It’s been another month of extensive work on Update 3. Much of it spent hammering out issues discovered throughout the stress test, which gave us an absolutely enormous amount of helpful information about the server and some hacks that were trying to mess with it.

There have also been a lot of minor changes to the codebase, primarily aimed at improving server side performance, there are however some client side optimizations as well, but some of those optimizations may not be implemented in the first release of the update, they’ll most likely be delivered in further patches or hotfixes.

As always, a lot of bug fixes and improvements to old and new mechanics, but also small additions, such as the swallowing animation that you may have seen during the stress test, the gore masks for Ptera, Deino, Carno and more. Some of which have been purposefully left for you to discover. Expect to see even more coming down the pipeline soon and with the addition of new members to the team we expect productivity to increase that much more. Not much more to say at this time, but rest assured we’re all hard at work and pushing forward. See you next time!


I started the month with some animation system changes to the deino. When turning in place while swimming it now plays a dedicated animation instead of just using the standard swimming animations. Swimming movement is pretty difficult to get done right, due to it having to be very smooth without any sudden snaps that we might get away with on land. Fortunately though it worked out without a hitch.

Issues kept popping up with our swimming system throughout development. We’ve been making changes to have it working right, but we just kept running into more difficult problems. So I ended up reworking it quite significantly and now we have a system that’s less error-prone and easier to work with. This ended up being quite challenging due to having to dig deep into engine code, but it ended up working well and got rid of our previous issues, so it was worth it. Even if we ended up releasing a build that allowed players to swim in the air. At least you got some insight into what we put QA through.


Well it’s been a crazy month for me, some of you have seen I've finally moved into my new place and settled in… Before an incident where I accidentally flooded half of it, oddly fitting during the development of an aquatic update.

There has been an absolutely enormous amount of bug fixing going on as we got things ready for Update 3’s release. Besides that however, performance improvements to AI and productionising code so we can speed up development times and make sure we have a robust foundation to move forward with. I’ve had some fun with the Utahraptor AI and I'm pushing to get that out as soon as possible as I'm sure you’re all sick of the Dryosaurus AI by now. That pretty much wraps it up from me. I hope everyone has been having fun with the stress test and look forward to seeing more jump scares!



This was one of the more straightforward creatures to work with. We liked the base design of the original Shant, so we started with that and tweaked body proportions to something that looked heavier yet balanced. With the redesign we also took the opportunity to add a couple features; the Shant’s notably square chin and the Edmontosaurini’s famous hoof-like forelegs.

Lastly was the spine. Fred had come up with a whole set of really nice options, but one of his in particular caught my eye for two reasons:

#1 was the slightly macabre look the spikes could have if you weren’t all that familiar with the Shant’s skeletal.

#2 was the 2nd silhouette it gave the animal - giving it a nice singular curve to it’s back that felt reminiscent of the original design while still letting the duo hump shape of the animal's actual back shine through.


With the majority of audio work needed for update 3 rounded out (aside from the occasional fix, improvement or tweak) my attention has been fully focused on re-making the ambient audio, in this month’s case, the swamp and jungle environments.

A huge amount of the process has involved trial and error approaches to create a more dynamic ambient environment, the final result of experimentation has led me to use a larger array of audio loops, which are less dense than the ones previously used. The volumes of these loops are carefully and methodically modulated over time to create peaks and troughs in the density of the ambient track. I divided these audio loops into categories - birds, insects and a distant bedding – the latter being used to create a sense of fullness without occupying too much of the dynamic headroom. This allows more dynamic range to play with, which can be filled with the audio produced from the actions of players, punctuating the ambience opposed to fighting with it. Although the end result gives a much more immersive and diverse audio experience, using a larger variety of audio loops, which do not have a definite audio volume point of reference, has made the mix process slightly more cumbersome. However, the swamp Biome is now complete and Jungle not far behind, after which I will be moving on to creating ambiences for Biomes that have not yet had their own audio in Evrima.

I have also designed a selection of one-shot audio files of fauna and generic dinosaur calls to be used in the night ambience. Combining these sounds with a restrained and evolving approach to ambient loops will give a much more suspenseful effect to the night ambience, laying the groundwork to build on when we tackle upcoming content such as Night Vision.

An important aspect that was stressed when implementing these calls, particularly the generic dinosaur calls, was ensuring they do not confuse people into thinking we have snuck in some new playables. Although the audio files created have the weight and power to be used as calls for large creatures, they are routed through real-time processing to put these sounds spatially into the distance so they blend with the ambience, providing atmosphere and immersion and not distractions.

Alongside these changes to the ambiences, I have also been looking at further improving the vocal attenuations, both for realism and so they work harmoniously with the ambience from larger distances, some of which can be heard in Update 3, the remaining majority of changes will be added alongside the new ambiences when all are complete.


