In my completely biased opinion I must say that this has been one of the best months I’ve had working on the game. The time finally came for me to continue working on the herrerasaurus. There had been a few times when I experimented with it due to the pteranodon’s latching for example, but I can focus more on the movement and agility now.

The climbing system is made up of several parts. First, there’s moving the character along the wall and there’s always room for improvement on this one. There are two actions that can happen related to this, climbing up a ledge and climbing down from a ledge into climbing mode, the latter being difficult as the character has to turn around and align itself to the wall.

Aiming your jumps is very important when playing as a herrerasaurus, so we added indicators that tell the player where you would land when jumping. You can hold the right button when standing or climbing, then press space to jump there. Jumping this way when standing in place will let you jump forward instead of straight up, this is extremely useful when jumping from branch to branch.

Speaking of branches, when walking on our largest trees the herrerasaurus will automatically follow them to avoid falling from a potentially lethal height. This one took quite some time to figure out, but it makes moving around much more convenient, so I’m glad with how it turned out.


All these come together very nicely, here’s a little teaser in its current unpolished state. Most animations are also just placeholders for now:




This month I’ve mostly been continuing to flesh out the vocal palette for Dilophosaurus, using the calls as a baseline for both aggressive and non-aggressive sounds. The low gurgling defined in its broadcast and attract have both been adapted as well as used to influence new sounds, including more sounds for idle and generic uses, along with drinking, wallowing, resting, sniffing.

The harsher shrieks from its threaten and danger calls have been a good reference to expand its sounds, particularly its attacks and various pain sounds, including death, pounced etc. I’ve also created the first sound that will be part of a suite of sounds for its venom ability, 3 very low and menacing hoots bookended by its signature gurgles, coming together to give the feeling of a mocking yet chilling laugh as it plays with its prey. This sound (among others), in theory, will be manipulated from the perspective of the prey to move around the spatial field, disorienting players that have fallen victim to this creature's venom.

I’ve also done some preliminary work on the Herrerasaurus. Its vocal calls have been set up with some alterations to the exports to facilitate the correct sound when the layers are passed through the various attenuation and processing. I’ve also done a first pass on adding footsteps and foley sounds to its animations. Finally I’ve started recording, editing and processing foley sounds for its climbing. So far only sounds for climbing trees have been done and they are in an iterative phase with the mechanic still undergoing work, however adding these sounds helps to define how this ability is going to feel as it progresses.

I’ve also been working on some bug fixes for issues related to calls distant reverb/delay as well as how vocals behave when performed in water


I've started creating the control rigs for our characters. They will help me create more detailed animations in the UE5 sequencer and also help me make the animation transitions a bit cleaner. I will certainly tweak the implemented IK system and gizmos a few more times until they fit perfectly for my work.



I've also started to create a sort of console-style in After Effects to begin capturing the “Apollo Engineering software.” This style will surely be with us more often and can be used in many ways. We've already used it in the Roadmap video, but trailcam videos or introductory templates for "found footage" could also be presented with this design.

In general, the goal of this new format is to get closer to the atmosphere of the lore, and I'm excited to see what we can do with it in the future.




This month, I’ve been mostly occupied with environment concepts of internal lab designs and icon work - creating cerato and troodon prototypes of our games logo (as a mini celebration for some of our new releases).

Cerato’s design was pretty straight forward since its skull is fairly distinct on its own.
However, Troodon came off a tad generic with just the usual skull pose; but it did give me an opportunity to try a version with multiple skulls to showcase the swarm gameplay-style of the animal. Hopefully these shake out to be something final that you all can see soon!


This month I spent some time on bug fixes, AI, and the addition of server whitelisting. Workshopping the base dinosaur AI has been heaps of fun. The base logic of tenontosaurus is mostly complete. They can be solitary or have their own AI groups they stick to. Anything further may spoil the magic, but it’s already capable of providing some exciting fights with players. I hope to get carnotaurus and omniraptor up and running shortly, too.


Been spending a lot of time with John Cake lately. He might come across as a bit of a showoff but he’s actually a pretty chill dude even if he doesn’t talk much. Thinks he’s still gonna be a guide on some island safari tour, dunno where he got that idea though, something about a book he read. I haven’t had the heart to tell him what his actual job is gonna be.

Aside from rigging up John Cake so we can do some of our own in-house animation, I’ve been working on the T. rex and Diabloceratops this month and Trike is finally all rigged up and ready to receive new animation. The T. rex has new locomotion for all of it’s growth stages as well, it’s a pretty big departure from the legacy animations, even the growth is different, it’s practically a whole new beast.

Herrerasaurus finally got a skeleton as well, had to grow some backbone to do all that climbing and jumping it’ll be doing and next I’ll be working on its climbing animation, touching up the prototype and placeholder animations with some more final animations for its debut.


With our recent change to the roadmap and how we approach game updates, the majority of QA’s time was spent focused on validating bug fixes for the latest patch that introduced server whitelisting. We also used this time to address some of the balance concerns that were prevalent in Update 6.5, including vomit preventing movement and an input lockup that occurred if a target was knocked down while pouncing on a character.

Talking of balance; now that we have moved away from larger updates and instead pushing out content as and when it’s ready, we are working on a new process for how we handle balance changes so that they can be provided much more frequently in accordance with your feedback. We hear your concerns about the ceratosaurus “vomit lock”, whereby a group of ceratosaurus’ will continuously bite a target, forcing it to vomit nonstop, preventing it from defending itself. This is not an intentional feature of the ceratosaurus’ kit and will be addressed as soon as possible, though it will require a rework of vomiting in general so expect to see more information on that when we have a solid direction that we want to take it in.

A few more known issues include the loss of player characters and both omniraptor and troodon pounce not “connecting” with a target, usually resulting in death. These are marked as high priority on our bug tracker and are actively being investigated by our programmers. A big thank you to those of you that have been reporting these issues.

QA have already started testing some of the upcoming playables in our latest builds and they are coming along very well, particularly the herrerasaurus with its unique ability to climb surfaces, as you may have seen already in dmIV’s post.

As many of you well know, the stress testing team applications were reopened recently and resulted in an astounding 1,400 submissions. These are currently being reviewed and successful candidates can expect an invitation to our new stress testing discord server very soon. We appreciate your patience and understanding in this matter.


The wheels have been churning around here all month. Fixing various issues and gearing up for a tonal shift in the game. I’ve been moving from dept to dept making sure everyone has what they need to swing for the fences. Hopefully there will be some homeruns in it for us and you.

The herrerasaurus has been coming along quite nicely. It’s been gaining in fun factor around here for a bit now. It will be a lot of fun seeing how you all like it and how many of you are going to plummet to your deaths. Practice, patience and prayers. But overall you’ll be able to make a leap of faith with a fair amount of surety.

The diablo and dilo have also been getting their special abilities implemented and tested. So we can shift the prototypes to their final form. Diablo is moving pretty good currently but needs a few tweaks to really make it something special. Hopefully resulting in some moments that feel good to play with as well as against. Dilo also seems to be heading in the right direction. Our intentions being to make it every bit as fear inducing as it used to be but modernized.

If all that weren’t enough, the rex is growing in power each day. I’m so excited to see what an apex can really do. But anyway, that’s all for now. I look forward to seeing you all over on Gateway.

