Much of my work this month revolved around the gallimimus, which has a different way of grabbing things, as it may use either its mouth or hands, so I developed a small system to control when to use one or the other, including swallowing something that was grabbed using the hands, the system adapts automatically. Included to that change, pickup also adapts to the size or position of the target. Like for tall trees it would use a Pickup High, or Pickup Mid animation in some cases. For stuff on the floor it would use Pickup Low.

Some more work animation related to beipi and diablo too, for all the shared abilities. Did some work on troodon Venom pounce visuals, mostly, but also adding support for the future uses of Pounce and transitions mid pounce, interesting things that are coming. Troodon is also getting some new small mechanics for Venom Pounce to help the troodon players to know about the condition of the target, envenomated or not, which stages, etc.

Lots of work done for fixing a significant amount of bugs or wrong behaviors, including diets. Besides that some code improvement, balance changes, optimizations and new things for camera and audio.

I have also added the option for server admins to enable/disable species through the admin panel, allowing or preventing further spawns of those animals.





I continued working on some gallimimus abilities. Its main damage source is from a kick attack, which can be performed while standing, running or jumping. If the animal is swimming or had its legs fractured it can use a peck attack, but it’s not very effective. When playing as a gallimimus it’s very unfortunate to break your legs, since you not only lose your ability to run away quickly, you also can’t fight back properly.

To help with that, there is one more trick in the gallimimus’s bag. It can protect itself from some fall damage by automatically springing forward to soften the landing. Falling from too high can still result in fractured legs or death, but it’s safer than other dinos.

Other than that I’ve been looking at various smaller tasks, such as the ceratosaurus’s vomit scent, bug fixes, balance changes, moving some blueprints to C++, smaller optimizations here and there.


The Dome and only the dome has been my soul focus this month, as it's a magnificent, yet massive object and point of interest in the map. Since transitioning to nanite, we are now open to options of having massive modular pieces like this dome, which we will feature in the new Gateway map.

To further reveal this massive structure, it will have four primary entrances for now, three of which are land based, and one directly connected to the river.

To ensure this all works and fits perfectly, I’ve made a Dome kit as we do work with modularity here at The Isle for human structures, which now consists of various height elements of the dome, and its main features like the massive window hexagon shape details.



Alongside that I’ve translated one of the small parts of the Dockyard kit to fit into the Dome kit to ensure more flexibility for the interiors, especially giving a lot more to the dark metallic look of the Dome, as it's far more industrial.



Dome Kit which features more concrete and industrial look.








The majority of this month I was focused on working on audio for the gallimimus, which now has all the sounds it needs for both adult and juvenile stages. I have also created some ambient spot sfx such as rustling and twig snapping that are implemented to play for Galli when in forested areas to keep players on their toes and consciously aware of the sounds that are happening around them.

I have also spent some time cleaning up and improving diablo’s calls, introducing processing to the legacy sounds, especially increasing the level of the higher frequencies which previously were lacking leaving the sounds seeming dull, as well as adding additional layers to elevate the recognisable calls in line with Evrima’s sound. Its adult calls are complete and implemented, but I am experimenting with a slight change to its 3 call, instead ending the call on a quick and sharp beak clack in a threatening display.

I’ve also made some adjustments to certain elements that relate to audio, the positions of ambient zones on gateway have been adjusted, volume balance to the ambiences as well as the volume and attenuations on the waterfall and ocean surf sounds.

I am now spending time play-testing troodon, cerato, beipi and galli to make any necessary improvements to their sound design as well as balancing audio levels and tightening up the implementation of audio for these creatures so they are sounding their best.




This was an interesting animal to approach. Fun to draw, but difficult to come up with scene ideas for. We had to hash out a few conceptual ideas to nail this one down. It’s similar to tenonto, but more visually limited, lacking utility of its tail or something like claws. How and where does it travel, or what can it do in the face of predators? Thinking of ways Maia can use its bodyweight or how it can interact with its environment were among the main features.

The other focus was maia’s motherly rep. A characteristic predominantly depicted by gentleness, but one can’t forget the other side of being a good parent means defending the hell out of your offspring. Good (vengeful) mother lizard.




I’ve been looking forward to this one.

Anatomically it’s a mix of clunky and elegant which is an interesting combo of characteristics to find poses for, how dynamic can you even make the pose without having the animal look completely off balance? There’s definitely a balancing act to say the least. We definitely wanted to make sure the deinocheirus looked dominant when holding its own in its native environment.

On the shading side, this was a perfect opportunity to play with water effects for the swamp setting. It’s mostly just doubling up on the shading layer, but it works well for differentiating between what’s above and below water.


This month has been a busy one for QA as far as bug reporting and balance testing is concerned. With 4 upcoming playables, it has proved a challenge that we were more than happy to take on.

There have been hundreds of issues that cropped up over the course of integrating the new species to EVRIMA. New playables introduce new mechanics that can break almost anything we had previously done. Now we have to consider totally new scenarios, such as what would happen if a deinosuchus is to lunge at a ceratosaurus while a troodon is envenomating it. Does it cause a crash? Maybe! We didn’t know until we had tried as many possibilities as we could think of. I am happy to say that all playables now seem to be in a good place as far as bugs are concerned, so we’re now getting to the part of just playing the game. Stress testers will play a big part in this process soon, as they will be our first line of feedback after QA to determine how fun or unfun they are to play as, and will allow us to make tweaks to them accordingly.

On the topic of tweaks, have a look at some of these more notable balance changes we’ve made for this update:

Unique night vision ranges have been set up for all existing and new playables. Much like in legacy, there are some characters that will excel in the dark, while others will have a more difficult time. In most cases (not all), playing a larger character will result in reduced night vision range as a way to balance their immense power.

Dryosaurus:


Tenotosaurus:


Omniraptor:


Carnotaurus:


Unique bleed modifiers have been set up for all bleed attacks. Specifics will be detailed in the changelog for the update. This is something that we have been meaning to add for some time now. As it was in legacy, we now have the ability to setup unique bleed modifiers for all the basic attacks in the game – for example, this will allow us to give the tyrannosaurus bite more flat damage than the giganotosaurus, but deal less bleed than the giga bite, etc.

The deinosuchus water sense passive ability has been adjusted to only appear for prey that swim on the surface of water. This was done so that both juvenile deinosuchus and beipiaosaurus have a more effective way of escaping an adult deinosuchus, making for some interesting cat and mouse scenarios between the two playables.



Dryosaurus’ dodge ability now has 2 “charges”, as opposed to it consuming stamina. The time it takes to recharge these is not set in stone, but you can see how it looks here.



Ceratosaurus has a “Charged Bite” ability. The longer you charge the attack, the more damage it will deal. This will also deal an increased amount of bacteria to the target, meaning you do not need to land as many bites to cause them to vomit.



As many of you already know, the beipiaosaurus can breach the surface of the water akin to a dolphin. We decided to take this a step further and allow this ability some use in gameplay, by having it restore a portion of the character’s oxygen when performed.



Gallimimus, when grouped, has a “Mobilize” ability. When performing a broadcast, all members within close proximity will receive a speed increase for a few seconds. When timed right, this can allow a large group to maintain the speed boost by “stacking” their broadcasts, at the cost of being obnoxiously loud to any nearby predators.



Unfortunately, I do not have anything to show you on troodon at this time – its venom needs further work to be clearer to the player what stage it’s at and whenever it has reset.

You will, however, be glad to hear that performance has once again been a large focus of the upcoming update. On top of our move to Unreal Engine 5, we have also been adjusting our default config files to ensure a smooth playing experience for those that meet our recommended hardware requirements.


For the past few weeks, I've been focusing on VFX in the video editor. Since we want to give many of our videos an older look, I started using Red Giant in the editor. This will give me a better workflow in the future when I want to create VHS, Terminal or Analog looks. I was able to try this out directly on the latest trailcam video, it's the first trailcam video at night, so I imitated the night vision in the video editor and made it look as realistic as possible.

And of course, the planning of the next release trailer is already in full swing, but the stress test will give me another impression of what is really realistic and makes sense in the end and what doesn't.

I especially want to look at the interaction between beipiaosaurus and deinosuchus and get more inspiration. Otherwise, it's now time to start implementing the first scene ideas.


No rest for the weary as they say. While our move to UE 5.1 has been relatively smooth, it has not been without issue which is to be expected with any engine update. This month has been chock-full of hoops, hurdles and bug boss battles. But we’re coming out of the otherside relatively unscathed. 6.5 has been expanded to include a lot more playables than originally intended which we’re excited about and hope you are as well. We look forward to getting this update to stress testers as soon as we can so it can go live pending tweaks. Very excited to see how the new creatures interact with the current roster in your hands.

Aside from the above creatures which the team has gone into decent detail about, work is in full swing on the diabloceratops and dilophosaurus which will be the next playable additions after the current 4 are debuted. The diabloceratops in particular ushering in a new mechanic specific to ceratopsians and those best suited to deal with them. I’m sure the programming team is going to LOVE that process. Sorry guys.

Anyway, expect to see me in the community discord periodically over the coming weeks to take public temperature of a few legacy animals that may or may not be making their way into production after the aforementioned. Wish us a powerful tailwind as we round out this update and move forward. Take care!

This month the focus has been adding onto and improving all the new dinosaurs, but also fixing the enormous amount of issues caused by our migration to Unreal Engine 5. But not everything has been about fixing issues, we have new additions such as bee hives (with some very angry bees) and new vocals for the troodon’s venom pounce that triggers simultaneously for each group member of the attacking troodons, to give players a hint of when to apply the target with an additional dose of venom. Some visual indications may be added as well. The new ‘grab high’ animations were also added for all herbivores/omnivores, which are useful for grabbing from tall plants, etc.






My first task was some foundation work for the gallimimus mechanics. I extended our movement system with individual multipliers for each movement mode in each growth stage in a way that also changes the play rate of that specific animation. This basically lets us modify movement speeds without having to change the play rate for the related animations manually. It’s something I thought about doing before for other reasons, so I’m glad there was a good time to do it now.

Then I moved on to actually making use of the system with new mechanics. The gallimimus’ speed will depend on its diet; you will run faster if you take care of your nutrients. Group leaders with a good diet will also be able to have a positive effect on teammates’ speeds when traveling together. It’s also possible to give each other a speed boost using calls. This will all need to be tested and balanced for gameplay, but as you can see there are many different factors that contribute to the final speed of the dinosaur.

A change that’s been planned for a while is to use the “alt attacks'' automatically depending on your movement state. A few things had to be changed in the background, but it is now working as intended. This also helps controller players, since they had no access to these actions previously. I also added a new setting in the menu for those who prefer the old control scheme.


As you’ve seen, last and this month marks the end of the cages, which was the main starting point of the new year. These cages will be featured in various conditions, and will showcase something down the line. They are featured in 5 sizes, from the smallest transportation ones, to the largest that can house a sauropod.






Alongside that there have been some minor tweaks and a new variation of the crowbar, which now features a pointy end.



Starting from this month, I’ve been tasked with a large structure that will surely be a massive point of interest on Gateway which spans 15 km on its longest distance.






This month was a slight change of pace for me.

We have a new dome in the works! With the kind of biome it’s supposed to contain it needed to be bigger than the aviaries and simply scaling-up the current domes/aviaries wasn’t going to look good. So a new design was called for. We took the opportunity to try something a little more industrial and generally simpler shape-wise with a hexagonal based angular design.







Once the base outer appearance was settled on, my task was to start conceptualizing entrances and interior aesthetics of the new dome with the guiding rule of ‘can it be made out of primitives?’(cubes, cylinders, etc)






If so, awesome. Because when making something large like this, you really need something as structurally simple as possible with details coming from the variations of the simple shapes it’s made out of.

