Fixed an issue where the camera would stop moving if the player pressed the cancel button when on the quit menu.
  
• Fixed Tenontosaurus dropping deep underwater after a Utahraptor pounced it, while it was swimming.
  
• Fixed Utahraptor's pouncing through Tenontosaurus when aimed at its shoulder.
  
• Fixed being able to jump while standing up from wallowing.
  
• Fixed audio from vocals stopping if the player spammed the chat.
  
• Fixed an input lockup that occurred from pressing the eat key while in the grab animation.
  
• Fixed being able to free look when not moving completely forward.
  
• Fixed various crevices on Spiro.
  
• Fixed jitter when exiting waist-deep water while running.
  
• Fixed game being blurry.

• Attempted fixes to memory leak.
  
• Movement stuttering and teleporting improvements. Several patches may still be required to finetune this.
  
• CPU process improvements, which should give a performance boost, especially to those with low-end CPUs.
  
• New footstep effects and design for testing performance and new future design concepts.

Having a bit of calm after the storm that was the push to get EVRIMA into your hands I went on a break to make up for the extra hours that were put in. This makes the month's update shorter than normal and even that is just going to be me talking about bug fixes. One of our more pressing matters was people figuring out how to play as unreleased dinosaurs. You can trust me when I say that I want to get the Pteranodon out there as soon as possible (because I want to work on it), but other tasks take precedence. Like preventing people from playing as unreleased dinosaurs.

My primary addition for the month is safe logging. When it went out to the QA team it caused a bit of an uproar because it was only working for a few people and not at all for others. Turns out I forgot to mention that resting is a requirement now. Sorry, lesson learned. At the time of writing there is still an issue that prevented it from going live. It's something I was not able to reproduce in the editor because sometimes Unreal is just like that. I am fairly confident that I fixed it, but we'll need to wait for the next QA build to test it.

As many of you know a major issue was the jitter when turning, especially at high speed. It's once again something we couldn’t test in-editor so it gave us a lot of headache. Multiple attempts were made, but it appears I finally found the solution. Basically Unreal tries to predict where other players will move based on their velocity and until the client receives an update from the server it will assume that others are moving in a straight line. Naturally that is not always the case and when the server sends an update with significantly different information, then that dino ends up being teleported to the accurate location on the player’s screen. When you have more players around you the server decreases the rate at which updates are sent, resulting in jitteriness for the players. All we had to do was increase the minimum update rate to a value that gives better results. The current setting looked right on our QA server, but we will be tweaking it depending on the performance of public servers.

To experience a bit of success while trying to fix the jittering I looked at various other bug fixes on the side or code improvements like streamlining the way we handle damage. The Gameplay Ability System we use supports various complex functionality and thus even the more straightforward things have to be done in a not so straightforward way. I worked on making it simple to do what we use it for. Free look (you're just going to call it alt look, aren't you) works better now if you activate it while not moving forward as well.

I also worked on setting up one of the next dinosaurs you will be seeing around The Isle, the Dryosaurus. A lot of effort went into making it easy to add a new dinosaur on the programming side, even if it is still a bit time consuming. Every creature is different so there are some refinements I still want to look at, but adding something that falls between existing dinos is something we can do very efficiently.



Now that I’m back from vacation I have been primarily working on performance improvements and bug fixes. We’ve noticed that some processes were consuming a small percentage of CPU causing a bottleneck in performance, so if you have a good GPU, but a weak CPU, your fps will be locked, since the GPU needs to “wait” for the CPU. After a little tinkering we gained some performance boosts and increased stability. Besides this, servers are having problems with a memory leak, which has also improved, tests are still running so that additional improvements can be made.

Bug fixes are a constant process, especially after adding more features, like mud on the body after wallowing, collisions, etc. But it doesn't mean we can´t work on new things as we fix bugs. Dryosaurus is in development now and we had some problems bringing it’s old animations to EVRIMA, but now it’s fixed, we should have Dryos running around the map very soon.

Swallowing is an ability that isn´t working as intended visually, the swallowed creature has a ragdoll during the process, but it is spamming and shaking, so I will return to it and rework the system in order to have a good visual mechanic. It is important to look good especially when we introduce big animals like the T-REX.

Another big change we did was to replace our steam solution plugin, bugs related to steam were fixed with that, but being a new system it will take some time until we master it completely, new features are planned like friend invites.