We’re back, back, back again and happy to finally release Update 3! It really beat us down trying to get the feeling just right. We spent the vast majority of April really trying to fine tune the Ptera and Deino gameplay into something that felt satisfying. While we are happy with where things ended up and it would appear many of you are as well, there are still one or two outstanding features we want to deliver on for those two animals. Like most of what we do these days, it’s going to require some new tech. So those things will be developed in the background alongside standard production.

Now that Update 3 is released we’re moving straight into Update 4. But before we dig deeper into that, there are going to be some shifts made to the roadmap that we hope you will like. The decisions we’ve made really focus on the systems that add replayability to the game, are foundational, fun and also, hotly requested. With some of the coming shifts we should be able to update faster while still focusing on delivering meaningful content that adds to the gameplay experience and isn’t just cosmetic. Be on the lookout for those changes soon. An announcement will accompany it’s release. Let us know what you think.

Lastly, stay tuned for further development of the Pachy. A hard-headed and irritable herbivore with trouble on the brain. Show it an immovable object and the Pachy will put it to the test. Don’t let it’s stature fool you, tangling with the wrong Pachy can have crippling consequences. Leaving you dazed, damaged or a wet pile of battered flesh. Approach with caution!

The animation team is hammering away at the Pachy’s animations and personality. With a fair amount completed and more to be checked off soon, in addition to some reactionary animations for it’s targets. WHAM! We’ve also got some more things blooming on the horizon by way of map changes, flora, fauna, human structures and humans themselves. We’re growing our team slowly but surely to add more quality and expedience to production. A few more key components and we’ll be right where we want to be. Be good, be kind.


That's a wrap for Update #3 & April folks. It's been an incredibly busy month as we hammered out issue after issue during the stress test, which we are incredibly thankful to our community for participating in. Through your gameplay we received an absolutely staggering amount of useful data that helps us push forward towards our ultimate goal of creating the game that we've all been dreaming of since our childhoods.

Before we go however, I'll leave a link to our trailer for Update #3. Prepare to soar through the skies as the nimble Pteranodon and delve the darkest depths as the terrifying Deinosuchus. Enjoy!

Hey Islanders!

We'd like to start with a heartfelt thank you to everyone who participated in our Update #3 Stress Test. Throughout the test we gathered an absolutely staggering amount of useful data that we swiftly put to good use, a major boost towards achieving the utmost quality we always strive for.

It's been truly awesome seeing all the overwhelmingly positive reactions to the new additions and we look forward to sharing our updated plans for the roadmap in the near future, which significantly optimizes and streamlines our production process, so keep an eye out for that!

For now however... It's time to soar the skies and delve the darkest depths.



Right click The Isle in your Steam Library > Left click Properties > Betas > in the available dropdown menu select "evrima - EVRIMA Public Branch" and your game will now update to the latest available version. You can also follow the gif below for visual instructions! NOTE: Your game needs to be closed in-order to switch branch.

• Added Deinosuchus as a playable class.
  
  Spacebar in water - Swim upwards.
  
  Ctrl in water - Swim downwards.
  
  Hold RMB when waterwalking (walking on the bed of water sources) - Big lunge. Used to grab targets to drown them. Only effective on targets half your weight or less, otherwise causes you to be staggered.
  
  Hold RMB on land - Small lunge. As above, but doesn't launch as far and costs more stamina.
  
  Tap RMB when swimming - Water boost. Used to rapidly launch yourself to your fastest swimming speed. Can also be used to grab swimming targets in the water.
  
  Passive - Water Sense. Used for detecting nearby movement in water.
  
  Hold Q while underwater - Enhanced Water Sense. Used to detect movement in water at a further range. The longer the key is held, the further you can sense. In order to use regular scent you must be above the surface of water.
  
  The Deinosuchus cannot eat food while underwater. The Deinosuchus must rise to the surface of water or be on land in order to do so.
  
  
• Added Pteranodon as a playable class.
  
  Hold Spacebar while stationary - Stationary take off. Used to launch yourself into the air to fly. Stamina cost is subject to change.
  
  Hold Spacebar while sprinting - Running take off. As above but can be performed while sprinting. Stamina cost is subject to change.
  
  Hold Spacebar while flying - Fly upwards.
  
  Hold Ctrl while flying - Fly downwards.
  
  Hold Shift while flying - Fly faster at an increased stamina cost.
  
  Hold Z while flying - Air break. Used to slow yourself down in order to land safely. Be careful though! If you lose too much momentum you will fall from the sky.
  
