Filipe - Lead Programmer

Another month of intense work focused on bug fixes, server and client performance and replication reliability.

This month I reworked part of the pickup ability to avoid having the need to respawn pieces of meat, which not only grants us additional performance, but also looks significantly better. It was a necessary improvement, as now both the elite and schooling fish use that same system. We’ve also resolved a hefty number of hilarious bugs relating to the fish, sometimes failing to float at all or deciding to fly away to the stars… It took a little time, but with the assistance of our marvellous QA team we managed to stabilize those issues.

The infamous Deinosuchus lunge, making mechanics like this function as necessary without the feeling of latency (having to wait for the server to execute code and send it back) is quite challenging. Similar to pounce in some aspects, lunge doesn't “wait” for the server, but applies what is needed, predicting that the server will agree, if the server says no for any reason, well, you know, everything breaks.

Most people know by now that we will be opening the QA branch again, for stress tests and disconnect issues before the full release of Update #3. We hope to find any missing issues from that test and of course, we count on all of you to help us, since numbers make a big difference. See you!

dmIV - Programmer

I’ve continued work on the flight movement, giving more control over speed. For one, it is now possible to brake and slow down, letting players have more precise control when they want to land accurately. On the other hand a faster flight is now possible when sprinting. It lets you move significantly faster, but you might want to watch your stamina.

I’ve also made some improvements to diving to make it smoother. There is now an acceleration and deceleration, you also change your up-down direction more gradually. Overall there are less and less sudden movements while diving, making it feel like you really are in water.

I’ve set up the 360 attacks for the Deinosuchus and Pteranodon. They use the same logic as all the others, so this one was a quick addition. I also added a version that is used while swimming as a Deino. The tests showed that the Deino’s turn rate is too slow to catch up with attackers from behind, so this tackled that issue. I also gave the Tenontosaurus some love and made it use controls more like the other species. The left mouse button is used for biting, while pressing it in combination with alt will perform the claw attack. I also separated the kick and the tail slam, so that the latter is only used when alt is held while pressing the right mouse button.

Amar0k - AI Programmer

This month has been a little crazy for me. I've had to take some time off due to personal reasons. However I have been mostly working on fish movement and trying to improve server performance regarding AI overall. There is also a big change being implemented to how AI will behave as a new server config option has been added which will allow switching AI behaviour between realism and player simulation. The difference should be self explanatory but i will go ahead and define it now.

Player simulation: Acts and behaves as close as possible to actual players, sometimes can be hard to tell the difference, such as spam crouching or bunny hopping around. This also includes the Realism traits.

Realism: Acts and behaves as a creature of that size/nature would generally behave in the real world, such as immediately fleeing as far away as possible from a larger predator.

This is obviously a LOT more effort to do but in the teams opinion is the right way forward to get to where we all want the game to be. I have pretty much finished the backbone of this system and have started working on the AI personalities/traits as some of you may have seen in my recent streams.

Also we are moving to more species based spawning, still randomized within a region but more biased towards what type your character is. I.E Amphibious will spawn near or in water.

Wedge - Sound Designer

This month has been a continuation of work on the areas that need addressing for the audio of water and flight gameplay. The underwater ambient audio has had an overhaul with bespoke sound cues for each water body type – swamps sound stiller than previously, oceans churn and bubble from the surf and waves, the flow of rivers can be heard and being near waterfalls underwater produces a spatialised heavy rumbling. To compliment this the groundwork has been laid for creating a more immersive audio experience diving deeper in water – as the player goes deeper the filtered yet still audible sounds of the ambience above will slowly fade as a more intense underwater ambience is introduced, including distant groans and cries of creatures that could be lurking in the deepest depths.

Heartbeat sounds have been created which will be introduced and increase in rate as the players oxygen levels decrease – this in combination with the changes to underwater ambiences will help to give a completely different feel to the underwater environment and gameplay – complimentary to the Deinosuchus’ ability to drag creatures underwater. All the Deino’s prey will hear is the deep tones and wash of the underwater ambience and the sounds of their struggle to escape; their heart starting to race and vortexes of water as they attempt to escape the Deino’s clutches.

Likewise with the Pteranodon the ambient audio will change as it flies higher, accomplished with new attenuations added to ambient loops which are applied solely on the Z-axis distance from the ambient zone.

Missing foley sounds are starting to be addressed; more detailed water foley sounds have been created and are ready to be implemented for the Deino – including sounds for submerging and emerging which differ based on if the listener is above or underwater, as well as entering/exiting/falling in water. The sound of bones crunching have also been added to Deino’s eat animations to give it a more intimidating audio aesthetic. On top of all these enhancements the general foley and vocal audio of both new playables are constantly being added to, tweaked and improved to progress towards Update #3.

hypno - QA Lead

QA has been dedicating a good chunk of time towards balance testing for Update 3. We have recognised and addressed many obvious improvements pertaining to the current public build and have been actively listening to community feedback - we’re really excited to see how these play out when the update is live and look forward to reading what you think about the changes!

There’s too many to list here but I’ll cover some of the more important additions. The full list will be released with the patch notes for the update.

As some of you may already know, we’ve addressed weights being wildly inaccurate for the upcoming patch. Expect the weight of your dinosaur to reflect the size of your creature much better now. Dryosaurus has been on a very strict grazing only diet and lost a total of 430kg using this one weird trick. Doctors hate him!

With the weight changes, some of you may have already caught onto the size changes we made to Carnotaurus and Tenontosaurus. The two creatures were scaled down for two reasons, the more important being that in the long run these sizes will make much more sense for gameplay balance.

The Carnotaurus is the fastest dinosaur on the island and as such we’re tailoring it to a “small game hunter” playstyle; it will focus on running down anything smaller than a Tenontosaurus. The Tenontosaurus has been set up so that it can go head-to-head with the Carnotaurus, so long as it uses its crowd control stunning attacks efficiently. The second reason for the scale down is due to it being a heavily requested change because “muh realism”, for lack of better terms. Feedback is very important to the QA team to determine game balance, so keep it coming!

Bleed potency has been increased across the board. Expect it to play a much larger role in combat now as attacks deal more bleed damage, causing your blood pool to drop significantly faster, thus causing your character’s regen rates to slow down equivalent to your remaining blood pool. I would highly recommend not moving too quickly when suffering from such injuries, as movement states will now affect how much blood you lose as well. Why don’t you have a lie down? You’ll feel much better. On top of this, we’ve decided to make wallowing less important in negating these effects (though it does still help.)

The cursed pounce stat rework. This was always going to be coming, it was just a matter of time! The statistics for pounce have been readjusted to promote its use as an attritional tool, rather than crazy amounts of damage. Pounce will deal deadly amounts of bleed damage, which focuses on wearing your targets out, instead of just outright killing them. Does this mean it will be impossible to hunt large targets? No. It just means they’ll require much more coordination and strategic thinking to do so.

Bucking has been significantly buffed to be worth performing now.

Other than that, it’s the same as usual for the team - check my previous dev blog posts for what that entails. We’re still hard at work testing the Deinosuchus lunge and it’s definitely one of the more complex mechanics, so it’s taking us a bit longer than usual compared to some of the more basic additions. Fingers crossed we catch all the bugs with it before you guys can!

As Filipe already mentioned, we’ll also be opening the QA branch to you guys when we believe all of our high priority issues are fixed and the new mechanics are functioning to a good standard. The reason for this is so that we can have the new mechanics tested under more stressful conditions (additional players) and so that we can confirm the random disconnect issue is fixed once and for all.


This month I’ve been patching a lot of small issues with some of the models, but mostly the whole month went into finalizing the fences to correctly fit the spline, to be able to walk in them, and making a bunch of variants and optimizing them. It's been quite a formidable task, especially making LODs for each and single variant, but we got the ball running and within a few days, I should be able to test them out on my end and finish the additional broken variants. Does that mean you can pass through them…. Hmmm. We shall see :P

To see the amount of fences - the lods check out this image here:



Alongside that, the fences got an overhaul with a lot of decals, and a lot of attention to detail to be sure that it all fits and can be translated onto real world terrain. This includes the new concrete texture that is made far sharper and with a lot more details. The rest of the details will be handled by shaders when the time is fit.

In these images you can see one broken variant, others are still in progress.









This one was a bit of a balancing act. On one hand, it’s a giant Komodo dragon, but on the other, we still want to find a way to make ours unique to the isle.