Whew it’s been a fun few weeks and AI is pretty close to its initial release. Hopefully within the next few weeks everyone will be in a world of pain trying to survive as the AI does not take prisoners. I am still in the process of tuning the relationship algorithm that goes into AI behaviour so it may very well be misbehaving and you might find yourself under attack by juvie Dryos.

Some of the key points that I will be focusing on;

Collision: If you have seen the streams lately you would have noticed my elegant solution for AI collision /s. It works and for the time being until collision is implemented, will do.

Targeting: AI will switch targets based on its perception and behavioural algorithm. This might do some funny things if there are lots of players picking on a single AI. I look forward to seeing how this plays out.

Behaviour: So currently the AI behaviour is pretty basic. It will roam/wander the map by itself or in a herd. It will defend itself but also actively hunt targets. They have Stamina (Use this to your advantage).They do rest & will look for and eat sources of food.

Performance: AI is mostly run server-side, It has to be extremely performant in all aspects otherwise the entire server will be affected. I have been running performance profiles and verified some areas we can improve. It’s looking alot better now and hopefully we can start to increase the amount of AI on the map. Currently I’m going to allow 60-100 MAX on Spiro and see where we go from there.

I want everyone to understand that it will not be perfect. The development time for AI has been around a month and 2 weeks. This includes me being on-boarded and learning how the project is set up. This is a very short amount of time in the software world. In saying that, I still feel like it is ready to be brought out into the community and I look forward to the criticism that is surely coming my way.


I’ve been a little quieter around here as I do a bunch of business organization things on the back end, making sure we are investing our finances and investing in our team and getting them the tools and people they need to actualize Don’s vision for this game and it’s future.

Much of what I have been doing is Dondi herding in getting him ready to take his lore and design sabbatical so he can focus on getting everything into a cohesive state that provides us a bit of a safety blanket should something terrible happen and he isn’t around to tell me what heinous stuff AE has planned or done to the inhabitants of the islands.

As you can imagine I’m hip deep in contracts, invoices, paperwork and licensing negotiations for tools, properties (like firearms/vests/rigs) while also writing my take on what’s important for the “Merc” side of gameplay and getting that broken down so that Kissen can get all the bits that make that part of our game work assigned to the right people on our team.

We’ve been super busy growing our team and getting the right people into the right jobs on our team which has resulted in some shuffling and some welcome additions to our management team.

To give you guys a brief rundown of what our management team looks like now. Hypno has been promoted and is now a full member of our management team and his role not only focuses around managing our QA team but also providing valuable gameplay design feedback and input. No one knows the ins and outs of the play side of our game like Jack so we felt it was important to give him a full seat at the table to help us make the right decisions.

Filipe, master of the keyboard camera angle has been promoted and is now managing our programming team full time while also providing input and acting as a sounding board for the management and decision making that happens internally. His diligent and at times ruthless approach to getting things fixed even when we have to remind the man to sleep sometimes has been very valuable to us and his attention to detail is second to none.

This means that our management team looks as follows. Don continues to serve as our director, Kissen is our Executive Producer and creative cat herder (Love you Art Team), Filipe is our Lead Programmer, Punch is our lead Community Director, Hypno is QA Leader and brutalizer of our design decision, with myself acting as our CFO/Business guy who still loves talking to you guys in the community so I back Punch up.


We now return you to another episode of KissenKitten's Chronicles…

Well, after giving the team a much needed week off from production, we’re finally getting back into the swing of things. I didn’t realize just how much I needed a break until I was in the middle of taking one. This team has been going hard in the paint on this game for so very long and I just wanted everyone to take some much needed time to live a normal life, reconnect with their loved ones and just relax for a little while. Especially considering how hectic and uncertain life has been for all of us across the globe. It makes a world of difference just stepping outside and letting the sun hit your face for a little bit, taking a deep breath and reflecting on the good stuff in your life. Instead of being consumed by the bad.

Also, for all of you would be producers, production managers and team leads out there, remember to put your team first. If you want to make something great, surround yourself with great people and then, treat them as such. They’ll repay you in badass performance and an amazing work atmosphere. I have fun working with these people each and every day. I’m excited to go to work! Imagine that! Without a happy, productive team, no project will succeed, remember that. Thankfully, the time off has done some good and the team has returned to work recharged, reinvigorated and down to clown (in the best way).

