Hey Islanders,

It's time to stretch your legs, clamber out from beneath those bushes and explore a whole new environment filled with a wide array of exotic foliage and fauna. Compete for these new resources and gorge yourself on them to maximize your strength and secure a swift passage to adulthood with the all-new Diet System. Paired with the arrival of the island's latest inhabitant, Pachycephalosaurus, comes the new locational Fracture System. It's now more important than ever to pick your fights wisely, lest you find yourself at the mercy of an assortment of crippling injuries.



If you've been playing on the Quality Assurance branch make sure to switch back to the main EVRIMA branch by right clicking The Isle in your Steam library > left click properties > betas > in the dropdown menu select "EVRIMA public branch".

You may also need to restart Steam if the update does not make itself immediately available.

• Added Diet System. Every species in the game now has a specific diet that, if not adhered to, will result in a longer growth time and other debuffs. Your character's preferred diet and more can be found on your character menu (Default key: Tab)
  
• Added Ambient AI animals.
  
• Added Pachycephalosaurus as a playable class.
  
• Added Fracture system.
  
• Added passive scent for Carnivores. Walking near footprints/blood will automatically cause them to be highlighted. Can be toggled with F8.
  
• Added scent tracking for Carnivores. Press Q on a set of footprints to "lock on" to them. Follow the direction that they are facing to track other players. This will be expanded upon further in future updates.
  
• Added Compsognathus scavenger AI.
  
• Added latching ability to Pteranodon, activate by holding RMB while flying into a vertical surface slowly.
  
• Added a couple of islands and some more coastal related areas to Spiro.
  
• Added anti-cheat.
  
• Added mud wallows to Spiro.
  
• Added ragdoll effect to all knockdowns.
  
• Added scent icons to the compass. Removed scent particles.
  
• Added Streamer mode to game settings to hide server name and coordinates.
  
• Added a camera offset to the Right or Left of the character using, by default, input V.
  
• Released Linux dedicated servers.
  
• Removed Dinosaur AI until it has been further improved.

• Added death sounds for all characters.
  
• Added tail physics with trail controllers.
  
• Added new Utahraptor broadcast call.
  
• Added new mud textures.
  
• Added wide Ceiba Tree variants with impostors and new branch textures.
  
• Added more ocean ambient audio.
  
• Added vocal sounds to Stegosaurus sit and stand animations.
  
• Added Carnotaurus sit vocal and reduced volume of stand vocal.
  
• Added swamp fauna one shots.
  
• Added foliage interaction plugin and fixed massive performance issues.
  
• Added a galaxy to the night sky.
  
• Added custom flooring to the radio tower.
  
• Added subtle wind/foliage rustle loops to swamp, jungle and plains biomes.
  
• Added random triggered stick snap sound to forest walk, trot and sprint sound cues with custom attenuation.
  
• Added a delay in changing direction when running fast.
  
• Added some new sounds to Dryosaurus.
  
• Added new falling impact sounds.
  
• Added some new Tenontosaurus supplementary vocal sounds, improved sounds on animations.
  
• Added location to deaths logs.
  
• Added more rock LOD materials.
  
• Added large detailing to the Ocean material.
  
• Added DLSS plugin.
  
• Added DLSS option to settings.
  
• Added Character panel to the escape menu.
  
• Added new sound system for rivers and beach.
  
• Added ocean shore blending to small rocks.
  
• Added new trim decals.
  
• Added specific repeating bird loop intermittently in jungle morning, day and evening.
  
• Added system to toggle sound based on what is being eaten. Soft, solid, leaves, etc.
  
• Added herbivore bite/chew sounds to grab and swallow animations.
  
• Added time of day in the character profile (24h mode).
  
• Added hint when you shouldn't swallow something.
  
• Added a 3s timer to toggling spectator mode.
  
• Added a value that changes Intensity value for pain sounds.
  
• Added better fish movement and more responsive fleeing.
  
• Added more movement to fish when stuck against side of rivers.
  
• Added specific vocals for each animal.
  
• Adjusted Pounce when colliding and playing a knockdown animation.

• Made pickup work in 2 ways: Tap to remove a piece of meat from any body size. Hold to drag that body, if able, otherwise also remove a piece.
  
• Adjusted pounce to have priority over other abilities.
  
• Changed pounce to work even if the target is in water.
  
• Made Deinosuchus juveniles see further in water than adults.
  
• Work on underwater ocean ambient sounds and ocean/beach ambient sounds.
  
• General water material improvements.
  
• Across the board foliage color tweaks.
  
• Updated website and bug report links.
  
• Swamp and jungle ambient audio stuff and some changes to vocal attenuations and general audio mix.
  
• Small changes to increase fluid simulation effect.
  
• Improved ambience audio mix and night ambiences.
  
• Adjustments to Utahraptor vocals pitch.
  
• Improved swamp evening ambience and jungle night ambience audio.
  
• Made pounce not cause knockdown when hitting trees, logs, rocks, etc.
  
• Improvements to ragdoll performance..
  
• Adjustments to fall damage in certain situations like being lunged our pouncing.
  
• Made Stegosaurus secondary only deal damage if the target is on the same side as the swing.
  
• Improved juvenile Stegosaurus bite and attack vocal sounds.
  
• Adjusted volume balance of ambient, vocal and foley sound classes
  
• Reworked part of the Foliage interaction plugin, added cheaper system with proper replication regardless of distance.
  
• Remastered Ocean material.
  
• Adjusted fog particle emissive values.
  
• Tweaked grass types.
  
• Day/Night cycle tweaks.
  
• Replaced the old rivers with the painted rapids ones.
  
• Separated trill from Utahraptor broadcast call, adjusted core and power layer volumes.
  
• Reduced the pitch of the adult Deinosuchus broadcast.
  
• Changed some more Dino vocals to use small idle attenuation.
  
• Improved save performance.
  
• Added a new perimeter fence ending, without the fence on the top.
  
• Cut off parts of the island to the cliffside.
  
• Reduced trigger rate of Swamp long bird one shots.
  
• Several updates to pounce and its animations.
  
• Security improvements.
  
• Adjustments to pounce and lunge causing getup animation to trigger if target was resting.
  
• Updated Utahraptor trot animations with out of sync notifies.
  
• Water material performance improvements.
  
• Landscape color tweaks.
  
• Color corrected dinosaur colors.
  
• Recolored Rivers.
  
• Made 1 and 3 call power call change more obvious.
  
• Improved animation and movement smoothness.
  
• Adjusted shadow scalability settings.
  
• Improved how some calls sound at low stamina.
  
• Improved Deinosuchus 1 & 3 call power modulation.
  
• Changes to Materials, base fence test.
  
• Reduced volume of eating, drinking and wallowing sounds.
  
• Reduced ambient one shot attenuations range and reduced swamp and jungle wind loops volume.
  
• Reduced volume and trigger rate of stick snap sounds, made volume scale with size.
  
• Improved how wallowing and knockdowns sound.
  
• Increased delay times of ambzones on Spiro.
  
• Improved save reliability, made it try to load the backup if the main file is invalid.
  
• Small changes for replication rate.
  
• Adjusted Eating and Pickup to sync in distance with body nearby.
  
• Adjustments to ragdolls during and after pickup.
  
• Adjusted carry position for all species.
  
• Removed cooldown from buck abilities.
  
• Modified some Server Logs.
  
• Made sunlight level more realistic.
  
• Changed the wind mask clamping.
  
• Updated Spiro map with part of the new shallow river.
  
• Reduced volume of end splash sound in Carnotaurus' drink loop.
  
• Increased volume of wind in the swamp, plains and jungle ambient sound cues.
  
• Improved server browser with filters and faster requests.
  
• Balanced sprinting stomp sound levels for larger creatures.
  
• Reduced volume of Hypsilophodon knockdown impact.
  
• More ambient audio adjustments.
  
• Adjusted Swamp and Rivers system to not rise above normal level.
  
• Adjusted Ceiba tree and Forest bush LOD color.
  
• Polished up some landscape issues.
  
• Removed the jungle floating in the ocean on the northern shore.
  
• Adjusted swallow threshold.
  
• Made wind louder at night, balanced ambience loops.
  
• Small improvement to corpse performance.
  
• Swapped character and admin inputs by default.
  
• Brightened up day to night transition.
  
• Adjusted Stegosaurus impale position.
  
• Made it easier to see at night.
  
• Adjusted ambient one shots volume, random chance & delay times.
  
• Adjusted volume and envelope adjustments to ambient loops.
  
• Reduced attenuation height fall off for ambient loops.
  
• Added sit and stand foley sound for tiny small and medium sized dino effects.
  
• Increased AI vector finding radius for fleeing and wandering.
  
• Made eating take priority over drinking and grazing.
  
• Increased volume of mud foley sound.
  
• Made smaller creatures use newer dirt slide sound.
  
• Minor ambient level adjustments.
  
• Adjusted the ragdolls and death animations for animals.
  
• Color corrected plant debris assets.
  
• Performance improvements to some AI tasks.
  
• Several visual improvements to pounce.
  
• Improved pounced animation blending.
  
• Added new meat bite and chew sounds and slight improvements to sounds on all carnivore eat, grab and swallow animations.
  
• Updated dirt dig sounds.
  
• Avoided thirst and hunger to decay when in spectator mode.
  
• Setup system to help against interactor overlapping when not needed.
  
• Increased lunge speed boost when swimming.
  
• Ensured all stagger animations have appropriate audio.
  
• Adjusted Pteranodon grab point.
  
• AI now decays and regens stamina, similarly to a player.
  
• Adjustments to artifacts with day time.
  
• Setup leaf rustle and twig snaps in Herbivore diet bite sounds.
  
• Improved Dryosaurus, Pteranodon, Stegosaurus and Deinosuchus pounceable areas.
  
• Reworked stagger to have movement, made Deinosuchus immune to being staggered.
  
• Changed animals replication values. Removed collision from AI capsule when in Stasis.
  
• Made floating corpses rise a little higher.
  
• Increased fish flee speed.
  
• Set fish possible swim height lower.
  
• Improved pounce visual stuttering.
  
• Adjusted footprint color in sand.
  
• Updated scent icons with fade in/out.
  
• Improved Stegosaurus impale.
  
• Adjusted sync of some fracture footstep notifies.
  
• Changed attenuation on Pteranodon and Stegosaurus head injury sound cues.
  
• Improved herbivore eat animation audio.
  
• Enabled Pteranodon additive landing animation while taking off in place.
  
• Resynched and balanced levels of herbivore diets foley sounds.
  
• Updated Utahraptor pinned animations.
  
• Made an anti-spam check for AdminPanel.
  
• Increased amount of mushrooms.
  
• Increased night brightness.

Bucking

• Stamina regeneration is now disabled while pouncing or being pounced.

Body dragging

• Sprint stamina decay while dragging increased slightly.

Eating

• Hunger intake values decreased across the board. It now takes longer to consume corpses to encourage contesting over food.

Locational Damage

• Every hind limb bone and the base of the spine now count towards the Leg locational hitzone to simulate "Hips."

Inertia

• Inertia values added to all animals. Smaller species are more agile than larger ones.