Body proportions mostly stayed the same, most of our exploration revolved around the face: Longer teeth, hidden teeth, square features, sharp features, heat pits and larger scale features. Ultimately we decided on a facial design that was predominantly Komodo dragon, but beefed up the body and accentuated facial features to be more menacing.

The rest of my month revolved around concept edits, Bary concepts and another set of nature sketches.


Indeed I’ll say, this month has been a bit of a blur. There’s so much going on all at once around here the time soars by. The team has been hard at work on Update #3 and all the bells and whistles to accompany it. This month has been full of testing and tweaking, testing and tweaking. One thing about doing something new is that you have to be the first to brave all the difficulties associated with the innovation. So that leads into highly iterative designs. Where we fine tune a feature over multi variations. The Deino’s movement is a great example of that. Based on the types of movements we wanted it to achieve, we had to fine tune what type of animation was needed and what implementation method was best. Sometimes these creatures have twice the number of animations than what you’ve seen. You only see the final version but sometimes there’s been 2-4. Not for every animation though, it's primarily mechanic related. Maybe in the future we’ll dig some of those up. But in the meantime we’ve got a few outstanding animations that we need to tweak for these two but we’re making good time. We are so excited to get this update to you because we’ve been working hard trying to provide a new experience in The Isle. We believe we’ve done that. The Deinosuchus and the Pteranodon are the heralds of the hard work that’s going into this project. We look forward to sharing the experience with you. Be kind to each other and yourself.


That’s February. As always, we hope that you enjoyed this insight into both our development process and the hardships we’ve had to overcome as we tread through these uncharted waters. We’ll see you in the next DevBlog!

Desync was the main issue on public builds since we went on a quick vacation. In the end, we found out the main issue behind it, which was a tool that helps with performance. Took some time for me to find the exact piece of code in the engine that was causing that, the lack of documentation is a big problem in those cases. Fortunately I found something and managed to decrease the desync issue, which can still be tracked and improved more, hopefully.

We also updated the engine to the latest version, which broke a few things and created more bugs, some of them are still in-game right now, like a strange sound stuttering for some people, we are investigating and will send an update as soon as possible.

Besides that, the work continues as always combating bugs, crashes and working on new features and dinosaurs. Deinosuchus and Ptera are taking a little longer this time because their gameplay is very different from most animals in-game, and we want to make it right. Have been working on Deinosuchus, mostly, with its different ways to interact with food and combat, especially the lunge ability. This ability is similar to pounce in some aspects, but won´t be an automatic ability, the player will have to time the lunge with bite to actually grab prey. Also, this ability has different effects when swimming in deep water, shallow or even on land.


An issue that affected many of our players is that sometimes players get out of sync with the server and they see your character running in an incorrect direction. At this time they are able to attack and damage you before they receive a correction from the server. This led to many annoyances because players were taking damage unfairly. I addressed this issue by adding a server-side validation. Hopefully this will reduce your frustration when playing the game.

There were a few methods that people could use to safe-log instantly. It was quite annoying to track down what was happening exactly and it turns out that those cases are treated as a “kick” by the engine instead of a standard disconnection. I added a check to make sure that the instant safe-log only happens when someone was kicked for real.

I don’t think a month goes by without me touching our animation blueprint. I made several new improvements, especially to diving. It feels much better now and I also addressed some more specific cases. I also spent much time setting up the water walking system. What it means is that the animal detects the ground when swimming and uses its legs to “walk” when close enough.

Another new mechanic for the Deino is called water sense. This lets you detect vibrations in the water you are in. It’s a passive ability, but you can hold the scent key (Q by default) to extend your detection range when stationary.

There were a few other smaller changes, like the Tenontosaurus claw being usable repeatedly or meat chunks being scentable. There are still several features in the works that we need time to work on, but I expect that we will be able to get them in your hands soon. I hope you are as excited as I am to work on them!


This past month has seen me creating and implementing sounds to the new mechanics being introduced to both the Deinosuchus and Pteranodon as well as creating more suitable foley. Considering these two are the first water-based and first flight-based additions to Evrima, this has involved creating bespoke sounds that fit the unique circumstances for each of these creatures.

The Pteranodon flight sounds have been improved adding more variations in the strength of the wing flaps and a dynamic system based on velocity to accompany; when velocity is slow the flap sounds are slightly stronger, and vice versa. A flight wind system has been introduced, also controlled by the velocity of the Pteranodon. The intensity and pitch of the wind sound is increased as the velocity does, resulting in a rushing wind sound when diving or falling. Subtle wind whoosh sounds have been created for moments where players are passed by a Pteranodon, and are ready to be implemented. Although the new wind system does achieve this doppler effect, I think the combination of a systemic approach layered with recordings will further improve the believability.

For the Deinosuchus a lot of attention has gone into its unique water sounds, taking into account that the sounds need to suit the movement, but also be subtle enough that it is viable for the creature to hunt undetected. Subtle trickling and paddling sounds have replaced the more blatant quality of the generic swim sounds. The introduction of animations for the water walking will allow me to also play subtler sounds. At the moment walking in shallow waters uses the land walking animations, consequently the conventional footstep sounds are played for this surface type, which does not reflect how the sound should behave. However more expressive splash sounds have their place for the Deinosuchus, such as with it’s Lunge ability.

Because the Deinosuchus introduces lots of potential for underwater gameplay, the underwater ambience and sound mix have been adjusted and will continue over the coming weeks. However they are not currently implemented correctly for all water bodies, which will be addressed as well. In addition lots of underwater supplementary sounds have been created and are gradually being implemented to support the audio immersion of underwater gameplay.


This month has been a test of patience. The new *REDACTED* (Perimeter Fences) are going as expected, there is a lot of testing to be done constantly, and it's been a wild ride so far with all the fixes with it, but all in all going the direction we want.

These fences require some more additional planning as said and in its textures in which I’ve made a whole new trim kit, alongside a new concrete base and its own decal trim mesh kit for heavy and huge leaks.

That alongside a new really cool and simple animated model that should be coming at some point, which some might have seen, the Satellite Dish Tower, which has a lot of joints and I do believe is a model that I pushed myself even further to get it detailed properly in a constraint time, so It worked out really cool.








Over the last few months I've been working with the concept team to create elder versions of the various playable species in the game. From a design perspective it was a bit of a tight rope as we found it important to make the elder versions easily identifiable from their adult counterparts while also being similar enough in shape and proportion so they could reuse animations. Care was also taken to make sure that they worked with the existing topology so there is minimal technical overhead to their implementation. All in all it proved to be quite fun to take the already monsterfied dinos and make them even more gnarly and monstery.








If I had to sum Kentro up, it’s our smaller, faster more offensive stegosaurid. I used a blend of oryx and porcupine as references for this one, somewhat elegant and very stand-off-ish.

There’s a few ways we could go about attacks/abilities on this one, a sweeping tail strike (as opposed to our stegosaurus’s stabbing strike), the shoulder check and something in the vein of a defensive stance - creating an aimed wall of spines to fend off foes, but we’ll have to see how that goes programming-wise.


Chubby looking yet nothing but muscle. I largely just referenced bighorn sheep for these guys; territorial, highly competitive and ready to showdown against anything around it’s size. In the way of abilities, we have the famous charge and a bone crushing head strike. Maybe it could even be more resistant to pounces and grabs.


This month for me has run me a little ragged but not in a bad way I suppose. It’s been filled to the top with documents, animations and interview processes. For the team, although a lot of production time went into getting the current hotfix to live, I am still very pleased with the team’s forward momentum on Update #3. My time in regard to Update #3 has been solidly spent on prototyping and polishing.

I’ll lift the veil a little on how that shakes down for those interested. Forgive me if you’ve heard it before. So, we first start with the mechanics themselves on paper, or on screen in this sense. After the mechanics have been decided upon, the animation team enters into the prototyping phase. During which, Bryan and I come up with how we think the motion should look when performing that particular action. Sometimes there’s crude ms-paint drawings involved lol. The prototypes are made quickly and usually lack a lot of the polish we like our animations to have in their more complete iterations. The reason being, that we do not want to spend too much production time on an animation that may turn out to be a complete dud for that action in-game. Sometimes the idea and the final result do not align. So prototypes must always be a rough draft to save on production time. The prototype is very rarely what you see in the final version you get to play as. Once we’ve completed it, we send it over to the programming team and they plug in the prototype animation into the mechanics they’re building for that creature. Sometimes, it looks great right out of the gate. But most often, some adjustments will need to be made to the animations in order to get them to not only look good but function nicely as well. An animation that looks great outside of the engine, won’t necessarily look great in-game on import. Some tweaking is often needed. So a lot of prototyping in both animation and programming has gone into the Deino’s numerous lunges and modes of locomotion as well as the Ptera’s skimming, flying blends, landings, jumps and more. However, once we have the basic foundation set for how we want those abilities to generally look and the mechanical function is behaving how we want, then we lean hard into polishing up those prototypes and turning them into final versions. We’re really looking forward to completing this update and getting it into your hands!