Production wise, I'm gearing everyone up to focus on pumping more creatures (and their mechanics) into the game as we squash more bugs. But we've also got new concepts, new models, new rigs, new animations, new human assets and more, all cooking in the oven. Mmmm! I’m also looking to grow our team. Yet again. lol So if you’re a tech programmer, tech animator or environment artist, get your portfolio all the way together Boo. No half-stepping if you want to join our team.

On the animation front, I've completed the Dryosaurus for implementation into EVRIMA. I'm sure you've gotten a glimpse of it during Amarok's AI streams. And yes, I’ll port over the burrow building stuff for it. GEEZ! I’ve also done some new anims for the Utahraptor and Tenontosaurus. Lets see if you’re awake enough to spot them when you see them.

The EVRIMA set of anims consists of about 25 additional animations that bring the old legacy dinos in line with what we're doing with our dinosaur mechanics. Wallowing, sliding, turning in place and special attacks to name a few. Bryan worked hard in the rigging department to ensure we could streamline the conversion from old to new, relatively painlessly. He’s my hero for that! In the past, we pretty much had to completely reanimate each dino that got a new model. Between Bryan and myself we’ve definitely reanimated some dinos at least 3 times. I think the Utahraptor is a shining example of that. He did the original set, then I did the next set, then he did the next one and now I’m doing some more again. All because we either changed the character’s model or expanded it’s set of abilities or how those abilities look or function visually etc. So not having to continue like that is such a boon for us. Now that being said, we'll still have to do that for some of the super old stuff. But in truth, they need reanimating anyway. There’s a lot of stuff I wanted to do and wanted done with those older rigs that just wasn’t possible. But stepping out of the dark ages of “we can’t do that because x” is allowing Bryan and myself to get really creative.

Anywho, right now I'm working on the Stegosaurus and the Tyrannosaurus Rex now that I've completed the Dryo. So I'll try to get some of the new animations in front of you guys as I complete them for those dinos. All dinos I work on really. I admittedly shadow completed the Dryo and shared next to none of it. It just went by so fast it slipped my mind! Whoops! Probably because I did some of it over the break. I dunno. But I’ll give you some tastes of the rest from now on, I promise. After I get these two OG dinos out of the way, then I’ll move full-tilt into more of the new kids on the block and get you guys something fresh to wreak havoc with. I’m leaning towards Troodon.

On that note, we've finally made it to over 100 animations total! Yay! That doesn't mean that each creature has 100 animations but it does mean that there are 100 different animations in total on the master list of anims. So for instance, the Utahraptor pounce is on the list of 100. But it's not an animation the Triceratops will have. It's just a master list of all the animations that are “possible” in the game. Some dinosaurs will have almost all of them, others not. It all depends on the complexity of the character. We're likely to have some dinos that are pretty straightforward with their unique gameplay expressed in other ways outside of a unique animation. But they'll all have a different feel regardless, which is the goal. I’m glad I finally get to do all the stuff I wanted to do. WHOOP!





That’s it for this month’s DevBlog, it may be a tad shorter than our prior blogs given that much of our staff have recently come back from vacation, now that we’ve overcome our first major hurdle in the release of EVRIMA we’re all refreshed and ready to continue the pursuit of what we’ve all been dreaming of.

A big thank you to everyone for all the support and feedback we’ve received, your input goes a long way in helping us achieve the end goal. Isle see you all in the next time! - Punchpacket

• Server memory leak fixed.
  
• Movement replication improvements to combat teleporting issue.
  
• Graphics settings added. (WIP)
  
• Keybind settings added. (WIP)
  
• Added keybind to hide chat. (Default F9)
  
• Added server name filtering.
  
• Increased footprints view distance.
  
• Removed unfinished species.

• Fixed a server crash caused by pounce.
  
• Fixed the admin scoreboard not closing when pressing Tab while it was open.
  
• Fixed players being able to drink from too far away.
  
• Fixed main menu and server list menu UI being misaligned.
  
• Fixed an issue where pressing the Esc key on the various menus caused the cursor to disappear.
  
• Fixed footprint decals appearing on characters.
  
• Fixed a lockup caused by using a vocal immediately after finishing the wallow animation.
  