Wallow

• Duration of wallow buff increased.

Juvenile stamina

• Juvenile stamina decay rates scale with visual size. Smaller animals can run for longer.

Group Limit

• Max group limit decreased from 5 to 3.

Max Health

• Starting Health decreased.
  
• Max Health reduced slightly.

Blood Pool

• Starting Blood Pool reduced.
  
• Max Blood Pool reduced.

AttackPower

• Starting AttackPower reduced.

Agility

• Walk turn rate decreased.
  
• Trot turn rate decreased.
  
• Skid duration increased.
  
• Skid distance increased.
  
• Deceleration rate decreased.

Movement speeds

• Juvenile Sprint speed reduced.
  
• Adult Sprint speed reduced.

Stamina decay rates

• Sprinting decay rate increased.

Primary Attack: Bite

• Damage reduced.
  
• Animation rate scale decreased.

Alternate Primary Attack: 360 Bite

• Damage reduced.
  
• Stamina cost added.
  
• Animation rate scale increased.

Sprinting Secondary Attack: Charge

• Speed modifier increased.
  
• Knockdown damage increased.
  
• Stagger damage increased.
  
• Cooldown removed.
  
• Now factors in Locational damage. (Can strike legs, heads, etc.)

Max Health

• Starting Health reduced.
  
• Max Health increased.

Blood Pool

• Starting Blood Pool reduced.
  
• Max Blood Pool increased.

Thirst

• Thirst duration reduced.

AttackPower

• Starting AttackPower reduced.

Movement speed

• Adult sprint speed reduced.

Alternate Primary Attack: 360 Bite

• Variable Stamina cost added. Costs more to use on land than water.

Secondary Attack: Lunge

• Damage now scales with AttackPower.

Max Health

• Starting Health reduced.
  
• Max Health reduced.

Blood Pool

• Starting Blood Pool reduced.
  
• Max Blood Pool reduced.

AttackPower

• Starting AttackPower reduced.

Stamina decay rates

• Sprinting decay rate increased.

Movement speeds

• Sprint speed reduced.

Primary Attack: Peck

• Damage reduced.

Max Health

• Max Health reduced.

Blood Pool

• Max Blood Pool reduced.

Jump

• Jump Velocity increased.

Primary Attack: Peck

• Damage reduced.

Secondary Attack: Spit

• Hunger consumption reduced.
  
• Max range increased.

Charged Jump

• Stamina cost reduced.

Max Health

• Starting Health reduced.
  
• Max Health reduced.

Blood Pool

• Starting Blood Pool reduced.
  
• Max Blood Pool reduced.

AttackPower

• Starting AttackPower reduced.

Movement speeds

• Sprint speed reduced.

Primary Attack: Peck

• Damage reduced.

Alternate Primary Attack: 360 Peck

• Damage reduced.

Launch

• Standing Launch stamina cost decreased.

Max Health

• Starting Health reduced.
  
• Max Health increased.

Blood Pool

• Starting Blood Pool reduced.
  
• Max Blood Pool increased.

AttackPower

• Starting AttackPower reduced.

Stamina decay rates

• Sprinting decay rate increased.

Turning rate

• Turning rate increased.

Primary Attack: Bite

• Damage reduced.

Secondary Attack: Tail Jab

• Damage adjusted at all growth stages. Adult damage remains the same.

Growth Time

• Relative grow time increased.

Max Health

• Starting Health reduced.
  
• Max Health reduced.

Blood Pool

• Starting Blood Pool reduced.
  
• Max Blood Pool reduced.

Stamina Regen rates

• Trotting regen rate reduced.

AttackPower

• Starting AttackPower reduced.

Stamina decay rates

• Sprinting decay rate increased.
  
• Slow swim decay rate increased.

Agility

• Turn in place rate decreased.

Movement speeds

• Sprint speed reduced.
  
• Juvenile Slow swim speed increased.
  
• Juvenile Fast swim speed increased.
  
• Adult Slow swim speed increased.
  
• Adult Fast swim speed increased.

Primary Attack: Bite

• Damage reduced.

Alternate Primary Attack: 360 Claw

• Damage reduced.
  
• Stamina adjusted.

Secondary Attack: Rear Kick

• Damage reduced.
  
• Stamina cost increased.

Alternate Secondary Attack: Tail Slam

• Damage reduced.
  
• Stamina cost increased.
  
• Priority increased against other special abilities.

Growth Time

• Relative grow time increased.

Mass

• Adult Mass reduced.

Max Health

• Starting Health reduced.
  
• Max Health reduced.

Blood Pool

• Starting Blood Pool reduced.
  
• Max Blood Pool reduced.

Corpse food value

• Corpse food value reduced.

Hunger

• Hunger duration increased.

AttackPower

• Starting AttackPower reduced.

Movement speeds

• Sprint speed reduced.

Stamina regen rates

• Trotting regen rate increased.
  
• Walking regen rate increased.

Stamina decay rates

• Sprinting decay rate increased.

Primary Attack: Bite

• Damage reduced.

Alternate Primary Attack: 360 Bite

• Damage reduced.
  
• Can transition directly to sprinting after attacking.

Pounce

• Pounce miss animation rate scale increased.

Large Pounce

• Initial Damage reduced.
  
• Initial Stamina reduced.
  
• Damage per tick reduced.
  
• Stamina per tick increased.

Small Pounce

• Initial Damage reduced.
  
• Initial Stamina reduced.
  
• Damage per tick reduced.
  
• Stamina per tick increased.
  
• 0.5s delay for targets to attack back after releasing the pin.

ALT Bite stamina cost

• Added stamina costs to Deinosuchus ALT bite.

• Fixed characters not saving properly.
  
• Changes to spectator mode to fix performance issues.
  
• Fixed wide Ceiba assets vertex colors.
  
• Fixed Stegosaurus not being able to vocalize or bite if carrying an impaled body.
  
• Fixed UI hints on top of character panel.
  
• Fixed all character calls playing at wrong pitch and made some minor improvements.
  
• Fixed fish always spawning in the center of swamps.
  
• Fixed some inconsistent hint messages.
  
• Fixed lunge applying wrong bleeding values.
  
• Fixed some issues related to pounce sync.
  
• Fixed Character UI overlapping Admin UI.
  
• Fixed staying on the water surface as Deinosuchus not working sometimes.
  
• Fixed some inconsistent values when growth is set using admin panel.
  
• Fixed invalid chat commands.
  
• Fixed some abilities draining stamina while swimming.
  
• Fixed incorrect growth montages playing.
  
• Fixed being unable to take off as Pteranodon while bleeding.
  
• Fixed stamina drain after stationary take off.
  
• Fixed Hypsilophodon stamina recharge after charge jump.
  
• Fixed Deinosuchus blending issues.
  
• Fixed speed values being incorrect on the character menu.
  
• Fixed blood level affecting charge.
  
• Fixed small UI hint bugs.
  
• Fixed growth tick restoring status.
  
• Fixed a particular collision issue affecting some abilities, like pounce and lunge.
  
• Fixed small issue related to corpse disable being interfered by interaction main disable overlap.
  
• Fixed collision on FoliageDeactivationVolume.
  
• Fixed some crossfading and pitch issues with Deinosuchus, Stegosaurus and Pteranodon broadcast calls.
  
• Fixed issue with foliage interactor collision.
  
• Fixed small distance issue in Interactor component causing interactive foliage to not go back to foliage instance.
  
• Fixed spectator names not working with Chinese characters.
  
• Fixed a bug with spawn cooldowns sometimes not being removed.
  
• Fixed Stegosaurus calls not working when impaling something.
  
• Fixed footprints sometimes having a rotation issue.
  
• Fixed speed issue when swimming up/down.
  
• Fixed flying Pteranodon not colliding with pouncer.
  
• Fixed idle walk bug.
  
• Fixed juvenile Deinosuchus not playing certain montages.
  
• Fixed vocals not updating properly with growth.
  
• Fixed vocals pitch issue.
  
• Fixed footstep decals not appearing sometimes.
  
• Fixed pounce cancel while looking down causing the player to become stuck in mid air.
  
• Fixed corpse despawn not working sometimes.
  
• Fixed lunge causing jump issue on target.
  
• Fixed Fish not getting a reference to surface correctly.
  
• Fixed growth and status issues with animals.
  
• Fixed vomit revert tick rate.
  
• Fixed overexposed clouds.
  
• Fixed some issues with UI cancelling eat and wallow.
  
• Fixed some abilities cancelling sprint.
  
• Fixed and updated RVT material Landscape texture color tweaks.
  
• Fixed Spiro level bounds, updated river sections along the NE river.
  
• Fixed Deinosuchus broadcast getting cut off.
  
• Fixed layer volumes on Pteranodon broadcast.
  
• Fixed cave loop not looping seamlessly.
  
• Fixed Carnotaurus footsteps position.
  
• Fixed Deinosuchus not able to remove spit sometimes.
  
• Fixed not being able to sprint while pounced.
  
• Fixed pouncer rotation on other clients.
  
• Fixed client memory leak when opening Admin panel.
  
• Fixed issues with status decay/regen values.
  
• Fixed Carnotaurus footstep socket location.
  
• Fixed Dryosaurus resting animation transitions.
  
• Fixed Pteranodon skimming additive.
  
• Fixed bleeding not being updated by movement.
  
• Fixed escape menu not working in spectator mode.
  
• Fixed Utahraptor juvenile 3 call audio.
  
• Fixed Deinosuchus broadcast power cutting off early.
  
• Fixed water sense sometimes not detecting fish.
  
• Fixed replication on Aquatic surface and Rivers.
  
• Fixed Rivers below mesh and water line not updating with water level.
  
• Fixed swimming state inconsistency.
  
• Fixed invisible map barriers.
  
• Fixed water tiling on a small pond.
  
• Fixed various map potholes.
  
• Fixed latency issues when dragging, causing desync.
  
• Fixed small issues with corpse ragdolls and meat chunks ragdolls.
  
• Fixed Landscape "Snow".
  
• Fixed some glitched terrain.
  
• Fixed server list name filter.
  
• Fixed animal forest footstep layer alignment.
  
• Fixed issue with safe logout not working.
  
• Fixed Deinosuchus belly jiggling violently when eating.
  
• Fixed vocal animations while latching.
  
• Fixed some issues with the bleeding VFX.
  
• Fixed bucking issue with multiple pouncers.
  
• Fixed a crash that would occur when pressing "Quit" on the main menu.
  
• Fixed bleeding tag issues.
  
• Fixed being able to teleport a dead player.
  
• Fixed some wrong curve values for elite fish.
  
• Fixed scent issue on gore pieces/fish.
  
• Fixed rivers not playing water sounds.
  
• Fixed merge and submerge sounds.
  
• Fixed ocean underwater material.
  
• Fixed the rocky shore collision.
  
• Fixed sound issues with beach and rivers.
  
• Fixed issue with stamina when carrying stuff.
  
• Fixed landscape LOD causing crash.
  
• Fixed loose level assets.
  
• Fixed some issues with the UI. (Profile and HUD blood icon)
  
• Fixed corpse sliding.
  
• Fixed Tenontosaurus juvenile bite sound.
  