  Hold RMB while flying close to a water source - Skim the water. Perform this action above ripples in water sources to catch fish. Release RMB when prompted to catch a schooling fish.
  
  The Pteranodon cannot swallow food while flying.
  
  
• Reworked the entirety of Spiro.
  
• Added Oxygen System. Character's that go underwater will lose oxygen at various speeds per species. Stamina is required to swim on the surface of water - if you run out you will begin to sink underwater. When near death from drowning, heartbeat sounds will begin to play and the screen will fade to black.
  
• Added Schooling Fish. These smaller fish swim in groups and can only be caught by the fishers on the island (currently only Deinosuchus and Pteranodon).
  
• Added Elite Fish. These fish are much larger and can be caught by both fishers and non-fishers. They also yield more food. Fishers will have an easier time catching these than non-fishers.
  
• Added whoosh and hit sounds to the Tenontosaurus tail slam attack.
  
• Added new cave assets.
  
• Added several new particle effects and sounds.
  
• Added an option to game session for realistic AI.
  
• Added carcass gore material to corpses, as featured in legacy.
  
• Added "Hold "E" to Wallow" hint.
  
• Added Bleed Resistance attribute. Currently only applied to Deinosuchus - it receives less bleed from attacks due to the healing properties of crocodilians. It does not wallow.
  
• Added the ability for administrators to copy player names/SteamIDs to their clipboard by clicking on them on the admin panel.
  
• Added an option in settings to invert camera control.
  
• Added an effect for when characters bleed in water.
  
• Added name colours to admin panel to reflect server permissions. (Yellow for admin, Red for developer)
  
• Added SteamID filter to admin panel.
  
• Added omnidirectional Carnotaurus bite attack (default ALT+LMB)
  
• Added save file encryption.
  
• Added gore mask to Deinosuchus, Pteranodon, Carnotaurus mouths, Stegosaurus spikes and Tenontosaurus claws.

• Reworked almost all areas of Spiro. Jungle have been made less dense. Entirely new scenes added to incentivize exploration.
  
• Bleed is now affected by movement. The faster you're moving, the more quickly you will lose blood.
  
• Wallowing no longer blocks bleed fully. In order to have 100% protection against the effects of bleed, the player must rest as well.
  
• Regional spawning now takes character type into consideration when choosing a location. ie. Deinosuchus will spawn in/near water sources and only has the option to spawn in regions with water.
  
• Removed global chat.
  
• Set default chat to local species.
  
• More ragdoll improvements.
  
• Better default keybinds for gamepad.
  
• Adjusted pickup to automatically carry fish in water.
  
• Adjusted pickup rotation when carrying.
  
• Setup all default gamepad keybinds.
  
• Small code and BP changes to replication efficiency.
  
• Updated road textures.
  
• Improved tail hitboxes.
  
• “Neck” hitbox has been added to all animals. This is future proofing for Ceratopsians and Sauropods, etc.
  
• Re-added the Utahraptor missed pounce landing animation. The animation plays much faster than previous iterations.
  
• Meat chunks now emit scent.
  
• Adjusted admin announcements panel size to not take up as much of the player's screen.
  
• Updated spawn selection map to reflect map changes.
  
• Carnotaurus' idle vocals now scale with its growth.
  
• Several improvements to sound effects attenuations and volumes.
  
• Swallowing improvements.
  
• Network performance improvements.
  
• Collision adjustments for perimiter fences.
  
• Allowed Stegosaurus to move while bucking.
  
• Adjusted Carnotaurus drinking animation
  
• Made lunge also work when using lunge speed boost
  
• Adjusted Carnotaurus pickup socket.
  
• Adjusted Stegosaurus buck animation.
  
• Improved ragdoll physics and physical animations.
  
• Adjusted pack scent values to group sizes.
  
• Adjusted adaptive river sounds volume an distance attenuation.
  
• Adjusted Carnotaurus pounce points.
  
• Improved Server Logs.
  
• Adjusted grouping so that it removes the player if they are killed or logout of the server.

Mass Rework

• Weights for all creatures reworked to be more accurate to scale throughout their growth cycles.

Bleed

• Global bleed damage increased.

Fall damage

• Reduced across the board as future proofing for the fracture system.

Grazing

• Paused hunger depletion when actively grazing, if the player is above 20% hunger.

Bucking

• Global bucking stamina damage increased. You now buck pouncers off much faster.
  
• Bucking costs more depending on the number of pouncers.

Locked Health

• Increased amount of locked health a player can have. Players will feel the aftermath of a battle a lot more as more of their health is locked away for a longer duration.
  
• Locked health now heals faster when resting, encouraging you to rest after a fight.

Locational Damage

• Leg hitbox damage multiplier decreased.
  
• Tail hitbox damage multiplier decreased.
  