Aside from the base structure, the tone of the interior was also drafted, with yellow tinted lighting and winding halls to create a sense of anticipation and unease as well as serving a technical purpose when it comes to something like load times to create that smooth transition from the outer world to the inner dome.



You mess with the bull you get the horns; It’s time for the trike (and not the kind you’d let your kids play with).

Being the largest of the ceratopsians, it doesn’t get to benefit from some of the features of its smaller cousins (burrows, speed) but it more than makes up for that by bringing the most formidable set of horns to the table.

Any creature that wants to target a trike will want to stay faaaar away from the face. Not only is it well protected, but at that point you are asking to get impaled. Likewise it’s not an animal you’re going to be able to toss around; that’s the trikes job. Yes those horns have many uses and like any frequently used tool, will need to be well maintained if you’re to hold onto those formidable weapons.


This month my focus has been to get ceratosaurus audio complete, designing every outstanding vocal sound necessary for both its adult and juvenile stages as well as implementing any foley missing for all animations of this creature. Now that ceratosaurus can be considered complete from an audio perspective, bar some polish and final minor additions, it is undergoing regular testing and iteration from me so that it is sounding as mean and fierce as we are envisioning, as well as making sure everything sounds correct across its entire growth cycle, which is quite an intensive task so regular time away from this creature is required so ears do not get fatigued.

To break up my workflow, I’ve moved on to working on the gallimimus alongside cerato. Galli's calls have remained the same as most will recognise them, but have been processed to improve the overall mix and I’m now facing the challenge of expanding its palette of sounds based on its core vocal aesthetic. I have already got a full sound suite for its pain sounds i.e. regular, extreme and death, as well as some in progress sounds for its secondary attack, its various eating animations and some generic sounds that will be peppered in to fill gaps and give this animal some vocal character accompanying its more understated movements.


With the upgrade to UE5, QA have had their hands full mostly with bug reporting, since a lot of issues arose during that transition. We had to go back to some of our older processes such as regression and adhoc testing in order to locate as many of these issues as possible and escalate them to the programmers. A lot of the issues were seemingly random, for example the corpse physics started to become very “floaty” simply from upgrading. Over the course of this upgrade and the past 3 months, our voluntary QA team has reported close to one thousand unique reports! Do be sure to show them some appreciation if you interact with them, they’ve more than earned it.

Troodon testing is really starting to come along now. As some of you already know, its venom pounce ability was causing the client to crash a few weeks ago, caused by the group vocals that Filipe mentioned in his post. I’m happy to say that the crash is and has been fixed for a couple of weeks now. That being said, we did run into some other particularly annoying issues with it… See below:



Unfortunately, at this time this issue is not yet fixed. Luckily, this is one of the few issues left for troodon before it’s ready to be stress-tested.

With most of the issues for troodon fixed now, playtesting and balancing is underway in QA and I am very excited to see how you guys perform with it. The troodon is very much a horde playstyle – it is too small to be able to comfortably take on the likes of an omniraptor alone, so it must group up in order to be its most effective (though it’s perfect for killing juveniles!)

The application of the venom pounce is similar to an omniraptor but it takes it a step further: you must work with your group and time your pounce correctly in order to envenomate your target - if you attack too soon after another troodon, it will reset the venom state and you will have to start from the process from the beginning. The design of having to better work with your group has led to some interesting encounters already and we have quickly discovered that it could be the deciding factor for if your group survives the attack or not. Better get practicing! 😉

Fortunately, the troodon being as small and fast as it is means that any encounter is easy to survive – simply run the other way and don’t look back.


Needless to say based on the entries above and below, this month has been quite a stir for the team. The majority of this month for me has been meetings, formulating documentation and finalizing systems which have been mentioned in various ways within this devblog by other members of the team. I get to keep this one short and sweet due to the director's commentary but I’ve cooked up an animation or two for you to feast upon as penance.



Hello islanders,

As many of you have already guessed, one of our first orders of business upon returning in 2023 was investigating the possibility of moving The Isle to UE5. Upon initial viewing it became clear very quickly that the ‘if’ we upgraded to UE5 was simply ‘when,’ so the process fully began earlier this month.

Though everyone in the editor has been working diligently to ensure a smooth transition to UE5, there have been some small technical hurdles we’ve had to overcome. I am acutely aware of this extra time it has taken and the restlessness is understandable. For your patience, 6.5 has been more than slightly altered from what was on the roadmap. The troodon will not be the only animal stepping forward in the update and more details will follow along shortly in Phase Three tomorrow.

(Note: Speaking of, we are attempting another route with Phase Three content. It will no longer be restricted to a weekly Wednesday, but all posts will contain context and detail attached, much like a single developer’s contribution to the devblog. This may finally put an end to the “pun and done” image drops.)

The assets seen on Gateway have been moved over to Nanite and the map itself has been converted from world composition to world partition. In the coming days it will be rolled out to stress testers to start benchmarking performance but I suspect the public will see the map in Update 7.

This leads me to the roadmap itself. Update 6.5 has been drastically swelled and Gateway doesn’t even exist on the roadmap whatsoever. It’s safe to say that it’s more than outdated and a checklist approach is not one we wish to continue with. A more traditional roadmap will roll out alongside 6.5 that will reflect the additional content that has been in the works.

Diabloceratops had its first round of prototype animations created for its unique mechanic, sparring (along with dusting off some of the more outdated animations). As it is in its infancy, I’m not able to say exactly how it will work, but we do have a very promising heading as a posture based mechanic. The objective here is to have some fun ways for ceratopsians to engage with one another in a non-lethal manner, but still have this feature capable of being a very lethal response when necessary whether to predators or an opponent. I am hoping this will answer the overwhelming desire most diabloceratops players have expressed to fight one another without having to kill one another… unless they really wanted to.



There’s a lot more I could go into purely because I rarely contribute to the blogs now, but I’ve jawed enough. You’ll see more of my contributions in Phase Three soon.

As always,

No pings. No reactions.

Don

With the release of U6 and the break over we have been in the process of migrating the game from Unreal Engine 4.27 to Unreal Engine 5. This has brought some exciting new features to work with like Nanite. As we convert more art assets to be compatible with this system, we can create more detailed and realistic environments without as much compromise to performance. I have also been working on implementing world partition with the map team to improve performance and optimize the rendering of the game's environments. This system divides the game world into smaller sections allowing us to only render the parts of the world that are currently visible to the player. The process has not been completed, so results may vary.

Overall, the migration to Unreal Engine 5 has been a challenging but exciting experience, and I am looking forward to seeing the final results in the future.

Aside from content migration, I have been working on the base dinosaur controller logic and have also improved the animal animations to include look poses and turn in place animations. The goal here is to smooth the animal movement to be less robotic and fix the movement strafing you currently see.


I started the year by finishing some code reorganization I started before the break. It’s one of those things where you put your time into something that doesn’t change anything for the users, but it makes your life easier in the future. Then I moved on to some engine update related tasks, which is mostly just making changes in all kinds of places where something works differently now or broke for some reason.

Afterwards my main task was the Ceratosaurus. It has a fairly straightforward mechanic, you build up bacteria in your mouth when you eat, which you can apply to other players by biting them. After enough hits this will cause them to vomit. The mechanic is currently functional, but it will still need testing, balancing and visual effects.


For the start of the new year, I spent my time finishing getting Beipi set up with its last pieces of missing audio, finishing off a handful of sounds for its hatchling/juvenile stages. After going over and testing Beipi to make sure it is fully complete audio-wise, I have moved on to working my way through all the supplementary sounds for Cerato. I have already designed and implemented around half of the sounds needed for its adult stage, with a handful of others also in progress. The sounds completed include eating, drinking, primary and alt attack, mouth display, death, regular pain, thrash and vomit, It’s sonic aesthetic is big and brutish with an emphasis on low guttural texture, its attacks sound impactful and gnarly with a satisfying crunch as its teeth clamp together and it also has a low but explosive roar when displaying to threaten its competitors and bolster its bite.

I spent a little time with Filipe looking into the issue related to footstep attenuation, we have narrowed down the cause to limitations with the system which is overriding the set attenuation and truncating the range, however we have not been able to find a solution to fix this but it is something we are aware of and looking in to.

Finally, I’ve dipped my toes into UE5’s new audio engine to familiarize myself and see what can be capable with metasounds. I’ve begun to think about how it can be integrated into our existing audio pipeline that is reliant on UE4’s systems so we can avoid deprecation issues, albeit this will be much further down the line from now.


Most of 2023 has been about updating rigs and filling in the missing pieces on a few of our Legacy animals in preparation for their debut in Evrima. Ceratosaurus saw a lot of work in particular and while there are always tweaks to be made to the animations once you see them in-game, that beastie is pretty much complete, with Gallimimus soon to follow.

My current task is getting Diabloceratops ready as well. It’s one of the older rigs and needs a lot of work before I’ll be happy with it. I also took the liberty of updating the baby morph, look at that little chonker.






Small and unreasonably angry, it’s The Isle’s Avaceratops.

Actually, just about all our ceratopsians are full of attitude, but the wrath of this one might’ve altered (or rather added to) its diet to take advantage of the carnage. Like boars, they have little patience for the presence of other creatures and are bullies of anything remotely their size. Full of energy, they’ll run you out of town unless you can hit back or are exceptionally good at staying out of reach.

So keep an eye on your hatchlings, such fragile things are a prized target of the opportunistic ceratopsian.


This month I continued working on the Ceratosaurus and the Gallimimus, adding more animations to both sets. I worked on the knockdowns for Ceratosaurus, but my focus was mostly on Gallimimus as we were wrapping up on these creatures' animated features. I worked on a hatchling animation for this creature, and I hope to see all of our Gallimimus players entering the Isle in style.


New year, new things. Meetings, meetings and more meetings dominated the first week and will do so further but we’ve certainly hit the ground running. Programming and adjacent teams are hard at work migrating to Unreal Engine 5 and all the “fun” stuff that comes along with that process.

Troodon will be moving into combat testing and then be making its way to the hands of stress testers when given the greenlight. On the topic of playables, the Beipiaosaurus, Ceratosaurus and Gallimimus are either animation/mechanic complete or very near it. Upon testing, more polish and the go-ahead, they will follow suit and make their way to be stress tested as well. We know you have been anxiously awaiting new playables and are excited to get them in your hands. Having expanded the animation team should help that process along even more. The Diabloceratops is next in line after those and will be entering R&D phases to see how far we can push the limits of a unique sparring experience for playables with horns. So keep your fingers crossed and send those good vibes. Dilophosaurus and Herrerasaurus will come afterwards provided there are no production shifts. We will also begin spinning up two apexes so we can establish what an apex animal’s impact will truly be like in Evrima. Their capabilities will far exceed anything you have experienced in Legacy and so need to be extensively tailored. Please do not expect them to appear on official servers but rather community servers instead when they are complete and we’re ready to launch them.

In regards to Update 7, the design team is pooling and organizing the multi-tiered approach we intend to take for perks and elders. There will be a few different ways to acquire perks and the perks will vary based on how you acquired them. Some based on what you eat, others based on how you’ve grown and others based on what you’ve done. Elder being a key component to retaining some of those acquired perks for a new playthrough of that species. More to come on that as time and development progresses. That’s all for now, see ya soon!

As we were getting closer to the release I mostly focused on bug fixes and smaller changes as it’s important not to break anything in the last second. I went over a few issues or confusing behavior we had with nesting and single parents in particular. Leaving a group after courting will make you lose access to the nest if there is one, but keep it for your partner, letting them raise the eggs alone. If you are a single parent and court with someone you will lose your existing nest. These steps were taken to make the system more straightforward and less prone to issues such as two single parents courting each other. Hopefully it will lead to a less confusing experience.