• Fixed issues of drag and carry with the animals.
  
• Fixed rest cancelling scent.
  
• Fixed misspelled vomit.
  
• Fixed issue with special ability cost on juveniles being too high.
  
• Fixed not being able to swallow carried food while swimming in surface, if not a Deinosuchus.
  
• Fixed pounce not working while falling/jumping.
  
• Fixed incorrect landscape LODs.
  
• Fixed underwater post processing having extreme colors during certain times of day.
  
• Fixed Carnotaurus juvenile calls.
  
• Fixed small issues with pounce desync and while swimming/mud.
  
• Fixed Tenontosaurus tail slam not causing a stagger animation.
  
• Fixed corpses not being eaten properly.
  
• Fixed pounce issue causing client side stuttering for pouncer and "following" after dismount.
  
• Fixed Carnotaurus and Tenontosaurus rest sounds.
  
• Fixed widget order.
  
• Fixed stat hints.
  
• Fixed autosaves not working.
  
• Fixed UI issue when logging in with 0 hunger/thirst.
  
• Fixed an issue with Pteranodon swallowing when flying.
  
• Fixed graze and swallow priority issue.
  
• Fixed drink intake inconsistency.
  
• Fixed not able to interact with plant or body constinuously after swallowing.
  
• Fixed pounce stuttering client side when bucking.
  
• Fixed Carnotaurus charge not setting ability state to special attack.
  
• Fixed an input lockup when trying to eat a body while in water.
  
• Fixed issue with water ripple animation sporadically working.
  
• Fixed crouch causing a good portion of the player's mesh to sink or float.
  
• Fixed juvenile Deinosuchus broadcast not animating in water.
  
• Fixed meat chunks not removing enough food from source.
  
• Fixed pounce issue when hitting a target too close to the ground.
  
• Fixed various issues with pickup.
  
• Fixed issues with jumping at low stamina.
  
• Fixed Deinosuchus blendspace speeds.
  
• Fixed ripple effects even when submerged.
  
• Fixed issue with meshcorrector when pouncing.
  
• Fixed scent range not resetting properly.
  
• Fixed water ripples being fired outside water.
  
• Fixed pounce issue when hitting small creatures.
  
• Fixed hint for when not able to grab.
  
• Fixed bite sounds pitch/crossfade.
  
• Fixed Hypsilophodon's eyes not turning white when dead.
  
• Fixed small issue with juvenile Stegosaurus high eat loop.
  
• Fixed Dryosaurus and Pteranodon bite sounds.
  
• Fixed Tenontosaurus snore sound.
  
• Fixed AI not losing perception properly.
  
• Fixed AI spawning in trees sometimes.
  
• Fixed pounce foliage trace.
  
• Fixed clearing attacker on perception lost.
  
• Fixed Deinosuchus' eyes being broken when using the shake animation.
  
• Fixed stagger animation not playing for hit client.
  
• Fixed Carnotaurus stagger animations.
  
• Fixed controller camera controls.
  
• Fixed a few resting and drinking crashes.
  
• Fixed Deinosuchus juvenile bite and generic call audio issues.
  
• Fixed a crash when fish get staggered.
  
• Fixed issue avoiding eating foley audio setup to work.
  
• Fixed small issue with vocals from DTs.
  
• Fixed sprint state not being applied if shift was pressed while sprinting is not possible.
  
• Fixed hit particles not spawning.
  
• Fixed persistent audio.
  
• Fixed pounce start animation stuttering when used right after scent.
  
• Fixed deino leg fracture speed info in dino profile
  
• Fixed plants, fruits and small branches material turning them invisible if too close.
  
• Fixed to headbutt ground causing knocked down players to stay forever stunned
  
• Fixed lunge causing oxygen decay on land
  
• Fixed "E" or "G" canceling stagger or knockdown CC effect
  
• Fixed deino and ptera being able to bite while being lunged
  
• Fixed knockdown into mud being permanent
  
• Fixed juv Deino buck animation not playing
  
• Fixed boar not rotating for attack

Hey everyone, it’s been a month of adjustments, fixes and preparations for what comes next. I’ve been particularly occupied with corrections of old and new mechanics this month to ensure that we have a clean path for the next updates, including humans as well.

One important fix was related to “Lag Compensation” which is utilized by a few abilities such as the Utah’s pounce and the Pachy’s ram, the system was causing a noticeable stutter and lacked the necessary accuracy in relation to server and client sync of events. The “Lag Compensation” is a generic term to help against the biggest issue in online games, the latency, or lag, which is the time certain things take to go from the client to server and/or from server to client. This system helps to reduce that latency the moment an ability is activated, which makes the entire ability chain significantly more reliable, accurate and ping tolerant. The problem is that such a system is sensitive to any code mistake, which obviously can break the various abilities, but it is important for the future. However, I’ve resolved the issues and with more tests/time we will finalize this mechanic so it can be implemented in other abilities and even expanded.

Besides that, I have also been working on humans (yes, officially) organizing animations, folders, classes, etc. Something important to note is that the initial implementation of humans will be basic and significantly expanded upon throughout development.

Hey all, this last year has gone by in a flash and I hope that you’re all looking forward to the holidays. This past month for me has been spent developing some of our server side tools, which will eliminate the issue of the servers not restarting properly, as well as making them significantly easier to manage on our end.

Based on feedback, the team and I are also reimagining our approach for the implementation of AI and the roles that they will fill within the ecosystem; we'll be able to share more specific details on that in future. I’ve also been working on the ambient animals, continuing to make their behaviour more dynamic and interesting to interact with alongside improvements to the fish. Other than that it has just been a plethora of bug fixes and performance testing as usual. That’s it for me this month!


I updated the stagger mechanic to have actual movement instead of just playing the animation in place. It’s just a little push, but the animations play out much better now that the feet are not sliding around. I had to set up a little “studio” in the engine to measure the movement speeds and durations for each direction of each animal but it will come handy for the new additions.

I made some changes to the tracking system as well. It’s mostly just balancing it at this point but there were some visual updates too. You can now see the cone and the footprints through foliage which was a much needed improvement in places with dense vegetation.



I also moved the scent icons back to the compass. When I first set up the system it was primarily for testing so now I went back and made some updates to support fading in and out. Finally I got around to moving the pack scent there as well.


This month QA has been busy assisting with rounding out Update #4. We’ve been spending the majority of our time bug testing and confirming the fixes for the programmers with each internal build of the game. We’ve noticed lately that the game has been suffering with a lot of crashes and input lockups (we hear you Stego players), so the majority of our focus has been spent on narrowing those down. These issues can arise from all sorts of unexpected places - one of the latest crashes was related simply to fracture sounds not playing properly, instead of the headbutt ability itself.

Besides bug testing, we’ve been following the mechanic test and balance feedback channels on the Discord closely, fine tuning the statistics for the characters across the board and the values for the diet system. A large focus during this time was spent looking at the Pachycephalosaurus and the accompanying fracture system, more specifically how well the character contends with the other species on the island. We knew that the Carnotaurus was going to be a huge threat for the Pachy and started by ensuring that this animal had the toolkit to deal with it effectively. The goal we’re currently pursuing is for the Pachy to be able to break its leg and be able to run away, instead of outright killing it; please let us know in the balance feedback Discord channel how it feels so far so we know how it’s performing.

Another focus we’ve had is the new scent tracking system that was mentioned above. We’re really excited to see this feature come into the game and think it’s going to push carnivore tracking into a whole new direction that the game hasn’t seen before. As mentioned in dmIV’s post, it’s mostly down to balance testing at the moment and we’re looking forward to seeing what you guys think about it!


This month has been all about the Dockyard and getting shaders ready for the new system.
Dockyard items have been progressing as expected with various buildings pretty much done. Just need to be put in a blueprint, optimize the distances and voila, we have at least 4 versatile buildings.

Others are on the way of course, with a large collection of props and interior changes, both in the decal department, and set dressing. These new items are a collection that we are pushing to make all aspects of human buildings feel unique and with a purpose, especially with coloring, which highlights the importance of each building, and what can be pretty much found there.
Alongside these, I’ve been making semi modular props for storage, to bring more life into these storage places.









That is so far regarding highly detailed items for the humans, and the new dockyard. I wish you all the best with the new year and holidays!

The art department has been keeping me busy a great deal. At the beginning of the month I’ve been working on finishing the Underwater Concept for our Rivers. Because rivers are thinner and longer in shape than lakes, I had to stretch out the concept art horizontally quite a bit to fit as much as I could. I’m hoping we can be quite creative with how the river bends, forms, deepens, and shapes. Default skins for all the animals have been completed and work on secondary skins has begun. We’re going to try and not be super drastic between patterns and keep them looking similar with their own flair. Think of them like different variations of the same skin, like different morphs in some reptiles. Hopefully they’ll break up the monotony of having the same patterns on every individual.



The release trailer for the 4th update had to be revised heavily in the last few months, as the content of the 4th update changed a lot over the course of its creation and thus many scenes of the trailer had to be re-filmed.

Especially the changes to the fractures took a lot of time, because now only the pachy can use fractures. So (besides small specials like the Halloween video) I spent the last weeks updating the release trailer.

Also during the last two weeks, I've been working on the audio effects for the trailer. When I film a scene in the game engine it is entirely without sound. I add the individual sound effects, each call, each step and each idle snort manually in the video editor, as it’s easier to adjust and edit the effects there.
When designing the sound of the trailer I make sure that the effects harmonize with the soundtracks. I often test many different variations until I'm satisfied with how the sounds fit. In the end there are often more than 10 audio tracks (uncompressed). Here is a little view behind the scenes of the audio tracks:



This month I continued the design of the Beipiaosaurus calls, which consist of a variety of unique bird sounds giving it a colourful sound palette. However, these sources are blended with more unusual sounds such as wood and plastic bowed with a cello bow, contrasting the delicate bird-like qualities with a harsher and raspier honking quality, which carries across the Beipi’s larger biology over modern birds, whilst maintaining the organic feel. The juvenile and hatchling calls follow the same gesture as the adult calls, but are created using a selection of the adult sounds pitched up combined with sounds from large birds in their infancy and in-organic elements such as glass squeaks.

I have also been continuing on the combat feedback sounds, the stab and claw attack sounds are complete with sufficient impact and gore, however the bite sound is still in development. As this sound will be heard very frequently a lot of attention is being put towards it in particular to ensure the sound is impactful, but also realistic, as we want the player to really feel these sounds as a clear indication of when they have been bitten. Additionally, I need to create enough iterations to the point at which repeat plays of the same sound do not occur so as not to break that immersion. This has to be achieved for all size categories so entails creating a large quantity of these sounds and making sure they hit the mark in both aesthetic and feeling.


Most of what I've been doing lately is updating rigs in preparation for future updates, for the rest you'll just have to wait and see when the proper time comes. Troodon, Beipiaosaurus and Ceratosaurus all got some modern upgrades in the puppeteering department along with some associated animation work with more to follow in the coming weeks.