• Disabled bleed being dealt with attacks that hit the tip of someone's tail.

Growth Time

• Growth time reduced to 135 minutes.

Scale

• Reduced the Carnotaurus in size.

HP Regen Rates

• Reduced standing rate.
  
• Reduced resting rate.

Stamina Decay Rates

• Increased sprinting stamina decay rate.
  
• Increased charge decay rate.
  
• Increased slow swim decay rate.
  
• Increased fast swim decay rate.

Bite speed

• Decreased bite speed play rate.

Turn radius

• Sprinting turn radius decreased

Group limit

• Group limit increased from 3 to 5.

Jump Velocity

• Increased jump height.

Stamina Decay Rates

• Decreased sprinting stamina decay.
  
• Increased slow swim decay rate.
  
• Increased fast swim decay rate.

Stamina Regen Rates

• Increased trotting stamina regen rate.
  
• Increased walking stamina regen rate.
  
• Increased standing stamina regen rate.
  
• Decreased resting stamina regen rate.

Hunger

• Increased hunger.

Corpse Value

• Decreased corpse value.

Growth Time

• Decreased time from 45 minutes to 30 minutes.

Thirst

• Increased thirst.

Sprint Speed

• Sprint Speed increased.

Stamina Decay Rates

• Decreased sprint decay rate.
  
• Increased slow swim decay rate.
  
• Increased fast swim decay rate.

Stamina Regen Rates

• Increased trotting stamina regen rate.
  
• Increased walking stamina regen rate.
  
• Increased standing stamina regen rate.
  
• Increased resting stamina regen rate.

Hunger

• Increased hunger.

Spit Cost

• Spit hunger cost decreased.

Tail Jab Stamina Cost

• Increased stamina cost.

Stamina Decay Rates

• Increased sprint decay rate.
  
• Increased slow swim decay rate.
  
• Increased fast swim decay rate.

Stamina Regen Rates

• Increased trotting stamina regen rate.
  
• Increased walking stamina regen rate.
  
• Increased standing stamina regen rate.
  
• Decreased resting stamina regen rate.

Starting HP

• Decreased starting HP.

Starting Blood

• Decreased starting blood.

Hunger

• Decreased hunger.

Thirst

• Decreased thirst.

Hitbox adjustment

• Removed damage for attacks that hit the Stegosaurus thagomizers (tail spikes).

Group limit

• Group limit increased to from 4 to 5.

Growth Time

• Growth time reduced to 105 minutes.

Scale

• Reduced the Tenontosaurus in size.

Rear Kick Stamina Cost

• Decreased rear kick stamina cost.

Jump Velocity

• Increased jump velocity.

Stamina Decay Rates

• Increased slow swim decay rate.
  
• Increased fast swim decay rate.

Stamina Regen Rates

• Increased trotting stamina regen rate.
  
• Increased walking stamina regen rate.
  
• Increased standing stamina regen rate.
  
• Decreased resting stamina regen rate.

Juvenile Sprint Speed

• Increased juvenile sprint play rate.

Hunger

• Decreased hunger.

Basic attack

• Removed bleed damage from the bite attack. (Claw should still deal bleed.)

Thirst

• Decreased thirst.

CC Thresholds

• Stagger threshold increased.
  
• Knockdown threshold increased.

Group limit

• Group limit increased from 6 to 8.

Growth Time

• Growth time reduced to 75 minutes.

ALT Bite

• Increased damage.
  
• Decreased stamina cost.

Stamina Decay Rates

• Increased sprint decay.
  
• Increased slow swim decay.
  
• Increased fast swim decay.

Stamina Regen Rates

• Increased trotting stamina regen rate.
  
• Increased standing stamina regen rate.
  
• Decreased resting stamina regen rate.

Group limit

• Group limit increased from 6 to 8.

Bleed

• Increased pounce bleed.

Latching

• Decreased initial damage.
  
• Decreased damage per tick.
  
• Decreased stamina per tick.

Pinning

• Decreased initial damage.
  
• Decreased damage per tick.
  
• Decreased stamina per tick.

Stamina Cost

• Initial Stamina cost increased.

• Fixed Utahraptor not accelerating at the correct speed.
  
• Fixed Dryosaurus AI aggression.
  
• Fixed eating locking up if body disappears when eating, if dragged previously.
  
• Fixed issue of ragdoll clipping to the floor and shaking widely.
  
• Fixed piece of meat not ragdolling on first grab.
  
• Fixed issues with Carnotaurus attenuations and eat vocal volume.
  
• Fixed Hypsilophodon not spawning water effects.
  
• Fixed not being able to wallow sometimes after swallowing meat.
  