Another small but significant change was making the “Eggs” button green on the menu if there are free eggs available. This should incentivize players to join nests, since you no longer have to manually look in the menu to check if anything’s available.



I also made some improvements to the human character’s camera and movement during some specific situations such as going prone while turning in place. He also has some new clothes to show off, I just had to plug those in without much work. The flashlight was also adjusted a bit to provide more light in a wider cone.

I had some smaller tasks regarding the new diets and gore. The compass will now show new icons for corpses which are in the rotten and bones stages, so players can tell from a distance if it interests them or not. I also updated the feeding system to work with the new diets, as it was significantly reworked.


This month I have added movements to the Gallimimus and the Ceratosaurus. The Gallimimus knockdowns were my first challenge, and one that was fun to take on, as this long-limbed creature has a tendency to flail a bit on impact, regardless of the direction. Things got a bit more creative for the pinned and wallow animations, as the Gallimimus will use its powerful legs to try and shake off an attacker rather than trying to bite, like our friend Ceratosaurus. And in wallowing, this creature has to remain alert to its surroundings, checking every moment or so to make sure no predators are sneaking up on it in a vulnerable state.

The Ceratosaurus also presented some unique challenges, specifically the wallow animation took time to get the right characterization. Such an aggressive predator/scavenger will not feel the same need to be alert during its wallow, so the slower, lazy movements required some precise timing. The pinned animation for this creature however, allowed me to explore that aggressive side. You won’t want to be on the wrong end of that fight should you ever encounter a pinned and angry Ceratosaurus.

This has already been a great start, and I am really happy with how these animations are going so far. I am excited to continue building on these creatures.


For December my focus has been split between bug fixes and enhancements in preparation for the impending update, and a complete round up of vocals needed for Beipiaosaurus. All of the vocalizations for all the various mechanics and animations are at the minimum designed for the Adult stage. Excluding some implementation, tweaks and a final pass to ensure nothing has been missed and functions as it should, its adult stage will not long be considered finished from an audio perspective. Beipi has been particularly challenging to give a voice to so I can’t wait to see what people think of how our angry little goose sounds.

I’ve already started processing/altering/adding to or replacing layers in a majority of these vocals so they can be repurposed for its juvenile stage and will be looking at setting up the progression from juvenile sounds to adult sounds when we return in the new year. Aside from this the only outstanding audio work to be done on Beipiaosaurus will be to design the bespoke sounds needed for its younger stage of growth such as its begging and hatching sounds and of course a final testing and quality pass! I’m looking forward to ticking another creature off my tasks, I’m particularly excited to continue my work on the next creature and no better time to do that then the start of a new year.

Enjoy the holidays and see you in the new year!



Our hornless mini-carno of the isle.

While Rugops can’t launch itself forward at ridiculous speeds like its larger counterpart, it would be foolish to say it’s not agile. Its home is the jungle or other similarly dense landscapes. Relying on its ability to outmaneuver predators or stealthily approach prey; Rugops might not send large creatures running, but the little guys closer to its size might want to think twice on making the jungle their safe haven.


Lazy, large and ready to throw its weight around.

Our Acrocanthosaurus is bulked out to explore a different mechanic to the established ripping and shredding. If it's able to get into position and topple its foe, the Acro can go in for a chokehold and smother targets with its bite and bodyweight in an attempt to take down creatures that it otherwise couldn’t handle. Acro is a slothful thick-skinned creature that leans into the slow and steady style of hunting, ready to bully when it’s not indulging in some symbiotic self care with the tiny creatures of the isle.


My main task this month was the final planning and creation of the release trailer for Update 6.
In the planning phase I collected some rough ideas and created the storyboard, but during the last weeks there were many plan changes and new ideas I tried out. My goals were: To present the game a bit more “maturely".

Darker, more unfriendly and more brutal, because that's what the new mechanics bring to the game. So I used the first part of the trailer to create an unpleasant atmosphere. A few brutal shots with dark music. Then a slow transition into the second part of the trailer. There the new mechanics are roughly explained. In this part it was important to me that everything is visualized very smoothly like in the last trailers, no sensory overload, no incoherent scenes like in the first part.

Gore will surely accompany us a lot in the next videos, so look forward to more bloody shots with the next updates.

The next video projects for next year are already in the planning phase, until then I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!


With the stress testing team doubling in size, we are now able to accurately simulate a full server experience, allowing us to better optimize the game for 100 player slots and to catch far more issues than QA would otherwise be able to do on their own. Due to how effective stress testing is proving, we will be looking into increasing the amount of stress tests going forward to ensure that a stable gameplay experience is maintained fully between each update. Not only will this mean that the quality of each update improves by the time it reaches the public branch, but it should also allow us to show off content earlier and far more frequently going forward.

As well as bug finding, the amount of extra people involved in the stress testing process has been very useful for balancing the game, as we can get a better understanding of how well each species can survive in a full server environment. This proved more difficult in the past with QA's limited numbers; we had a decent idea for balancing combat between species but as for general survival, it was a lot more trial and error. Now, however, we know where X species goes and what they do in X location, meaning we can better plan future mechanics of the game around this knowledge. This will be very important for upcoming mechanics such as the Migration System.

Performance has been a big factor for this update. We recognise that previous versions of Evrima have been struggling in this regard and so there will be a continued effort to improve this even further. I hope you will notice the improvement for this update and that it will be the start of many more improvements to come for the game's optimization.


This month flew by like so many of the rest. We at last bring gore to The Isle with Update 6. The team worked hard to ensure the first iteration of gore would set the foundations for the tone of the game as a whole and give us some more diet flexibility. The Isle has no intentions of shying away from the harsh realities of life and death. Blending the beauty of nature with its brutality. There may be other further changes to the gore visuals as time goes on and maybe some more interactions as well. So spend some time ripping each other open and see what comes out. Speaking of interactions, there’s a new ability the carnivores possess that will allow you to shake the coin purse out of a dead body. Find a dead creature small enough to carry, then hold LMB and give your mouse a side to side shake to see what tasty treats you can dislodge from the fleshy goodie bag you’ve acquired.

Alongside Update 6, you will also have the option of previewing our Gen 2 ambassador on unofficial servers. Yes, he is still going to die a lot. He still has basic functionality but is smoother than the last time he was previewed and has a few minor enhancements. Go take him on a night time safari. I dare you. Unlike previous tests however, his presence will be permanent from here on out as we begin larger scale production on human related features in the new year. The Gen 2s will be getting weapons in the not so distant future but those are likely to start out as melee weapons first like knives, sledgehammers and crowbars. Additional dinosaurs will still be rolling in since their foundational mechanics are broadly set as a whole and that’s what’s been needed to allow us to focus on inserting more playables. Dinosaur foundations being set frees up resources that can be spent on the long awaited Gen 2s.

This year has somehow been long and swift all at the same time. Full of many rapid changes, uphill battles, team expansion etc. So winter break was right on time. As an added bonus, we will be granting access to the latest snapshot of Gateway to the stress testers and allow them to stream it as it exists in UE4. Hope you enjoy it! Have a wonderful holiday and a happy new year!

Hey Islanders,

Tear apart your prey and treat yourself to their innards. Update 6 brings forth the first iteration of gore, gifting each dinosaur with a plethora of delectable organs to feast upon. Meat, fresh and otherwise will impact your diet positively or negatively based on what part of a corpse you eat and how old it is. Utilize scent to select the best bits for yourself, leaving the rest for the scavengers. A discerning carnivore is drawn to death but wary of decay.

• Added new diet combinations and effects
  
• Added Thrash ability for carnivores. Hold LMB and move camera to the left/right quickly while carrying a corpse to initiate it
  
• Added experimental human character. Toggle on with bEnableHumans=true in server Game.ini
  
• Added Pterodactylus Scavenger AI
  
• Added support for Eye Colour customisation in skin system
  
• Added extra condition to destroy fruits if they fall down from landscape
  
• Added chicken pinned animation
  
• Added support for default pinned and pinned front animations
  
• Added support for night vision range to scale with growth and diets
  
• Added new Compsognathus animations and some changes to sessions
  
• Added breath to end of Carnotaurus pain sounds
  
• Gave all dinos a small z offset on camera when landing (jump or fall)
  
• Added compression and limiting to master soundclass
  
• Setup large hollow wood footstep sounds
  
• Setup Large nature (firm) wood footsteps
  
• Added new system for corpse scent
  
• Added support for custom corpse scenting ranges
  
• Added minimum camera height for very little dinos
  
• Added angle check when performing "near pounce"
  
• Added Pickup special condition for Pteranodon
  
• Added new Dryosaurus dodge
  
• Added sounds to chicken idle and attack
  
• Setup blunt impacts for abilities hit
  
• Added sounds to new Dryosaurus dodge
  
• Added New blood VFX for different attack types
  
• Added Camera lock when eating/drinking
  
• Added more frog sounds to swamp night ambience
  
• Added more daytime swamp one shots
  
• Added lots more jungle bird one shot sounds
  
• Added more sounds to jungle, more ambient sound tweaks
  
• Added flies on non-fresh corpses
  
• Added more tree creak one shots
  
• Added wind one shots to beach ambiencezone
  
• Added support for latch climbing out of water
  
• Added more coastal bird and land fauna one shots to beach ambience
  
• Added jump Fixed to Hypsilophodon and Pteranodon
  
• Added support for swimming in sloped water (rivers)
  
• Added slowdown the mouse sensitivity for the camera lock
  
• Added jungle night ambience to overcast cue
  
• Added system to prevent human head/camera clipping in walls
  
• Added system to prevent camera clipping in walls for dinos when zoomed in
  
• Added game settings to show fps/ping and disable physics foliage
  
• Added new loading screen
  
• Added footsteps to boar locomotion animation
  
• Added footsteps to chicken, deer, goat, frog, turtle
  
• Added human kick sound cues
  
• Added sounds when colliding with foliage
  
• Added human footstep audio
  
• Added new Ribs Meat mesh and Skeleton Mesh for most playables
  
• Setup all dinos gore Morphs
  
• Added AMD FSR2 plugin
  
• Added more game settings for DLAA, NIS and FSR2
  
• Added support to attack corpses in order to expose the organs (must hit middle)
  
• Setup eyes blink and white eyes for corpses
  
• Added ability to attack burrows
  
• Added support for different directional montages for swimming on surface or underwater
  
• Added solution to organs sometimes falling through floor after it is tossed
  
• Added Pachycephalosaurus Headbutt Pre audio
  
• Added different scent icons for rotten corpses and bones
  
• Added new fleshimpact sound to attacking corpses
  
• Added crouched kick animation for human
  
• Added organ types to avoid cannibalism
  
• Added some human accessories, replaced bodysuit
  
• Added human lunged pose
  
• Added new line of sight check for AI
  
• Added Hypsilophodon Spit clean for humans
  
• Added some loading screen hints
  
• Added can't grab message when close to a too heavy fruit
  
• Added living check to knockdowns
  
• Added support for meat chunks/gore to have Rotten shader
  
• Added rotten overtime for organs, if they exist on the body

• Made faction select nest button green when public eggs are available
  
• Made charge cancel when running off a ledge
  
• Improved swimming movement
  
• Material corrections to dinosaurs
  
• Made carnivores to stop movement completely if eating a corpse is succesful
  
• Made Deinosuchuss not receive eat hint when getting close to a corpse if lunge carrying
  
• Reduced juv Pachycephalosaurus 3 call volume
  
• Improved latch accuracy, reduced trace calls, added capsule rotation
  
• Small performance improvements for Schooling fishes
  
• Made Stegosaurus not drop stuff in mouth if tail attack, but drops if a target is impaled
  