With November having come and gone, we have gathered all the information we feel we need in regards to diets, fractures and the pachy. We have a few more things we want to polish and solidify before we fully release Update 4 but we are quite satisfied with the initial results. Which has led us to expanding on diets even more. The diet system has a lot more depth than we initially released it with as we wanted to take our time and carefully assess its impacts on the ecosystem first. We didn’t want to bloat the system with too many factors that may have led to a false assessment of how well the feature as a whole was performing. With diets being such a cornerstone feature, we really wanted to have a solid base to work from before adding too much complexity. But we are satisfied with the results and can begin working on the deeper gameplay we want to deliver. Some of the changes to come, in a later update, will center around mixing dietary elements that have effects that can then be tailored to your individual playstyle. We will be maintaining that one of each element will still be required for a dietary growth boost but we will be introducing combinations of diet elements that can result in substantial changes to movespeed, stamina, regen, damage etc depending on what exactly you are eating. If you like going fast, there's a dietary combination for that. Want to maximize your strength? There’s a combination for that too. We really want you to be able to choose how you play within the confines of the island's harshness. Naturally we will have to keep a very close eye on balance and will likely only include one active buff through diets at a time but we are excited to offer you much more complexity. More information to come as we are closer to the release of these new changes. Which will not be accompanying the release of Update 4.

With Update 4 coming to a close, I can reveal some elements of Update 5. Which is largely restructuring how nesting occurs in The Isle. While some of the basic elements you have come to know will still be present, we are adding more engagement to the experience. Players will have to engage in courtship displays, form a bond and then create the nest together, varying by species. There will be different requirements for the type of nest your animal creates and different incentives to nest in certain areas as well. We aim to deliver an in-depth parental experience so you can really bond with players you create nests with and invite to your nests. Which will make the stress all the more dire when your nest and offspring are inevitably threatened with brutality by outside forces.

The skin system is also underway with changes to patterns and colors and a means for unlocking different skins and patterns through gameplay. Maintaining an exploratory commitment to allowing server owners to decide how they want a species visually represented on their server. Before we go... I'll leave you all with a little preview of Utahraptor's courting animations. More information on Update 5 as we progress, in the meantime be kind to one another and we’ll see you in December!

Hey everyone, it feels like these months are flying by! As if it was only a few days since our previous DevBlog. As you’d likely expect, I’ve been primarily focused with the ongoing Mechanic Test for Update #4. For the Diet System I’ve set up some additional fruits and vegetables such as coconuts, interactable horned melons, radishes & pumpkins.

The implementation of coconuts also required collaboration with our awesome animation team, so that a certain hard-headed herbivore could use it’s ram attack to split them open to reveal the nutritious prize hidden inside. That collaboration also resulted in a system that plays low, mid or high eating animations based on the size of the eater and plant being eaten, dynamically.

Besides all that, I've been busy making adjustments to the Diet and Fracture systems, the usual day-to-day bug fixing and testing some things that we’ve been working on for updates 5 & 6, which we’re all excited to share with you sometime in the near future. That’s my October everyone, see you next time!



Most of my month was spent reworking how footprint scent works. They are now detected passively around the player in a small radius, which increases as you hold Q. This can be toggled by tapping Q as well. Players can also begin tracking specific dinosaurs by tapping Q while standing on top of a footprint. This will highlight the prints left by that player with a different color.

Another big change is that you can no longer scent all footprints. Instead players will only leave behind groups of scentable prints a distance away from each other, so you will need to find these instead of following a continuous line. We are still experimenting with different cues and visuals but that’s the general direction, making tracking feel more like tracking.



Hello! This month I spent a bit of time working on a new monitoring tool for the team to use as you may have seen in some previews or my stream. It includes a heatmap of where all the players are hanging out. We can use this for balancing or map design to name a few functions. I have also spent a bit of time on the ambient rabbit which I'm hoping to do something similar for each of the ambient animals it now burrows after a certain distance and time spent running from a predator. It will eventually come out of the burrow if you are far enough away. There has been some pretty heavy work going on with the backend servers and how we manage them which is still on-going. Carnotaurus AI also received some much needed love recently as it was slaughtering everything in its path.


This month I continued work on the edible plant assets, including a remake of an older asset, the Coconut Palm. I was able to bring the asset up to a higher graphical fidelity as well as add some extra details to it for the diet system. It comes complete with bushels of coconuts and the coconuts can be cracked open in multiple layers. Quite a glow up for one of the assets that made its debut with the first batch of tropical foliage!



Additionally I made some new smaller diet assets, including a season appropriate pumpkin! In addition to smashing some pumpkins, the player should be able to gorge on radishes and russula mushrooms soon.



This month I have been continuing to round out any audio missing from update 4 content – I created the sounds for coconuts being smashed and foley sounds for eating, particularly herbivores which now just need to be implemented. Additionally I have been sourcing more sounds for the ambient animals in spare time when possible.

I created more variants for the Troodon calls as previously only one iteration was made, which entailed recreating them from scratch with the audio files used originally and manipulating the elements to create subtle diversity. I have also started conceptualising calls for the Beipiaosaurus, after a phase of drafting ideas I have a clearer direction and am now looking for unique sources and sounds that can be combined and processed to have a referential aesthetic to sounds produced by waterfowl, whilst adding layers with a more harsh or threatening dinosaurian quality.

With the introduction of blunt force impact sounds on the Pachy headbutt I have also been looking at creating sounds to complete the audio design for combat. I have planned what sounds will be needed for the various combat situations and started designing impactful hit feedback sounds for all sizes of creatures, on top of blunt impact sounds these will include bites, stabs and slashes as well as additional gore sweetener layers with potential ongoing additions as new abilities are added.









This month has been pretty busy with skins.

Fred and I have been working to finish dressing up the remainder of our current planned roster.
It’s been an interesting balancing act coming up with fitting patterns that are unique enough to the animal while still abiding by our skin system of 4 separate colours and a detailed colour for the male pattern.

When the time does come where we get to elaborate on our skin system and add multiple patterns, we’ll have plenty to draw upon.



October has been a whirlwind of epic proportions! A lot of troodons running around all over the place in addition to hammering away at the remaining content for Update 4. There are new diet plants incoming and more to be created even after those. The creatures have their fracture animations in testing currently so you can finally limp away at a decent speed like a boss should you get knee-capped. Just a few final touches and tweaking a few stats and we’re going to be ready to drop Update 4 and start previewing content for Update 5. All of your help has been very valuable to us and we appreciate your contributions. Enjoy the spooky treat Seiza and the team have cooked up for you all! See you in November!

Hey everyone, it’s been another month of intense work, design and code changes for the diet system, based upon the enormously helpful community feedback which we’ve highly appreciated.

You’ve likely noticed other additions that are already available in the Mechanic Test branch, such as the new pickup system for herbivores, allowing them to remove pieces of edible plants to carry, eat or swallow. The same mechanic also applies to fruits that are now fully interactable, which are able to be snatched from the actual tree. We’ve also added digging animations for certain creatures, this process destroys the flower but allows the animal to devour the roots that lay beneath. The plant spawners have also had modifications applied to them, making them more efficient and it includes cluster spawns for certain types of plants like the horned melons, as an example. Besides all that, we’ve made some changes to the UI, mostly in the character panel to account for the new needed information related to diet and fracture.

Plus some new animations applied to the fracture system and several bug fixes in general, but mostly everything lately has been related to Diet and Fracture systems.



I started the month working on tail physics. It’s animation-based which gives us much better performance and reliability in exchange for not supporting collision. We also had to look through basically all the different actions each dinosaur can perform and selectively disable the physics where it didn’t look right. This included the tails clipping into the ground or not showing enough movement in tail-focused actions like the tail slam or the Hypsi jump charge.

I also made changes to how mud works. The first few versions ended up being quite deadly so it had to be toned down a bit. The final version is not much different from walking normally. Heavier dinosaurs can sink down quite deep which results in slower movement and increased stamina drain when moving. I also enabled resting and wallowing in deep mud, it looks like a fun way to chill with your friends!

We wanted to take a look at replacing the scent particles with icons. It went through several iterations so we could get a feel for each one. The most obvious one was just placing the icons on the food/water directly. We also tried a compass style to keep the screen more empty. The current version is a circle around the character in the world that hasn’t made it to your hands yet. We’ve been looking at feedback for the different styles to make sure we end up going with what’s best for the game.



More backend work from me over the last month as I have mostly finished the integration of Easy Anti Cheat as those of you who have participated in the mechanic test may have noticed. Linux server testing also seems to be going extraordinarily well and we are looking forward to releasing this to the public soon.

Recently, AI has started to get some much needed attention and has seen some big improvements with a lot of work left to go. The Carno has been introduced to Spiro along with the Compy and various animals.

The boar will put up a fight and the rabbit will now burrow if you can't catch it quick enough. Over time the majority of these animals will have some quirky behaviour to make them more interesting to interact with.



Besides the "Field Observation" video (of which you will see more of in the future) and other small projects, I've also focused a lot on the work on the Update 4 release trailer in the last months.

The Diet System and the Fracture System offer potential for two completely different moods in the trailer. While the Diet part can be presented rather calm and slow, the Fracture part has to be fast and dynamic. To achieve this, I mixed two very different soundtracks and created a suitable transition.

The two new mechanics also had to be explained a little closer in the trailer. The Diet System is especially hard to visualize without it having a HUD indication. So you can expect more informative texts to the cinematic shots this time. I already finished the planning and the filming and editing is in a good place too. Currently the Update 4 release trailer is longer than the Update 3 release trailer, I can't wait to show you the result! Here is a little preview:






Since I didn’t cover the previous DevBlog, I’ll be expanding mine a bit in detail.
These past 2 months have been heavily focused on the Dockyard and all its planning and peripherals. Tapwing has made wonderful concepts that you have most likely seen, and with this, we went full ahead with the first initial blockout of the dockyard:



Keep in mind this is extremely early and changes will be made no doubt, but it gives a proper scale on what's to come, and the sheer size of it. We might decrease it by a bit but this is the general idea of the size.

Besides that, Dockyard received its own road system, alongside the corresponding signage, leaks, damages, etc.






With that came a completely new and reworked floor shader to encompass a lot of cool maps which would make it truly shine, such as progressive “random” damages to the road, sidewalks, and the floor in general.

As well a new Decal Trim mesh has been added, to add neat detailing alongside any wall or any part of the mesh we want. A great example is the Dockyard perimeter fence:



With a great addition of new materials and textures:






Lastly I’ve been working on the Dockyard Kit, which is a task that is quite large due to the variation and sheer size of it. That has encompassed pretty much the whole of this month, starting with the models that the kit needs. We have a bunch of sloped items and roofing which is a challenge on its own to fit and make modular without breaking the system at hand. Preview:



Lastly, the shader. The bane of my existence. The shader of the buildings for the Dockyard and the future iterations of any kit from now on will be handled differently.

The shader has been redone, using 4 colors instead of 8-9, with extensive overhaul to simplicity, yet unique for each building. It's partly based on already “known” ideas but implemented in a per building (class) basis, and combined with various technologies.

In simple terms, the way we build buildings now is a bit more performant, and we are able to paint unique damage/leaks/ on each building, at a cost of the material slightly.
This is still in development. but here is a quick glance at it (ignore the missing interior)






The shader features damage/leaks, and a custom color overlay on some parts, which we want (painting lines across the building for instance). And that is where we stand for these 2 months! Cheers!