• Added server whitelists - Details below

• Various adjustments to improve accuracy of directional attacks
  
• Fixed locomotion input locking during vomiting
  
• Improvements to spectator mode update rates
  
• Added the missing hint for the 3x carb diet combination

• Fixed the input lockup when a character is knocked down during a pounce
  
• Fixed players being shielded from attacks if they are standing on a corpse
  
• Fixed being able to interact with already swallowed actors
  
• Fixed omnivore diets ignoring carnivorous diet requirements
  
• Fixed the carb diet spending more stamina instead of spending less
  
• Fixed gallimimus paranoia audio playing in all biomes instead of just the jungle
  
• Fixed corpses not floating to the top of water
  
• Fixed gallimimus mobilization vocals playing indefinitely when sprinting and causing other vocals to become blocked
  
• Fixed pounce sometimes causing the target to always buck if the buck input was pressed as the pouncer was dismounting

Server owners can enable whitelists by adding bServerWhitelist=true under the TIGameSession section of the Game.ini file.

In the same file, add each Steam64 ID using: WhitelistIDs=71231XXXXXXXXXXXX under the TIGameStateBase section.

Once enabled, only IDs in that list will be able to join the server. Server admins will be able to join regardless of if they are on the whitelist or not.

Example below:

[/script/theisle.tigamestatebase]
WhitelistIDs=71231XXXXXXXXXXXX
WhitelistIDs=71231XXXXXXXXXXXX
WhitelistIDs=71231XXXXXXXXXXXX

[/script/theisle.tigamesession]
ServerName=Server Name
MaxPlayerCount=50
bServerNesting=false
bAllowReplay=false
bServerWhitelist=true

Most of the month was focused on getting 6.5 out of the door. It entailed an array of bug fixes, balance adjustments and subtle refinements to nearly every game mechanic. We also invested significant effort in server-side optimizations to bolster performance. With the update now live, my attention has shifted back to the main branch, where I am actively working on enabling the migration system for rigorous QA testing. Furthermore, I’m also working on new playable dinosaurs such as the dilophosaurus, which involves implementing mechanics and animations associated with them.

In addition, I’m refining the pounce ability to achieve a smoother visual when latching onto targets. Modifications are also being made to the pachy’s headbutt attack to enhance its precision when inflicting fractures. Looking ahead, our primary focus is centered on developing the next set of updates, which will introduce our new map, Gateway. Perks are in progress already and should evolve fast as the team convenes to finalize their design.


A lot of my work was for update 6.5, so there’s not much I can say about it you haven’t already seen or experienced. I made various finishing touches to the new dinosaurs, such as improvements to beipi’s buoyancy and animations, making the gallimimus forage frogs and crabs more reliably, adding a defense buff to the ceratosaurus when it’s chuffing around corpses. I’m really happy to see the update making its way to people’s hands. I enjoyed working on the beipiaosaurus in particular, so it’s great that the players are having fun with it as well.

Other than that I have been working quite a bit on the diabloceratops recently. There are several different interactions happening as part of the sparring system, so I have my hands full. It’s in a fairly rough state at the moment, but things are starting to take shape, so I’m excited to see how the community will feel about it.

I often record videos for internal showcases and I have some for the beipiaosaurus, which I thought would be interesting to show. You’ve already seen what the final product looks like, so here’s a behind the scenes look at how we got there:









As the others have mentioned lots of work to get the 6.5 update out most of my work has been related to the engine update and improvements to the back-end services we use for our deployment pipeline. I have been working on easy anti-cheat and monitoring its performance over the last month. I won’t go into too much detail but I can tell you there has been significant improvement in this area and it’s working quite well. We don’t tolerate cheaters and we are doing everything we can to prevent them from ruining the game for everyone else.

I have been running some hotfixes this week to fix some issues with RCON, queuing and the server list. RCON has had some new commands added like being able to update the playable classes. Queueing is now live on all of our official servers and whilst it seems to be behaving for most people we are aware of an occasional issue where you might still get the “Server is full” message after joining. I have been working on a new server scheduler which manages our official servers and restarts. This system restarts the servers on a 12 hour cycle and will show a 5 minute restart warning.

Some more changes to AI and its base behavior has been well defined now. We will be rolling some more dangerous AI critters out with Gateway. I look forward to seeing that, it’s always a pleasure watching players fight Boars. Deer will start to spawn in small herds with fawns and will regroup together if they are separated during an attack. Rabbit burrows can be destroyed to bring out a hiding rabbit. We have noticed AI will tend to end up around the jungle areas making them difficult to find so I have been working on a new movement system for how the AI will traverse the map and flee from predators.

That’s about it for me this month. I hope you have all been enjoying the 6.5 update. It's been a blast for me. Till next time.


This month, aside from the work put towards polish of 6.5’s audio and with the majority of diabloceratops’ adult vocalizations complete, my focus has turned to dilophosaurus. A lot of time has been spent experimenting on this creature's sound design, aside from the signature low trill that the community all knows and loves, it did not really have much of a defined sonic identity beyond that.


To address this I first created something new and wholly unique and interesting for the remaining calls that I did not complete last month as these sounds would define how I approach the rest of dilo’s sounds. The danger and threat calls’ main elements consist of a variety of pitched down bird shrieks as well as piercing sounds created from source such as metal creaks, bowed styrofoam, Aztec death whistles etc. These shrill sounds are underpinned by gurgling roars and fluttery hisses, coming together to create terrifying screams that will cut through the night time ambience instilling fear into its prey. Like the broadcast and attract, the generic call has largely remained the same as its legacy version with the exception of being improved upon, accentuating the more alien qualities of this sound.

With its vocal identity clearer I was then able to use the ideas and source material laid out through the calls to aid me through the process of creating other sounds for it. It’s mellower sounds such as when drinking, courting and wallowing use the gurgling, squelching, chirping, trilling and clicking, while its more aggressive actions such as attacks and pain sounds use the shrill shrieking, piercing screams and gnarly growls to display this predators’ horrifying prowess. There’s still plenty left to do for the dilophosaurus but I’m happy with how this creature's sound is coming together.


It’s been a busy month for sure. Couple tweaks here and there on the ceratosaurus alt attack to make it more responsive, the last few animations on dilophosaurus and also finishing up herrerasaurus attacks and locomotion.

However, the time has come for tyrannosaurus and triceratops. I’ve been looking forward to working on trike again and giving it a real nice tune-up. First thing first though, it needs a rig update, those puppet strings haven’t been serviced since before Legacy if memory serves, so it’s getting a thorough update before we dive into animation. Rex got the same treatment already and it is a real terrifying chungus.

No, I won’t be streaming the rex, but I’ve already completed the new locomotion for its different growth stages. I’m super happy with how it’s turning out and I think you’ll find it to be far more interesting than its Legacy counterpart. Next time you see the rex it’s probably gonna be chomping you down, so don’t get too eager.


Gun Month. And bug fixing. That is the overall summary of this amazing month. I’ve been tasked with getting our beloved humans some weapons, starting with our own version which mostly is based on the M24, a lever action bolt rifle, with a vast amount of attachments.

As I’ve been tasked with making weapons, we’ve set some standards regarding both rails, and the attachment system overall. The rail size will be uniform, meaning in the long run, that any attachment that makes sense will be interchangeable with weapons.

Back to the rifle, it's been designed to hold those attachments, and grant you a 8x scope that will help your “hunting.”





We also have a pistol that is a combination of a few designs overlaid on the framework of a P226 derivative. Now this is still in the works and is subject to changes, but here is the progress so far:






And that is pretty much it besides an array of bug fixes, and getting some stuff in order.



What if baryonyx was bigger and had a pelican jaw? Well you get The Isle’s version of suchomimus.

With it being one of those animals that shares so many design features with other dinosaurs of ours, it was tricky coming up with unique scenes for sucho. At the end of the day I decided to focus on two main features: A wading lifestyle and its pelican pouch of a mouth.

Navigating more freely through shallow water and muddy terrain, Sucho could utilize mud as a defense against egg stealing creatures, rendering the would-be thieves into an easy to catch snack. Now when it comes to sucho’s jaws, while they might not pack the biggest punch, they can really pack it away. Holding extra food or carrying water over to give hatchlings a worry-free drink, those jaws allow it to carry more than most.