• Fixed an issue where pouncing a Utahraptor with a corpse in its mouth would cause the corpse to break and freeze in mid-air.

Hey Islanders! It's EVRIMAn for himself!

https://gyazo.com/0c3347f2976f66d2e58bc9814becccd7

Right click The Isle in your Steam library > left click properties > betas > in the dropdown menu select "EVRIMA Public Branch". Afterwards your game will update to the latest version of EVRIMA, you may need to restart Steam for the branch to become visible.

Well, it's been over a month since we bootlegged Isla Spiro into existence from a heightmap that was planned for a second island, which has been my primary focus. A lot of my time and effort ping-ponging in between backend and ultimately uninteresting things to read about was converting the plans of the second island to fit the immediate release of EVRIMA, which went from roads being paths, and certain POI's for the human environment that would have been done relegated to interesting natural structures (or the groundwork for the aforementioned).

One of the issues of an island so large that originally would have had AI already laid out was making sure people knew how to get from A to B, so I put in slightly distorted routes made of dirt and rock in for animals to follow, which needs to be converted into something a little more natural since a texture like that wouldn't really be what a trail looks like at all, so I intend to change the dirt and rock that is meant for the side of mountains converted to compacted dirt and lightly sprinkled foliage and debris from consistent travel of large prehistoric animals.

Aside from that, if anyone is wondering, landmass doesn't work properly with world composition. It would've been nice if it did, so we still have to do rivers the old fashioned way (completely handcrafted) which almost always has some error in it, no matter how many times it's been combed over.

Technically since the time of my creation of my part of the devblog, EVRIMA has been out for a little over 24 hours, so aside from map fixes and helping out respective branches of development where I'm needed, most of my time is spent reviewing feedback and videos to see the impressions of everyone that has their hands on it. One of the original shortcomings, is the origin of the Isle starting with a roster that we didn't really have a choice in and struggling to fill out an ecosystem. So I'll be completing a roadmap with pools of dinosaurs that will be categorically selected to fill out the needs of our ecosystem as it expands.



Since the last devblog we’ve done a ludicrous amount of work both internally and externally and while we’ve made some mistakes along the way we are always learning from those mistakes.

I’ve been chasing down NDA’s, Contracts and liaising with everyone trying to answer questions, give the developers whatever support they need and preparing with our DevOps engineer to spin up a slew of official servers for the launch of EVRIMA including the documentation that goes into making that available to the public so the community can host its own servers for EVRIMA.

It’s been a pretty emotional time as we onboard new folks, deal with the hype and criticism of what we’ve put out into the world and work to combat those issues as they come up. We’ve been very cognizant of the time it’s taken for us to get here and place EVRIMA into your hands. I look forward to seeing the reactions of the public, both the good and bad so we can keep making a better game.



The last month was mostly bug fixing and mechanic improvements in preparation for
the long awaited update (EVRIMA). Grab/Carry is a huge and very complex mechanic that has given me and QA a lot of work, but I hope that in the end it becomes a “must have” ability in-game.

We had a major problem that was causing players to stutter whilst moving around, which we
managed to fix by changing the network manager settings and correcting replication values.
Some more improvements are possible and also network performance will receive more focus during the next weeks with the implementation of the Replication Graph. The Replication Graph (Engine Plugin) is a system for network replication in multiplayer games that is designed to scale well with large numbers of players and replicated Actors.

I would like to talk more about one specific thing that isn't very well known by those outside the team, which is swimming. Swimming is a cool mechanic, but most games have it by simply adding a Physics Volume box in the level, setting it to water type and then the engine handles most the physics and buoyancy. The problem is that you are restricted to the shape of those boxes, they don't work with angles, they don't move in game, don't replicate and if you have a ocean covering your world, that box will prevent the possibilities of having caves below the sea level, because you would hit the invisible box and start swimming.

Our system fixes all those problems. Basically we don't have to place thousands (yes, that’s right, thousands) of those boxes in the map anymore.So lakes and rivers have a more accurate swim system based on their shapes, oceans don’t have a giant water volume anymore so caves are possible, in land or water. Also allows us to have drought and flood systems, and another cool thing: angled water surfaces, like rivers on a hill for example, which can have a "water flow" force that can pull players and corpses without causing a severe hit in performance. Besides all that, we are working on some gameplay balance. Adjusting things like damage, health and stamina restoration, stamina drain, hunger decay, etc.