• Fixed underwater ambient sound not playing in swamp.
  
• Fixed eating animation continuing for 1 more tick after releasing it.
  
• Fixed gore rotation when eating.
  
• Fixed pounce being canceled when losing contact with target.
  
• Fixed meat chunks giving more food when eating from ground.
  
• Fixed issue with Carnotaurus charge stomp audio on jungle terrain.
  
• Fixed Carnotaurus self stagger not playing.
  
• Fixed underwater sound not working in rivers.
  
• Fixed animation not playing if pounced while resting.
  
• Fixed vocals being interrupted every pounce tick of damage.
  
• Fixed bite hitboxes when using the alt attack while jumping/swimming.
  
• Fixed a crash if physics asset get returns null when spawning.
  
• Fixed vocals breaking during anim transitions.
  
• Fixed animation transitions causing pinned anim not to work.
  
• Fixed a crash when trying to eat a corpse being carried.
  
• Fixed Carnotaurus and Utahraptor playing the swallow animation while swimming.
  
• Fixed fast getup working even without stamina.
  
• Fixed river underwater ambience playing above water level.
  
• Fixed not being able to rest sometimes after scenting and swimming.
  
• Fixed Hypsilophodon spit not being visible when looking forward.
  
• Fixed edible bushes being depleted but still showing the eat prompt.
  
• Fixed Stegosaurus eat animation playing out animation twice.
  
• Fixed meat chunks becoming stuck in a player's mouth if spamming E.
  
• Fixed input lock and animation becoming stuck after swallowing while sprinting.
  
• Fixed Dryosaurus rotation when in water after hiding.
  
• Fixed swallowing ending pickup prematurely.
  
• Fixed eating loop animation canceling eat ability.
  
• Fixed being able to deal damage after being staggered.
  
• Fixed Hypsilophodon tail replication.
  
• Fixed bleeding VFX not spawning consistently.
  
• Fixed post processing not working underwater for swamps and rivers.
  
• Fixed jungle ambience audio loop dropping out when voice limit met
  
• Fixed pounce points to avoid utah rotate in place while pouncing big creatures
  
• Fixed not being able to swallow meat chunks when first grabbing them
  
• Fixed Pickup causing walk to be toggled
  
• Fixed various issues with the collision of trees.
  
• Fixed Dryosaurus eating animation not looping.
  
• Fixed Tenontosaurus rotating pouncing Utahraptors.
  
• Fixed underwater audio in various parts of Spiro where water isn't present.
  
• Fixed navigation invokers being registered multiple times.
  
• Fixed swamp and rivers PP being reset by other pawns (including fish).
  
• Fixed spawning wet footprints on hard surfaces if wallowed.
  
• Fixed pounce applying bleed with an incorrect value.
  
• Fixed eating math tick from normal eating allowing "ghost" amount of food
  
• Fixed weight issue with meats
  
• Fixed being able to set growth higher than 1, affecting Attribute values
  
• Fixed eating giving extra food.
  
• Fixed montage not stopping after depleting corpse.
  
• Fixed player names changing while in spectator.
  
• Fixed an issue with drinking and eating animations looping, not receiving the order to stop on other clients.
  
• Fixed Pounce causing input lock if server and client didn't agree on if the player started to swim.
  
• Fixed herbivore eating animations loop stopping ability early.
  
• Fixed forcefield collision on Spiro.
  
• Fixed red currant bush glowing in sunlight.
  
• Fixed regional spawn cooldown sometimes showing as -1.
  
• Fixed Carnotaurus corpse drag animations not playing.
  
• Fixed Stegosaurus resting audio being too loud.
  
• Fixed grabbing corpses speeding up their decay rate.
  
• Fixed entering "/" into chat preventing chat from being opened again.
  
• Fixed Carnotaurus jittering when skidding.
  
• Fixed growth pausing if the player did not shutdown the game using the ingame quit button.
  
• Fixed pouncing on players stood on top of assets immediately throwing the Utahraptor off.
  
• Fixed cloud setting not saving when exiting settings.
  
• Fixed texture setting not saving when exiting settings.
  
• Fixed players occasionally respawning as a Utahraptor juvenile outside of the map.
  
• Fixed admin grow command making players stand automatically.
  
• Fixed camera stuttering slightly when crouching.

And we fixed 200+ unique bugs related to the new mechanics. There are some fixes in here that were not present in public QA, so keep an eye out for those too!


Below is a list of high priority issues that we will be aiming to resolve in an upcoming hotfix, amongst some additional enhancements before pressing on towards Update #4.

• Rare issue where players can fall underneath the map.
  
• Rare issue where players that have been lunged by a Deinosuchus can have physics enabled on their limbs, even after being released from the lunge. Safelog to fix.
  