• Visual adjustments to Lunge
  
• Jungle foliage across the board color corrected
  
• Improved latch rotation, reduced jittering
  
• Reduced acceleration rate for Pteranodon running takeoff
  
• Small change to Carnotaurus pinned loop copy (used for lunge)
  
• Some improvements to medium footsteps intensity and volume
  
• Adjusted Skin/Faction/Char/SpawnZone panels to allow going back from/to skin system
  
• Adjusted Elite fish weights
  
• Improved Omniraptor pounce dismount animation
  
• Avoid screen hints when in spec mode
  
• Adjusted pickup speeds overall
  
• Give player small alert with stomach flashing when near to vomit
  
• Enabled scent when in mud
  
• Volume adjustment to Deinosuchus and Stegosaurus call
  
• Slightly reduced UI sounds volume
  
• Vocal volume balancing, reduced limiter post gain slightly
  
• Reduced attenuation falloff on underwater movement sounds
  
• Restored swimming end solution
  
• Enable Hypsilophodon spit in mud
  
• Made eggs auto rot if the occupier dies
  
• Removed cooldown if the attack cancels
  
• Made Carnotaurus charge trace length velocity based
  
• Improved resting transition for Deinosuchus with fractured legs
  
• Balance and improvements to beach ambiences audio
  
• Tweaked plains ambient sounds
  
• Made anti gamma slightly brighter instead of black
  
• Updated DLSS plugin
  
• Force Pteranodon to fall if pounced and flight had started
  
• Adjusted Crab, frog, chicken and rabbit weights
  
• Made directional attacks uncrouch the player
  
• Made reseting requested speed possible when unpossessed
  
• Avoid battle musics if damager or target are too small in comparison
  
• Avoid pounce to cancel charge
  
• Disabled knockdown and stagger on lunged dinos
  
• Updated Diet status info in profiler UI
  
• Below server name, also show player amount in dino profiler
  
• Made courting only require one animation loop
  
• Made Dryosaurus dodge blend in durations shorter
  
• Slightly increased navigation radius finder for rabbits
  
• Slightly reduced volume of Deinosuchus calls
  
• Made scent widget show only 90 degrees instead of 360
  
• Adjusted Pteranodon carry location
  
• Replaced old blood splatters from normal attacks
  
• Optimizations to multiple shader
  
• Blocked Lunge, Pounce and Headbutt during Hatchling stage
  
• Block Pickup during Hatchling Stage
  
• Made juvenile pouncers take more stamina damage, made stamina damage be based on the bucker's attack power
  
• Increased distance for rabbit to burrow when character nearby
  
• Removed forced Compsognathus spawn on nest build
  
• Adjusted velocity limit for latching onto a wall to make it easier for juvs
  
• Increased AI predator avoidance distance
  
• Improved scav flee directions
  
• Increased Dryosaurus dodge stamina cost to match jump
  
• Made nest building be cancelled when the abiltiy ends in any way
  
• Greatly reduced water refraction from the underside on the swamp material
  
• Adjusted gravity with dino growth
  
• Increased delay for when check speeds should start, to avoid issues when load takes too long
  
• Changed Utahraptor to Omniraptor
  
• River material height lowered around camera
  
• Made quick log perform a save and reload instead of repossessing
  
• Reduced the wind on the water lilies
  
• Removed a couple of busy loops from coastal ambience bedding
  
• Improved air turn behaviour after releasing/jumping off from latching latch
  
• Avoid camera lock if moving while grazing
  
• Made latch jump off follow the camera pitch
  
• Gave flies a floor offset when spawned
  
• reduced jungle tree creak one shots volume
  
• Reduced plains morning birds one shots to just songbirds and balanced with one shots volume
  
• Made certain fruits to break when hitting the floor when falling from the tree, such as coconut, papaya and jackfruit
  
• Gave Camera lock a default 30º offset in any direction
  
• Improved swimming in sloped water
  
• Optimized swimming on horizontal water
  
• Made claw swipe sound occlude underwater, reduced volume of Hypsilophodon feathers
  
• Updated Carnivores diets
  
• Made flies to despawn if corpse is carried/dragged, then re spawn when dropped
  
• Increased volume variability of jungle and swamp one shots
  
• Made bucking ability end when out of stamina
  
• Avoid Flies to spawn when corpse is in water
  
• Increased dino air control from 0.05 to 0.15
  
• Made nest incubation time update when laying eggs
  
• Made drinking prompt only show when walking
  
• Adapts the camera lock right or left depending which direction player were looking before locking the camera during eat/drink
  
• Made Pteranodon Max zoom shorter when flying
  
• Disabled bone fracture when parrying headbutt and almost nullified damage
  
• Adjustments to vocal curves and attenuations
  
• Made compies sprint and more reactive when harrassing
  
• Increased food values for some small animals such as rabbit, frog, crab and chicken (might be too much now)
  
• Disabled tap to sprint when swimming
  
• Improved Pterodactylus wing flaps and added membrane sound layer
  
• Changed human sprint animation
  
• Improved system preventing looking down your own neck as a human
  
• Replaced human swim forward animations
  
• Improved swimming hand pose
  
• Improved human carrying hand pose
  
• Replaced deep mud med walk and trot footsteps
  
• Replaced small deep mud trot and walk footsteps
  
• Improved human resting pose
  
• Improved human sleep pose
  
• Changed corpse smell timer end condition
  
• Made flies to also try to spawn during carcass phase
  
• Set up prone enter/exit animations
  
• Disabled meat chunks pickup when corpse has changed to skeleton
  
• Updated non nav mesh movement system
  
• Disabled sideways prone movement
  
• Disabled being prone in water
  
• Disabled human wallowing
  
• Enabled moving onto mud while crouched/prone
  
• Made fruits to have overall more food
  
• Decreased Pteranodon swim slow speed
  
• Disabled float in water once full skeleton
  
• Enabled going crouched and prone in mud
  
• Adjusted flashlight spotlight location
  
• Avoided camera lock when wallowing
  
• Allow Scent when carrying or dragging something
  
• Made turtle call less frequently
  
• Updated medium and large gore sounds, adjustments to gore sound synch for Carnotaurus and Deinosuchus eat, pick up and swallow animations
  
• Updates to pounce to reduce jitterings
  
• Improved Headbutt stuttering caused by lag compensation
  
• Avoided wallow hint for humans
  
• Made zoom scale more with dino size
  
• Updated small gore sounds and updated gore sound synch on Pteranodon and Omniraptor eat, grab and swallow animations
  
• Improvements to Deinosuchus adult and juvenile eat animations gore sounds
  
• Improvements to Deinosuchus grab and swallow sounds
  
• Made trying to latch uncrouch the player
  
• Made Carnotaurus cancel charging if it breaks its legs
  
• Disabled eating/drinking when moving
  
• Made Grazing to have half the walk speed and half the rotation rate
  
• Disabled Deinosuchus water sense effects on the surface
  
• Made leaving a group make you lose access to your nest, but keep it for the other player as a single parent
  
• Made courting lose access to the current nests of both players
  
• Made dinos unpair when kicked from a group
  
• Avoided being able to Thrash skeletons
  
• Avoided Thrash ability when flying
  
• Improved fish reaction and flee speeds
  
• Disabled speed check for grazing and swallowing, adjusted eating/drinking to trot speed
  
• Avoid herbivores to be able to attack corpses
  
• Slowed down human eating loop
  
• Improved human camera when going prone while looking far off to the side
  
• Adjusted corpse smell ranges
  
• Made carcass use the normal scent icon
  
• Made chunks/organs not "teleport" when dropped from mouth
  
• Turned the opacity of the river underwater surface up
  
• Trimmed silence at beginning of gore impact large sound
  
• Made Pteranodon not drop things when crashing
  
• Made food type update on the corpse smell sphere
  
• Made nutrients to decay slower than hunger
  
• Reduced size of skin code text in dino profiler
  
• Changed diet indicator colors
  
• Allow moving while swallowing
  
• Avoid camera lock when swallowing
  
• Changed blood locked icon visibility order
  
• Disabled thrash while swimming
  
• Improved human flashlight grip
  
• Updated feeding to work with the new diet system
  
• Made feeding impossible if hunger and thirst are 0% and the dino has no nutrients
  
• Imported Fixed human clothes, changed pants, added baseball hat
  
• Increased food value for Melon
  
• Improved human flashlight
  
• Disabled flashlight while eating or drinking
  
• Optimization to blood decal shader.
  
• Avoid Hatchlings to be able to open bodies
  
• Adjusted some UI to avoid resolution issues
  
• Disabled Ctrl action when latching for non climbers
  
• Disabled head fracture animation when sleeping
  
• Avoid Hypsilophodon spit clear when carrying something
  
• Improved human kick "whoosh" sound
  
• Changed volume of Deinosuchus water sense sound and bush rustle sound
  
• Changed Omniraptor pounce vocal attenuation
  
• Reduced volume of hatchling water sense sound
  
• Changed attenuation on generic vomit sounds
  
• Ensured Deinosuchus makes vocal sound when spat on by Hypsilophodon
  
• Improved synch of Tenontosaurus pounced/buck sounds
  
• Decreased headbutt down post wait time
  
• Blocked free look when grazing
  
• Enabled pre cache shader
  
• Updated human meshes, disabled blinking
  
• Adjusted pounce dismount distance

Mud

Attacks now blocked by mud:

• Pachycephalosaurus Ram
  
• Carnotaurus Charge
  
• Omniraptor Pounce
  
• Tenotosaurus Kick
  
• Dryosaurus Dodge
  
• Any Jump-based ability

Fractures

• Leg fractures do not heal while standing
  
• Body fracture stamina drain increased

Diets

• Malnutrition growth rate decreased
  
• Nutrient drain set to 10% longer than Hunger time
  
• Juvenile Carnivore diets enabled

Growth Times

• Growth times reduced globally to fit new diet system changes

Special Ability: Charge

• Stamina drain reduced
  
• Charge speed bonus decreased
  
• Turn rate adjusted for sprint and charge

Bucking

• Stamina damage per tick increased

Special Ability: Lunge

• Lunge recoil damage increased significantly

Dodge

• Stamina cost increased

Bucking

• Stamina damage per tick increased

Special Ability: Ram

• Sound cue added to charge up

Bleed Resistance

• Bleed resistance increased

Special Ability: Pounce

• Latch damage per tick decreased
  
• Failed Pounce recovery speed decreased (faster)

Bucking

• Stamina damage per tick increased

Bucking

• Stamina damage per tick increased

Bucking

• Stamina damage per tick increased

• Fixed Carnotaurus turn rate
  
• Fixed free horizontal flight when out of stamina
  
• Fixed mouse issue in spawnzone select
  
• Attempt to force eating montage to stop when getting pinned
  
• Avoid dig animation to be interrupted if button released after plant mesh is swapped
  
• Fixed beg ending abruptly for some species
  
• Fixed attempt to vomit reset after safelogout
  
• Fixed pounce playing lunge animation sometimes after killing pinned AI
  
• Fixed Deinosuchus idle sound playing underwater
  
• Fixed Omniraptor silhouette in dino profiler
  
• Fixed attempt to pounce/knockdown animation transitions
  
• Fixed vomit audio playing log in from save
  
• Fixed carnivore eating causing instant break
  
• Fixed camera destroy before faction select UI appear
  
• Fixed latch movement speed on slopes
  
• Fixed pounce start and pounce start sprint animation transitions
  
• Fixed mouth blood mask not setting when grabbing a meat chunk
  
• Fixed water hint appearing when lunge carrying
  
• Fixed being able to jump and drink at the same time
  
• Fixed admin DM's not working
  
• Fixed Rabbit sometimes playing Omniraptor broadcast
  
• Fixed Pterodactylus land sound issue
  
• Fixed no sound on Tenontosaurus buck
  
• Fixed Carnotaurus footsteps modulation on forest
  
• Fixed Carnotaurus bite silent when head is underwater
  
• Fixed injured Deinosuchus animations acting up
  
• Fixed Hypsilophodon tail staying charged after breaking a leg
  
• Fixed water walking trace channel
  
• Fixed Stegosaurus jitter after secondary attack
  
• Fixed Deinosuchus lunges being audible when Deinosuchus is underwater while camera is above
  