Now that we’re back from our Holiday break we’re refreshed, eager and roaring to go. Whilst we’ve had a few bumps in the road in terms of performance (improvements still ongoing), the Pteranodon & Deinosuchus are shaping up to be our most mechanically intricate playables yet and we're all incredibly excited to see what shenanigans you all get up to! That’ll wrap it up for this month folks, look forward to seeing you in February! - Punchpacket.

Hey Islanders,

This is just a small hotfix primarily aimed at stomping out the desync issues that have plagued the previous version of the EVRIMA Public Branch. You can check out the patchnotes below!


Additions

• Updated project version to 4.26.
  
• Added regional spawn cooldowns. If you die within a spawn zone, you will be temporarily locked from respawning at the location for 300 seconds.
  
• Added new Utahraptor sniffing animations for scent.
  
• Added Pitch and Volume multiplier to CharacterEffects Notifies.
  
• Added volumetric clouds. These can be enabled in your graphics settings at the cost of performance.
  
• Added "DisableHints" to gameplay settings.

Enhancements

• Dropped damage requests when the target is desynced on the requesting client. This should help to prevent players being killed from attacks that didn't hit them on their client.
  
• Enabled knockdown and stagger against pouncing Utahraptors.
  
• Changed Carnotaurus idle attenuation so that it can't be heard from far away.
  
• Improved small metal footstep sounds.
  
• Some visual improvements to swallow, pickup and pounce
  
• Increased the time for a corpse to disappear after depleting its food value.
  
• Added a small turning radius while swimming to avoid turning in place.
  
• Made Tenontosaurus tail slam cancel pickup abilities.
  
• Adjusted Tenontosaurus claw/bite velocity threshold, claw attack can now be used in succession and while walking.
  
• Made Tenontosaurus claw attack update free look movement direction.
  
• Volume balance of creature vocals.
  
• Made flesh chunks scentable.
  
• Disabled underwater footprint ripples.

Bug fixes

• Fixed server desync causing visual movement stuttering.
  
• Reverted Utahraptor pounce to requiring 100% growth to avoid unforeseen issues. We will revisit juveniles pouncing again some time in the future.
  
• Fixed small issue in weight replication value.
  
• Fixed wood footsteps not playing correctly on wooden pallets.
  
• Fixed Utahraptor's not releasing a carried corpse when hit by a Tenontosaurus tail slam/kick.
  
• Fixed being able to stop without sliding or decelerating.
  
• Fixed Utahraptor's occasionally becoming stuck in the pounce animation.
  
• Fixed player's mouths closing when trying to swallow while swimming.
  
• Fixed player's characters disappearing instantly whenever they lost connection to the internet.
  
• Fixed Carnotaurus charge canceling its vocal animations.
  
• Fixed terrain alignment when partially submerged in water.
  
• Fixed unsafe logout removing pawn in certain cases.
  
• Fixed a load of issues pertaining to the upcoming playables Deinosuchus and Pteranodon.
  
• Fixed flesh chunks giving more food if eating them from the ground instead of swallowing them.
  
• Fixed meat of chunk floating if trying to swallow while near another meat chunk.
  
• Fixed charge cooldown indicator not appearing if the charge duration lasted longer than the cooldown timer.
  
• Fixed enemies sliding after being pounced.
  
• Fixed issue with the Hypsilophodon floating when dropping its corpse after carrying it.
  
• Fixed Stegosaurus bite occasionally causing targets to become impaled on its tail.
  
• Fixed Utahraptor becoming stuck during its pounce after it was tail slammed by a Tenontosaurus.
  
• Fixed some bugs related to stamina (sprint and oxygen) causing players to sometimes die from drown already on land.
  
• Fixed being able to swim backwards if the client had low FPS.
  
• Fixed admins not auto respawning if they died while in spectator mode.
  
• Fixed admins being able to enter spectator mode if they were dead but hadn't yet gone to the character select screen.
  
• Fixed AmbZone Loop sound parameter not being set by day cycle.
  
• Fixed footstep issue with Hypsilophodon idle animation sounds.
  
• Fixed rare crash from null ref at spring arm.
  
• Fixed uncontrolled Utahraptors spawning when players connected after quick logging.
  
• Fixed crash caused by null char reference when setting team id.
  
• Fixed Carnotaurus pain sound being excessively loud.

After the release of an update we usually start working on improvements, bug fixes or reworking things that aren’t functioning as intended. That’s exactly what happened after the release of Update #2, we deployed several hotfixes, which not only fixed stuff, but also added additional content.

Performance is always one of our primary concerns, whatever we do we try to do it in the most optimized manner possible, but sometimes that doesn’t work out or it results in bugs, but there are always several ways to do something, but to make it good and performant is the real challenge.

Anyways, we’ve got a lengthy list of bug fixes, but we’ve also managed to add some additional content. We reimplemented the Foliage Interaction to the foliage, and I managed to make it work with replication in a very efficient way, so you can see foliage bending and shaking when something moves, big or small.

I also managed to create a solution for the Admin spectator camera, to display usernames and Steam IDs of all connected players in the server, it works well and doesn't cause big performance hits to the server, since it is mostly data, not processing. This is a very popular addition for admins, but doesn´t stop there, we will add more as progress moves forward.
Also implemented some improvements to ragdoll, especially when replication is reinitiated, to pounce, pickup and some movement server corrections as well as vocals. But vocals were not exactly improved, they were reworked, to be more efficient, have more realistic attenuation distance (being adjusted yet) and also avoid any kind of latency. So now it is latency free and in sync with animation.

Other small things are, for example: Plus icon to blood meter, so you know when it is being recovered. A new (surprise!!) health indicator in the dinosaur profile (heart icon). AI now bleeds, so easier to track and chat now clears the list at a certain point, to avoid performance issues, besides simple commands to toggle them:

/gl <message> - Sends a message in Global chat
/gr <message> - Sends a message in Group chat
/ls <message> - Sends message in Local Species chat


As always there were many bugs that needed to be fixed. One that was particularly annoying was juvies not being able to get out of water in the same places where adults had no problem. The way swimming works in the engine can be difficult to work with and slow swim speeds led to this issue. Fortunately one of my movement system overhauls made it possible to just add a little boost to the dino’s speed until it successfully gets out of the water.

With the Tenontosaurus gaining access to CC attacks it became important to add some prevention against getting stunlocked. Later on I also tweaked the attack to only stagger dinosaurs that are close to your own weight instead of having a sharp limit where something is either knocked down or unaffected. It still felt a bit too strong so I disabled CC for attacks that hit the tail.

I’ve been able to dedicate most of my time to working on the Pteranodon lately. Stamina is now consumed when gaining altitude during flight so you can’t just fly forever anymore. I made gliding not consume any, but we’ll see how that works out. Initially I just set some baseline values and we tweak those as time goes on. The takeoffs work better now as well. Starting your flight from running is free, but it only lifts you up a little. Taking off from standing still takes you much higher quickly, but you’ll feel its impact on your stamina so it’s best suited for situations where you need to get away quickly.

Finally I’ve been busy working on the skimming mechanic. If you spot a school of fish in the water you can try to catch one by flying over them while holding the right mouse button. Then you just need to release it at the right time. It might sound like free food, but hitting the water could easily mean you becoming someone’s dinner instead.


As I’m sure many of you are aware I’ve been working on the Regional Spawning System. It allows players to select from a variety of spawn areas, a significant QoL improvement for playing with friends. It also helps to prevent spawnkilling by distributing players across a general area rather than on a static spawnpoint.

The majority of the last few weeks I’ve been working on the brand new Fish AI, which is now ready to be pulled apart and destroyed by our eager QA team. Terrain Alignment and IK is also on the way, though it is still in its early days and I can’t wait to share more.

We’ve also been tinkering with the recently released Unreal Engine 4.26 update and we’re in the process of getting the project ready to transition to that version as it contains some very nice features that we are hyped to take advantage of.