Another funny bug we had in the last few days is related to changes we did for scaling dinos with growth. Sometimes adult ones were being seen as juvs, but floating around. After some investigation we managed to find the cause of it and fixed, but the laughs are going to stay for a while. :D

Video: https://www.twitch.tv/sheepzf/clip/AlluringSecretiveAyeayePunchTrees

QA is also giving us awesome suggestions and ideas that we are discussing and applying to the game when possible, their help is highly appreciated.



With our QA team diligently finding all the bugs we tried to hide in the game, I spent a lot of time fixing various issues.

A visual effect for scenting is something that I had been putting off for a while. One reason is that we never really reached a fully fleshed out consensus on what we wanted it to look like exactly, the other is that water is difficult to deal with. The ideas we had were seeing a fog through walls where the object is, or a radar/compass-style effect around the player that shows you directions. As a combination of the two I started experimenting with a fog that gives out particles which are attracted to the dinosaur.

We have two types of water sources you can sniff out, lakes and rivers. Lakes are implemented using large boxes that extend under the landscape. We couldn't rely on just highlighting those, since you would see water where you can't reach it. I ended up creating a system that finds points of the water surface that are not covered. These points are used as the source of the particles, giving a nice effect. The same concept was surprisingly simple to apply to rivers, I just had to use a random spline point instead.

The visuals could be a bit overwhelming with a lot of water/food around so I added a little change to help with that. Depending on your current hunger/thirst the different effects are more/less visible.

Another large issue I had to tackle was seamlessly blending from the juvenile to the adult locomotion animations while keeping it in line with your movement speed. In many games the speed your character is moving and the speed they move their legs are not necessarily the same. Of course they are made to line up, but it's controlled independently. Unreal Engine provides tools for blending different animations but it has its limitations. We had a set of animations working in the juvenile state and one in the adult state. Continuously blending from one to the other posed a challenge, since juveniles move faster relatively to their size. A good amount of math had to be changed, but I made it work while keeping the movement and animation speeds in sync.

A new addition to EVRIMA was saving. There's not a lot of data we need to manage just yet, but it's something I'm sure you'll appreciate. Not much to talk about with this one.

What do you get when the animator/manager's favorite dinosaur makes it into the game? More animations than what you can fit into your control scheme of course. The Tenontosaurus has a wide range of attacks you can perform depending on your camera angle. At the time of writing it's still subject to change and unfinished. Luckily we're using a solid framework for the dinosaur abilities, so adding these attacks was quite smooth. I changed some of the bite ability to make parts of the code reusable and to increase maintainability.

We were having movement jitter issues for a while that needed to be fixed. The cause turned out to be the collision between quickly moving characters. Unfortunately in a networked environment, player locations are not replicated exactly across clients. Meaning that the player's game and the server, sometimes disagree on what should happen. In these cases the server's opinion takes priority and the players experience teleportation and jittery movement. We came to the conclusion that the collision had to go.

This came with a load of other issues that needed to be addressed. I added several new mechanisms that simulate collision without having to rely on the built-in solution. Generally speaking, you will not be able to walk inside other players. I was able to make use of the existing obstacle avoidance mechanic for this. The biggest hurdle was still being able to jump inside/through others.

I ended up going back to our implementation for replicating custom movement and reworking it to make better use of what the engine offered. That was something I'd actually been meaning to do for a long time, so I was quite happy that I finally had a proper reason. Using these changes I was able to make it so that players are stopped when colliding in the air as well. We still had occasional cases of characters ending up inside each other. I solved this by making them get pushed away from each other a little until they no longer overlap. It's a subtle thing, but it does a great job preventing multiple dinosaurs standing in the same spot.

Jack – QA Lead, “The Judge”, Destroyer of Programmer’s Hopes and Dreams

As the Quality Assurance Lead, I’ve been tasked with assuring the utmost polished product that we can deliver in the given timeframe. This means that I have to be “the judge” on which bugs are prioritized by the programmers and which features are to be considered a necessity for the release. When a bug comes through, I’ll slap a high priority label on it so that the programmers know it’s next on their to-do list. When a necessary addition still isn’t in the game, I get sad and spam ping them in our Dev Discord until it’s added. The most important thing to keep in mind is that everything you find will be subject to change.