• Fixed Deinosuchus hatchling using small footsteps instead of tiny on dirt terrain
  
• Fixed Stegosaurus movement and animation mismatch when facing straight forward
  
• Fixed alt attack letting players spam bite in mud/water/air
  
• Fixed juvie Pteranodon air brake speed
  
• Fixed Pteranodon head fracture causing leg issues
  
• Fixed tail physics jittering when walking in water
  
• Fixed Deinosuchus nose blocking Hypsilophodon spit
  
• Fixed Deinosuchus bite vocal not crossfading properly
  
• Fixed Hypsilophodon bobbing underwater
  
• Fixed pounce miss recovery animation cancel when landing on mud
  
• Fixed issues with meah chunks near bodies
  
• Fixed dino blood mouth in water not getting cleaned
  
• Fixed not able to drag Pterodactylus
  
• Fixed head butt parry and Fixed miss canceling in mud
  
• Fixed announcement message issue
  
• Fixed to player corpses not showing in Spec Mode
  
• Fixed lunge early end in mud
  
• Fixed Pounce start effect
  
• Fixed AI locked in pinned animation if only tapping
  
• Fixed Toggle command frogs spawn in river
  
• Fixed drag loops playing on Carnotaurus blind and Deinosuchus eat animations
  
• Fixed vomit alert UI not showing up
  
• Fixed attempt to fish school scale issue
  
• Fixed attempt to pounce canceling so fast that causes input lock into targets
  
• Fixed Spec Mode stack NV layers
  
• Fixed attempt to damage scale issues
  
• Fixed rabbit burrowing on non diggable surfaces
  
• Fixed rabbit burrows on slopes
  
• Fixed rabbit teleporting and burrowing out rotation/location
  
• Check for navigation target being underwater to all AI
  
• Fixed rabbits going into water
  
• Fixed Compsognathus spawning in deep mud
  
• Fixed attempt to Debris eating lock issues
  
• Fixed Buck Abilities not having damage attribute setup
  
• Fixed Status values for growth boosts from diet
  
• Fixed some UI status
  
• Added exception for AI attacking spectator pawns
  
• Fixed Dryosaurus dodge using bite when swimming or jumping
  
• Fixed issue with laying egg into a nest that's being damaged
  
• Adjusted vomit indicator scale causing it to appear even when 0
  
• Fixed jitteriness when latching onto walls
  
• Fixed courted characters unpairing from unpossession
  
• Fixed going into spectator breaking grouping
  
• Fixed for AI not having oxygen/health decay
  
• Fixed full servers not showing in server list
  
• Fixed invisible chickens
  
• Fixed Deinosuchus alt attack issue in mud
  
• Fixed Deinosuchus injured animations
  
• Fixed pounce locking target after pin
  
• Fixed Lunge causing input lock after releasing target
  
• Fixed extra sound layer of one shots in ambient zones
  
• Fixed Lungeshake swimming animation not playing
  
• Fixed scenting objects inside the character when the range is 0
  
• Fixed scavenger crash for nests
  
• Fixed scavenger dynamic chase/flee
  
• Fixed jumping not working sometimes
  
• Fixed Frog having Omniraptor vocals
  
• Fixed Edible plants not showing correctly in compass
  
• Fixed issues with ragdoll during carry
  
• Fixed lunge shake swimming montage
  
• Fixed resurfacing for dinos without resurfacing animation
  
• Fixed managing rotten eggs while holding debris
  
• Fixed juveniles playing adult montages
  
• Fixed Pounce buck stamina
  
• Fixed a couple wrong slot combinations and some UI info
  
• Fixed bucking without stamina
  
• Fixed issues with diet combinations regarding amount of each nutrients
  
• Fixed attempt to vomit montage not being interrupted sometimes
  
• Fixed loading saves on respawn when not necessary
  
• Fixed player´s corpses not showing in spec mode
  
• Fixed Dryosaurus dodge not using stamina
  
• Fixed idle stamina regen
  
• Fixed wrong data type error for finding full sessions
  
• Fixed swamp water normal tiling too small
  
• Fixed crabs swimming below the water surface
  
• Fixed duplicate entries when using name filter server list
  
• Fixed for group names showing on re-render if tags disabled
  
• Fixed jungle ambience playing day sounds at night
  
• Fixed moss direction on juvenile ceiba tree bark
  
• Fixed sky using wrong skylight color during partly cloudy weather
  
• Fixed leaves and roots spawning on cliffs
  
• Adjusted Ceiba Tree Collisions.
  
• Fixed an issue with swallowing blocking pickup or input lock eating
  
• Fixed some unoptimized assets
  
• Fixed Ocean water collision
  
• Fixed river PP volume being detected for swimming instead of just the surface mesh
  
• Fixed cloud settings
  
• Fixed Carnotaurus, Tenontosaurus and Stegosaurus not playing walk footstep sounds
  
• Fixed Carnotaurus charge vocal triggering when falling
  
• Fixed character turning after stopping when swimming
  
• Fixed pickup issue when trying to pick a meat chunk from the floor
  
• Fixed bug that sometimes caused Pickup to trigger Drag just once
  
• Fixed Deinosuchus blind sounds
  
• Fixed human crouch using wrong footsteps
  
• Fixed Jump land notifies sometimes not firing.
  
• Fixed and adjustments to vocals and reverb levels
  
• Fixed going underwater on sloped water
  
• Fixed Deinosuchus neck montages
  
• Corrected ScentRange and NV range growth scale.
  
• Fixed Deinosuchus submerging in rivers while moving
  
• Fixed bobbing on water by holding space
  
• Fixed water surface jittering
  
• Fixed Pteranodon neck blending bone
  
• Fixed animation notify effects checking for walk speed when swimming
  
• Fixed not sinking in rivers
  
• Fixed issue with water detection
  
• Fixed flies spawning before time, if dragged
  
• Fixed tracking not working
  
• Fixed swallow causing engine freeze, input lock and other random effects
  
• Fixed directional attacks consuming stamina with broken legs
  
• Fixed Preferred foods info in dino panel
  
• Fixed prone jittering
  
• Fixed issues with underwater montage blending
  
• Fixed Deinosuchus water and swim broadcast blocked after first use
  
• Fixed issues with partial montage blending
  
• Fixed Lunge animation jittering
  
• Fixed Eat_Out animations not playing
  
• Fixed for persistent sensitivity
  
• Fixed camera pitch limits affecting admin pawn
  
• Fixed corpse desync
  
• Fixed crab ragdoll issue
  
• Fixed human jittering when sprinting
  
• Fixed controller crash on input move forward
  
• Fixed rare crash when teleporting
  
• Fixed a trace camera colliding with meat chunks and other dynamic objects
  
• Fixed headbutt not dropping fruits
  
• Fixed Deinosuchus lunge playing FX underwater
  
• Fixed issue of fishes dying without oxygen
  
• Added prevention for looking down human character's neck
  
• Fixed human looking towards velocity when kicking
  
• Fixed character capsule not being scaled for simulated clients when going prone
  
• Fixed Deinosuchus trot footsteps not audible
  
• Fixed human walk steps inaudible and Fixed human using tiny footsteps
  
• Fixed fracture health regen
  
• Fixed a couple issues when Headbutt and Pounce interact with one another
  
• Fixed coconut auto fall issue when rammed, which reset the mesh
  
• Fixed Footprint and Blood splat negative size turning them invisible
  
• Fixed Deinosuchus vocal interruption fail
  
• Fixed other Deinosuchus animations being stuck in horizontal
  
• Fixed Carnotaurus getting up too soon after knockdown, not letting the montage finish in time
  
• Fixed animation issue when pouncing a crouched human
  
• Fixed attempt to river multi PP layers
  
• Fixed animals footsteps not setup correctly
  
• Fixed human camera location
  
• Fixed Rabbit not being susceptible to pounce, inability to swim or not floating on death
  
• Fixed Boar T_pose once latched by any pounce type ability
  
• Fixed corpses not floating in water
  
• Fixed Flies wrong position after carry
  
• Fixed Compsognathus not being interactable
  
• Small Fix for "Diet Deteriorating" in dino profiler
  
• Fixed prone camera jitter when turning
  
• Fixed humans not vomiting
  
• Fixed human animation jitter in some cases
  
• Fixed jumping when prone
  
• Fixed Mushroom not applying debuffs
  
• Fixed human terrain alignment when crawling onto mud
  
• Fixed small value symbol in dino profiler
  
• Change to reference client side for pickup to avoid issues during swimming
  
• Fixed fish rotations and finalized movement/fleeing
  
• Fixed corpse detection issue when bone if dropped from carry/drag
  
• Fixed attempt to skin system showing up for humans
  
• Fixed Salt Lick applying effect before animation ends
  
• Fixed to Stomach highest nutrient not working
  
• Fixed to diet issue regarding juveniles been set until full adult
  
• Fixed human eat/swallow issues
  
• Fixed 180 direction attack animations sometimes not matching the turn direction
  
• Fixed human camera going under the floor in some animations
  
• Fixed corpse smell sphere radius not updating for clients
  
• Fixed latch on failing if it incorrectly detects sloped walls as ground
  
• Fixed human colliding with ragdolls
  
• Fixed Humans not able to drag bodies
  
• Fixed issue of carrying causing stuttering on human pawn
  
• Fixed to Mango and Orange tree weird behaviors when respawning fruits
  
• Fixed Pteranodon sometimes not playing crash landed animation
  
• Disabled hatchlings auto pick up besides Deinosuchus
  
• Fixed FSR mode not setting the UI value on load
  
• Added male fertility check for egg laying prompt
  
• Fixed DLAA default UI value not setting on load
  
• Fixed not able to pick organs from corpse if they spawned from attack
  
• Fixed animations for changing standing/crouching/prone state while turning
  
• Fixed not able to drag Compsognathus corpse
  
• Fixed to DLAA getting disabled on apply during gameplay on the map
  
• Fixed courting issues if someone unpairs too soon
  
• Fixed heal command not stopping delayed vomit
  
• Fixed human sleeping animation
  
• Fixed for the skeletons flying
  
• Fixed to not starting with a full slot as juvenile
  
• Fixed attempt to Lunge elite fishes issue client side
  
• Fixed fog line on Spiro
  
• Fixed Stegosaurus tail attack not working in mud
  
• Fixed dinosaurs not being assigned team IDs if they have no default controller
  
• Fixed food amount and bite attack causing inconsistences on gore material
  
• Fixed swallow not giving nutrients
  
• Fixed Carnotaurus knockdown idle sound issue
  
• Fixed Deinosuchus terrain alignment to water floor
  
• Fixed meat pieces coming out from skeletons when eating them
  
• Fixed scent icons not updating for Rotten and Bones
  
• Fixed fruits showing wrong scent icon
  
• Fixed Pumpkin and Melon not showing scent icon
  
• Fixed eyes color not loading properly
  
• Avoid blood VFX when skeleton is dragged/carried
  
• Avoid skin checks/save for humans
  
• Fixed Night vision range updating for other nearby clients too
  
• Fixed corpse bite sound using the corpse instead of the owner DT
  
• Fixed human shirt clipping
  
• Fixed human ragdoll and not able to be dragged/carried
  
• Fixed lunge failing on server when sometimes target isn´t valid
  
• Fixed montages not resetting to full body properly
  
• Fixed human animations not playing when looking up
  
• Fixed requesting spawns in nests with dead parents
  
• Fixed issue of eating plant piece and not able to graze after
  
• Fixed to issue of corpse disappearing before becoming bone
  
• Fixed pumpkins despawning or falling though map on startup
  
• Fixed humans seeing other characters names
  
• Fixed human mesh being distorted
  
• Fixed human clipping issue when drinking
  
• Fixed decals showing on human meshes
  
• Fixed model only visible in high settings in skin preview
  
• Fixed human drinking animation thumb pose
  
• Fixed character group admin being reset on new invite
  
• Fixed Ambient Animals not moving correctly
  
• Fixed some growth boots values set on diet combinations
  
• Fixed diet % values after vomiting
  
• Fixed occlusion channel on non-call vocals attenuation
  
• Fixed Omniraptor jump vocal sometimes not triggering
  
• Fixed meat or piece getting stuck if the player died while swallowing
  
• Fixed "invisible" meat/plant/organs
  
• Fixed skimming not working, affected Deinosuchus too
  
• Fixed juvenile Deinosuchus water bite vfx issue
  
• Fixed jungle bush imposters not aligning with mesh properly
  
• Fixed flashlight harsh edges
  
• Fixed slow jumping fish and set all niagara schools to same effect
  
• Fixed rare condition where a nutrient slot is locked
  
• Fixed a pounce check to avoid skipping the animation when activating it on the floor
  