My attention has been turned towards designing the vocal sounds for both the Pteranodon and the Deinosuchus the past couple of weeks. Both creatures present their own unique challenge. For the Pteranodon I wanted to create a sound palette unique from existing examples, whilst maintaining believability for all calls. The core layers of the final sounds after a few prototypes consist of various rhythmic bird-like chirping and cooing sounds and beak clacking, as well as sustained croaks, hisses and screeches. Additionally, the Pteranodon attack and pain sounds have also been created.

As most modern Crocodilians have a limited range of vocal sounds, the difficulty with the Deinosuchus was stretching the few sounds they do make over several vocalisations and still be varied, relying on the expressiveness of these sounds to convey the right feel for each call. An interesting element introduced is the pop of its jaw latching shut used in both the threaten call and bite sound, however this sound as well as the rest of these calls may be subject to change as they are evaluated.
Another aspect of the audio that has become an issue is the attenuations on the Vocal calls, locating the Dinosaur that produced the call as it stands is difficult. So adjustments are being made to create a more realistic representation of how the sound is affected over distance whilst still allowing the calls to travel long distances. This is an ongoing issue that will be regularly refined as we progress and more creatures are added.



It’s an animal I pictured to be an in-between of passive and vicious. When it comes to behaviour, I referenced cheetahs and bulls loosely. (Posing certainly didn’t transfer easily with such different anatomy) In the end I went with the watchful, bull-like , almost elegant hunter. It’s lands are the plains and it’s either going to be curious about you or looking to eat you.


The oversized honey badger of the Isle. With an iron stomach, its able to dig into many putrid carcasses that might otherwise poison other carnivores. Even cannibalism isn’t far from the menu. A vicious bully with a vicious bite, but when it can’t chase its foe away, having a more hydrodynamic body than its peers can give it an edge to take the food and run.



I don’t know about you but it’s hard to not see seagulls, albatrosses and Rynchops looking at Ptera. Though a glider primarily skimming for fish, it’s also got a knack for harassment and thievery. So keep a sharp eye on your food and a tight grip on your prey, or it might disappear faster than you can take notice.


Well look at this! The last DevBlog of the year! 2020 has been a wild ride for all of us and not just the team but the whole world. But through it all, we have remained steadfast in our intent and vision. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our new players for your budding interest in our game and all of our veterans for your continued support over the years. Game Development is a challenging vocation but make no mistake, we are here for it. Through our trials and tribulations, our successes and triumphs and our mistakes and losses, we have endured and in many ways flourished. Each day we grow as people, as a team and as developers. You all are an integral part of that process so thank you all so much for being a part of our journey and helping to push us forward.

For me this month, I’ve been updating some EVRIMA animations as well as passes on the Pteranodon’s animations and features. Setting the stage for Update 3. With December being our shortest production month of the year, we’re rounding out with a hotfix to Update 2 that should hopefully give you all some fun experiences over the holidays. I’m shooing the team away today to spend time with their loved ones, catch up on shows, play games or just stare at a wall in an empty room for a few weeks if they so choose. But no production (if I have anything to say about it). Everyone will return to production the second week in January, hopefully rejuvenated and ready to hit the ground running on Update 3. We have already soared over so much ground with the Pteranodon (sorry Punch) that we should be able to get the Ptera off of our production plate relatively quickly (crosses fingers). The Deinosuchus though, is going to be our heaviest hitter. We are striving to knock it’s gameplay out of the park and give you guys a unique experience for this aquatic terror with all the shoreline lunging, deathrolling, bone crunching action, the likes of which you have never seen. Outside of a documentary anyway. So wish us luck going forward, keep those bug reports flowing and have a wonderful holiday and a better 2021 than your 2020. As always, be good to yourselves and each other. See you next year!

Additions

• Added and setup simple terrain alignment for all species. This is currently WIP.
  
• Added regional spawning system. Pick a general area to spawn in for ease of finding other players.
  
• Added health indicator to the character profile screen.
  
• Added a "Plus" icon to blood when it is being recovered, so it is clearer when you are regaining blood instead of bleeding.
  
• Added manual banning option for server admins.
  
• Added player names and their SteamID64 when in admin spectator mode.
  
• Added toggle for admin spectator camera names. Use Shift + U when in admin spectator mode to toggle player names on/off.
  
• Added chat to admin spectator mode.
  
• Added commands for chat:
  /gl <message> - Sends a message in Global chat.
  /gr <message> - Sends a message in Group chat.
  /ls <message> - Sends message in Local Species chat.
  
• Added a "Press to Buck" hint when latched onto by a Utahraptor pounce.
  
• Added simple solution for "replicated" interactive foliage. Scales by dinosaur size.
  
• Added interaction to material instances.
  
• Added new scent particles system to water and corpses.
  
• Added distance submix to medium attenuations and tweaked medium attenuation settings.
  
• Added distant reverb submix to small vocal attenuations.
  
• Added generic layer to mud knockdown sound.
  
• Added wood footstep sounds - walk/trot/sprint - for medium and small dinosaurs.
  
• AI have a reduced chance of seeing another character if they are crouching or not moving.
  
• Added the first pass of human structures.
  
• Added a lot of preparations for future content.

Enhancements

• Changed the admin spectator camera key from "/" to "Shift + /" by default, to prevent admins from accidentally entering spectator mode during regular gameplay.
  
• Changed pounce to be canceled when hitting an object, like a tree.
  
• Made AI bleed.
  
• Made all chat boxes clear old entries after 250 messages in total, improving client performance.
  
• Renamed the community-made teleport location names with placeholder names, pending their official equivalents.
  
• Moved vocals to a new system that's more efficient and latency free.
  
• Tightened small dinosaur call attenuations.
  
• Tightened medium dino call attenuations.
  
• Tweaked close foley attenuation settings.
  
• Changed attenuations on Carnotaurus pain, bite, and eat vocal sounds.
  
• Changed attenuations on Stegosaurus bite and pain vocal sounds.
  
• Changed Hypsilophodon attenuations and volumes.
  
• Change to small broadcast attenuation.
  
• Improved medium attenuations.
  
• Improved small dinosaur attenuations.
  
• Improved Carnotaurus drink animation.
  
• Improved foliage interaction system. More stable, less jittery.
  
• Improved Carnotaurus swallow sounds.
  
• Increased the broadcast range for both the Carnotaurus and Hypsilophodon.
  
• Adjusted broadcasts notifies to fix hold and not hold modulation of sound cue.
  
• Adjusted size and location of some AI spawners.
  
• Adjusted water volumes size.
  
• Adjusted time of ragdoll activation.
  
• Carnotaurus attract and generic attenuation distance slightly increased.
  
• Small dinosaur steps attenuation tightened.
  
• Medium roar attenuation reverb send curve changed.
  
• Edits to characters materials.
  
• Made Charge cancel pickup of targets and avoid auto pickup when killing something small.
  
• Assigned Stegosaurus tail attack sounds to soundclass.
  
• Made bucking affect all pouncers, not just the last person to pounce you.
  
• Made list of pouncers to be removed before ending pounce.
  
• Turned up volume of dinovocals soundclass.
  
• Disabled spatialisation on underwater ambience and turned down volume.
  
• Vocal call audio level adjustments.
  
• Made corpses start floating much earlier. Increased collision thickness of buoyancy plane to avoid clipping.
  
• Decreased Carnotaurus deceleration rate.
  
• Increase timer frequency for pickup.
  
• Removed spatialisation from underwater ambience in oceans.
  
• Adjustment to footstep trace initial location.
  
• Improvements to light and fog on Spiro.

Balance

• Adjusted buck stamina "damage" across the board, allowing players to buck off Utahraptor's pouncing them more effectively.
  
• Increased Stegosaurus headshot damage multiplier slightly, giving a better chance of killing one.
  
• Prevented Tenontosaurus secondary from applying crowd control on tail hits.
  
• Increased Tenontosaurus juvenile attack power slightly.

Bug fixes

• Fixed the Utahraptor not taking damage from attacks when dismounting from a pounce or recovering from a failed pounce. AKA "the iframes bug".
  
• Fixed eating a corpse until it disappears causing a short input lock.
  
• Fixed Pounce getting stuck on water or trees, input locking the pouncer.
  
• Fixed Utahraptors floating mid-air if they pounced a wallowing Stegosaurus.
  
• Fixed Bucking not dealing stamina "damage".
  
• Fixed Bucking abilities not being committed.
  
• Fixed being staggered not canceling certain abilities.
  
• Fixed Eat/Drink ability allowing players to move while performing eating or drinking.
  
• Fixed some movement, jittering and translation corrections on Pounce.
  