A contrast to our brawler Utahraptor, Austroraptor is our hydro-savi Dromaeosaurid of The Isle.
Many water birds served as inspiration to its lifestyle. A mix of the black heron's hunting style and supraorbital ridge of hawks lead to the idea of Astro’s prominent brow feathers, shading its eyes, allowing it to detect creatures in the water before retracting those feathers for its osprey-like pounce. In the realm of mobility it’s quite nimble on land and while not spectacularly speedy in water, it is still more mobile than most, being able to dive to escape prying eyes of larger land predators.

As a final feature inspired by swans, it seemed like a suitable idea that Austros might be able to carry its less mobile hatchling on treks down the winding river. Just make sure not to lose track of your baby should a fight break out! (Note: Nature sketches are not always indicative of the final in-game mechanics)



Over the past few months I got to work on one of the more complicated edible plant assets, Sumac, Mountain Ash, Variegated Orange and the Mango tree. Unlike with previous assets this one did not involve a lot of Zbrush work, the only assets that really needed sculpting were the fruits themselves.



The tree branch cards and the trees themselves were constructed with the help of substance and speed tree. Substance for making the trunk texture as well as various leaf textures, and speed tree for the final construction and placement of all the elements. After hours of careful node editing and value tweaks the results speak for themselves.




The way the fruit wound up working ingame turned out pretty cool. All in all this is one of my favorite edible plant assets.



This won’t be a long post, as most of you already know the public mechanic testing is underway and is our full focus at the moment; almost everything that myself and the QA team have been working on is already available on the quality assurance branch. Besides that, I’d like to thank everyone for the assistance thus far on the new systems. Without your feedback, we would be finding it much more difficult to determine how the systems should be designed and balanced. We recognise that they are far from perfect, therefore we will continue to monitor your feedback closely as we make further changes to them - keep it coming!

It should also be noted that the team is very much aware of the current performance issues with the game, which we’re thoroughly investigating and working to resolve.

Besides assisting with feedback on the new systems and their balancing, QA has been keeping on top of the community bug reports. These reports are checked daily by the team and are without a doubt the best way to help us out in making gameplay as smooth as possible. If you know of any bugs, please submit them here: Bug Report - Google Form



This month has been full of challenges and hurdles that we’ve been tackling and leaping over left and right! Thank you all so much for hopping on for the mechanic test and assisting us with diets, fractures and their satellite systems. We still have more content to accompany diets including about 13 more plant species, changes to carnivore diets and other additions to how diets function overall that we refrained from including in the initial test. As a reminder, the fracture system is going to expand across all land-based locomotion (walk, trot, sprint). With that being a considerable animation undertaking, we will be adding them to the game in batches as we complete them. We still have more work to do now that we have your feedback but are pleased with the reception of the first implementation of these mechanics.

We’re also in the process of making some hard-hitting changes to address the harsh performance issues you may have been experiencing. Which has taken up a fair bit of time. But we’ll provide more information on that at a later date. While those issues are being parsed, several members of the team have since moved on to Update 5. Laying the groundwork for what is to come with the long awaited nesting, skin and night vision features.

Animation wise, there’s more to come for diets. Gotta actually crack those coconuts open in the future after all. Not just for a tasty, thirst-quenching treat, but for other reasons as well. The goal here is to provide more interaction with the environment as we know that has been relatively minimal in the past. As mentioned before, there’s more coming for fractures and some things in the gore pipeline that are being prototyped. We think you gore fans will be pleased at the results should we be able to do it how we’d like. So wish us luck on that front! The Troodon is also well on its way with a plethora of animations already completed which some of you keen-eyed folks have already discovered. We’ll be showcasing some of those animations for you guys soon so you can get an idea of how eerie the serpentine envenomator is. Especially when together and especially at night. See you in October!

This month I worked more on fracture and diets, mainly additional mechanics, effects or behaviors based on feedback, but of course, bug fixes provided by QA tests, since those mechanics, specially diets, has several “roots” to the game core, which forced me to change other mechanics, creating bugs if not being careful. Besides that I also made changes to several other mechanics in game, such as group invite that work only if holding the key, which you have already experienced in the latest hotfix, but also the same principle with pickup, while tap allows to remove a meat chunk from the body and holding will perform the carry/drag (if possible). The Eating mechanic was expanded to provide the herbivores the ability to eat from fruits, being on the tree or on the floor, those are going to be able to be picked up by herbivores. Pickup is now in sync with the eating ability´s distance check, so if you can see the eat hint, you should also be able to use the pickup ability.

More changes to the game core system, which are simpler, cleaner and more reliable now, avoiding unnecessary extra work by the server, increasing it´s stability. More changes to rivers and their sound system, ocean now should have wave sounds and also modified the Ambient zone system, fixing some weird behaviors and done some modifications to distance and landscape check before spawning an ambient sound.

Added the DLSS plugin, as requested by popular demand, with settings that can be changed in the title menu. Also added a “lag compensation” system to pounce, which is still experimental, and under heavy testing as you read this. This system is going to be the basis to help fight bugs and issues with abilities related to high latency.

Besides that, the usual bug fixes and more work on the Pachy’s headbutt attack, which also allows parrying more easily now.


It’ll be brief post from me this month as the majority of my work during August has been developing various backend stuff that I can't really talk about just yet, as well as setting up the new ambient AI animals that will be coming as part of the Diet System in Update #4. They’ve already gone through a variety of balance changes via playtesting with our dedicated Quality Assurance team.

Besides that I have been working on getting Linux support for our servers which is going extraordinarily well and is currently under heavy testing.


This month I continued development on an upcoming Pteranodon mechanic. It is now more reliable, works and looks better as well. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it once you get your hands on it. I’m not saying more for now, but it’s looking real good in Seiza’s upcoming Update #4 trailer!

I’ve also made improvements to the movement, specifically trying to turn while sprinting. The animals now have a bit more weight behind them, meaning that it will take them a little bit longer to change directions at full speed. This actually made it into the patch that went out recently, so you should be able to experience it already. I made some further improvements since then and I feel it’s become one of those small things that you might not even notice but it really helps with providing a realistic movement for our animals.

Additionally I took a picture of something that you will see in a future update. Here’s a little preview:








Outside of finalizing plans for the dockyard, and drafting any remaining concepts for this, I’ve been experimenting with a little side project to brainstorm building ideas. My goal is to use our work-in-progress map and think about the scenery from a first-person point of view. For instance, what would it be like to come into a clearing? Then I’d develop some concept art depicting what I might expect to see there.

I would take screenshots and create a rough paint-over to see how the structures might look integrated into the environment. In addition to these building concept studies, I’ll also be developing more nature sketches. So stay tuned.


This month I have mostly completed the vocal sounds for both Pachycephalosaurus (including juvenile vocals) and Compsognathus. The Compy’s vocals consist of a variety of chirping, croaking and squeaking sounds to achieve a diverse vocal range and now just need to be critically tested until satisfied. The Pachy has the majority of its vocals bar some breathy grunting, bellowing and chuffing, to fill in the gaps between actions to make it really come to life.

Improvements have been made to the ambiences that are currently in Spiro, birds and fauna heard at night are more spaced out, tree creaks have been added into the jungle, wind is louder at night and the volume and tonality (especially at night) of loops have been balanced some more.

To accompany the weight of the blunt force impact sounds, I recreated the body fall sounds to give a satisfying thump as victims of blunt force trauma tumble to the ground, just need a system set up to switch between surface variants.

As well as the above, I have made some progress on ambient animal audio, however there is plenty more to edit and set up. On the side I also added or replaced some supplementary vocals for both the Dryosaurus and Tenontosaurus as I felt these two were lacking any extra vocals compared to the rest of the roster however there is always room for more. Additionally I ensured every playable has a more noticeably different vocal for 1 and 3 call when the key is held with the exception of the Pachy which is in progress currently.


Recently, a lot of the quality assurance team’s time has been invested in tightening up on the game’s balance. The goal with our balance is to move away from the feeling of being a large deathmatch and lean more into the survival game it’s supposed to be. This means that when you go into a fight with a juvenile, you know that it’s just that, a juvenile. It means that when you kill and bring down a large animal, you know that it’s going to feed your pack for days to come. It is very important for us to prepare the balance of the game this way now, rather than later, as character stats would have become increasingly artificially inflated and the previous balance wouldn’t have fared well with future mechanics. It’s important to keep in mind that everything is always subject to change.

Fractures are proving to be a game changer in combat. Character’s heads, bodies, and legs can be specifically targeted in order to impose various negative effects. Get a head fracture? Your character doesn’t deal as much damage from their head related attacks (bites, headbutts, etc) and your screen becomes clouded to simulate a concussion. I don’t want to spoil the effects of the other types of fractures, so you’ll just have to learn those the hard way. :)

Progress on the Diet System is coming along really well, despite not many testing disciplines being ticked on the public roadmap. This system intertwines with almost all mechanics that came before it, so it’s definitely taking a bit longer than other mechanics to test for bugs. That being said though, I’m happy to say that the system is almost in a position to be tested publicly. Not long now!

The public testing of the Diet System will be paramount in ensuring that the mechanic works as we have intended. While the QA team has been able to find a vast number of bugs related to the system, the balance of the system has gone mostly unaltered. Due to the lack of QA testers we have, we simply wouldn’t have the data required to properly set up the values for the system. That’s where you, the players, come in to help us!

During the public test we will be closely monitoring player feedback - we will need to know absolutely everything about it. Growth for a certain species is too easy/difficult? Buffs/debuffs are too strong/weak? Preferred diet doesn’t make sense for the character? The system just isn’t fun and it’s tedious? This is your time to shine and assist us in creating the foundations for a gameplay loop that is fun, engaging and rewarding.


Lots and lots of animating this month in preparation for diets and fractures. Some new content to the game will include new eating animations for herbivores that will be eating from various heights. Since eating is such a large part of a creature’s day, we want to ensure it’s a visual treat as well as a sustaining one. Something tasty out of reach? Just rear up and grab it if your creature has that capability. Something underground? Dig it up! Depending on your species and your diet, you may have several ways to dine.

Bryan and I have also been toiling away on fracture animations. As I have mentioned previously, the fracture system is intended to right some of the frustrating wrongs of bonebreak from Legacy and stepping the general idea into modernity. No longer a death sentence, when fractured you’ll still be able to get around at varying speeds and also defend yourself. The system aims to give you the player, more visual feedback of cause and effect interactions. The fracture system is but one of many ways we intend on making combat more dynamic and readable. We want to slowly do away with guessing games of how hurt your opponent actually is. In the not so distant future, you’ll be able to tell at a glance. Moreover, if you are on the receiving end, your opponent would be wise not to underestimate the amount of fight you have left in you.

The Pachycephalosaurus is in the locker room getting ready to come out swinging in Update 4.5. One of EVRIMA's first creatures to go through a dramatic transformation as it ages. The Pachy is a robust powerhouse that no longer feels stale and generic but stands on its own two feet, primed to lift you off of yours.