• Fixed NV range and Scent range scalling too much
  
• Fixed settings widget issues with different resolutions
  
• Fixed boar animations
  
• Fixed boar ignoring some targets
  
• Fixed boar attacking AI
  
• Fixed boars attacking dead things

This month I spent the majority of my time improving new and current systems. As part of that focus, code in general received some significant improvements and cleanup. Diets, Insects & Migration received some minor additions while we are still polishing them in QA. Our focus right now is ensuring they are fun and balanced, which is often more difficult than developing the mechanic itself.

You’ll be glad to know that corpse detection is now far more reliable and we added rigged skeletons (generics for now), which will allow them to be carried or dragged. In combination with shaders, VFX and organs this can be really macabre.

Hardened fruits like coconuts now have a chance to fall from trees and open upon impact with the ground, allowing animals ill-equipped to break them to have an opportunity for sustenance.

Added the Death screen from Legacy, with some improvements made to the Loading Screen and performance of the HUD UI in general.

Added new camera behaviors that interact with certain abilities like eating/drinking/pickup and just movement in general. These are not the final changes and the camera will continue to be expanded upon as development progresses. Other minor changes were made to Vocals, Humans, Interactable Foliage, the Troodon Venom Pounce and more.

Finally, I updated the NVIDIA DLSS plugin and implemented an alternative for non RTX users, AMD FSR2. Which will hopefully allow a wider range of players to enjoy a boost to their performance. It will also come alongside a variety of new graphic and game settings aimed at granting players increased quality of life.

See you next time everyone!


This month I've been working on finishing the new scavengers and flier/swimming AI. The scavengers are complete and have moved to testing. Fish AI has had a big overhaul of movement and fleeing; they are now much more active and reliable with full rotation and interactive movement. Performance improvements have also been a part of these recent changes so we can allow more AI on the map.

Also the new animal AI framework is coming along nicely with more performant logic and reliability this will scale across to the new dinosaur AI. I have also been working on a complete AI behavior debugger to allow easier testing and for collecting performance data. Some small changes to the anti cheat also with an updated module and upgraded permissions.


This month I mostly worked on human related things. The biggest addition would probably be prone support. It works similarly to crouching and I was able to reuse some existing code fortunately which made the implementation significantly faster. There are some significant differences though, such as the character’s collision being shorter, limited sideways camera turning or the movement being restricted to crawling forward and backwards for now.

Our humans use what is called a “true first person” system. Most first person games attach the arms and equipment to the camera directly and add the legs separately if at all. We wanted to try a different approach and take the same character you would see from third person and place the camera where the eyes are. This presents many challenges that I looked at.

First of all, sometimes the character’s head can clip inside walls or the floor during certain animations. I ended up creating a system that dynamically adjusts the location of the mesh to prevent that from happening. It’s a pretty effective solution that fixes the problem without being noticeable. The second issue I tackled was being able to look down your own neck, since that doesn’t feel very natural if we’re being honest. It mostly came down to doing the math to limit the camera movement appropriately.

I also set up prone related animations and made some tweaks to existing ones. Most of our current animations are placeholders until we’re ready to make proper ones, but I made some improvements to them so that we have something better for the time being.

Bryan - Animator

Pretty much my only project this month has been gore. Lots of gore. All our Dinosaurs now have a spinal column, ribs and that bit of meat you can never really pick off the bone. For the most part I’ve stuck with skeletal diagrams to keep the skeletons reasonably true to the real animals with the notable exception of the Omniraptor where I referenced a Deinonychus skeletal and then just kind of winged it based on that.

Stegosaurus is probably my favorite so far, it looks so cool without the plates. Very satisfying collection of bones to work on. As you can probably imagine, Tenontosaurus’ tail took a while seeing as that animal is at least 90% tail. It’s been a fun process really, putting a skeleton together is a little like playing with Lego.



For now we don’t have other bones, just vertebrae, cervical ribs, thoracic ribs and tail chevrons but there are a bunch of other juicy, squishy bits you’ll find in the middle of a Dinosaur as well.

Lastly, we have gore morphs too. If you chew on a corpse, you’ll notice it actually gets eaten now, revealing all those bones in the body. Don’t forget to pluck out the eyes first before someone else gets them.


This month was a wild prop one yet again, I’ve first added the Portable Generator, which will be used heavily by the humans while restoring bases.



It needs fuel of course, (duh) but its an essential to any new human settlement.



Secondly I’d like to introduce the Spotlight, with a vintage flare, that will light up the way and areas on the island in the future:





With alongside it I’ve wrapped up and finished the large Searchlight (hint, it will be movable):



And lastly, I’d like to introduce a human item, The Crowbar:




Besides the finished props, I’ve started to work on our Cages, which will be featured in five different sizes. Its a work in progress, so it is of course subject to change.



See you next month!



It’s time for our nimble, single crested “friend” the Monolophosaurus.

With a nose like that it made sense that it’d be a master of it’s sense of smell, but how to best use that as a mechanic? Being able to zero in on targets more easily or being able to catch scent of something from further away were starting ideas, but then another experimental idea was pitched that I quite liked. Why not a projectile of sorts, or rather a scent trap.

This substance is something that Mono could use to either mark a target to keep track of it during a hunt or lay a trap for careless creatures that step through this substance and make themselves easy-to-chase prey for Monolophosaurus.

Water and mud would be your best friend to wash off the stench with this guy running around.



I started this month with a continuation of the progress on Beipiaosaurus vocal sounds, some more supplementary sounds such as vomit and death vocals. Additionally I worked on some sounds for the juvenile stage including its underwater vocals and some of its attacks.

My focus shifted through the month to working on some basic sounds for humans. I have created a bespoke footstep shoe layer to be used as a sweetener on current footsteps as a placeholder which works well for now. I have also designed some basic sounds for combat including punch and kick movement and some satisfying impacts in addition to a generic close combat weapon swing sound. To complete this basic set of sounds I am working on some generic breathing to be used at various stages, including resting, a moderate breathing for exerting and movement and a fatigued stage of breathing for injury and stamina depletion.

With the impending gore update I have done a complete overhaul to gore sounds currently used for each size category, this includes biting, chewing, gorging, tearing and ripping. All these sounds already existed and could be heard through actions such as eating or grabbing meat but have been replaced with new sounds intended to be more visceral and weightier.

I’ve also been giving Troodon a bit more attention, improving some of its existing sounds such as its bite vocal and sniffing sounds. In addition I’ve been designing some new vocals to complement the venom mechanic with a unique vocal, each increasing in intensity, to signal each stage of the envenomation process.

As always along with active progress I’ve put some time into minor QOL adjustments and bug fixes, some of the more significant being updated deep mud footsteps to be used in mud pits, ensuring all ambient AI animals produce footstep sounds and improving wing flap sounds for Pterodactylus.

Hey everyone, I spent most of this month continuing the development of the Migration & Diet systems, participating in several long design meetings throughout the month, with even more to come as we hash out and test the final details.

Besides the Migration System and New Diet system with slot combinations, I also implemented a variety of new food items for Update #6. Such as: Fiddlehead, Dulse, Russula, Papaya, Jackfruit, Cashews, Banana & Brazil Nuts, they will spawn in specific areas of the map depending on their main biome. A new class of interactable actors will be introduced in Update 6, insects. Two types; Flies that spawn close to corpses and bees that provide juveniles with a nutritious treat... Though adults will receive quite the nasty sting!

Carnivores will be receiving a special mechanic for Update 6, it is called the Thrash Mechanic, or Corpse Shake. I can’t spoil the details just yet, but I think the names alone will provide you with all the information you need to get a good idea of what this entails. Besides that, the Troodon received some more love this month as I made improvements to its Venom Pounce to significantly increase its visual smoothness. We’re also experimenting with a locked camera adjustment for when you’re eating/drinking, aimed at making the game more dynamic & immersive, so you’ll no-longer have eyes in the back of your head while stuffing your face with food or drink.


This month I made some changes to how logging in works. We often had different behavior whether the user did a quick or a safe log, with quick log generally having more issues. So I changed how that works and now it uses the same system as safe log, making it significantly more reliable.

Climbing is something I keep coming back to. It’s an interesting process because every time I make progress I feel very satisfied, but then I come back later and notice new things that need improvement. So I ended up polishing it further and also set up a few animations for testing. The visuals are in an early stage since our animators are busy with other tasks, but here’s a quick look at where things are:


Then I went back to the human character. The first time we made him publicly accessible I didn’t really have the time to make the code as clean as I like. So now I moved everything from Blueprint (Unreal’s visual scripting solution) to C++ (actual code). I also improved a few things in the background to make some of the human-specific movements work better. This isn’t really something that a player would notice, but it was important for making future extension easier.


As we followed the prop month, we went into another one. This month my focus was on not only props but bridging a collision update to a group of objects, for a specific reason. Hehe.

You’ve seen the container last week, well this week we bring forth the Military PDA, which will be used by humans, as a specific way of interacting and using it in the world. We will delve further into its use down the line.




Second less noticeable object is a “simple” stool, which has a few minor variants:



Third one is the HAM Radio, which in the future, “may” have specific intractability, and you’ve seen it perhaps in the Phase-Three section of our Official Discord.




Lastly for this month, I’ve wrapped up and finished an important part of the human future building system, the Portable Generator.





And that is it from me this month. Enjoy!


This month I started out by finalizing ambiences I was working on last month, refining them to achieve the atmosphere we are aiming for on a clear day, both coastal and plains ambience as well as one instance of cave ambience have been added to the new map. Some new layers and one shots have also been introduced to the Jungle and swamp ambiences to expand on what already was heard in these areas.

I’ve also made some changes to ensure all animals have a vocal call for their idle and/or movement animations and created attenuations for them so they can be heard at range to help players locate them through sound.

Another addition to the soundscape will be heard through the buzzing of fly swarms that spawn on rotting corpses. Alongside this I have designed a few sounds for bee swarms.

The remainder of my time this month has been aimed at adding sound to Beipiaosaurus. I started with ensuring both its on land calls and underwater calls, once implemented, are only heard within the correct contexts and at the right pitch and volume. I then went on to add the majority of its foley sounds and created some new sound effects including webbed feet footsteps, claw swipes and jaw snaps. Finally I’ve started working through the supplementary vocals for Beipi. The sounds for all attacks and pain animations are complete or near completion and I will be moving on to the rest over the next month.