So keep your distance if you're smallish in size. What suchomimus can scarf down might surprise you.


This month has flown by and as the others have mentioned it was 6.5 focused. It is currently live and in your hands at long last. Definitely took longer than we would have liked. Engine upgrades and Murphy’s law saw to that. But we’re over that bridge and now preparing to cross the next one. There are new playables on the horizon in the Diabloceratops, Dilophosaurus, Herrerasaurus and Tyrannosaurus Rex. Each at varying stages of completion and each ushering in some new mechanics we hope you’ll enjoy as much as you’ve been enjoying the most recent additions. We’re pulling out all the stops to make sure when you play as these creatures, it feels impactful, immersive and an experience unique to The Isle. Do keep in mind the Tyrannosaurus Rex is currently planned to be available as a playable on community servers only, not officials.

As was mentioned when we first made the hard decision to recode the game from scratch, essentially making a second game, we wanted to focus on mechanics before playables. To avoid bloating the roster and forcing us to retcon them all to fit each new mechanic. Which can take far longer, end up being severely watered down and in many instances, become impossible to do (see: Legacy). So a few years, a lot of hard work, heartache, dedication and a pandemic later and we’re finally ready to start implementing more playables. It is not lost on myself or the team as a whole that regardless of any reasoning or justifications, you guys want playables. Period. Straight like that. Now that we’ve gotten what we needed mostly out of the way, playables you shall have.

The animation team has grown a fair amount over the past few months with each new member learning the ins and outs of what it takes to make a creature for the game. From the artistic eye necessary to create the motions, to the technical limitations we have to abide by, to the creative drip that’s demanded to make a creature shine in The Isle. They’re soaking it all in and exceeding my expectations. So I am personally excited to get more playables in your hands and see what types of experiences you are able to craft with them and how they stack up to the already established roster. Be on the lookout for the new roadmap that will be coming soon and shed more light on our plans for the future as we shift our eyes towards Gateway and the reality of the original vision for The Isle taking shape. Bye for now.

Dinner for four.

Experience the shift to Unreal Engine 5 with the overdue 6.5 update. Discover the ravenous appetite of the Ceratosaurus, a predator and scavenger capable of gorging itself on decaying corpses to inflict devastating bacteria-infected wounds. Immerse yourself in the aquatic realm alongside the Beipiaosaurus, as it breaches the water's surface with grace and dives for prey along the riverbeds. Unite your flock and sprint across the plains as the Gallimimus, the embodiment of speed and finesse. But beware, when night falls the horde stirs. Troodons are cunning predators armed with venomous strikes that leave their prey vulnerable.



If you encounter client performance issues, it's highly recommended that you wipe your Config folder.

1. If running The Isle, exit the game.
   
2. Open File Explorer.
   
3. Click the address bar at the top.
   
4. Type %localappdata% then press Enter.
   
5. Find "TheIsle" folder. Open it.
   
6. Open the "Saved" folder.
   
7. Delete the "Config" folder. Note: This will reset any of your custom settings to their defaults.
   
8. Start the game.

• Upgraded project to Unreal Engine 5
  
• Converted Spiro from World Composition to World Partition (for the first and last time)
  
• Added playable omnivores category
  
• Added beipiaosaurus as a playable class
  
• Added ceratosaurus as a playable class
  
• Added gallimimus as a playable class
  
• Added troodon as a playable class
  
• Added foraging mechanics to beipiaosaurus and gallimimus
  
• Added unique bleed modifiers to all attacks
  
• Added dryosaurus dodge "charges" instead of consuming its stamina
  
• Added the option for server admins to enable/disable certain species via the admin panel. This will save automatically to the server config files and can also be adjusted there
  
• Added replay system. F2 ingame to start/stop recording on servers that have the system enabled (bAllowReplay=true in Game.ini). Replays must be a minimum of 5 seconds and cannot be viewed until 30 minutes has passed
  
• Added new graphics settings menu
  
• Added new skin colors for carnotaurus / hypsilophodon / pteranodon / omniraptor / tenontosaurus
  
• Added support for individual leg fracture regen so it heals only if resting
  
• Added sounds to hypsilophodon hatching animation
  
• Added new deinosuchus fast waterwalking animations
  
• Added ability to hear vocals in spectator mode
  
• Added blunt impact sound to pachycephalosaurus' alt attack
  
• Added diet bleed resist to malnutrition.
  
• Added pteranodon left and right skimming animation when turning
  
• Added new omniraptor lunged animation loop
  
• Added fall damage to mud
  
• Added camera offset when resting/sleeping
  
• Added red color to a couple debuff diet status
  
• Added grab hint for gore
  
• Added a different hint for not being able to swallow if the amount of food would cause you to vomit
  
• Added small and tiny jump foley sounds
  
• Added support for different, front/back footprint scales, made tenotosaurus front footprint slightly bigger
  
• Added boar pinned and bucking sounds
  
• Added LODs to gore meshes
  
• Added new birds erupt wingbeats sound
  
• Added physics to tail when poucing a large target
  
• Added new dirt, mud, sand and grass vfx
  
• Added new hint for grabbing corpses underwater for deinosuchus
  
• Added scalable body splash sfx
  
• Added corpse dragging sfx
  
• Added new swim fast and slow water vfx
  
• Added a modifier for characters to have a different carry weight threshold
  
• Added physics sleep system to gore for performance
  
• Added new sounds to juvenile tenontosaurus drink animations
  
• Added new carnivore grab soundcues
  
• Added carnivore grab notifies to drag grab animations
  
• Added "hold" to accept group call message
  
• Added pounce points to compsognathus AI
  
• Added condition to use high eat animations when eating fruits from the tree
  
• Added condition to stop eating if corpse is dragged away
  
• Added seaturtle animations and setup new movement
  
• Added timer using notify state on grab animations for herbivores
  
• Added pounce points to crabs and frogs. Added their missing animations
  
• Added missing animations to goats and rabbits
  
• Added sound for animals passing through most types of foliage
  
• Added "commands" to RCON command list

• Updated all carnivore diets
  
• Big improvements to spatialisation on both dinosaur and animal vocals
  
• Setup new nightvision range values due to Spiro lighting changes
  
• Made alt attacks be used by default when not sprinting, added settings toggle
  
• Made deinosuchus water sense ignore underwater characters
  
• Prevented deinosuchus from sprinting when holding a character with its lunge on land
  
• Made salt lick remove vomit debuff over time instead of all at once. Allowed input release to interrupt the ability
  
• Enabled head tracking while carrying something
  
• Updated player spawns and plant spawns
  
• Disabled charging for hatchling carnotaurus
  
• Improved juvenile carnotaurus run footstep sync
  
• Tweaked tenotosaurus pounced animation sounds
  
• Removed tail drag sound from juvenile deinosuchus run
  
• Corrected stegosaurus walk and trot footstep sync
  
• Allowed dryosaurus dodge when carrying something
  
• Increased boars aggressiveness for relationship algorithm
  
• Increased scavenger AI spawn range, AI improvements to boar
  
• Adjusted bucking stamina damage to decrease based on pouncer growth
  
• Improved alt bite sound sync and improved broadcast and death sound
  
• Set deinosuchus to be knockdown immune
  
• Changes to pachycephalosaurus headbutt regarding head fracture against carnotaurus charge
  
• Greatly reduced the wind sway on vines
  
• Disabled spawning footprints when in mud
  
• Adjusted lunge location point and rotation
  
• Adjusted carnotaurus and tenotosaurus pounce sockets
  
• Prevented players from pouncing a target that is being lunged
  
• Reduced air control based on scale
  
• Disabled pteranodon latching when not flying
  
• Changed dryosaurus rest end transition blend
  
• Added proportional food value to represent bone amount when corpse is swallowed
  