This month has been particularly weighted since the diets are so very important to the foundations of the dinosaur gameplay loop. There’s a lot of new plants coming into the game and more to come even after we release Update 4. In addition to the teams working directly on Update 4, the rest of the team has been revving their engines in preparation for Update 5 and on working on some perennial tasks. We’re getting the hatchlings ready to face the world! Yes, that will include Hypsi. Lots of work on human areas that we haven’t quite revealed just yet and some explorations on how we want our soldiers vivisected. Poor guys. All in all, despite this update being production heavy and very foundational, it has been a relatively clear path considering the amount of work that has gone into it. Some artists have been preparing for months for you to finally see what they’ve been working on all put together and in-game. Some will have to wait longer still but we’re all primed and ready to get your feedback on the systems we are dropping with Update 4 so we can really deliver on some interesting gameplay!


And finally, I'll leave you all with a little teaser of things to come...

Hey Islanders,

In preparation for Update #4, we're deploying a smaller patch ahead of the main update to combat a variety of issues that were present in the previous version of EVRIMA. This patch also includes a plethora of quality of life & balance changes that we'd love to gather community feedback on, that way the upcoming stress test for Update #4 can be predominantly focused on testing the new systems like Diets & Fractures.

More information regarding the upcoming stress test for Update #4 will be announced in the near future, so make sure to keep an eye out!

Here's a brief overview of the main balance changes:

• Global health/blood rework. Health now matches character weight, which will hopefully make character stats feel less artificially inflated.
  
• Global damage changes. Damage was adjusted to better match the health changes. We've also put a large focus on making the smaller dinosaurs/juveniles feel much more fragile compared to their adult counter parts. Special attacks have been made much more crucial in combat, as basic attacks such as bites have been nerfed across the board.
  
• Global speed nerf. Most characters have been slowed down by 10% of their previous speed to mitigate speed creep. Some animals were being pushed to their absolute limit with their speeds, resulting in animations looking bad visually and forcing smaller characters to be increased in speed unnecessarily as well. This was also done to encourage the use of special abilities, rather than just running and biting wildly.
  
• Locational damage adjustments to prevent people from being bitten on the head through their entire body.
  
• Corpses now give an amount of food more accurate to the size of the creature. They do, however, take longer to eat. This change was made to encourage more contesting over bodies rather than just being able to eat them quickly and leave with no real sense of danger. Drinking time remains the same but if you want to see this change for water too then be sure to let us know!
  
• Pounce rework. Mechanic has been further adjusted to be utilised as an attritional tool, rather than a killing tool. Dismount now launches the player further to somewhat prevent pouncers from instantly being hit after releasing.

• New Ambient sounds.
  
• Global dev ban list for servers and players.
  
• Added ragdoll to knockdowns.
  
• Added turning inertia.

• Improved ragdoll performance.
  
• Group Changes: Need to hold friendly call for a few seconds to invite players or to accept a group invite.
  
• New Scent particles.
  
• Several sound updates.
  
• General Water improvements.
  
• Improvements to character save system.
  
• Improvements to spectator mode.
  
• Improved power parameter for vocals.
  
• Made Stegosaurus secondary only deal damage if target is on the same side as the swing.
  
• Fixes to corpse disable and UI hints.
  
• Corrected dinosaur colors.
  
• Changed pounce to pin only same or smaller weight targets besides Utahraptor and Hypsilophodon.
  
• Increased Carnotaurus alt attack speed, matches normal turn rate.
  
• Made Deinosuchus alt attacks spend stamina.
  
• Doubled Hypsilophodon spit distance.
  
• Improved some sliding transitions.
  
• Improved animation and movement smoothness.
  
• AI improvements and new behaviors.

Bucking

• Stamina regeneration is now disabled while pouncing or being pounced.

Body dragging

• Sprint stamina decay while dragging increased slightly.

Eating

• Hunger intake values decreased across the board. It now takes longer to consume corpses to encourage contesting over food.

Locational Damage

• Head, Neck, Arm, Body, and Leg locational hit zones now stop hit traces. You can no longer hit a head through a body, or a body through a leg.

Max Health

• Starting Health decreased.
  
• Max Health reduced slightly.

Blood Pool

• Starting Blood Pool reduced.
  
• Max Blood Pool reduced.

AttackPower

• Starting AttackPower reduced.

Movement speeds

• Sprint speed reduced.

Stamina decay rates

• Sprinting decay rate increased.

Primary Attack: Bite

• Damage reduced.

Alternate Primary Attack: 360 Bite

• Damage reduced.
  
• Stamina cost added.
  
• Animation rate scale increased.

Sprinting Secondary Attack: Charge

• Speed modifier increased.
  
• Knockdown damage increased.
  
• Stagger damage increased.
  
• Cooldown removed.

Max Health

• Starting Health reduced.
  
• Max Health increased.

Blood Pool

• Starting Blood Pool reduced.
  
• Max Blood Pool increased.

AttackPower

• Starting AttackPower reduced.

Movement speed

• Adult sprint speed reduced.

Alternate Primary Attack: 360 Bite

• Stamina cost added.

Secondary Attack: Lunge

• Damage now scales with AttackPower.

Max Health

• Starting Health reduced.
  
• Max Health reduced.

Blood Pool

• Starting Blood Pool reduced.
  
• Max Blood Pool reduced.

AttackPower

• Starting AttackPower reduced.

Stamina decay rates

• Sprinting decay rate increased.

Movement speeds

• Sprint speed reduced.

Primary Attack: Peck

• Damage reduced.

Max Health

• Max Health reduced.

Blood Pool

• Max Blood Pool reduced.

Jump

• Jump Velocity increased.

Primary Attack: Peck

• Damage reduced.

Secondary Attack: Spit

• Hunger consumption reduced.
  
• Max range increased.

Charged Jump

• Stamina cost reduced.

Max Health

• Starting Health reduced.
  
• Max Health reduced.

Blood Pool

• Starting Blood Pool reduced.
  
• Max Blood Pool reduced.

AttackPower

• Starting AttackPower reduced.

Movement speeds

• Sprint speed reduced.

Primary Attack: Peck

• Damage reduced.

Alternate Primary Attack: 360 Peck

• Damage reduced.

Launch

• Standing Launch stamina cost decreased.

Max Health

• Starting Health reduced.
  
• Max Health increased.

Blood Pool

• Starting Blood Pool reduced.
  
• Max Blood Pool increased.

AttackPower

• Starting AttackPower reduced.

Turning rate

• Turning rate increased.

Primary Attack: Bite

• Damage reduced.

Secondary Attack: Tail Jab

• Damage adjusted at all growth stages. Adult damage remains the same.

Max Health

• Starting Health reduced.
  
• Max Health reduced.

Blood Pool

• Starting Blood Pool reduced.
  
• Max Blood Pool reduced.

Stamina Regen rates

• Trotting regen rate reduced.

AttackPower

• Starting AttackPower reduced.

Stamina decay rates

• Sprinting decay rate increased.
  
• Slow swim decay rate increased.

Movement speeds

• Sprint speed reduced.

Primary Attack: Bite

• Damage reduced.

Alternate Primary Attack: 360 Claw

• Damage reduced.
  
• Stamina adjusted.

Secondary Attack: Rear Kick

• Stamina cost increased.

Growth time

• Growth time reduced.

Mass

• Adult Mass reduced.

Max Health

• Starting Health reduced.
  
• Max Health reduced.

Blood Pool

• Starting Blood Pool reduced.
  
• Max Blood Pool reduced.

Corpse food value

• Corpse food value reduced.

AttackPower

• Starting AttackPower reduced.

Movement speeds

• Sprint speed reduced.

Stamina decay rates

• Sprinting decay rate increased.

Primary Attack: Bite

• Damage reduced.

Alternate Primary Attack: 360 Bite

• Damage reduced.

Large Pounce

• Initial Damage reduced.
  
• Initial Stamina reduced.
  
• Damage per tick reduced.
  
• Stamina per tick increased.

Small Pounce

• Initial Damage reduced.
  
• Initial Stamina reduced.
  
• Damage per tick reduced.
  
• Stamina per tick increased.
  
• 0.5s delay for targets to attack back after releasing the pin.

• Fixed Stegosaurus not being able to vocalize or bite if carrying impaled body.
  
• Fixed Utahraptor calls playing at incorrect pitch.
  
• Fixed some inconsistent hint messages.
  
• Fixed lunge applying incorrect bleeding values.
  
• Fixed pouncing rocks, trees or walls to cause pouncer knockdown.
  
• Fixed sometimes not staying on the water surface as Deinosuchus.
  
• Fixed abilities draining stamina while swimming.
  
• Fixed being unable to take off while bleeding as Pteranodon.
  
• Fixed stamina drain after stationary takeoff as Pteranodon.
  
• Fixed Hypsilophodon stamina recharge after charge jump.
  
• Fixed footprint/blood clouds sometimes not showing up properly.
  
• Fixed blood level affecting charge.
  
• Fixed bug and optimised the Ambient AI spawner.
  
• Fixed spec names not working with Chinese characters.
  
• Fixed locked damage decay not updating with blood level and resting state.
  
• Fixed footprint rotation issue.
  
• Fixed pounce and lunge causing get up animation to trigger.
  
• Fixed speed issue when swimming up/down.
  
• Fixed flying Pteranodon colliding with a pouncing Utahraptor not working properly.
  
• Fixed locational hitboxes being misaligned slightly.
  
• Fixed swallowing corpse not working properly when swimming on surface as a Deinosuchus.
  
• Fixed some abilities canceling sprint.
  
• Fixed various issues with turning.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused a server crash.

It’s been an absolutely great month with plenty of awesome new things coming down the pipeline. This month I worked on the Pachycephelosaurus Headbutt ability. This ability will arrive with two variations, a tap and a hold. We are still designing the main differences between those variations, besides animations. Balancing it is also a work in progress and fracture will also play a role in these abilities.

The Utahraptor Pounce has also received some attention, besides the usual bug fixes it got some new flashy animations and small changes to its momentum when performing the ability while standing. One complaint we kept hearing was the dismount after pouncing big targets, like Stegosaurus, so besides the animation it now falls further away from the target and is faster to land as well. This ability will continue to be updated with new animations and improvements to the mechanic and overall look, so it isn´t finished yet. Expect more improvements in general in the future.

The Diet System is under vigorous testing from our Quality Assurance team, with the majority of the bugs eliminated we are ready to organize a more robust and populated test environment to see how it performs, which will require assistance from our awesome community, like a stress test, but far more limited and focused in scope. Additional details will follow in future.

Another important feature being worked on in conjunction with dmIV is the fracture system, the design is simple, but allows a lot of variation in gameplay, not only different effects applied to your character during fights, but there will be another important factor to surviving in general.

I also updated Knockdown with ragdoll because having it be animation only doesn't look as great as we would like, so the ragdoll adds some realism to the fall, it works well when hit by the Headbutt ability, however this is still work in progress and will be extended to many other mechanics and systems in the future. Besides all that I’ve been occupied with the usual bug fixes, performance improvements and some stuff I can't comment on yet. So, see you soon!