• Fixed collision and a lot of model issues.
  
• Fixed Stegosaurus missing animation montages.
  
• Fixed dinosaur speed in profile menu.
  
• Fixed particle parameters not updating after they are deactivated.
  
• Fixed Gamehud sometimes giving blood mask when not damaged.
  
• Fixed client side spam animation to clear blindness.
  
• Fixed amount of connected players not showing correctly in the player list.
  
• Fixed HUD not updating when leaving spectator camera.
  
• Fixed Pounce issue when prematurely losing contact with target.
  
• Fixed Pounce releasing the target if it starts to swim.
  
• Fixed Carnotaurus post-slide animation issue.
  
• Fixed eating affecting Pounce detection.
  
• Fixed the Carnotaurus Charge picking up small dinosaurs.
  
• Fixed Carnotaurus juvenile stomping sound when charging on forest terrain.
  
• Fixed knockdown not canceling pickup.
  
• Fixed water bool not being false ever.
  
• Fixed water height offset for Tenotosaurus and Stegosaurus, causing small creatures to swim above surface.
  
• Fixed Hypsilophodon being dragged by the wrong socket.
  
• Fixed HUD info for thirst and hunger not updating when rejoining after a crash.
  
• Fixed clear vision not working if near any source of food.
  
• Fixed admins entering spectator if they pressed the spectator key while in the admin panel.
  
• Fixed some sounds still being audible when audio is set to 0 in the settings, such as the Stegosaurus tail attack sounds.
  
• Fixed swallowed AI still appearing with scent and the eating prompt still being visible for them as if they were still alive.
  
• Fixed Carnotaurus wipe animation playing multiple times if the client pressed the wipe key before the animation had finished.
  
• Fixed damage overlay appearing in admin spectator camera.
  
• Fixed screenshot mode breaking HUD if they were already in spectator camera mode.
  
• Fixed small creatures swimming in shallow water if they were next to a Stegosaurus or Tenontosaurus.
  
• Fixed Carnotaurus being able to bypass their drift by releasing the sprint key just before turning.
  
• Fixed being able to use Utahraptor's Pounce and Dryosaurus' Dodge while knocked down or staggered.

Known Issues

• Carnivores become stuck in an eating loop by tapping the eat key on a ragdoll. Pressing the eat key again will cancel the loop.
  
• Texture settings cannot be changed ingame.
  
• Moving too far away from your character with the admin spectator camera can lock up the player. Relog or slay yourself to fix this.
  
• AI can still sometimes appear invisible.

Hey Islanders,

Just so you're all aware the slow stamina regeneration encountered in the previous EVRIMA patch was not an intentional change, rather the side effect of a bugfix which we've now completely resolved. I'd also like to mention that the secret listed on our roadmap is still scheduled to be delivered in an upcoming hotfix, as we're fresh out of the weekend and have focused our efforts on resolving issues and evaluating community feedback to further improve the overall gameplay experience.

With this update comes a standardization to the hunger and thirst values. Currently, every species is set to starve after 45 minutes and dehydrate after 30 minutes. It must be made abundantly clear that these are not set in stone, as we recognise that this would make it far too easy for some of our characters to grow. This is the process that has been decided on by QA, so that we could have every species capable of surviving, while also giving the team more time to finetune each class so that their values aren't tedious to manage but also not too easy to survive on - this is a survival game after all!



Enhancements

• Made Hunger and Thirst be a fixed value regardless of growth.
  
• Made Hunger and Thirst have same values.
  
• Removed cloud shadows and reduced the maximum cloud density.
  
• Increased AI stasis check range.
  
• Doubled AI Amount (Still only Dryosaurus).
  
• Increased Dryosaurus AI sight range.
  
• Changed attenuation on sound cues for Pain, Wallow and mud (Stegosaurus and Carnotaurus).

Balance

• Disabled bleed on Carnotaurus charge attack.

Bug fixes

• Fixed Utahraptor being unable to move for a second after a pounce if they were low on stamina.
  
• Fixed admins being able to grow Utahraptors that pounce on other players to ridiculous sizes. No more Titans, sorry. :)
  
• Fixed knocked down and staggered players still being able to attack other players.
  
• Fixed Hunger and Thirst decaying faster when growing.
  
• Fixed Tenontosaurus secondary attacks not causing other players to play stagger animations.
  
• Fixed Tenontosaurus stagger time not matching its animation.
  
• Fixed Bite ability resetting ability state.
  
• Fixed Blood UI icon swapping sometimes or when logging out.
  
• Fixed Flesh Chunks not being able to be swallowed when stood in shallow water.

Known Issues

• AI does not bleed currently.
  
• Eating a corpse until it disappears causes a short input lock.
  
• Bucking a pouncer does not cause their stamina to decay faster.
  
• Players that are hit on the tail can be knocked down/staggered.
  
• Players can sometimes bypass group limits if they send invites at the same time.
  
• Utahraptor's cannot be hit when in the recovery animation after falling from a pounce.
  
• Texture settings cannot be changed ingame.
  
• May be able to eat/drink whilst walking.

Hey Islanders,

We've just deployed a hotfix to resolve a number of issues such as the dreaded chatbox fps decay and the floating meat chunks. We've also reverted Spiro back to it's former size, as well as numerous other bug fixes and enhancements. Be sure to let us know what you think, we're all eager to hear your feedback!


Additions

• Added a hint for swallowing corpses.
  
• Added loading screen tip for clogging wounds via wallowing.
  
• Added a fade-in when loading into the map.
  
• Added default gamepad binding for resting.
  
• Added small slide foley sounds for all surfaces.
  
• Added optimizations to water trace.
  
• Added Hypsilophodon stagger and knockdown animations.
  
• Added Stegosaurus stagger animation.

Enhancements

• By popular request, Spiro's playable area has been reverted back to its previous size. Teleport locations restored for admins.
  
• Made blood pool UI stay visible if not full.
  
• Turned down Carnotaurus vocals volume.
  
• Turned up volume of dinosaur vocals sound class.
  
• Tweaked Carnotaurus charge end vocal sound.
  
• Improved Stegosaurus tail whip sound.
  
• Removed pain notifies from Stegosaurus. Improved attack, pain and extreme pain vocals.
  
• Carnotaurus calls modulation improvements.
  
• Increased AI spawn rate on Spiro.
  
• Bans now remove themselves if they have expired when the banned player attempts to join.
  
• New bans now work even if there is an existing ban that has expired.
  
• Improved Carnotaurus charge start juvenile sound attenuation and mix.
  
• Changed medium swim idle sound.
  
• Reduced the volume for the Carnotaurus pain sound.
  
• Underwater sound mix fades out faster.
  
• Mud knockdown sound tweaked.
  
• Hypsilophodon spit volume increased.
  
• Corrected pitches of medium swim sound cues.
  
• Changed Pounce to allow sprint input during it, allowing you to sprint immediately after releasing your pounce.
  
• Reduced the volume of some ambient zone birds and insects sounds.
  
• Reduced global cooldown after biting.
  
• Hypsilophodon breathing given smaller attenuation, Carnotaurus and Stegosaurus juvenile calls have pitch modulation.
  
• Minor tweak to Stegosaurus juvenile calls.
  
• Stegosaurus and Carnotaurus bite sounds fix. Stegosaurus adult calls are more noticeable pitch shift.
  
• Hypsilophodon bite volume increased.
  
• Adjusted Plant spawners and Ambzones on Spiro.
  
• Increased readability for the Hypsilophodon bite animation.

Balance

• Slowed down juvenile Carnotaurus sprint speed by 30%.
  
• Tweaked turn rate for Carnotaurus to be a bit faster for juvies and slower for adults.
  
• Made Tenonto secondary stagger characters around its weight (+-25%). This allows the Tenontosaurus to stagger Carnotaurus using its tail slam/kick attacks.

Bug fixes

• Fixed meat chunks floating.
  
• Fixed chat entries ticks causing massive FPS drop over time. You don't need to change from global anymore to save FPS.
  
• Fixed issue with weight attribute not being updated properly when growing, causing several issues.
  
• Fixed bleeding damage being more than it should be, which is especially noticeable at the juvenile stage.
  
• Fixed damage/blind stopping pounce struggle animation.
  
• Fixed Carnotaurus bleeding when charging into something twice your weight.
  
• Fixed Carnotaurus pain sounds and Stegosaurus bucking sound.
  
• Fixed Tenotosaurus tail slam vocal pitch.
  