• Made tenontosaurus tail attack hitbox extend below the ground to make the attack more reliable
  
• Adjustments to sounds being occluded by water
  
• Updated and add a few more pounce points on dinos
  
• Adjusted growth based gravity scaling
  
• Adjusted heart and intestine ragdoll settings
  
• Changed respawn values for mango and coconut trees
  
• Adjusted carno charge hitbox width
  
• Adjusted deinosuchus swallow curve
  
• Slide dust and blood drip vfx updated
  
• Updated pteranodon run cycle UI animation to match ingame animation
  
• Adjusted underwater ocean ambience volume
  
• Increased schooling fish hit chance to 100%
  
• Updated deer vocal sounds
  
• Updated hypsilophodon and compsognathus ragdolls
  
• Adjusted deer vocals volume, adjusted footsteps volume
  
• Improved audio latency settings, increased reverb amount for medium animal call attenuation
  
• Improved drink vocals
  
• Improved pteranodon wing flaps velocity base volume, pitch modulation and notify sync
  
• Made lunge clear target value if hitting a target that was already lunging or lunged
  
• Made root plants expire after a while once dug up and not eaten
  
• Boar aggression range slightly increased
  
• Adjusted footstep soundclasses volume
  
• Changed blend in amount for lunge shore animation
  
• Improved medium breath sounds and medium flesh bite sound
  
• Made salt licking loop the animation
  
• Adjusted volume and blend of drag sound cues
  
• Made full body to partial body animation transition slower, especially for quadrupeds
  
• Edits to character shader instances
  
• Forced organs to rotten on spawn if source corpse is rotten
  
• Changed headbutt launch direction calculation
  
• Made death sounds to set age parameter
  
• Disabled some eating hints for hatchlings
  
• Made blood clot UI more obvious
  
• Increased volume of omniraptor begging sounds
  
• Corrected Omni adult bite sound pitch
  
• Improved sounds on all hatching animations
  
• Adjusted boar movement
  
• Changed attenuation on boar attack
  
• Made carnotaurus not a cannibal anymore
  
• Prevented hatchlings from catching schooling fish, unless deinosuchus
  
• Prevented grab hint if skeleton is underwater
  
• Disabled hypsilophodon spit for hatchlings
  
• Made lunge and ram not stagger targets
  
• Reduced knockdown duration from 2.1s to 1s
  
• Adjusted blood percentage icon
  
• Updated deer animation system
  
• Slowed deer AI sprint speed
  
• Underwater post process material changes
  
• Made latched pouncer to disengage if target is pinned by another pouncer
  
• Made sure logout does not call load title map more than once
  
• Lowered Cinematic settings to Epic.
  
• Improvements to lunge floor detection on release a player
  
• Reduced volume of medium body splash sound
  
• Improved deinosuchus grab sounds and jaw sound size scaling
  
• Setup lunge animation for deer AI
  
• Improvements to anti hack
  
• Improved carnotaurus charge breaths
  
• Adjusted boar pounced animation
  
• Improved tiny and small footstep attenuations
  
• Updated skin preview map
  
• Adjusted logic for deciding normal or high eating animation
  
• Adjusted tiny footsteps volume curve
  
• Balanced crossfades, modulations and volume of all footsteps
  
• Finalized frog animations
  
• Improved pachycephalosaurus vs pachycephalosaurus headbutt sound attenuation
  
• Made weight calculation to increase stamina cost of pounced target bucking while having pouncers latched
  
• Disabled headtracking during blinded animation
  
• Improved physics when chunks are dropped
  
• Added more pitch variation to deinosuchus' regular pain sound
  
• Adjusted levels of land body impact sounds
  
• Made all hatchling/juvenile attacks use smaller attenuation
  
• Pitch and volume adjustments to herbivore diet sfx
  
• Updated stegosaurus grazing animation
  
• Adjusted deinosuchus bite and swallow volume
  
• Made some minor corrections to pitch modulations for some drag loops
  
• Made all juvenile sounds use smaller attenuation relative to adult
  
• Adjusted pitch scaling for tiny sit and stand foley sounds
  
• Improved tiny and small footsteps volume and crossfade balance over growth for medium/large creatures (e.g deinosuchus)
  
• Reduced food amount received from schooling fish as deinosuchus
  
• Made lunge speed boost only constant if holding the button
  
• Set non-water footsteps to be occluded in water
  
• Improved some deinosuchus, carnotaurus and modular grab/swallowing sounds
  
• Changed hypsilophodon spit attenuation
  
• Reduced volume of old sounds used for nest building
  
• Minor tweaks to swallow sounds
  
• Improvements to grab sounds
  
• Adjusted instant movement stop when water boosting hit a shoreline
  
• Updated river and swamp underwater materials
  
• Improved deino submerging animation, swimming angle after stopping movement
  
• Made lunge water boost speed to last as input is hold.
  
• Adjusted small and medium gore sounds
  
• Increased occlusion filter frequency on a few attenuations
  
• Made characters uncrouch in knee deep water
  
• All footsteps vfx set to render distance
  
• Adjusted math for eat low/mid and high animations
  
• Adjusted spectator mode teleport to be more accurate
  
• Adjusted lunge collision trace
  
• Adjusted South East location on Spiro to be closer to swamp
  
• Small change to fruits base to avoid them despawning early
  
• Amphibian AI now wander if they are not near water
  
• Reduced scavenger AI spawn distances
  
• Adjusted seaturtle pounce point and added missing animations
  
• Changed frog idle anim to still for corpse, dragged and lunged
  
• RCON now accepts multiple packets on the same connection
  
• Increasd RCON buffer size

Staggers

Staggers removed from all attacks except the following:

• Tenontosaurus tail slam
  
• Tenontosaurus rear kick
  
• Carnotaurus charge
  
• Pachycephalosaurus 360 attack

Knockdown

• Knockdown recovery time reduced across the board

Night Vision

• Night vision ranges all adjusted across the board

Diets

• All carnivore diets updated with the addition of the new characters

Special Ability: Charge

• Charge Hit trace size reduced.
  
• Activation cost set to 10%
  
• Stamina cost per second no longer scales with growth
  
• Knockdown threshold reduced slightly

Movement

• Acceleration rate reduced
  
• Subadult sprint speed scale reduced

Bucking

• Stamina damage reduced

Special Ability: Lunge

• Recovery time of lunge stagger increased substantially
  
• Sprinting disabled when holding a character on land

Water Sense

• Will now only detect players on the surface of water

Movement

• Subadult speed modifier decreased

Hunger

• Consumes food faster, resulting in it needing more food to be sustained

Special Ability: Dodge

• No longer uses stamina, instead uses charges
  
• Max stored charges set to 2
  
• Charge recharge time set to 10 seconds
  
• Cooldown set to 1.5 seconds

Turn Rates

• Turn rate cap increased

Turn Rates

• Default turn rate increased
  
• 180 turn rate increased
  
• Turn rate cap increased

Special Ability: Ram

• Tap Knockdown threshold reduced
  
• Tap Ram stagger threshold reduced
  
• Held Ram Knockdown threshold reduced
  
• Held Ram stagger threshold reduced

Special Ability: Pounce

• Stamina damage against moving targets now scales with growth
  
• Pounce miss animation removed

Turn Rates

• Turn rate cap increased

Bucking

• Stamina damage reduced

Special Ability: Tail Slam

• Tail slam damage reduced

Bucking

• Stamina damage reduced

• Fixed several issues related to UE5 engine upgrade
  
• Fixed spawn crash when multiple people spawn at same time in same area
  
• Fixed server crash when attacking Rabbit borrow
  
• Fixed amphibious and aquatic spawns not spawning on mostly land bounds
  
• Fixed lunge latency when dropping target
  
• Fixed foliage hit dismount for omniraptor pounce being only client side
  
• Fixed omniraptor scaling issues
  
• Fixed swallow issue that caused despawn issues
  
• Fixed impale causing stego input issues and allowing the player to grab corpses
  