As you’d expect, I’ve devoted much of this month to developing additional AI variants, including the new Ambient AI which will make its debut as part of the upcoming Diet System, breathing new life into the island’s ecosystem through a variety of extant creatures ranging from chickens, sea turtles, goats and much more that I’ll leave for you all to discover in-game.

Besides that, I’ve recently completed some extensive work on our backend. However I can’t share the details of that just yet.


I finished off designing the fracture sounds early this month. I've taken a modular approach to how these sounds will be implemented, creating a collection of different elements [breaks, cracks, pop, crunches and splinters]. I’ve created variants for a range of sizes/severity, which will provide control over the fracture sounds make-up as I can vary the combination of these components. Continuing on from fractures I’ve also finalised some blunt force impact sounds, with the majority of focus aimed at getting the Pachy vs Pachy headbutt sound to hit just right.

I have returned back to ambient audio to create the cave ambient audio. I’ve designed some bedding loops as well as bat and water drip one shots, once I’ve finished designing the sounds for this (currently) final biome, the audio currently not set up, will need to be as well as refined properly in Spiro, aiming to achieve a dynamic and tasteful soundscape with a balance of both diversity and sparsity.

I have also been focusing on experimenting with the design of a selection of creature’s vocals for some new additions that will be coming soonest, including Compsognathus and Pachycephalosaurus, in addition to editing [and designing, for the more unique species] sounds to accompany the ambient animals arriving with the Diet System, all of which I will be carrying over into the next month.

Additionally to the above I have also made some general adjustments to audio; the Utahraptor adult broadcast has been improved as well as the attenuation set up being fixed. Further work has been done in general on the vocals' pitch and volume; the adult Stegosaurus vocals in particular have been improved with some level balancing between layers. I’ve also added some improvements to the environment audio such as randomly triggered stick snap sounds to the jungle floor surface footsteps and light wind and foliage rustle loops to some of the new ambient zones.


In the last few months I’ve been continuing work on the large amount of edible plants we want for the diet system. In addition to the Tagetes, Sunchoke and Agave plants I showed last time, I’ve also wrapped up work on a Horned Melon, Wild Potato Vine and Chanterelle Mushroom.



What I didn’t get a chance to show last time was the assets in the engine, so enjoy some nice eye candy. I’m looking forward to seeing these assets scattered throughout the game world for players to spot and eat.




A devblog from me? First time for everything I guess. Been working on improving our animation workflow, centered mainly around the addition of Pachycephalosaurus and its ability to knock things into next week. One of the hurdles we’ve had with animation is with the left and right turning, used to be those were in separate files so if we wanted to make changes to the base animation, it required us to then have to remake the left and right versions of that locomotion cycle.

Recently however I’ve found a workaround to a bug in 3D Max that allows us to use Layers, which is both significantly more convenient to work with and faster to do. The major upside to using layers is we can readily make changes to the base animation and not have to remake the left/right versions of that locomotion cycle. As an added bonus, limping and other injuries that are visible during locomotion can be done as layers as well, which makes the whole process of adding injury animations to all the current roster faster and more productive.


I've been helping out with how our natural environment will be handled. Overall the island is to be a tropical environment. As you've seen from some of Jace’s stunning work, there will be coasts and jungles, but there’s more to that when it comes to the tropics. We’ll have visually distinct habitats so the island has points of interest and uniqueness without losing cohesion.

Recently I've been working on underwater habitats. There will be 4 different habitats; Swamp, Lake, River, and the Coast. The most important thing for me right now is to make sure each habitat has a clear visual distinction to one another. So for example, the color of the water for each will be different, as well as the plants and floor. The real challenge, after finding some visually interesting plants, is finding their names. Googling plants isn't fun. Next I’ll be working on the Rivers, then the Coast. The concepts take a while to be completed but they’ll make their way into the phase-two channel, then eventually into the game for you to explore.








A lot of my recent work has entailed me revisiting the old dockyard and working with VisualTech, Jace and Dondi to tackle the layout and aesthetic. I gathered the old dockyard concepts, reimagined some structures and worked to create a rough concept and overall layout blueprint of the dockyard.

Additionally since we’ve been brainstorming other buildings and facilities to flesh out the landscape, research and write-ups have been the other half of my workload. I’ve been creating pitch lists of human structures and what potential mechanics or lore they could be tied to. With humans on the horizon, we’ll want some of their environments to be ready.








Well this month I hit the ground running upon returning from vacation. Bringing with me swaths of on-location redwood reference images that Jace and the rest of the team have been putting to good use. It really feels like another world!

The majority of this month has been diet focused as that will be the meat and potatoes of Update 4 (sorry Punch). I’m sure many of you have caught Amar0k’s ambient AI streams and seen some of those placeholder critters running around. The plan here is to get a relatively solid foundation of diet items in the game for adequate gameplay and testing. Diets as a whole are intended to hit a few marks which include but are not limited to, bolstering your creature’s growth, increasing your stats and moving players as a whole around the map to attain the numerous benefits of following an appropriate diet. That being said, as with most features we have planned, there are no requirements to following the guidelines of the mechanic but you may find yourself woefully debilitated in strength, speed, growth, wellness etc. Be aware that many of the ambient creatures you have seen thus far are placeholders and are subject to change in model, texture, animation and even species. So don’t get too attached. Alongside the animals will be our diet plants which span quite a few species for which we’ll likely drop more images of in the not so distant future. However, the initial release of Update 4 will not include the entire plant roster as that will take far more time to produce than is necessary to release Update 4 effectively. So you will continually be seeing new diet plants added to the game over the course of 2021.

We’ve also been toiling away with fractures. There are currently 3 types of fractures you can sustain from a fracture-causing attack. Each fracture type has its own debilitating effects. Our primary goal with the fracture system was to reimagine the archaic “bonebreak” into something that feels hard-hitting and impactful without being overpowered and an instant death sentence. Alongside this will come many animation changes. As you may know, The Isle has always favored a minimalistic HUD that aims to keep you in the moment when traversing the island. In order to keep with that theme, we needed to be able to convey player vs player impact in a way that remains consistent with our vision but also gives you, the player, visual clarity as to what is happening when you are engaged in combat with another player. So our fractures will be ushering in new animations that will denote what type of fracture you or your target has sustained. So, at a glance, you will know exactly which players are suffering from which fractures (or combination of fractures), giving you more opportunities to coordinate your next attack or make a speedy retreat.

The Pachycephalosaurus has been getting lots of love this month due to it being the poster child of fracturing. We've been spending a lot of time injecting more personality and combat prowess into it so when you are finally behind its eyes, you will be able to fully feel the fantasy of being a no-nonsense, heavy-hitting herbivore that demands respect and its space. In addition to that, we have been reworking some of its older animations to bring them more inline with the quality EVRIMA dinosaurs demand. So be on the lookout for those changes as time goes on.

We’re also continuously working on improving performance across the board. Which is a never ending cycle. Aside from that, there are a few extra flavor adjustments to some of the other inhabitants. The Utahraptor pounce (which isn’t quite complete just yet) has gotten some love and there’s a new ability for the Pteranodon as well as some work for the scavenging Compsognathus and its governing AI. Humans are also well underway and are on track to make their initial appearance this year. More on them at a later date.

That pretty much sums up the month thus far. We hope you guys are as excited to experience these new systems as we are to present them to you. As always, when the time comes, we’ll want to hear your valuable feedback on what the systems are and are not giving so they can be improved upon. We are also welcoming a new member to the team in August. So if you see them around (if they wish to be seen), say hello.

That’s all folks! Be kind to each other and to yourself.

Much of this past month I’ve been working on the new diet system, setting up the latest design decisions during the several meetings we've already had. I’m very happy with the system we are developing, it seems robust, very flexible and easy to set up after the main programming core is complete, it will bring forth a completely new playstyle, but be aware that this can make the game far more difficult than what it is now, having a good or a bad diet during your life cycle will make an enormous difference when it comes to survival.

We need a lot of balance changes to get this right and even more adaptations as we introduce additional playables. There are also a number of other things that I've been working on but cannot share the specifics of just yet, as we need to be sure that those systems have the necessary quality and performance, otherwise we’d have to go back to the design board, so no point talking about those right now.

Lastly it’s been the usual pending fixes and performance improvements for both server and clients, this is a constant process that we will work on throughout the game’s development, as new content can also affect performance in one way or another.


Firstly I completed the class setup for the Pachycephalosaurus so we could begin testing the animations. This is a quick and straightforward process on the programming side, but significantly helps the animation team.

Afterwards I moved onto updating the scent effect. You might have experienced strange behaviour when the framerate dropped, or certain particles not being very smooth or pleasant to look at. The style of the plant and water scent didn’t really work out as well as I’d originally hoped with the leaf and bubble shaped particles, so this time around I chose something that resembles the corpse effect more. I think you will enjoy seeing it in the game.



I also added a new mechanic, fractures. Even though fractures will be more heavily utilized by the Pachycephalosaurus, we’re bringing the feature itself to update 4. There are three different parts that can be affected: the legs, the body and the head. Fractured legs decrease your movement speed, but still leave you enough mobility to get around. In the case of the head your vision becomes blurry and you deal less damage due to the concussion messing with your concentration. Getting your body fractured makes you take a bit of damage each time you perform an attack.

Other than that there’s the usual bug fixes. A particularly annoying one that keeps coming back is surfacing as a Deinosuchus and just having it stay there. No accidental submerging, no hopping out of the water a little, no flying up into the sky, just staying on the surface. I went through this several times already and I think I finally reached a point where it reliably behaves how you’d expect it to.


This year is flying by! I have been more focused on AI lately to try to get some more species out in the world. We should be seeing the Utahraptor and Tenontosaurus AI make an appearance soon with full use of all their playable abilities. You may also be able to catch AI off guard as they are eating or drinking with some added dynamic behaviour.

I have also been working on a new method for spawning AI as the diet system will require the right balance of creatures in the world to function correctly. You should always be able to find the right nutrients, you just have to know where to look.

Lastly the usual performance improvements to AI logic is an on-going battle as everything runs server-side and needs to be handled appropriately. This will only get more complex as we add more creatures and more AI. I am constantly looking for more creative ways to do certain tasks and handle AI behaviours.




How to design a terror of the skies without going overboard?

Well to start I wanted to branch off from the original design, borrowing and accentuating the forward leaning crest and the sharp yet sturdy beak with some facial features inspired by the great ground hornbill.

While we played with the idea of giving the quetzalcoatlus a fibrous coat. We went with skin this time around. At least for now. We’d like to get our hands on a technical artist who would create a proper shader that could do pycnofibres justice.



Well I’d say Deinocheirus was a mix of fun and frustration.

On one hand there was a fair amount of potential to work with in the way of feathers, different types of skin or scales and other potential soft tissue. On the other hand, Deinocheirus is a rather silly looking animal based on the skeletal. So how to balance staying true enough to the bones while still coming up with something that fits our aesthetic. Ultimately we stayed pretty close to the skeleton for this one, only lengthening the neck and tail a tad and bulking up the hands.

For covering we went with a half and half of textured hide and feathers. Aiming for something somewhat hydrodynamic for the large wader. A mix of hornbill and ducks were used for facial details, giant armadillo claws for the hands, both for offence and to dig up plants and perhaps water sources. Lastly coot-like pads were added on the feet as a little detail suggesting the mud dwelling life.