To update you all from the last devblog, QA’s responsibilities have mostly remained the same. Find bugs, replicate bugs, report bugs, make developer’s cry. It’s proving to be a simple yet effective cycle as we’ve now reported 550+ total unique bugs (more than double the amount since our last blog!)
However, as we’ve been approaching the release date for the public build, QA’s focus has shifted towards play testing and balance testing for a lot of the recent patches. The team is comprised of a variety of different players; we have old timers that have been around since the day the game was conceived and contrarily, we also have some much newer faces that bring an entirely different perspective to the game. I am certain that with the amount of balance testing and feedback that we’re taking onboard from QA that you’ll be happy with the outcome. If not, I’ll cry. (No, seriously, send feedback. Thanks.)

In my opinion, balancing a game is one of the most difficult tasks we face as a team – there are no rights or wrongs – everyone has a different opinion. The approach we’re taking is to establish which “tier” we believe a species to be in. The main variable for this is obviously the scale of the creature; if a Utahraptor is in tier 2 then a Tenontosaurus would also be in tier 2. With this in mind, we will play test the two and try various scenarios, such as a one on one battle to the death or an outnumbered party that must fend for its life. We’ve been attempting these play tests almost every build now, with the full team giving their opinions on how it should feel and where adjustments need to be made, leading to some pretty exciting results.

We believe we’ve got both the Utahraptor and Tenontosaurus in a good spot now, but you guys will need to be the deciding factor on that.

KissenKitten - Production/Animation, Team Mom, Catherder Prime.

This month I've been devoting a lot of my time that isn't centered around overall production to animation. Lots and lots of it. My primary focus has been making sure all the animations that are needed for EVRIMA are in place. Like nibbling at mineral deposits and general quality of life tweaks to what's currently flowing through the QA pipeline and EVRIMA. Some of what I've been doing you may have seen snippets of. Like a troodon vocal here, a magy locomotion there. But outside of that, there are a few “new” things, like looping fishing animations that I've been prototyping. Animation prototyping often involves animating the same action in various ways (while not sacrificing productivity) to find out the best way to go about delivering on the action. So, when our dedicated fishers make their debut, the fundamentals of their mechanics will have been fully iterated on and tested. We want to make sure we choose the best way to deliver on the fantasy. A lot of the time, an animation that you’ve seen may have one or two other versions that you’ve never seen before. Some, even more than that.

In addition, I've been going full tilt boogie on some of the dinos that will be coming later on. With Bryan motoring through the rigging process, there's going to be plenty to keep the both of us busy for months to come as far as animations are concerned. But currently, my full focus is devoted to the Hypsilophodon which is likely to appear as one of the first AI dinosaurs post EVRIMA release. I'm working my way through vocals, eating, drinking and all of the other animations that really give a creature it's character. Then, I move out from that and focus on the animations that are essential but maybe not quite as expressive. Things like turning etc. So be on the lookout for some chirpy goodness over the coming weeks.

Tapwing- Concept Artist, Nightmare Fuel Generator, Characterization Wizard

‘If you’ve seen the colour concept for Ovi it’s probably obvious that cassowary birds were a big inspiration, with them being forest floor explorers taking advantage of their flexible diets. Aggressive, prideful, with moments of playfulness. A little wood grouse wormed it’s way in there as well with some of the posturing.’

VisualTech48 (Gabriel Radić) - 3d Environmental Artist

For the past few months since I started working on The Isle team I’ve been pretty much incognito due to the nature of the items I’m working on, and especially due to the release date for my work is yet to be set and my stuff implemented.

So finally, I’m here to talk about it. These months I’ve been working on the Human Environment assets, which consists of various buildings, items and such, starting from the “Dockyard” and all of its content. For the time being I’ve set up the whole modular system which we will be using to create buildings and various assets. These consist of various kits, which each represent some part or type of structure, like a “wall kit”, “pipe system kit”, and so on, within which I combine and make a building out of it.