• Fixed Hypsilophodon sound attenuation. You shouldn't hear them anywhere on the map now.
  
• Fixed being able to set growth on Hypsilophodon.
  
• Fixed attenuation issue with Stegosaurus bite sound cue.
  
• Fixed juveniles having difficulty getting out of certain rivers.
  
• Fixed and setup Carnotaurus extreme pain sound.
  
• Fixed input lock after eating a body that despawns due to its food value running out.
  
• Fixed Hypsilophodon spit causing input lock if a player was hit when vocalizing.
  
• Fixed spectator camera causing your character to become "misaligned" with the player's camera.
  
• Fixed the eating action cancelling pickup by accident if the player quickly tapped the eat key.
  
• Fixed server log showing wrong growth for the death log.
  
• Fixed max stamina, max hunger and max thirst being set from save, allowing absurd edited values.
  
• Fixed staggers not playing properly for some characters.
  
• Fixed multiple players being able to drag a single corpse.
  
• Fixed not being able to jump for a while after biting.
  
• Fixed grabbing meat from floating bodies causing them to sink.
  
• Fixed being able to attack while knocked down or staggered.
  
• Fixed small bugs related to admin commands not registering.
  
• Fixed Tenontosaurus claw attack dealing the same damage as its bite.
  
• Fixed wallow not being interrupted properly at the end, causing a small input lockup.
  
• Fixed Carnotaurus stagger time being too long, causing a small input lockup.

Hey Islanders,

Just to let you all know that we've deployed a hotfix with the aim of fixing a couple of issues you've all encountered in Update #2, most notably the server crashing. That aside, we hope that you're having a blast with Update #2 and we're eagerly anticipating all of your thoughts & feedback!

Remember to restart your Steam clients if the update is not visible!


Bug fixes

• Attempted to resolve server crashes caused by an issue with scent.
  
• Fixed player caps on the server list appearing with 10 additional slots.
  
• Fixed ban functionality for administrators

Filipe | FTessaro - Lead Programmer

It’s been a busy month as we’re hard at work finishing up this next update.
I’ve been working this month mostly on bug fixes and improvements in general. Some of the improvements required changes to how various abilities worked to detect the ragdolls, such as eating and pickup. The addition of pieces of meat and schools of fish adds further complexity to the code, resulting in additional bugs of course.

We’ve made significant improvements to the Utahraptor pounce, some technical issues remain, relating to the engine which causes a weird rotation problem. I hope to fix it ASAP, but it won't delay the update, as we’re able to easily deploy the fix in a hotfix update.

Ragdolls have received more attention, especially when picking them up or dropping them around, including bodies in water, weird behaviors are still expected sometimes, just because ragdoll physics are really hard to "control". Expect to see additional improvements in the future.

AmbZones were updated to account for the new day cycle system, which is not the final system, all that will be improved down the road.

Another important thing we’ve been working on is server performance, which we’ve improved to allow for more stability, more players and decrease the chance of jittering or teleportations.

Client performance has also seen some improvements, but with the addition of the basic day/night cycle we are not going to see a substantial improvement just yet. Keep in mind that the day/night cycle wasn't in our plans for Update 2, so we will continue working on improving it´s functionality and performance. The strange over time fps decay seems to be fixed, which I think will be a major improvement for the client experience overall.

Bleeding has been a very popular topic in QA meetings and discussion, not only related to its functionality, but also how much and how it affects the game. Bleeding uses a mathematical system that simulates individual wounds, each wound has its own time of bleeding and blood "damage", that is stackable. If your blood pool reaches 0 you simply die. That is when wallow comes to help you, to avoid dying from bleeding after a long battle, you can wallow to clog your wounds temporarily, allowing you to survive while your body closes the wounds. BUT, if during the time mud is clogging your wounds you are attacked again, all your wounds open and start to bleed again, so be careful!
UI indicators were also added, but overall the functionality itself is still WIP, so bleeding can still change depending on the balance requirements.

Besides all that I also have been working on adding some more security to the game code, mostly related to admin and dev commands. We will be improving the game security a lot more over time.

Amarok - Programmer

Well, every month seems more crazy then the last it’s been a busy few weeks preparing for Update #2 fixing bugs and working on some last minute additions. I really felt the environment needed some attention so we worked on adding the new Day/Night cycle early and it's been well received by QA and I'm sure a lot of you have seen the screenshots although still a WIP it really improves the overall feel of the game.

I also worked on improving the situation with keybinds, All of you gamepad players can now rejoice as support has been added for those along with being able to set any keybinds that were previously missing.

AI has also seen some needed attention with improved movement and behavior for the Dryo. We have also increased the spawn rate and amount of AI whilst also resolving the issue with AI seemingly not respawning.

Lots of additional functionality to the admin panel. Since we now have time you can control. Along with the overall brightness and night time lighting. There is also an added option to teleport to a specific named location within the current playable area. (names subject to change)

Foliage Interaction and Foliage Fade is back , although not fully implemented yet the fade is in as an interim solution and will be improved over time. Foliage Interaction is also in but not fully implemented and will be further improved over time.

I have also been busy looking at IK(Inverse Kinematics) and coming up with a proper solution that we can scale to our current and future roster. You will hear more about this in the near future and should see it added to the roadmap in Ongoing Content soon.

Fishing has taken up some of my time as we start to move into Update #3 territory. The schools and elite fish are mostly complete as far as functionality goes. It’s over to QA to break it which I'm sure they will!

That about wraps it up for me. I just wanted to add that I’ve been here for almost 6 months now and it’s been a pretty wild ride. I see the real potential of the game now and I'm looking forward to the incredible future The Isle has in store.

dmIV - Programmer

I continued work on the hypsi spit ability. We ended up going with the trace based solution for more reliability. I also added an aiming system that indicates whether you will blind your target. It zooms in your camera as well to give you a better angle and it can be cancelled with the R button as well. Recently the range has been greatly extended to allow hitting predators while staying outside their attack range.

I changed the charge ability to be more forgiving. Previously ending it caused you to come to a complete stop to prevent spamming. That has been replaced with a cooldown, so you can cancel the charge and keep running. I also modified what happens when you charge into something heavier than yourself. If your target is not much heavier than you then they get staggered and you have an opportunity to land a bite. Hitting heavier targets will end up with you getting staggered instead and even take damage when running into much bigger dinosaurs. Pick your fights carefully!

I made several changes in the background regarding how we store certain data, this will give us an easier time in the future as we have a growing number of dinosaurs. It doesn’t mean anything to the players, but from a programming perspective these changes help a lot.

There were some periods of time when I didn’t have any tasks related to Update 2 so I had the opportunity to swing back to the ptera and the deino. Both of them had to be updated code-wise to work with systems that have changed over the last 8 months. I got them up and running and jumped straight into working on the pteranodon’s issues that have been bothering me ever since. After finally scratching that itch I moved over to the deino swimming. That one is much more complete mechanically, but getting the animations right is a lot more difficult. For aquatic movement we can’t have sudden snaps that are fine on land. I feel that I made good progress, although there is still work to do. In a way it’s kind of like art, where you feel very satisfied with what you made and then others tell you that it still needs a lot of improvement. After spending a lot of time with something you see it in a different light and then look at it the next day and you see it completely differently.

Wedge - Sound Designer

Wedge here, new Sound Designer for The Isle. It’s been an exciting and enjoyable first month working with everyone on the team and seeing what they are all working on. My time has mostly consisted of creating supplementary sounds for the new playables, the most interesting of which being the unique attacks for each, Hypsilophodon’s spit, Carnotaurus’ charge and Stegosaurus’ tail attack. Other vocal sounds added for these three include wallow, snore, pain, eat, bite, pinned, pounced and so on. The process has been an interesting one; adhering to Dinosauriac’s existing sound identities for each creature whilst contributing new subtly different and appropriate vocal sounds.

As well as new dinosaur vocal sounds I’ve been focusing on creating foley sounds for a range of elements, ranging from adding mud foley sounds to the wallow to feather rustles for the Hypsilophodon to additional breaths for medium and small creatures to name a few. The footstep sound for medium sized Dinosaurs have been tweaked, replacing a layer of the medium sized Dinosaur footstep sounds to add a bit of weight, driven by the systems already in place to control pitch and volume parameters based on the size of the creature. Mud footsteps have been replaced as well however I think the way mud sounds are approached will be a developing process. Knockdowns and slide surface material foley sounds are in the works with drag foley following after. Small and medium sounds have been created for knockdowns and medium for slides, ready to be implemented.