I’ve also had a focus on a large amount of minor enhancements and bug fixes – replacing or editing sounds that break immersion and ensuring they are heard and functioning the way we intend (e.g balance and quality of footsteps sounds, replacing leg break sounds, etc.)



Returning to the stage is one of our loudest creatures on the isle, Parasaurolophus.

This one has been tricky as it’s more of a looker than a fighter; not that it can’t slap away smaller animals, but when the big predators roll in, it’ll need to pull out a different bag of tricks to make up for its lack of weaponry. Its agility is its first asset. being surprisingly nimble for its size on all fours, it can make those ambushing attempts that much harder to land. Against more endurance style hunters though, its voice would give it a second chance. As an ear bleeding yell might stagger the predator long enough to give Para a good head start in running away.

All in all they are sociable singers and get the most benefit from being around others. 2’s a party and 3 is a crowd is not a sentiment the Parasaurolophus shares.


This month we presented you with our latest video format, The Isle Guides. As the game grows, it gets more and more complex, one of the ways we would like to explain new mechanics is through guide videos so that newcomers have an easier time getting started. Keep in mind that in future we will also have tutorial resources in-game as well.

The goal of the guide videos is to answer as many questions as possible related to the new mechanics. I hope this goal has been achieved in the Nesting Guide. Your feedback is very important here, because these are certainly not the last videos of it's kind.

Also this year we want to share another special Halloween video. In line with the upcoming Gore update, I was already able to use a few of the new Gore assets in the video. For this, Bryan also created exclusive "zombie" animations for the video, I hope you like them as much as I do.

Happy Halloween everyone!

It’s been a busy month of finalizing code and running tests with QA. The migration system is functional, only encountering a few bugs that we’ve now fixed, but far more tests are required to know for sure if it is going to work well and act as an engaging gameplay loop.

The new diet improvements are also finished, as of right now we are currently testing the slot combinations in order to find bugs but also to try and steer away from any sort of must have/meta builds. We've also expanded the penalties for dinosaurs that neglect their diets, they begin to incur malnutrition (a bad diet) that causes your dinosaur to become far weaker than it was before, the debuffs are significantly more aggressive than the previous iteration (AFK'ers beware!), while the new positive buffs are improved and allow for a wide variety of combinations you can use to custom tailor your diet to specifically grant benefits that support your preferred playstyle. For example, heavily favour a specific stat? Stuff your face and fill all three slots with the same type of nutrient to gain a beefy buff towards a single stat. Or you could opt to mix & match, vary your diet with more than one type of nutrient to grant a multitude of additional benefits, including a significantly higher growth rate.

In other news, some improvements have been made to pounce visuals and the overall speed of the pickup system. We regularly received feedback on how slow it was to pick something up, as attempting to snag a morsel from a corpse often resulted in the player’s demise as the system locked them in place for eons, so hopefully the increased speed will alleviate the scavengers' woes. We’ve also implemented other community suggestions, such as the stomach icon flashing as a warning that you’re near to vomiting. And lastly, besides overall bug fixing I’m also working on making corpse detection far more reliable. See you next month everyone.


The Dryosaurus received some love this month in the form of a reworked dodge ability. The new version will provide more speed and agility, allowing you to move in any direction very quickly. It’s faster than sprinting too, so you will even be able to use it when moving forward to gain bursts of speed. We hope this will improve survivability and make the dinosaur more fun to play.

The new gore system comes with some changes to scent as well. Corpses now have a wider detection range than before and it also scales with how decomposed the body is. As time goes on dinosaurs will be able to smell the body from further and further away, making it more risky to stick around for long. Speaking of detection from far away, I also added support for increased corpse scenting range by species. This will be heavily utilized by the Ceratosaurus, which will be able to sniff corpses out from very long distances.

I also made some improvements to hit detection, you will no longer be able to attack others through walls or similar obstacles. So far we’ve mostly just had trees where it was not a huge issue, but now that more human structures are coming to the game it would have been more problematic.

I also prepared some of the legacy dinosaurs with the necessary code and files for the Evrima workflow, obviously they will need many new animations along with unique mechanics, but now we have a foundation to work with once we get there. Beipiaosaurus is coming along nicely, now with a variety of attacks and more animations in place. No promises about when you’ll be seeing it in-game, but I’ve been really enjoying working on it, so I hope that soon you’ll get to enjoy it just as much.


I started the month diving into performance and testing out various optimizations with a lot of changes to AI coming over the next few months including an entire new logic methodology. The decision for this change was based on reliability and performance of the Engines base AI trees which have strange behaviours after extended periods of operation or server up time. Lots of R&D went into how this might work and internal testing over the last month has proved the system, so now begins the journey of extending it into production.

The start of this system has been introduced with scavengers like the Compsognathus and Pterodactylus which now have the ability to raid nests for eggs and hatchlings which should make nesting more interactive and require more attention to watch over.

Fish AI has also had some significant changes to how they move around to fix latent responsiveness and non natural movement.


This month has been pretty much prop month, alongside nature collision. Starting with the cables and ropes set, which consist of variants of cables, from wiring, to plastic cables, to all sorts of indoor and outdoor cables.




After that I jumped onto the lighting, and in this case, track lighting for roads and various markings:



Afterwards we went on to the roll-off dumpster, which is a massive one, and it has WHEELS!




And lastly, we come to the semi-modular security console, consisting of various screens, and tabletops:





That is it for this month, a lot of bug fixing for some props and collision for the nature stuff and buildings.


This month’s focus for me, aside from a handful of small tasks, has been almost entirely on environmental sound design. I’ve been working on a variety of biome ambiences, including the two already in the public build as well as some new ones.

With Filipe’s help a bug that was preventing one of the one shot sound categories firing has been fixed which should make a noticeable difference to the amount of spatialized ambient sounds in environments you are already familiar with. On top of that I've also been balancing and refining them in terms of volume, on both an individual and macro level, as well as the frequency/volume ranges that one shots occur in, and dynamic volume modulation of the various layers within the ambient bedding.

I’ve also been finalizing ambiences for three more biomes that have been in progress but on hold for a while - plains, beach and cave. All three are now complete, spare some final mix adjustments. However the beach environment poses a unique difference that will need to be solved first before being introduced to a map as two of its one shot sound sets are sounds that should only emit past the shoreline out from the ocean.

Lastly I've been designing an ambient soundscape for a Redwoods biome, focusing on creating a sparse, spacious yet diverse ambience. The intent is to recreate an illusion of stillness through the ambience by zooming in on smaller sounds like insects and foliage, and particularly the distinct creaking of Redwood trees. However the environment does contain a large range of sounds for birds, animals and dinosaurs, but I've ensured there is enough distance and space between them to not overcrowd the ambience and fight against the intent for the soundscape of this biome’s ambience. All sound assets have been set up and my attention is solely on the balance of both this environment individually and the balance across all biomes.



It’s a tough life for Alberto growing up, but if one does make it to adulthood, they can become quite the deadly force.

We wanted to play with the idea of a high-risk high-reward animal, with the full grown Alberto having enviable tracking capabilities and power at the cost of stamina. It can’t run for days but when it does set up an ambush and catch you, the fight is over fast. Albertosaurus is a creature you’ll most likely see hunting in pairs and sometimes tailed by their offspring. While they can have many young, very few are expected to survive. If some do manage to not fall prey to similar sized carnivores during their youth, their continued growth and demand for food will get them chased off by their more ravenous parents or even eaten themselves if they insist on hanging around while food runs out.


You could almost call this one a vampire, because if Giganotosaurus is around, you know it’s going to be a bloodbath.

It’s a proficient bloodletter, so with this in mind, the Giga’s hunting style focuses on bleeding out large targets and flesh-grazing. like many wild canids who will start ripping apart larger prey before they’ve actually killed it. Bleed resistance and perhaps a dietary preference to flesh over organs are additional ideas we may play with depending on how we want Giganotosaurus to interact with each other.
And lastly, I wanted to play with the idea of it being proficient in sniffing out a bleeding target, allowing it to better find and bogart an ongoing hunt when blood is spilled.


Another month down and it’s testing, testing and some more testing. This month has been a methodical one with the team making tweaks and adjustments to the upcoming features pretty constantly.

Gore is moving along nicely with the final assets about to replace the proxy assets you have seen previously soon. Carnivores will be able to feel like they are actually feasting upon their prey in a much more dynamic way than ever before. Also paving the way for the flesh, organs and bones to all have unique diet implications based on the type of creature you happen to be playing. Some getting more out of a particular type of meat than others. In addition to the gore bits you’ve seen, there are new blood vfx that are currently being implemented that will start making attacks and eating of flesh a more visceral experience for the players. It’s getting messy!

As for creatures, the Troodon is in testing to ensure its venom is strong when properly applied but able to be circumvented by stronger animals with proficient battle prowess. If standing there and letting things happen is your playstyle, these animals will likely drop you and giggle while they do it. However, Troodons may have deadly venom and speed but they are glass cannons and will not be able to withstand much damage. So perhaps the best defense is a good offense if you’re strong or skilled enough to contend with them. The Beipiaosaurus has also been getting a lot of attention for those that have the bandwidth to split focus. Recently getting some new attacks and polish for some of its movement. We were even joking about the possibility of a barrel roll. But don’t take that too seriously. Some of the other animals that have been getting some love include the Dryosaurus, Gallimimus, Ceratosaurus, Dilophosaurus and Diabloceratops. The new additions getting their groundwork laid so their implementation can be more swift than playables created from scratch. Legacy ports give us some much needed breathing room as so much of their art has already been created and they just need supplemental animations and maybe some polishing tweaks here and there. You may have also seen that the Compsognathus and Pterodactylus are getting some new functionality. They will be able to raid the nests of players and may even make a meal of unattended hatchlings. So keep a watchful eye on your offspring and maybe teach them how to fight before you go off to forage.

There’s also a lot of testing of new natural assets and locations. The cycads you may have seen for instance form a sanctuary crèche for small animals and juveniles to get a brief respite from larger animals. The cycads wind and twist creating a network of terrain that will prove difficult to navigate for large animals, impassable for others but easy to zip through for smaller creatures and juveniles. Be aware that while these areas will assist in keeping larger animals out, smaller predators are still very capable of entering so it is unwise to let your guard down. These sanctuaries will also have a buzzing environmental hazard that ensures anything too big that gets in, may not get out alive and that any juvenile creatures attempting to make it their permanent home beyond a certain size can meet the same fate.

There’s much more going on but I think I’ll put a pin in it here. Take care and I’ll see you in the next one!

Hey Islanders,
​
A new patch is now available on the EVRIMA Public Branch, bringing forth a completely new Night Vision system, developed in response to the community feedback regarding our previous iteration of Night Vision. We hope that you enjoy the changes!

Please note that you may need to restart your Steam client if the download does not make itself immediately available.
​
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0.9.91.06
- New Night Vision
- NV is disabled underwater
- Made Day as default
- Decreased Day time from 60 to 45mins
- Decreased Night time from 45 to 30 mins
- Increased spawn amount of some small AI animals
- Fix to corpse detection not being reliable as it should
- Duckweed removed from surface rendering

Hey everyone, some of this month was spent working on the night vision update, which included a few bug-fixes and some necessary improvements to our anti-cheat capabilities. We're also evaluating feedback & investigating a number of reports regarding issues with the current night vision system, you'll find more information on that further down the blog in KissenKitten's post.