• Chat may not auto show sometimes, despite the toggle being enabled in settings. Re-enable to fix it.
  
• Occasionally players may not be able to spawn as a Deinosuchus. Relog to fix it.

Hey Islanders,

Our stress test for Update #3 is now live. We'd like to start off by taking the opportunity to thank everyone for their continued patience and support as we toil away on the final stretch of Update #3.

While we understand that many of you are eager to dive headfirst into the stress test, we'd like to properly temper expectations by making it extremely clear from the get-go that the stress test is an important event to help us identify and eliminate any issues that may only arise within servers that are filled to their maximum capacity. Please be aware that during the test you are likely to encounter bugs, missing or not yet fully functional features, performance issues and limited server availability. We expect the stress test to last for one - two weeks. If you're looking for an optimal play-experience we recommend waiting for the full release of the upcoming update.

In order to participate in the stress test you'll need to swap your Steam beta branch:

Right click The Isle in your Steam library > left click Properties > Betas > in the dropdown menu select "Quality Assurance Branch" and your game will now automatically update to the latest available version.

If the Quality Assurance branch is not visible in your dropdown menu, simply restart Steam.

You can identify Official Stress Test servers by the names listed below:

Official Evrima Stress Test - EU
Official Evrima Stress Test - NA


Known issues:

• Grouping temporarily disabled
  
• Spawning atop new map scenes
  
• Schooling Fish can be overly difficult to catch
  
• Some caves have been blocked off until they have been completed

Below you'll find a short description of the abilities that accompany the two new playables. The full changelog will not be available until the release of Update #3.

The Deinosuchus.

• Spacebar in water - Swim upwards.
  
• Ctrl in water - Swim downwards.
  
• Hold RMB when waterwalking (walking on the bed of water sources) - Big lunge. Used to grab targets to drown them. Only effective on targets half your weight or less, otherwise causes you to be staggered.
  
• Hold RMB on land - Small lunge. As above, but doesn't launch as far and costs more stamina.
  
• Tap RMB when swimming - Water boost. Used to rapidly launch yourself to your fastest swimming speed.
  
• Passive - Water Sense. Used for detecting nearby movement in water.
  
• Hold Q while underwater - Enhanced Water Sense. Used to detect movement in water at a further range. The longer the key is held, the further you can sense. In order to use regular scent you must be above the surface of water.
  
• The Deinosuchus cannot eat food while underwater. The Deinosuchus must rise to the surface of water or be on land in order to do so.

The Pteranodon.

• Hold Spacebar while stationary - Stationary take off. Used to launch yourself into the air to fly.
  
• Hold Spacebar while sprinting - Running take off. Costs less stamina than the stationary take off but takes longer to get into the air.
  
• Hold Spacebar while flying - Fly upwards.
  
• Hold Ctrl while flying - Fly downwards.
  
• Hold Shift while flying - Fly faster at an increased stamina cost.
  
• Hold Z while flying - Air break. Used to slow yourself down in order to land safely.
  
• Hold RMB while flying close to a water source - Skim the water. Perform this action above ripples in water sources to catch fish. Release RMB when prompted to catch a schooling fish.
  
• The Pteranodon cannot swallow food while flying.

Who stole January and February?

It’s been a very busy month of developing creative solutions for all-manner of things. Much of the month has been intense bug fixing, improvements, balance changes and performance work. On that topic, I’ve partially reworked the swallowing ability so that it functions properly with the new fish and all sorts of upcoming/future content (yeah, diets). It was primarily conflicting with our code so it had to be rewritten and expanded, which brought with it a few additional bugs that were easily tracked down by our awesome Quality Assurance team in no time at all.

With the help of our QA team we reworked a lot of the math behind the eating ability in general, in regards to how much food you need from a corpse or bush, as an example. We also encountered some major issues relating to animations and seamless growth, I’m afraid I can’t go into details about that, but it consumed a significant chunk of time and creative thinking to get the solution that works in any and all situations. I won’t mention everything we worked on this month, because that would enormously inflate the DevBlog and bore you all to tears.

Besides bug-fixing, the Deinosuchus and it’s widely anticipated lunge ability found itself at the forefront of my tasklist this month. And I can say without a doubt that the Deinosuchus is one of the most unique and mechanically intricate animals we’ve ever designed. It’s been a truly arduous process of tweaking and reiterating based on early and frequent feedback, which is of the utmost importance as we save ourselves from falling victim to the curse of wasted time.

To round off my post I’ll list a few of the less eye-catching things that I’ve worked on this month. Such as changes to replication, water post processing, bleeding (which has bleeding resistance now), carcass material parameters, ambient zones and vocals.

See you next time!