We had some additional features in mind for the neck and even the nose, but decided to hold off on those for now, saving them for the future elder stage and potential cosmetics.


The first half of this month saw me finish up designing the remaining sounds for the Ocean biome, I spent a decent amount of time creating all the one-shots needed. Now all sound sets are completed for the Coastal biome, a bespoke ambient zone will need to be created, as two of the four one-shot sound sets will need to emit exclusively from the ocean and one exclusively from land. Afterwards I focused on mixing the four existing biomes together, maintaining an appropriate dynamic range as the player crosses from one ambient zone to the next, so there is less work needed to complete the mix later on. In doing so I found that I had only fully developed the idea of creating Fauna one shots for all times when working on the Jungle biome. Consequently, these sounds were missing from the Swamp biome so I set aside some time to create these. Currently all 4 of the biomes I have worked on so far have all audio needed designed and set-up in the engine, leaving just the cave biome audio left to create.

For the second half of the month, I shifted from working on the ambient audio in order to make progress on both Fractures and the Pachycephalosaurus vocal audio. I have started designing a collection of cracking, splintering and popping bone sounds with varying degrees of intensity to audibly indicate how severe the fracture based on size and how it was applied. For the Pachy I have updated the existing calls, adding more layers to give depth and weight to them, whilst conforming aesthetically both to the original calls and to new vocals that I create. The calls were further improved by introducing additions such as the 1 and 3 calls power layer that are audible upon holding the key. I have also created a large majority of the supplementary vocal sounds for the adult Pachy.


Majority of the month has been spent upping the prop count, with cool new additions that make it more “homey” for our humans, starting by adding a semi-modular television so they can sit back and watch the dinosaurs eat, featuring a lot of variants so we don’t look at the same one each time.





Within the same package we also have the broken mirror variants, with pieces of glass missing or broken, the holy toilet itself, and the sink as well.









Other than that, I’ve been hard at work with the new buildings and interiors, some of which you'll see very soon, as well as one that is still being constructed, but with added stuff as well. This has been a good challenge to make, as some changes have been made to the system, and with the addition of a lot of decals I’ve pushed it to look as “used” as I can with the current propwork we have.












That's a wrap for June! We hope that you've all enjoyed this insight into some of what we've been up to the past month. As a parting gift I was able to secure Fred's latest map concept, feast your eyes upon our plans for the Underwater Swamp Environments! - Punchpacket.

Hey Islanders,

We've deployed a small hotfix to alleviate issues that were encountered the previous patch, predominantly those pertaining to server performance. You may need to restart your Steam client if Steam does not display the latest update in your download manager.

• Prevented toggling spectator mode after dying to avoid issues.
  
• Spectator mode client and server performance improvements.
  
• Spectator nametag widget improvements.
  
• Reduced volume of Utahraptor and Tenotosaurus rest sounds.

• Fixed players being flung up from the surface of water sources, causing them to fall to their deaths.
  
• Fixed Utahraptor pounce bleeding values being incorrect.
  
• Fixed Pteranodon bucking animation causing the player to slide.
  
• Fixed footprint materials causing artifacts when flipped.
  
• Fixed corpse performance solution not working properly.
  
• Fixed being able to grow dead characters.
  
• Fixed being able to be attacked while in spectator mode.
  
• Fixed vomit not setting debuff caps after safe logging or a server restart.
  
• Fixed Utahraptor 3 call core layer not playing.
  
• Fixed Tenontosaurus vocals being muffled in certain locations.
  
• Fixed Stamina/Hunger/Thirst percentages only showing if the chatbox was active. They can now be viewed by hovering them with your mouse while the character screen is open.

I’ve been mostly working on the latest update for this month, after the big Update #3. I noticed a big performance hit on the servers caused by the new Spectator Mode system, way higher than expected, so I reworked it a little bit in order to alleviate the issues, which was the main cause of the irritating rubber banding that many of you had been experiencing the last few weeks. I used the opportunity to also add more features to it, such as showing AIs.

Worked also on the Juvenile Pounce for the Utahraptor, which was very straightforward since the basics of the system had already been completed, we just had to do some balance changes, add some additional animations and do some value testing.

As some of you may recall, I mentioned a few months ago that we were working in a new water system, so this month I unified the fluid simulation system to all water sources and with Jace’s help in the material side of things, the water looks good, similar to how it was before, but with the fluid simulation, which brings more immersion and new gameplay situations to the game.

Besides the usual bugs that consume a good portion of our time, I was also working on a Mesh Painting system, in order to dynamically add scars, damage marks, blood, bites or claws in the body of the damaged dinos, for example, but can be used for far cooler things, it still needs some extra work so it will be implemented sometime down the road.


I started the month with preparing support for the hatchling, subadult and elder growth stages. So far we’ve only had support for dinosaurs growing from juvenile to adult. We set up our systems with the extension in mind, but other features took priority. Now we are getting closer to the nesting system’s introduction and the Pachycephalosaurus will also have a subadult stage, so the time came to add support. It’s currently limited to only allow growth between juvenile and adult, but now we will only have to flick a switch when we get to nesting and later elders.

Last month’s water system rework also opened up an opportunity to add a feature we’ve been missing. Previously our dinos started swimming when they walked into the water down to their midpoint. It had varied results, but usually resulted in dinos swimming slightly above the water when near the edge. Now this height can be customized on a per-dino basis, meaning you can walk into the water much deeper before you start swimming. Overall it provides a much more realistic behaviour.

Afterwards I moved on to the diet and migration systems. I’m not going into specifics for now, but the initial version is functional and ready for QA testing after we’ve pushed 3.5 to the public.


This month I’ve been making more progress on designing the ambiences; with both jungle and plains biomes now complete alongside swamp, two biomes remain. I have now started on the fourth biome to tackle coasts. This will not only include addressing the usual ambient sounds, but also improvements to both the underwater ocean ambience and the ocean surf audio, improving on the quality as well as cohesion with the new changes already made. Currently I have collected together all bird one shots for each time of day, as well as a handful of loops. The ocean surf and underwater improvements are in progress. The ocean surf has been given more definition and a broader frequency spectrum range for improved fidelity. When combined with a more energetic selection of sounds for the underwater ambience it gives a better impression of the waves crashing over you as you are just below the surface. Going deeper will drive a crossfade which fades out the livelier sounds to a subtler and deafeningly empty ambience. To accompany the deep ocean ambience I have designed a selection of aquatic creature calls, previewed in the most recent phase two post, giving more life and atmosphere to the depths. To be explicit it must be stated that these examples are the raw one-shots before they have been put through real-time distance processing so may differ slightly due to this.

I have also re-evaluated the categorisation of the spatialised one shots that spawn around the player. These calls are now categorised (bar the underwater ambiences) by birds, insects (as before), as well as Fauna and a new category - a bespoke sound set indicative of the relevant biome. Each sound-set by and large is different depending on the time of day. This change should achieve a more tailored ambience for each biome whilst increasing the perceived bio-diversity and detail.

Although these changes to ambiences won’t be heard until they are all complete, sounds have been added to the new buck animations and some tenonto sounds have been altered, all of which will be included in the upcoming patch/hotfix.


Hello folks yet again, as I missed the previous month I won’t miss this one!

As always I’m mostly working on human stuff, but now you get to see them in game. I’ve been focusing heavily on adding the interior and exterior proper bases to the map, and voila, here we go and here we have two new set piece locations, alongside a bunch of new props to fill up the way. The whole system works flawlessly now so you will soon be seeing stuff like the radio tower and some other structures already in the map getting massive overhauls, as they get their interior. New modular systems are being built like the modular Locker System, and future props like these to ensure a lot of varirarity to the whole human aspect.

While it is taken care of, a lot of props are still on the way, so stay tuned for those, as the humans slowly creep up upon us.

As well I’ve done a lot of the shading process to make the whole locations far more interesting, with added Dirt and Moss, and the props can now benefit from said blends and additions, alongside a bunch of small fixes to the existing system to make sure it really feels at home.










After the trailer for Update 3 was finalized, I started with the next tasks, including the upcoming second trailer for Update 3. This will have a different format, a little less cinematic but more informative.
The planning and the filming went well and quickly, in the last two weeks I also completed the editing and polishing part.

With such small teasers and trailers we would like to keep you up to date at all times, so it is possible that you will see more of those informative sneak peeks in the future.

I also received your feedback on the Update 3 trailer and I really appreciate it. I am very happy about your kind words, Thank you!







This is our dropbear of the Isle, or rather our mix of anole, jaguar and attack dog in dinosaur form.
When it came to features for Herrerasaurus, climbing was too fun an idea to pass up.

The first hurdle I had to tackle was finding a reference for climbing. There aren’t too many climbers sporting a long set of hind-legs and a short pair of arms like the Herrera has. Outside of some lizards I found the Tarsier, which proved to be a lot of help for reference, sporting similar proportions to what I was looking for whilst still being a climber, jumper and hunter.

Now while a climbing mechanic was a nice idea for mobility, it still felt like Herrera was missing a little something in the hunting department. Which is where the far right concept comes in, a bite with a grapple. You could just bite and deal some damage, but if you bite and hang on, withstanding some running and bucking you can get a bite of food from something you weren’t otherwise able to kill.
I liked this idea for a couple reasons outside of its mechanical usefulness.

On one hand, there’s something humorous about the animal being thrown around like an over ambitious cowboy, while on the other, I find it a rather unnerving idea that something could dart out of the woods and suddenly latch onto you.


This month I started work on the first in a series of edible plant assets. I was given quite a hefty list of these so I'm bound to be doing this sort of work for quite a while. For efficiency's sake sometimes it is important to lump assets into the same texture and material groups, so I worked on the first three in tandem.



Quality vegetation work is entirely rooted in good foundational texture work. Oftentimes you won't know if the asset will turn out well until the very end of the process, so it is important to have a solid plan for what you want. Here I've laid out some of the components I'll need for this series of assets.





And finally here are some shots of the assembled pieces, I'm quite happy with how they've come together.


After the launch of Update 3 we shifted gears and are now moving full steam ahead with Update 4. In addition, the hotfix we've been working on has been packed with so much additional content that it has partly evolved into its own mini-update which we've coined as 3.5.

Production moves briskly forward on diets. We're nailing down each species, what they provide, who they provide it to and where they're located amongst other things. Which is all necessary to ensure that we get a fully functional ecosystem up and running, as well as providing everyone with an intricate and interesting gameplay loop for you all to sink your claws into. Besides that we've been working on the Pachycephalosaurus which is slated to crash headfirst into Update 4.5. Be sure to keep a watchful eye on our phase-two and social media channels as we can't wait to share all of the neat clips that will be making their way through the development pipeline soon.

Humans and their assets are also progressing nicely, as well as the long awaited community creature that is almost ready to emerge from it's concept phase...


That's a wrap for May folks! What started as a hotfix swiftly evolved into so much more... As you're reading this, Update #3.5 should be in your hands, with it a plethora of bug fixes & quality of life improvements.

See you next time Islanders! - Punchpacket