• Fixed pachycephalosaurus vomit animation issue
  
• Fixed footsteps being inaudible from behind
  
• Fixed deinosuchus jaw audible underwater
  
• Fixed juvenile deinosuchus water attack duplicate jaw sound and splash vfx issue
  
• Fixed deinosuchus sounds playing when underwater in rivers
  
• Fixed carnotaurus charge animation blending
  
• Fixed issues with nest placement
  
• Fixed chunks not being destroyed if swallow is interrupted during animation
  
• Fixed hitting pounce/lunge on any potential target that may be already pouncing
  
• Fixed sliding sometimes auto-cancelling
  
• Fixed landing animation when jumping into mud
  
• Fixed pachycephalosaurus graze animation speed
  
• Fixed boar root motion
  
• Fixed stomach alert for deinosuchus
  
• Fixed hypsilophodon eyebrows not having a default color
  
• Fixed AI not having correct look pose values
  
• Fixed issues when pouncing the same spot of a target as another player
  
• Fixed DLSS settings not working correctly
  
• Fixed wallow message not showing up if near water
  
• Fixed NIS not applying on start up
  
• Fixed pachycephalosaurus ram not working on foliage
  
• Fixed admin panel bind error and fixed text box colors
  
• Fixed spectator mode not showing AI sometimes
  
• Fixed various gore ragdoll stretch issues
  
• Fixed stomach content % hint not showing when hovered with cursor
  
• Fixed carnotaurus t-pose if lunged when resting
  
• Fixed carnotaurus charge against lunge causing the target to auto-walk
  
• Fixed leg fracture healing if standing
  
• Fixed vomit not reducing max hunger for diet values calculation
  
• Fixed issues with meat chunk ragdolls when dropped
  
• Fixed meat turning invisible or stuck in mouth if dropped when swallowiing and hit by a stun ability
  
• Fixed dino profile max speed value being incorrect sometimes
  
• Fixed not being able to toggle crouch while vocalizing
  
• Fixed organs disappearing upon relogging, but were still interactable
  
• Fixed pack scent not working
  
• Fixed chat entry text color suddenly changing to black
  
• Fixed stamina consumption when sprint flying downwards
  
• Fixed stamina decay increasing instead of decreasing with certain diets
  
• Fixed being able to get organs from corpses that are too heavy
  
• Fixed organs food/nutrient amount per size
  
• Fixed scent clouds lingering after they were supposed to disappear
  
• Fixed various issues related to pounce interaction.
  
• Fixed actors and gore clipping meshes during swallow
  
• Fixed hypsilophodon aim particles not disappearing
  
• Fixed being able to lunge multiple targets at once
  
• Fixed not being able to perform vocals more than once while resting
  
• Fixed juvenile jump heights
  
• Fixed 3D preview only using juvenile animations
  
• Fixed health decay not increasing if in malnutrition state
  
• Fixed diet slots not respecting max amount set by vomit debuff
  
• Fixed reverted blood resistence boost/debuff from diets
  
• Fixed poucing a target already pouncing making them detach
  
• Fixed dryosaurus rest to idle blend issue
  
• Fixed blood scent clouds not disappearing
  
• Fixed diet slots fill icon amount mismatched after vomiting from admin panel
  
• Fixed carnotaurus charge crash
  
• Fixed group leader not being set on server properly
  
• Fixed jump sometimes not working
  
• Fixed coconut eating closed condition
  
• Fixed loaded nests not being set correctly
  
• Fixed nest scavenger crash
  
• Fixed wrong multiplier being used for growth
  
• Fixed pounce animation interrupting once target is knocked down
  
• Fixed swallow organs sometimes not giving the proper food/nutrient amount
  
• Fixed overlap issues on underwater sound and pp for rivers
  
• Fixed some graphics settings not reloading correctly
  
• Fixed cooldown issue with drinking
  
• Fixed cooldown on end for some abilities
  
• Fixed pachycephalosaurus ram stopping mid-air sometimes
  
• Fixed chicken LODs and updated ragdoll
  
• Fixed socket issue client side
  
• Fixed various issues with player group names
  
• Fixed plants with roots showing the empty mesh version for a moment once the root is fully eaten
  
• Fixed organs sometimes stretching on the floor when body is being dragged
  
• Fixed boar animation when pinned
  
• Fixed bypassing group limit with courted pairs
  
• Fixed bleeding tooltip % not showing
  
• Fixed some fall damage issues
  
• Fixed various issues with ram, pounce and lunge
  
• Fixed blood sometimes not updating the UI properly
  
• Fixed material instance issue with growth
  
• Fixed regenerating/decaying attributes not being clamped
  
• Fixed not using LOD0 with low/medium view distance
  
• Fixed organs stretching during corpse drag
  
• Fixed nutrients not respecting hunger cap
  
• Fixed fracture audio playing multiple times
  
• Fixed foliage contact audio not playing correctly sometimes
  
• Fixed animations not playing properly when pounce is interrupted by specific situations (such as knockdown or instant death)
  
• Fixed footsteps notifies being named and velocity parameter being turned on incorrectly
  
• Fixed multiple players being able to pick up gore or corpses
  
• Fixed omniraptor, pachycephalosaurus, pteranodon and tenontosaurus drink animation loops
  
• Fixed some drink montage issues
  
• Fixed max stamina not respecting vomit debuff limit when growth tick applies
  
• Fixed schooling fish falling through the ground
  
• Fixed hungeroffset wrong calculation in swallow ability
  
• Fixed boar hit reaction and attack
  
• Fixed corpes sliding after a knockdown launch
  
• Fixed deinosuchus quick get-up from resting animation stuttering
  
• Fixed spectator mode showing invalid characters (such as logged out players)
  
• Fixed rotation rate issue when moving after alt attacks
  
• Fixed tiny body splash playing small sound
  
• Fixed crash when logging sometimes
  
• Fixed pteranodon not being able to peck while flying
  
• Fixed gore rotten value not setting rotten state
  
• Fixed juvenile hints related to not being able to grab and eat a closed coconut
  
• Fixed organs pickup spawn not setting weight multiplier
  
• Fixed lunge and pounce bleeding value
  
• Fixed fall damage after client correction
  
• Fixed stegosaurus impale issues
  
• Fixed lunge not causing damage to an already lunging deinosuchus
  
• Fixed pounce camera issues
  
• Fixed blood decay not updating correctly
  
• Fixed pounce hit impact animation overwriting pinned one sometimes
  
• Fixed coconut hint not showing occasionally
  
• Fixed character mesh scale sometimes being incorrect on death
  
• Fixed some shader issues
  
• Fixed some montages not looping correctly
  
• Fixed some vomit montages playing full body
  
• Fixed plants not updating mesh on begin play if dug already
  
• Fixed drag loop in deinosuchus eat loop animation
  
• Fixed graze not ending right after input release if near water source
  
• Fixed small code mistake breaking dragging
  
• Fixed meat chunks and organs not becoming rotten when they should
  
• Fixed some vocal types of sound in animation not getting interrupted as they should
  