Regarding Update 6 the progress is going really well and I will split into categories below:

Gore/Organs: The base code is finished which allows organs to spawn when needed and be fully interactive with physics, soon we’ll be starting tests using animals bigger than the Utahraptor, but I don't foresee needing to make big changes in the code, besides possible enhancements and bug fixes. Still in regards to organs a new mechanic is being created for all carnivores, it is a gore specific mechanic that can be used for things like role-playing and improving diets, more details about it soon. New gore and rotten textures are going to be added to the corpses, and bone meshes as well. The bone assets are the last stage of a corpse, they will be interactable.

Diets/Nutrients/Slots: The enhanced system for diets was set up to grant more control to the players for what dietary buffs or “advantages” they can receive in our survival environment. With this new system, slots are not locked to specific nutrients anymore, they are now fed with the latest consumed nutrient and can be combined as desired by the players, for better understanding, you could fill two slots with carbs and one slot with lipid, which would provide the player with a specific buff, or a different combination of all slots fed with protein, providing another completely different buff. Players can use this to better customize their character to their playstyle.

Migration System: Since the new diet slot combinations system was finished some time ago, we now can start testing migration with the herbivores and slowly start integrating the carnivores into it. Several meetings are scheduled for the design team to decide all the details for the migration system, as well as the effects from different slot combinations. This system will motivate players to move around the map to get the benefits from their diets. You’ll get more details on this system in a future DevBlog.

Vocals: I also spent some time improving the entire vocal system, which now is more reliable, performant and fixed an issue related to reverb the sound when traveling great distances.

Skin System: By popular request, we’ve added Eye customization, so players now can choose the color of Iris to customize the character even further, integrated to the “random” button and import/export functions. I also fixed a couple bugs in the slot saves.

Physics Doors/Gates: Those systems were finished and provided to the Map Design team to start adding them to the maps. Those doors/gates are interactive physics based actors, the bigger the animal the easier it is to push them and open/close. Some doors will be “locked” by default, needing a human player to first unlock it before it becomes usable by animals. While the basic physics functionality is done, more work and adjustments may be necessary in the future.

Automatic Lights: Map Design now also has access to special actors that are automated in the island based on time of day, those lights turn on or off depending the time of day. This is a basic system that may be expanded in the future with other automatic systems added to it. This has a small relationship to Lore.

Interactive Foliage: This system has been expanded, now more foliage types were added to it, physics assets setup and tiny performance improvements added. It allows players to physically interact with foliage in the map, regardless of the distance or amount. Besides the visual joy of it, this can also be used to detect prey or threats among the foliage. This will continue to be expanded over time as much as possible.

Besides all that, we had a significant amount of bug fixes this month for QA to test, and more to come as there were also some quick tests with burrowing.


I continued working on the Beipiaosaurus with something you might have already seen floating around, the breach. If you surface fast enough you will be able to breach the surface of the water. This allows you to maneuver around predators better and potentially reach shores you couldn’t reach otherwise. Personally though I think it was worth adding even if it’s just for fun, there’s something very satisfying about launching up in the air and diving back down.


An interesting experience for me working on this creature is how it connects to when I was working on the Deinosuchus. We originally had a concept where the “water walking” was a more distinct state that keeps the animal only moving along the floor and you would have to leave that state by manually swimming up. In the end we went with the more seamless version you know well, since the Deinosuchus sinks passively and there isn’t that much of a difference between swimming or water walking. In the case of the Beipiaosaurus however, we returned to that same concept with some minor changes. So on the programming side I was able to just bring back the water walking prototype from back then, tidy it up a bit and just like that, one of the main mechanics was ready to go. The breach is a different, but quite funny story. While working on the Deinosuchus at one point I accidentally made it gain velocity when surfacing instead of losing it. This resulted in some very ridiculous behaviour and it’s completely different from how the new mechanic works, but I thought it was interesting how it also came back in a way.


Most of the month was actually spent working on something I had been waiting to work on for a long time, climbing. The idea originally came up along with the Pteranodon’s latch mechanic, but ultimately we didn’t have the time to include that. I always really enjoyed climbing in games where it’s possible, so I was pretty excited by the idea of taking a stab at it myself. There’s a lot of things that can go wrong with a system like this, you can have all kinds of complex surfaces and a character moving along in every possible direction. Making it work reliably and looking nice and smooth is quite a challenge. There’s still a good bit of work left to do, but it’s coming along nicely. As for what dinosaur actually gets to this, let’s just save that for later.


With the hotfix out of the way I have continued working on the new online subsystem and resolving various issues with that. Player count is one as you would have noticed it not correctly updating to show a full server along with some work on RCON and the Queue system. AI work is back in full swing with the new Pterodactylus and Compy getting additional functionality like nest raiding and attacking so watch out hatchlings!

There has been a significant change to the overall movement of AI and how that functions to save on performance and the general look and feel of how they move around in the world. I have continued reworking crowd AI and spawning for performance and dietary updates.


My month has been partially occupied by another wave of color selections for some upcoming dinosaurs. I'm sure you’ve seen some clips or pictures going around the Isle discord. But besides that, I’ve more nature sketches for you guys.


Our lion of The Isle.

What we wanted for this dinosaur was to showcase its ambush centered abilities and really let them use those claws. For instance, you might not be able to outrun a Gallimimus, but if you can get the jump on it, you might just have the burst of speed to grab it before it slips away. For some other uses with it’s claws besides grappling and pinning, we explored the idea of it being able to dig up burrows or perhaps carry it’s food in hand rather than in mouth so that it might still be able to call, bite or smell where other animals would have to put their food down and risk loosing it’s catch to a sneaky thief.

All in all, you’ll want to be careful around those dense tree lines when Allosaurus is around



It’s time for our king of the skies. An insidious meat-eating flying giraffe with a lance for a face and you’ve got our Quetz.

With Quetzalcoatlus we wanted to show its air-savviness, from combat to surprise landing stab and runs. While it might not be able to go toe to toe with other apexes its size, it’s a nightmare to the many smaller creatures of the isle. Its long neck and beak give it plenty of range that make it formidable on the ground or in the jungles. So keep a sharp eye out amongst those trees, one of them might be staring back at you.


All of my work this month has revolved around Beipiaosaurus, it’s been a tricky and ungainly animal to work with as most Therizinosaurs are. They are the embodiment of “I don’t know what to do with my hands.” thanks to their abnormally large forelimbs and semi-upright stance. Thankfully we’re nearly done with the animation stage of its development once a few kinks are worked out, with only the Juvenile animations left to do. I think I speak for both Kissen and myself when I say “it’s been swell but the swelling has gone down”, we’re eager to move on to the next subject after spending so long on the Beipiaosaurus.

It will definitely be a fun playable creature and we really went all out on its swimming animations. I'm quite pleased with how it turned out and I hope you will be too.

On that note I’ll likely start streaming again soon so I’ll have to dig out the Gerry cam again since I know you all only watched the stream for the good boy. I have quite a few good animals on my task list you’ll enjoy, both from the new roster and classics from the Legacy roster.




This month has been partly committed to the Damage Pass, consisting for now, with various decals and mesh type decals for damage and grunge to the buildings in general. It started off with various leaks, from rust ones to just environmental ones, dirt and grimes.




Next up I went further and took scans of existing damage decals, and color corrected them and made them game ready, with various tweaks to both color, height, and displacement which now features a bit more in the game itself. It's a “cheap” and old school POM displacement and all of the decals that are featured in the damage pass now have it.




I’ve started re-constructing the exteriors and a bit of interiors of known and done buildings to feature these types of damages and decals, which now makes them look more of this world, and that it has been weathered even further, with the addition of metal mask damages as well:





You can see a clear difference in the damage on the last image, where the decal has been put to most of the edge of the garage.

Lastly, I’ve made the CCTV 2 types of cameras, with a few variants, nothing too shabby. Here are some HD images of them rendered in Marmoset:






I’ve mostly been focusing on rounding out all sounds for Troodon, this has included the final adult sounds that were not finished by the end of last month, creating a juvenile variant for the majority of these sounds (the ones that didn’t need this worked fine just undergoing some pitch modulation in engine) and finally sounds for its hatchling stage which at this stage include just a vocal sound for hatching and begging. Now all sounds are implemented I will be doing some fairly extensive play testing on Troodon to ensure that all sounds work as intended and there are no key sounds i’ve missed.

I’ve also been working on creating chorus vocal sets, much like Pterodactylus’, for Compies. I have completed a large group sound for the food chorus, a mob of chirping and interesting trills, as well as a handful of short alarm sounds, leaving only a chorus sound triggered by the player crossing into a territory they are inhabiting left to do. With these two significant tasks (Troodon and AI choruses) nearly off my plate I’m looking forward to what’s next to come.

As always, alongside work on new content, I’ve addressed a few sound issues that are brought to my attention either through the community feedback channel, QA bug reports or raised by the team or from my own playtesting. The most common issues I’ve addressed are problems of consistency in the intensity and volume of both ambient water sounds and footsteps (specifically for medium creature sound sets) across the three different movement speeds. I’ve also started putting together foley sounds for dragging corpses (and also for Deino’s movement), I’ve been putting together a looping sound for each surface type in game, split into 3 loops for each surface one for each of the main size categories which is an audio enhancement to breath a bit more life and detail into these interactions.


I swear it feels like there’s no more than a week in between these blogs. Time flies when you’re battling a knife fingered battle penguin. This month has consisted of further work on the mechanics mentioned in the last blog like gore. With the VFX pipeline pumping out buckets of blood in preparation for gore’s debut. After some fine tuning, we’ll be getting some test shots prepared for public consumption. Expanded diets and migration are also in full swing. The TLDR being that you’ll have more options for how you want the life of your character to play out. If you got into a scuffle and want to heal your wounds a little faster, there’s a diet buff for that. Feel like you’d enjoy running around a bit longer before being gassed? There’s a diet buff for that too. With the new system, you should be able to get a lot more mileage out of your gameplay experience and discover the best routes for your species and your personality that continue long after you’ve reached adulthood.

Troodon is nearing completion but needs testing and some supporting effects before it can be considered ready. Alongside it, the Beipiaosaurus has been diligently making its way towards animation completion despite being a fever dream to work with. We think you all are really going to enjoy it. But know that we suffered to make it a reality. Animation work on the Ceratosaurus and Gallimimus has slowed down as we’ve increased production but those two haven’t been nearly as complicated to work with. The Dryosaurus is also having its dodge reworked to be much more intuitive and fluid. The burrowing has been prototyped a few times as well but it is not ready to be showcased just yet. It is still on the backburner but at least on simmer. Some of the other animals that have been making some production appearances that we haven’t mentioned much include the Oviraptor, Baryonyx, Kentrosaurus and Dilophosaurus. None of which have entered the animation stage just yet though. But some of their supporting art should be making an appearance in the not so distant future. Some may even be featured in some streams soon. Cross your fingers!

Humans are getting some in-game polish in preparation for their entry to the live branch alongside Update 6. Our human modeler has done such a great job on them all and I’m so excited for them to be showcased in a much better light than you’ve currently seen. Speaking of light, we have received a lot of your feedback in regards to the new night vision causing some of our more sensitive players motion sickness and headaches and are working on making some adjustments to make it easier on the eyes. We take the matter seriously and want to make sure we can make the night vision experience comfortable for as wide a range of people as possible. Should it take longer than expected to make those adjustments, we will revert night vision in the interim so we don’t bar any of you from playing while we craft a solution.

Lastly we do have some new content coming out related to the NPE (New Player Experience) that we feel will help make The Isle more accessible to players that are new to survival games and specifically one pioneering playable animals. We understand the learning curve in The Isle can be steep at times. In many ways, we intend to keep it that way but also want to ensure accessibility is not solely lost due to a lack of clarity rather than a lapse in player judgment and decision making. So expect that content to drop soon as well. See you in the next one!