Getting acclimated to the sizing and growth audio systems has also kept me busy when getting sounds implemented, balancing cues to create a smooth transition from juvenile to adult and small to big dinosaur, with rigorous testing from QA keeping me on my toes and helping me pick it up quickly.

With lots more work to be done I’m looking forward to creating more sounds for what’s in store!



This month has been a bit hectic but I can finally be proud to have far more assets into the main branch and it's coming to the update soon!

So what has changed/is new? This month I’ve been heavily working on the modular system to get the *ACCESS GRANTED* Utility buildings done, and the *REDACTED* station, and get the whole system finally tested and ready for shipping.

The whole system has been redesigned both for the interior and the exterior of both of them, in regarding to what should’ve been the *REDACTED* a few months ago. We use less, but precise pieces to make the same building but still allowing a lot of flexibility to the whole kit.

This has been a huge challenge to implement and do the proper tile test so I can make sure that everything fits absolutely perfectly, and that it can be reused in future builds, but as well have a versatile amount of pieces so we can do a lot of cool and unique variants. It should be soon clear not only with the 3 new pieces coming to the game for the human environment but in the near future with the addition of the *REDACTED* camp/ huge station.

Alongside that I’ve been adding a bunch of new textures, some you may seen but a lot has been redesigned, like the trim texture, and a few new metal pieces, and a more crispier glass texture, and the all new set of a specialized non uniform texture for the garage, which we can reuse with multiple dimensions and sizes depending on our needs.

Not to mention I’ve implemented some really cool known technologies with normal maps to achieve some of the crispier decals and normal edges, like on the intersections of walls:


And finally, some of the props you’ve seen, you will soon find in-game if you manage to locate them. This and the amount of effort to make it all function and be implemented correctly has been really hard work, but a really pleasant work, as I’m more than thrilled for you, the community, to see it as soon as possible. They will deploy in a patch following the release of Update 2.

Here are some of the new stuff that is in,

Jack | Hypno - QA Lead

*GASPS FOR AIR* . Where do I even begin?! Firstly, I need to apologize for having not written one of these for a LONG time – it’s far overdue and I realize I can only use the dog ate my homework trick so many times…

Since my last update, truthfully, the majority of QA’s duties have not changed all that much. Those poor people expect sunshine and rainbows but they’re really in for nothing but pain and torment. It’s fine, they signed away their souls to us.

As before, we’ve been putting our various testing methods to full use for this update BUT our processes for approaching them have been streamlined. Previously, QA were given massive lists of potential issues to check, one by one. For example, “what happens if a player pounces another player that’s swimming?”, which we would then break down into various sub-queries to check, such as “what happens if a player pounces a (Tenonto, Hypsi, Stego, etc) while it’s swimming?". This process became incredibly tedious and in hindsight was not an effective use of QA’s time; imagine what would happen if we had 20 different playables? Yeah… Let’s not.

Instead, where possible, the queries to test for shared mechanics, such as grouping/wallowing/bleed etc, do not need to be tested by EVERY species at their various progress in growth, they’re instead just tested using one playable. You may believe this to be less thorough, and arguably it is, however the shared mechanics all use the same code regardless of species, so 9/10 times if it’s not an issue for one character, it’s not an issue for all of them.

“With all this extra time on your hands, what the hell have you been doing instead of the regular testing then?” I’m glad you asked! (Just pretend you did.) - Now that we have so much more freedom to test other areas of the game, playtesting within QA has been ramped up significantly. Playtesting is by far one of our more enjoyable processes, by which QA just plays the game, see how fun it is, and take note of any issues that do occur. The amount of issues alone we’ve discovered from simply playing the game rather than attempting really specific queries is staggering. I believe the quality in playability for this update will blow our previous updates out of the water and I only wish I had started this a lot sooner.
I believe that if it receives the QA grub of approval then I have no doubts that you’ll enjoy the experience that we’ve collectively delivered. (Seriously, these people will sit and test the gameplay balance for hours at a time; I’m like 72% convinced they’re robots.)

Talking about balance, QA have become much more involved in how we’re approaching balance for our game. Suggested topics for balance are brought to me by QA, which are then compiled into polls for them to vote on. When we have the results, we will review them in a meeting, looking at the majority votes and important points that they’ve brought up when discussing it before coming to a conclusion. Note: the conclusion isn’t always a majority vote; if there’s a particularly good idea submitted as to why a creature should be balanced the way it is then oftentimes the team can be convinced to go down that avenue. It is now up to you, the public, to determine how well of a job we’ve all done. By the time you’ve read this, the update should be out - if there is any feedback that you may have for the QA team on the game’s balance or mechanics then please do let them know because they are now actively monitoring those channels.

I just wanted to close my devblog to say how incredibly proud I am of the QA team. In the case that you were not aware, they are ALL volunteers and have given up their free time to make sure that the product you get is of the best quality. A huge thanks to them!



Hey all! The majority of what we've been doing for the month of November has been getting the Hypsilophodon, Carnotaurus and Stegosaurus ready for you guys. We had to do a ton of polishing of their mechanic features, sounds, anims etc and we still have some to do after release. But we feel overall, things are in a good spot for you guys to enjoy the fruits of our labor. Please leave feedback and bug reports per usual so you can help catch the things we may not have. It helps a lot.

As it pertains to the concept team, I have seen a few questions about when/if we're going to show more concept redesigns of the old roster creatures in need of them and unfortunately it will be a little while longer before you see more of those. The concept team has been shifted to elder work for the EVRIMA creatures in preparation for the perk, diet and dimorphism systems respectively as they will all have an impact on elder acquisition. As the designs are approved and models completed, we will roll out some images for you guys on the Public Roadmap under the Elder card in Ongoing Content. Please be aware that while their models may be complete, there is an entire suite of tech, animations, sound, textures etc that will need to accompany their release. So as I mentioned in the previous devblog, you will not see any of them in-game until all of their needs are met. We will likely start debuting some of the images over the next week or so.

The animation department has had their dance card full the entire month of November with the Carno Charge adding approximately 16 animations per creature. OOF! When we develop new mechanics that have never existed in The Isle before, we have a few rounds of R&D (research and development) between the animation and programming departments where we try things out in multiple ways to find that sweet spot. The sweet spot consisting of what works the best for multiplayer, can be programmed optimally, is aesthetically pleasing visually and is the most fun to use. In an effort to achieve all of the aforementioned, it sometimes leads to some hefty overhead with animations and occasionally some mind-numbing programming wizardry. I'm sure when the animation department "wants to try something new" the programmers break out in a cold sweat. But they're always up to the task and always find the most ingenious ways to make it happen which lends so heavily to the feel and style of this game. Each department is a powerhouse individually but their achievements alone pale in comparison to their work together. Teamwork makes the dream work folks! (equal parts corny and true)

Moving forward, we're going to be hitting the ground running on Update 3, Fishing & Fishers. A lot of the content contained within, we've already shown development for so we're not starting from ground zero with our next update. We still have a lot of content to add to it that you have not seen yet though. Believe me when I say, the team is every bit as excited to get into aquatic and avian gameplay as the rest of you. Be on the lookout for its development. We are very excited to deliver on Update 3 in as big a way as possible so prepare to look for danger from above and below when you go in search of fishies.

Closing Remarks

And that wraps it up for the seventh DevBlog! As usual I hope that you enjoyed the insight into our development process and by the time you’ve read this, Update #2 should already be in your hands. We’re all extremely eager to hear your thoughts & feedback. If you encounter any issues whilst playing please be sure to submit a bug report, it goes a long way in helping us create the game we’ve all been dreaming of. - Punchpacket

Hey Islanders,

It's the day you've all been waiting for, Update #2 has now been released! Make sure that you restart your Steam clients if the update is not visible, as well as ensure that you've set your Steam beta branch to EVRIMA.

I'd like to make you all aware that whilst the secret listed on our Public Roadmap is entirely feature complete, its in-game placement unfortunately missed our internal cut-off date for new additions, therefore it'll be delivered as part of a hotfix that we'll deploying sometime after Update #2's initial release. Also the server queue system will not be available in the initial release whilst we resolve a number of issues discovered by our diligent QA team.

Most importantly however, we're all extremely eager to hear your thoughts & feedback. If you encounter an issue whilst playing please be sure to submit a bug report, it goes a long way in helping us create the game we've all been dreaming of.



Additions

• Added the Carnotaurus class as a playable.
  
• Added the Hypsilophodon class as a playable. Note: This class currently spawns as an adult and its juvenile will make an appearance in a later update.
  