• Fixed character spawn hitch
  
• Fixed boar headtracking
  
• Fixed boar alert mode loop
  
• Fixed organ weight multiplication happening twice
  
• Fixed pounce client jittering and stamina fall not reseting target state
  
• Fixed carnotaurus charge speed and animation
  
• Fixed issue with organ weight/food calculation
  
• Fixed vocals not replicating properly
  
• Fixed hatchling hatch body impact sound too heavy/loud
  
• Fixed and improve salt lick sounds for all playables
  
• Fixed deinosuchus jaw pop sound echoing
  
• Fixed no audio when biting or swallowing as deinosuchus hatchling
  
• Fixed deinosuchus juvenile having double vocals
  
• Fixed stegosaurus impale making fruit/piece of plant disappear when carried
  
• Fixed hatchlings being able to dig up plants
  
• Fixed stamina reduction when trying to rest on top of a corpse
  
• Fixed boar targeting corpses
  
• Fixed deer targeting everything
  
• Fixed draw distance value
  
• Fixed radial impulse firing for organ that's not attached
  
• Fixed never recovering from knockdown
  
• Fixed fish movement
  
• Fixed duplicated vocal audio for some species
  
• Fixed apply button becoming hidden
  
• Fixed settings saving before finishing applying some settings
  
• Fixed corpses occasionally still being visible after swallowing them
  
• Fixed corpses not being able to be picked up after it was carried in the mouth of a pteranodon that flew into the ground and died
  
• Fixed stego call crossfades
  
• Fixed graphics options value being reset in the UI
  
• Fixed pounce checks to avoid specific interactions sometimes failing
  
• Fixed balances to vocal calls
  
• Fixed deinosuchus lunge body drop sound
  
• Fixed carnivores not being able to get meat chunks or organs from corpses sometimes
  
• Fixed medium sprint footsteps modulations and carnotaurus charge stomp layer
  
• Fixed small walk/crouch attenuation issue
  
• Fixed body splash sounds and water steps not firing correctly
  
• Fixed tiny body splash not playing
  
• Fixed underwater river PP not working sometimes
  
• Fixed vocal and attenuation curves across the board
  
• Fixed all vocals to sound hoarse at low stamina
  
• Fixed carnotaurus charge sometimes consuming stamina when failing to activate
  
• Fixed medium broadcast reverb coming in at close distance
  
• Fixed crouching animation transition issue
  
• Fixed footsteps being audible underwater
  
• Fixed deinosuchus juvenile bite sound
  
• Fixed duplicate pitch mod on medium sprint dirt and rock steps
  
• Fixed vocal type sounds spam check not working correctly
  
• Fixed oceans not blocking vocals underwater
  
• Fixed large body drop on land sound
  
• Fixed various issues related to carrying
  
• Fixed deinosuchus bite crossfades
  
• Fixed sprint footsteps spatialisation radius
  
• Fixed blunt impact sound issue
  
• Fixed no sound when eating in shallow water as juvenile deinosuchus
  
• Fixed juvenile deinosuchus swallow sounds
  
• Fixed juvenile carnotaurus attract core layer not playing
  
• Fixed pounce end setting ability state back to none if player was pinned while latched
  
• Fixed vocals not attaching to owner correctly
  
• Fixed organs being destroyed if an actor was destroyed or turned to bones
  
• Fixed corpses sometimes falling from mouth when grabbed/carried
  
• Fixed chunks/organs/ragdolls falling through floor in some areas
  
• Fixed vocals issue where another player can interrupt vocals
  
• Fixed pawns not being destroy correctly server side if a player logged out while in spectator camera
  
• Fixed sprint steps non-spatialised radius
  
• Fixed pounce input lock
  
• Fixed ragdolls reseting during carry/dragged causing issues of some recently spawned or stasis AI to fall from mouth
  
• Fixed rivers not blocking vocals occasionally
  
• Fixed tracked footprints being flipped and scaled incorrectly sometimes
  
• Fixed and improved sniffing breath sounds
  
• Fixed gore destroy time causing issues when something was recently dropped
  
• Fixed gore latency issues on the client when they are destroyed
  
• Fixed corpses being destroyed while being dragged/carried
  
• Fixed camera offset for underwater sfx
  
• Fixed pounce start animation not playing if already falling
  
• Fixed being able to build nests underwater
  
• Fixed schooling fish scale pulsating when caught sometimes
  
• Fixed pressing G while pinned freeing the target
  
• Fixed spectator mode widgets not updating in real time
  
• Fixed online admin getter
  
• Fixed debris causing issues
  
• Fixed some sound cues not playing
  
• Fixed certain vocals not working for specific sounds
  
• Fixed pickup activation being possible if pounced
  
• Fixed hypsilophodon blinded animation sounds
  
• Fixed deinosuchus wateridle sounds being audible above water
  
• Fixed swallow mechanic (visuals) not working on other clients sometimes
  
• Fixed pickup interrupting movement even if there is nothing around to pickup
  
• Fixed swallowing not destroying a corpse
  
• Fixed player actor staying in game if the player disconnected while in spectator mode
  
• Fixed certain fruit trees not respawning fruits over time
  
• Fixed thrashed organs scaling incorrectly when spawning
  
• Fixed deinosuchus lunge grabbing a target on the end of the ability
  
• Fixed pickup end causing rotation rate to be 0 if player press G during pinned
  
• Fixed attempt to replicate being deactivated when fruits or gore is picked up
  
• Fixed deinosuchus not being able to start moving up/down while sinking
  
• Fixed carbs causing stamina decay to increase instead of decrease
  
• Fixed water culling trace not blocking on rivers
  
• Fixed juvenile stegosaurus wallow sounds being incorrect
  
• Fixed subadult pachycephalosaurus crouch animation looking strange visually
  
• Fixed juvenile stegosaurus animation walk speed not matching how fast it was moving
  
• Fixed lunge releasing target occasionally if going from water to land
  
• Fixed deinosuchus camera clip when zoomed in and moving
  
• Fixed deinosuchus dropping objects causing them to fall under the map
  
• Fixed certain fruits not vanishing after being eaten completely
  
• Fixed hatchling stego wallow body drops not audible
  
• Fixed river culling vocals incorrectly sometimes
  
• Fixed target animation lock at struggle if pouncer dies during pin action
  
• Fixed hypsilophodon's mouth being open too wide when holding something while standing idle
  
• Fixed camera offset when moving for deinosuchus being too high for hatchlings/juveniles and also to be avoided when swimming
  
• Fixed scars disappearing when logging out
  
• Fixed stomach giving the highest % nutrient of the player character instead of the target corpse when organ was pulled out instead of thrashed
  
• Fixed rare/strange issue when chunks/gore get stuck on face for other clients
  
• Fixed fruits not respawning at all if eaten from the tree
  
• Fixed some material parameters not being set once replicated
  
• Fixed issue if eating was canceled due to corpse dragged or carried
  
• Fixed plants not replicating when dug up or eaten fully
  
• Fixed targets becoming locked in pinned animation if pouncer died during the pin
  
• Fixed bones showing as a nutrient icon
  
• Fixed how plants verify used sockets for spawning fruits
  
• Fixed animals injured animations not using normal locomotion ones to avoid then t-posing
  
• Fixed tail physics not being disabled when sprinting at subadult stage
  
• Fixed seaturtle idle look pose
  
• Fixed being able to use deinosuchus alt attack with a leg fracture
  
• Fixed deer lookpose causing jaw issues
  
• Fixed fruits not be cleaned up on clients once destroyed
  
• Fixed sounds with boar locomotion
  
• Fixed interactor box scale during crouch
  
• Fixed frog carried animation
  
• Fixed rabbit carry position being wrong due to animation
  
• Fixed idle special animations playing even if pinned
  
• Fixed corpses resetting to non-fresh if eaten too fast
  
• Fixed tiny slow swim sounds being occluded in water
  
• Fixed mud body drop sounds occluded in mud pools
  
• Fixed stamina decay not increasing during malnutrition
  
• Fixed scavenger perception
  
• Fixed an issue where scavengers would not always make it to carcass and would not flee from bigger characters
  