You can imagine it as constructing lego blocks, and then putting them into the right place without a blueprint really, as all of the modular stuff needs a lot of thinking through so all the pieces can fit together. But once fully implemented and assembled, it can make the whole process of making buildings faster. Along with the decal shader which enhance the look of the building, and along side Ikarop’s shaders give an amazing look and feel to it. So far I’ve got the basic system in place, shaders are being constructed, and we’ll soon be moving into the first level of implementation and see what’s next on the drawing board for the system, which afterwards I’ll be slowly constructing buildings and its items.

Looking forward to showcasing my work soon enough, and giving you that streaming I promised around 3 weeks! Cheers


























Outside of my other duties assisting in level design and UI, my main responsibility on The Isle for the past 5 years has been to give life to the world and its inhabitants through audio. The processes behind this have evolved considerably over time. When initially starting on the project back in the day, there was serious time pressure to create all the starting creature's vocal sets in less than a month. As things progressed, we developed a whole emotional range for these creatures, from friendly chirps to angry bellows, with variations for young and old members of the species.

With the latest iteration of the game you have the ability to grow your dinosaur from hatchling to full adult, and it is now completely seamless. This was one of the major design challenges for the past year, and required a complete overhaul of how dinosaur vocals are handled. The goal I set was that, if we're able to have smooth growth visually, we should have smooth growth on the audio side as well. It was a colossal task.

The first step was to break everything down into much more modular pieces to allow for greater flexibility in how we treat creature sounds in-game. Previously everything was merged down into a single roar effect, whereas now the key elements of growls, breaths and the signature core effect of each vocalization are separated into their own stems. These are combined in-game in different combinations, allowing for not only the ability to tweak each aspect individually, but to have a lot more variety in what your roar sounds like. This also means that distance processing has to occur systemically now, instead of using pre-rendered files for when you hear dinosaurs at long range. This is something that's still being heavily tweaked, but from applying different multi-tap delays and reverb effects we've achieved pretty good results so far.

When it comes to growth, the approach we took was to use various dynamic parameters to smoothly transition from hatchling, to juvenile, to adult. The pitch and volume of your calls gradually shift over time as you grow larger, to create a fairly convincing blend. We use a similar setup for the animal footsteps, transitioning from the light tippety taps of hatchlings to the larger more resonant footfalls of full adults, with different setups for small, medium and large creatures. Whilst it's not perfect and we can't account for *all* the effects a dinosaur makes, I'm really happy with how it's turned out. Hopefully when you get to play it, the approach we've taken feels a lot better than if we'd just had your dinosaur suddenly going from a timid squeak to a throaty growl when you randomly hit a certain point.

Allen - amar0k - Developer of NuDinoNet - Destroyer of AFK growers dreams

Hear ye hear ye. First dev blog for me, I have been with the team for a little over two weeks and it has been incredible so far. I honestly really enjoy working with the team and I am more than excited to see where the project goes from here!

I’ve spent most of my time getting familiar with project specifics and working on best methods to implement AI functionality. I believe the foundation is mapped and the concrete set.

A lot of you would have seen my streams which I really enjoy. Being able to interact with you all as I try to showcase as much as I can with the progress of the AI which I have nicknamed DinoNet, Basic AI with some intermediate interactions are well underway and with each day comes new challenges and advancements in AI behaviour.

DinoNet features currently consist of ;
Fighting Back
Aggression
Hiding
Running
Hearing Footsteps/Calls
Voice calling responses
Voice calling between AI
Herding
Defensive behaviour


The current challenge is getting all of this to work consistently and fluently at scale. I want the entire DinoNet foundation to scale to any character type.

Some other challenges I’m facing are scaling large amounts of AI characters on a map, this is a problem that all games have to deal with at some point, I have a good solution and initial testing has shown promising results. So this will become a focal point for me over the next few months.
With the launch of EVRIMA underway I have also spent some time helping the team squash critical bugs so we can get the content out to you guys as quickly as possible.
That’s about it from me!

I cannot wait to see you guys fighting the AI and the hilarity that ensues.

Paradym

This wraps up our Dev Blog #2 and we look forward to the next one, this one kind of got truncated due to the pace of work and we will likely spend some more time doing post mortems about some of the more interesting bugs so they don’t just live/die in the UDN forums and exist elsewhere.

Thanks for sticking with us and see you in the next blog!

Hey Islanders,

Just a small announcement to let everyone know that we are targeting June 14th-20th for the release of EVRIMA. We're all super excited to get EVRIMA into your hands and eagerly look forward to all of your feedback!