One of my more significant changes was reworking the fall damage. The original system was made based on just 2 - 3 playables and didn’t scale well with the much smaller (Hypsilophodon/Pteranodon) or larger (Stegosaurus/Deinosuchus) animals. I went back to the drawing board and came up with a solution that is more easily configurable and straightforward. In short, we have a curve that associates weight values with a lethal fall height. The damage for anything below that is calculated proportionally.

Another addition is the Pteranodon now crashing into the ground when not landing carefully. This prevents movement for some time, so you are more inclined to use the air brake. It’s also really funny seeing a Pteranodon dive headfirst into the ground and turning into a pancake. With the new playables getting more and more complete we are able to have more playtests, more feedback and in turn more balance changes. This includes speeds, stats or minor changes to mechanics. Fortunately we are able to go through these quickly.

A more recent change I worked on is overhauling the oxygen system. Oxygen is now drained every time when the character is underwater and at an accelerated rate too. Running out of stamina while swimming makes your character sink, causing oxygen loss, so the old behaviour still exists in a different way. Be careful when swimming, because if your oxygen hits 0 it means you are dead in the water.


This month has been a continuation of last month’s Fence bonanza, it’s been extensive work to patch them and add a lot of new variants, like drainage, bent, etc., and test them out to the fullest extent. Alongside a lot of broken variants, which were semi simulated so we can get an extent on how it is broken, to be as real as it can.



This alongside a very neat and detailed prop-making, like the new but damaged Power Generator, which has been a really detailed galore making, especially the texturing part.









As well I’ve been fixing a bunch of bugs, and doing some new zones for the Humans, the Ranger Fencing and doing small additions to the prop work so we can populate it a lot lot smoother and better.












The last few months I've been staying busy doing all these dinosaur revamps. For example I just wrapped up this Albertosaurus sculpt and began work on the Baryonyx. This month though I'm taking a temporary break from this type of work and moving onto some environment assets.



Dondi requested some meshes to help embellish the edges of slopes and cliffs. For this asset we wanted something that looked a little more like exposed dirt rather than a rocky cliff. A lot of the finishing touches on this will be done in-engine with the detail textures that will help blend it into the terrain and add the high frequency noise that you need to sell the material type.



My first few weeks went well, I got to know the team and familiarized myself with the workflow and the tasks ahead. Most of all, I spent a lot of time planning my first big project, the trailer for Update 3. In this case, planning means writing a storyboard. I had a lot of ideas and had to try to adapt them to the project. I tested what's possible and what not and that involves a lot of improvisation. My goal is to present Update 3 cinematically, the majestic side of the game, but also the horror side. Ultimately, I managed to write a storyboard that depicts both parts of the game and mostly relates to Update 3.

After the planning was done, I started on the practical part of my work. I have two options for that: I can film together in-game with the help of the QA team as dino-actors or create my own scenes directly in the UE4 sequencer.

Both have their advantages and disadvantages, a mix of both variants will bring the best result.
I can't wait to show you the final version when it's done. Here is a little sneak peek from a couple of the scenes I’ve already filmed:





At this point, a big thank you to everyone for the nice feedback on the "blood" Trailer, that gave me a lot of courage to take this step.


This month has consisted of a lot of improving audio and systems introduced in the previous months, as well as creating any outstanding audio missing from the Deinosuchus and accompanying mechanics. Heartbeat sounds were created to accompany the rework to the oxygen system, through the use of two sound cues which coordinate with the separate in and out beats, rate at which the heartbeat plays can be dynamically controlled according to the oxygen levels, ramping up the pressure when clinging on for dear life. A water vibrate sound was created, emulating the same effect that is created by crocodilians bellowing in water accompanying the newly implemented water broadcast.

I also designed Juvenile variations of all supplementary vocal sounds for the Deinosuchus (alongside an improvement to the quality of the calls at younger growth) and more underwater sounds including bite and struggling sounds. The underwater struggle sounds were created to be heard from all creatures becoming prey to Deino's lunge ability, complimenting last month’s rework of underwater audio. These reactions have also slightly been improved by trying to add more variation to the vocalisations when lunged, however this brought my attention to an issue where the vocals could still be heard when the underwater sound mix was not in effect, which was resolved by creating new occlusion settings for all attenuations so that when underwater (or generally obstructed) the audio is filtered. For now this serves as a suitable fix however this will likely need to be readdressed when tackling interior environments where a more comprehensive solution for partial audio occlusion will need to be considered.