• Fixed fruits auto fall timer being reset by auto respawn
  
• Fixed fast moving clouds after death
  
• Fixed footprints spawning when walking in water
  
• Fixed lunge causing oxygen damage on surface or land
  
• Fixed gore floor correction not detecting static meshes
  
• Fixed swamp water on Spiro
  
• Fixed coastal AI spawning in nesting grounds
  
• Fixed chicken, crab and frog AI not reacting to players
  
• Fixed boar and chicken health being incorrect
  
• Fixed an issue with RCON not saving correctly
  
  
• Fixed over 500 additional issues that were introduced with the new playable classes

• Ceratosaurus charged bite audio is delayed
  
• Organs, fruits and meat chunks can become uninteractable and stuck to the player's face if left too long before swallowed/dropped. Safelog to fix
  
• Occasionally, a 2nd giant moon will appear in the sky that fixes itself after a few minutes
  
• Elite fish will sometimes desync and appear to be flying. They are not interactable and will fix themselves when approached. This is usually caused by an admin being in spectator mode
  
• Additional observation issues with admin spectator mode
  
• Deinosuchus has an issue where dropping an organ or meat chunk causes it to return to the corpse it was pulled from
  
• Corpses will occasionally be seen falling from the sky when first rendered
  
• Group nametags will sometimes disappear and not return if you leave render distance of a player. Regroup to fix
  
• Sometimes night vision does not work correctly underwater as deinosuchus and beipiaosaurus. Safelogging will fix this

This month, my main focus was on enhancing and resolving issues with various mechanics. We had several strange behaviors concerning physics and other various interactions when multiple abilities occurred simultaneously. Such as with the introduction of troodon, a new playable capable of pouncing, that brought forth additional scenarios that had the potential to disrupt existing mechanics. On the topic of pounce; I’ve made some significant changes to the aftermath of missing a pounce, now it does not “stagger” the pouncer anymore, allowing it to be more fluid, fast and more visually accurate. Moreover, with troodon, I developed a system where nearby troodons will emit specific vocal sounds whenever a target becomes envenomated. This feature aids in synchronizing attacks and will be further improved upon in future updates.


Pickup is another mechanic that has received some attention. We noticed some odd behaviors relating to both Organs and Meat Chunks, especially when their physics decide not to simulate properly. In that regard I also added a dynamic math that allows “Grab High” animations to play, when grabbing fruits, for example, from tall trees. I also fixed a bunch of smaller issues such as loading screen causing a crash, double calls issue, UI hints, the “pitch black skin” bug, vocal distance being short and much more. Overall I’ve squashed hundreds of bugs this month.


I've been hopping around different types of assignments for a while now, one of which is returning to the environment concepts. Specifically, I’ve returned to finish the line of Underwater Environment Concepts.

After discussions about visuals and gameplay needs, I do what I always do and start looking for references and inspiration. A bit of a challenge was the visuals. Normally, when we think of coral reefs and kelp forests, we think of images like those from Blue Planet 2 & Planet Earth 2: beauty and serenity with all kinds of gorgeous colors. This would need to be toned down to fit our horror gameplay and visual style for the game. It can be pretty at times, but not always. I also had to take into consideration the types of terrains and biomes of the ocean and to hopefully create an interesting environment for players to traverse and explore.

So, as you’ve seen before in the “isle-phase-three” channel on the official discord, I started by making a simple study of how these biomes and formations will be loosely mapped out based on depth. As you can see below, we’ll start at the shallows with coral reefs, and as we get lower, we’ll see more rock formations. Kelp forests will be sprinkled throughout both. As rock formations become bigger, corals start to disappear. Eventually, at the barrier of the map, we plan on making it pretty desolate.



For the reef concept above I wanted to keep variations of color, but needed to make sure I didn't go too far to where it looked like an underwater paradise or a screenshot from ‘The Little Mermaid’. My color choice of rocks could’ve been better, but with the different forms and corals, I think it looks good. On the right, we see a rough sketch of Rock formations. We can look forward to placing them around the medium depths of the environment. What I have here is probably the largest these formations will ever get. Not only does this show how they will fill some open waters with interest, but how we can look forward to bridging the gaps between our underwater players and coastal pterosaur players above. Underneath the Rock formations, we have a scene of animals interacting at the edge of a Kelp Forest. Typical Kelp forests in documentaries look really beautiful and welcoming, with rich, full fronds of bright green or orange leaves. We probably won't be doing that and taking that opportunity to make them feel dark and claustrophobic. Hopefully that will be reflected in our lighting and assets.



Finally, after studying and planning, we get to the fully rendered concept above which showcases all the elements mentioned before. There was a lot of coral and rock to paint, as well as getting the right hues and colors down, but I’d argue this is one of the better Underwater Concepts made. I look forward to seeing this being built in game by our lovely Jace, and eventually seeing the player base take a dive and explore what we have planned.


This month has been a month with a variation of bug fixes and massive in global, but seemingly minor updates to the Modular Kit. We’ve now solved the stair, door, and all kinds of problems that were linked just by being modular. Not only that, the kit for now, features over 250 objects, making it the most granular kit we have so far, and it being new, and this granular allows us to do so many variations with the buildings.

This is by far the end of the kit, as the kit will now only get upgraded by new parts as we go on. Not only that we will feature a distinct and clearcut way of knowing which building serves what purpose, with various techniques.

That and the, in the works, new shader to support this level of modularity, should bring a lot of life to the island and the human environment and its effect on the world.

Keep in mind these images are still work in progress and do NOT feature the new shader, and is one of many possibilities. This is just a very rough showcase of what we can show, without any detailing done to the buildings.





While waiting for the magic shader, and before we proceed to new textures to encompass it and make it fully functional.

That is it for this month!


Main priority and the majority of my time this month has been occupied with fixing as many bugs as possible, as well as making improvements and addressing any missing or incorrect audio cues where possible.

Other than any work that I’ve done this month to go towards the polish of audio in 6.5 I’ve also made some more headway on some Diablo sounds, however the focus on the new update has slowed this progress slightly. I have the majority of Diablo’s adult sounds designed or at least undergoing iteration and finalization, only a handful remain to create such as courting, sparring and some generic or filler vocal sounds for use in idles, resting and filling in gaps where necessary etc.

I’ve started bringing dilophosaurus’ calls up to the quality bar we are setting with Evrima, with its attract and broadcast vocals already complete. These two calls are revamped versions of the original legacy calls, retaining the sonic quality and character of the existing sounds but bulking them out with a bit more presence and weight using various additional layers and some cleaning and processing techniques on the existing raw files. The other three calls are going to need more work and some deviation from the original concept to get to a similar standard.

I’m also working on a new sound that will be used in place of the broadcast call for gallimimus’ mobilize ability, a brief honk with that signature gallimimus flavor effectively clearing some space in the mix so it's not a barrage of long and noisy calls.


My focus in the last weeks was completely on finishing the release trailer for update 6.5. Since the new species bring many new mechanics into the game, there is again a lot to explain in the trailer. While the trailer starts relatively calm with the beipiaosaurus, the atmosphere gets more and more stressful. At the latest when the troodon is introduced, you notice the horror aspects of the game, because this is the first time I used night shots for a trailer.

I also got inspired in the stress test, so I was able to try out the game mechanics myself and thus better represent and explain them in the trailer. As always, I'm staying rather abstract in explaining the mechanics, but I hope it's easy to understand. The presentation of the gallimimus mechanics was the biggest challenge in this project, as he has to keep moving all the time. However, I found a smooth solution that shows the mechanics well. In the coming days I will finish the final touches.