• Added the Stegosaurus class as a playable.
  
• Added Carnotaurus Charge ability (Charge by tapping RMB while sprinting at max speed. Creatures small enough can be instantly killed by it or knocked down, while larger creatures will be staggered.)
  
• Added Hypsilophodon Spit ability (Spit by holding RMB and release to fire.)
  
• Added Hypsilophodon High-jump ability (High-jump holding Space).
  
• Added Stegosaurus Tail impale ability (Tail impale using RMB. Aim the direction of the impale attack with your camera.)
  
• Added the Bleeding System. Wallow to temporarily clot your wounds and stop your blood pool from running out. If your blood pool runs out, your character will die.
  
• Added the initial pass of the Day/Night Cycle. Nightvision and further functionality to come with Update #6, Night Terrors.
  
• Added Additional Admin Functionality. Player bans, Statistic changing (hunger, thirst, bleed, growth), Server logging, Spectator camera, Day/night cycle manipulation, Mail system and various Spiro teleports using community-made names.
  
• Added Flesh Chunks. Press G on a corpse larger than your character to pull out a flesh chunk to eat later or give to another player.
  
• Added Crowd Control (CC) mechanics. Knock smaller opponents over, or stagger larger ones.
  
• Added visual indication of the Vomit debuff. Statistics will now appear to be locked off.
  
• Added additional information to server selection. View your current character on a server and its current statistics. More server filtering options (list alphabetically, by player count, by ping, etc). Added a "connect" button.
  
• Added the initial pass for foliage interaction. Push grass as you move through it.
  
• Added female skins. Select female on the character select menu, as seen in legacy. This is purely cosmetic at the moment but will play a much bigger role with nesting and sexual dimorphism.
  
• Added new ambient sounds to the map.

Enhancements

• Improved client and server performance.
  
• Reduced playable map size to encourage more player interaction.
  
• Adjusted the grouping system. Friendly call with 2 to accept a group invite, threaten with 3 to reject them.
  
• Improved grouping system UI. Added online group member and group leader indicators. Made group invites timeout if ignored for too long.
  
• Adjusted chat so that channels separate messages. Global shows all chat, including group and local, while group only shows group and local only shows local.
  
• Improved ragdolls across the board. There should be less replication issues for them when killing players, carrying bodies, etc.
  
• Added support for gamepad controllers and rebinding.
  
• Increased AI spawn rate.
  
• Improved Dryosaurus AI.
  
• Made chat UI auto disappear if not used for a while.
  
• Merged the admin scoreboard and admin panel. Access both using TAB by default.
  
• Added some missing sounds for small herbivores grazing. Chomp chomp.
  
• Vocals fade out if cancelled early via any means.
  
• Replaced old mud sounds

Balance

• Increased the scent range of the Tenontosaurus.
  
• Increased the severity of Locked Damage.
  
• Adjusted Pack Scent values for all of the Dinosaurs.
  
• Set Carnotaurus group limit to 3.
  
• Reduced group limit for Dryosaurus from 15 to 10.
  
• Set Hypsilophodon group limit to 10.
  
• Set Stegosaurus group limit to 4.
  
• Reduced group limit for Tenontosaurus from 8 to 6.
  
• Adjusted damage values for Pounce.
  
• Added Bleed to all of the Utahraptor's attacks and to the Claw/Kick attacks for Tenontosaurus.
  
• Adjusted Tenontosaurus Claw attack speed.
  
• Adjusted damage values for Tenontosaurus Tail Slam and Rear Kick.
  
• Added CC to Tenontosaurus Rear Kick & Tail Slam.
  
• Revamped the controls menu in settings.
  
• Allowed multiple pouncers if the target creature is large enough.
  
• Decreased delay time between Tenontosaurus attacks significantly.
  
• Made fall damage weight based. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
  
• Increased acceleration for walking/trotting across the board. If an animal wants to move, it moves. Sprint acceleration depends on species size.

Bug fixes

• Fixed "A FRenderResource" crash.
  
• Fixed players walking underwater.
  
• Fixed all issues in the last public build relating to the grouping system.
  
• Fixed AI not respawning.
  
• Fixed game hints not being hidden when hiding HUD with F10.
  
• Fixed some players not being able to hear other players calls if facing away from them.
  
• Fixed being able to apply an infinite amount of mud to your character via spamming wallowing.
  
• Fixed players occasionally becoming stuck upside down after a pounce is complete. Both pouncer and pouncee.
  
• Fixed some of the control options not changing. (Part of the revamp mentioned above.)
  
• Fixed the remaining crevices on Spiro.
  
• Fixed small corpses sometimes becoming stuck in a player's mouth when carrying them.
  
• Fixed crouching while sprinting draining stamina.
  
• Fixed corpses sometimes being delayed before they're dropped from a player's mouth.
  
• Fixed jittery Utahraptor movement if the player looked directly down and spammed the movement keys.
  
• Fixed missing eating sounds from the Tenontosaurus.
  
• Fixed game hints displaying over the character menu.
  
• Fixed ragdolls breaking if a small corpse was picked up then the player immediately pressed the eat key.
  
• Fixed chat not being able to be scrolled... Again.
  
• Fixed Utahraptor not playing the swallow animation if it was standing/swimming in water.
  
• Fixed vocals from continuing to play just after your character had been killed.
  
• Fixed Tenontosaurus being able to jump and tail slam at the same time by exploiting the rest mechanic.
  
• Fixed Utahraptors teleporting around if they pounced at each other at the same time.
  
• Fixed players being able to swim in mid-air if they teleported to another player while swimming.
  
• Fixed being able to pounce through some assets, such as trees.
  
• Fixed being able to pickup multiple corpses at the same time.
  
• Fixed locked damage resetting if the player safe logged.
  
• Fixed logging in water sometimes preventing the player from being pounced.
  
• Fixed pouncing preventing fall damage from occurring if used before landing in water from a high place.
  
• Fixed pouncing a resting player sometimes causing their character to face sideways.
  
• Fixed vomiting in water causing a temporary input lockup.
  
• Fixed running down a hill while carrying a small corpse causing jittery movement.
  
• Fixed full body animations playing while turning in place. (The legs weren't moving because the character was stood in place but they were still turning.)
  
• Fixed grazing automatically initiating a trot, despite the player being in walk mode prior to them grazing.
  
• Fixed characters not loading if the player held the spacebar while spawning.
  
• Fixed admin announcements preventing other admins from teleporting.
  
• Fixed various vocal sounds emitting from behind the player's character, rather than from their mouth.
  
• Fixed crouching preventing bodies being automatically grabbed when killing a much small player.
  
• Fixed throwing up while swallowing a small corpse allowing the player to push ragdolls by just moving through them.
  
• Fixed teleporting a safelogging player not teleporting them but instead just waking them up.
  
• Fixed spamming E while swallowing a body causing it to create an invisible duplicate.
  
• Fixed Dryosaurus jittering when quick standing from resting.
  
• Fixed chat input lockup if the player clicked outside of the text box, rather than pressing enter.
  
• Fixed drink hint appearing while swimming.
  
• Fixed being able to slide through players when stopping movement abruptly.
  
• Fixed teleporting height so that admins are no longer taking damage when teleporting.
  
  
• Fixed roughly 200+ unique bugs related to the new mechanics and playables. (For the sake of our sanity we can't list them all here. Hats off to the QA team for these!)

Known Issues
The following is a list of our high priority issues. Most of the bugs listed here are going to be addressed in a hotfix patch. Report additional bugs here: https://forms.gle/ufXDnxNfhRhZ7CCi8

• Swallowing meat chunks will frequently cause them to float in mid-air.
  
• Kicking players from groups is currently not possible.
  
• The Favourite/Discord buttons are visible on the server list menu but they do not yet function.
  
• Various sound issues pertaining to the growth of a creature (some sounds are for juveniles but also play for the adults, for example.)
  
• Map tiles still cause stutters when crossing them.
  
• Players can pick up a corpse at the same time as another player.
  
• Swallowing a corpse results in the ragdoll stretching until it disappears. It's just a visual issue and should not prevent you from gaining hunger.
  
• If you enter the admin spectator mode while sprinting, your camera can become misaligned with your character. Avoid for now by standing still when entering spectator camera.
  
• Various issues pertaining to bucking off pouncers and the balance for the mechanic.
  
• Attempting to eat from a body that's being dragged can temporarily lock input for the player. Press E/LMB to unlock yourself.