My focus has now been turned towards the audio used in the ambient zones around the map, the current sounds lack a sense of dynamism and are often a bit of an auditory assault of unrelenting wildlife sounds. The current sounds that randomly spawn around the player will stay largely the same, with the addition of some more sounds. However I am replacing the bulk of the bedding underlying these random sounds, with a much larger variety of ambient loops that will ebb and flow in intensity, creating a more varied and dynamic experience. Currently I am reworking the Swamp biome after which Jungle, Plains and Beach environments will all follow suit.





I’d say this Bary was a bit of a chimera of designs. After exploring some wildly different ideas that didn’t fit the bill, we looked back to what we liked about the old model. It had interesting textures we liked all in all, but we wanted to try a more pulled back version of those ideas.

We salvaged the tail and merged the animals’ overall build with another bulkier concept of ours inspired by the ‘Jaguar Bary’ idea that’s been floating around and a rendition of Baryonyx that Dondi was quite fond of

The last two design features were elongated claws for fishing/general weaponry and lips. Something purely for variety in aesthetics I wanted to try, having seen the idea around in spinosaurus depictions.

We did have a lipless version around as backup just in case the idea didn’t work, but so far it’s looking pretty damn good on the model.


QA has been busy working in numerous areas over the course of this month. The bulk of our work this time around has been focused mostly on performance testing and playtesting, ensuring that our server can maintain our recommended player cap. The results of the performance changes from our programmers has been very promising, running 40 QA testers with ease. I fully expect our servers to be capable of running even more players, which will be one of the many reasons for the upcoming beta.

Playtesting continues to prove most useful to us. Not only can we record performance, but we can also see which parts of the game are enjoyable and which parts are not. Once again, we’ve gathered valuable data from these tests and have balanced our characters accordingly, fine tuning our statistics to account for the latest additions to the roster. Expect the following:

Locational hitboxes have been improved across the board. Stegosaurus will not take damage if bitten on its tail spikes (thagomizers). Players can also now, generally speaking, target a character’s neck to deal more damage than they would towards the torso. This is also future proofing us for playables later on, such as Ceratopsians that would have much thicker skulls (and therefore take less damage to their heads), while they may have an increased modifier towards their neck.

Terrestrials are not as efficient in the water as they once were. Heavier animals will swim slower now and attempting to swim faster will cause your stamina to deplete very quickly. Depleting your stamina will cause you to drown or worse, leave you struggling to escape the jaws of a very large crocodilian.

While actively grazing, hunger drain is paused. This encourages the use of the graze mechanic when herbivores migrate across the map. This will be subject to change, pertaining to the later Diet System.

Carnotaurus charge doesn’t knock people down when hitting the tail anymore… Because that wasn’t fun. The carnotaurus will also turn a bit slower when sprinting to encourage the use of the charge ability more - no more carelessly running up to other players and spam biting.

The Deinosuchus and Pteranodon have also been carefully balanced, as to not feel too over/underpowered compared with the rest of our roster. The Pteranodon underwent a few iterations of flight duration/costs throughout its growth in order to feel like the player is “learning” to fly as you play it. The Deinosuchus will not immediately be able to easily kill other players - it starts off by having to exclusively catch and eat fish before it can eventually grow to its apex-killing capabilities.

And much more!

With just a few more high priority bugs being fixed (of which some you may have noticed in Filipe’s recent stream) we’ll be opening the floodgates for the beta in no time! Thank you all for your patience.


So much to do stacked upon our precious plans. However, everyone has been no less productive. Quite the contrary. Everyone has been making magic happen behind the scenes. Pulling rabbits out of hats even. The animation team has been mostly polishing some of the final animations for the ptera and Deinosuchus. Making sure as much of the flow we want is established. We always keep a list of things to go back to and improve in the future, so quality will always go up. I can’t say it hasn’t had its high points but the animation team is definitely ready to get the Ptera and deino off our plates so we can start working on new stuff. Be on the lookout for the public test soon. The animation team has also been prototyping some new ways to raise our bar a little higher behind the scenes. A lot of the other creatures on the roadmap have already been rigged and are ready to be animated, if we haven’t started them already. So we are very anxious to move forward.

The team has spent a fair amount of March trying to reestablish the look we want for everything. From the top to the bottom. So expect some shifts here and there with the overall tone of the game’s visuals. We’ve also been trucking along with production of our humans. Our Gen 2s are in peak condition and currently going through bootcamp to prepare for the war ahead. More to share on that soon. Until next time...



As you can see it’s been an incredibly busy March. We’ve added a couple of new and extremely talented individuals to our development team and continue to plow through the final stretch of Update #3. Before I end this blog however, I’ll share a few additional images below...















As you can see, Dondi has been quite busy working on the new environments that you’ll all get to explore in the coming update. We’re all so incredibly excited and can’t wait to see you all delve into the depths and soar through the skies.

We'll see you next time Islanders! - Punchpacket.

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.