This month has been rather weighted to be honest. Got the stress test cranked out which has greatly assisted in helping us track down bugs and refine mechanics. So thank you to all that participated! It has been fun to see how the new playables are being wielded and all the new strats that are emerging with each. Especially how they fare against the already established animals. Each new creature changes the island's dynamics and that is very interesting to observe. Once we iron out the kinks we’ll be in a good spot to release update 6.5 which is much larger than we originally intended but in a good way. So thank you for a thousand years of patient waiting. It has definitely taken a bit longer than we would have liked. But we want to get you in on the fun as much as you want to have it and want it to be as solid as we can get it. So hang tight.

The team has also grown and will be growing further still. Lots of new talent swirling around, keeping me on my toes. The animation team has been expanded by several artists which are performing spectacularly. I’m crazy proud of their strides! The diablo, dilo and herrera are well on their way to being the next creatures you’ll see running around on the map, decimating your hp and adding to the soundscape. When their unique mechanics are a bit further along I’ll try to slip some content of them to you so you’ll have an understanding on what they will play like and be capable of. Following in their footsteps will be the Tyrannosaurus Rex which enters production fully next week and boasts some interesting adjustments I’m sure the keen-eyed will notice. .

All in all, this month has honestly been a bug hunting slog but we’re clawing our way to the surface and seeing the light at the end of the 6.5 tunnel. I am very excited to turn these creatures loose on the general public and affix my gaze on Update 7 which I personally have been anxiously awaiting forever and the team is probably tired of hearing my talk about. Also, alongside the release of Update 6.5 or very shortly after will come roadmap changes as previously mentioned which will alter the way we disseminate information and how we update the game as a whole. Aiming for something that suits us better as a development team and is better for you all as well. With the media embargo lifted, I’m sure there’s a lot of 6.5 content to snack on while we rev this bad boy up! Bye bye for now!

In our previous testing the gallimimus was only able to forage near shores, where it could dig up frogs. This does not really fit the playstyle of the dinosaur, so I added support for foraging on land. The system is still essentially the same, with the difference that compies can be dug up instead. They provide a little food, but no nutrients, serving as a more interactive version of grazing.

Originally we tried a leaping attack with a lot of movement for the gallimimus' "alt attack", but it didn't feel right in the end. So it was replaced with a quick kick towards where you're looking without turning the character. On the topic of kicks, I also added support for controlling which leg you attack with while running or jumping. This is not just a visual difference, be sure to use the appropriate one to hit your target.

With some of our dinos having really high juvenile speeds relative to their size (in particular the gallimimus and troodon) it was time to change how our character speeds are determined. Previously it was blending the animations as you grew and determining your speed to match that, but unfortunately this came with issues such as dinosaurs becoming way too fast during the transition period or not having as much flexibility. So I turned things around and speeds are being set directly, while the animation system was updated to figure out the right animation to play. This was actually quite challenging, since the animation blend spaces don't necessarily match the speed you'd expect when you just blend them as they are. So I came up with a solution to adjust the blended animation to make sure there is no foot sliding.

Unfortunately when it comes to programming it can be hard to explain why we have to change things that "already work" just to make them work differently even though the end result is very similar from a player perspective. Sometimes these refactors just have to be made for things to work better.

With update 6.5 moving into the testing phase there were periods where I had time to move on to new tasks. For me this meant the diabloceratops. The base character was already set up with the basics, just missing unique abilities and several animations. Many of you might be able to guess already, but I started work on the sparring mechanic. It's not an easy one, there are two players constantly moving around, performing actions that can affect each other's movement, many different things can happen. It's in early stages, but there's strafing movement, interlocking and basic animation support in place already. Naturally at the moment update 6.5 takes priority, but it's coming along nicely in the meantime.


Once in a while a dinosaur comes along in Evrima where we have to do a bunch of legwork we haven’t done before, diabloceratops is definitely one of those now. I’ve been busy working on the locomotion and watching yaks try to bully each other on Youtube for the ‘sparring’ mechanic and hoo boy that was a lot to do, you don’t wanna know how many animations that was to do. It was 48.

Been a busy month for dinosaurs in general, with the last bits for gallimimus and ceratosaurus being finished at the start of the month. Been nice to continue the trend of breaking away from expanding necessary features for the base Evrima dinosaurs like omniraptor or carnotaurus and working on bringing new animals into the ecosystem. Ceratosaurus will definitely be a welcome addition to remind carnotaurus that it isn’t normally an apex predator just because it’s bigger than omniraptor.


I’ve been full steam ahead working through designing sounds for the diabloceratops. Both primary and directional attack vocal sounds are completed as well as vocals for vomiting, drinking, regular/extreme pain and death sounds with more currently in the works. When I have the sounds for all shared mechanics I will be experimenting with sounds for its sparring mechanic

I made some edits and designed some new sounds for gallimimus, its attacks had been reworked. The existing sounds for its directional attack were edited to fit the new animations, and new sounds were made for the others, for its running kick, a short grunt with a bit of oomph, and a bird-like growl for its peck attack.

I have also put some attention towards fine tuning the crossfades and pitch/volume modulations for all 4 of the new playables to ensure there is a smooth and appropriate transition across all vocals when blending between juvenile to adult sounds.


Besides working on creature sounds I also finished up on a fairly demanding design, a sound to accompany the pulsing of a colony of bees displaying near synchronicity. The sound consists of a bed layer, the ambient hum of the swarm. The clattering and vibrating of the wings is made up from various sources, such as rice on plastic, foil packaging inserted into a handheld fan etc. They are processed granularly to emulate the clustered sound of dozens of tiny wings vibrating against each other. The pulsing motion is created using dopplers to simulate the motion with dialed in variation to amplitude, pitch and panning. I then processed with a resonator to extract some subtle natural pitch and added a synthesized low bass sound that compliments the pulsing rhythm and adds some restrained tonality.



They are small, they are many and if you thought compsognathus were bad for stealing food, wait till you meet Pterodactylus. They are ravenous little corps cleaners and it was fun helping come up with different ways they could be tiny menaces on The Isle. Like breaking down large bodies, bullying smaller creatures off their kill and some potential egg thievery too. So keep a close eye on anything of yours that could be deemed food, you might find it munched on or snatched away when your back is turned by the mini toothy pterosaurs.


This month has been a whirlwind of action for the team all around. Stress testing has begun and we’re fleshing out the new playables as testing dictates their adjustments for live release in addition to a lot of engine problem solving. As with any engine change or update there are unforeseen issues, interactions and bugs that can arise that may not play nicely with old tech or downright break something entirely. Luckily, many of these engine bugs and incompatibilities are known to the gamedev community and the engine developers and will hopefully be tackled soon. Aside from that the troodon’s testing phases have been promising for their intended playstyle feeling unique among the roster. With a few knob twists and lever pulls it should be in a nice spot that doesn’t leave it feeling too under or overpowered. Though we’ll have to keep an eye on especially coordinated groups. Completion of ceratosaurus, gallimimus and beipiaosaurus playtesting should go much swifter. Fingers crossed.

Additionally, the diabloceratops is animation complete pending any alterations to established animations for the sparring mechanic. dmIV has laid down some impressive first iterations that we should be able to share soon. We hope you like it! The dilophosaurus is also well on its way to being animation complete after some directional attacks and injuries. So there’s a chance it will enter testing alongside the diabloceratops. If that weren’t enough, the herrerasaurus is also entering full swing production. Some team changes have been made that should allow us to crank animations out a bit faster than usual which will be a welcomed change of pace.

There’s also been a lot of pre-production rounded out on some features to come for both the Gen 1 and Gen 2 humans which I am excited to work on despite being more of a dinosaur fan personally. Getting 6.5 out the door will be a welcome relief for us all and get us one step closer to the reality of what The Isle really is as a horror survival experience. Catch ya next time!

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!