Dear exiles,

Technically it's getting cold outside. Hope everyone's been enjoying the first week of October! It's getting colder by the day, the perfect time to curl up under a blanket, drink some hot chocolate, and play a video game.

For this week's community letter, we're trying something different: fewer words! And possibly some more gifs and pictures, depending on what I'm allowed to show.


Work is well under way on the next PC update, which will add thrall inventories and new building pieces to the game. Entertainers, fighters and archers you break on your Wheel of Pain needs to be clothed and equipped before they can fight for you, so if you've always wanted to make a giant, uniformed army of thralls you will be able to do that. With this patch we're also updating the basic creature AI. Best case we'll be rolling out the patch in about two weeks.


Last week we patched Xbox with the Big PC/Xbox Parity Update™. This moved a heap of changes, optimizations and improvements to the Xbox version of Conan Exiles, bringing it in line with the PC version. The full change log can be found here. Going forward we will continue to keep the two versions in sync. Keep in mind that there will always be a delay from PC to console, due to the certification process, but we are working on reducing the time it takes for the console versions to reach parity.


Every Friday, the entire development team meets up to discuss what they’ve been working on recently: New content and features, bugs that have been fixed, and things to come down the pipeline. The development team is split into cross professional Scrum teams that each have their own focus and tasks to complete. You can find their names and descriptions in the first community letter.


In addition to the usual bug fixes the Vanguard team has started working on improving the new ragdoll setup that has been added to the combat system. Because knocking someone down with a giant hammer isn't the same when you can't send that person flying in a heap of limbs.

The Vanguard has also been fixing some usability issues in the Xbox version. Finally, there's a new addition to The Vanguard: a junior programmer named Marius. Welcome to the team!


On the dungeon side of things the Terraformers have been concepting and experimenting with lava flow patterns and maps. We need that molten rock to look hella good. Here's a work in progress look at the latest version of the area surrounding the dungeon.



Beyond the virtual landscaping, work has begun on a cleaver item to help gather meat more easily.


The Berserkers have finished up the auto-targeting and lock-on systems for the combat system prototypes. We saw some concerns about this following last week's community letter. We're currently only prototyping and testing new targeting systems. Nothing is being added until we have something that we think fits well with our desired combat paradigm.


The art team is cranking out new weapons, building pieces and creatures. There are also animations happening. It's better if we just show you what they've been working on.




PUPPY!!!


KITTY!!!



The tools guys are working on improving what kind of information we get in crash reports. Things like knowing the location of players when the client or server crashes, for example.

On the tech team side of things there's been crash fixes and optimization work, especially on the Xbox parity patch that was rolled out on Friday. Work continues this week on further bug and crash fixes.

Finally, the guys working at Coconut Lizard have managed to hack together a playable build of the PS4 version.


Players have been asking for a status update on the new features, and we wanted to give you guys some information on that front. We are currently focused on polish and stability. We have a certain threshold of polish that we would like to reach before we start adding new features again, as we don't want to do things half assed. We'll provide more updates about features in the future.

Sincerely,

Funcom

Dear exiles,

Technically it's getting cold outside. Hope everyone's been enjoying the first week of October! It's getting colder by the day, the perfect time to curl up under a blanket, drink some hot chocolate, and play a video game.

For this week's community letter, we're trying something different: fewer words! And possibly some more gifs and pictures, depending on what I'm allowed to show.


Work is well under way on the next PC update, which will add thrall inventories and new building pieces to the game. Entertainers, fighters and archers you break on your Wheel of Pain needs to be clothed and equipped before they can fight for you, so if you've always wanted to make a giant, uniformed army of thralls you will be able to do that. With this patch we're also updating the basic creature AI. Best case we'll be rolling out the patch in about two weeks.


Last week we patched Xbox with the Big PC/Xbox Parity Update™. This moved a heap of changes, optimizations and improvements to the Xbox version of Conan Exiles, bringing it in line with the PC version. The full change log can be found here. Going forward we will continue to keep the two versions in sync. Keep in mind that there will always be a delay from PC to console, due to the certification process, but we are working on reducing the time it takes for the console versions to reach parity.


Every Friday, the entire development team meets up to discuss what they’ve been working on recently: New content and features, bugs that have been fixed, and things to come down the pipeline. The development team is split into cross professional Scrum teams that each have their own focus and tasks to complete. You can find their names and descriptions in the first community letter.


In addition to the usual bug fixes the Vanguard team has started working on improving the new ragdoll setup that has been added to the combat system. Because knocking someone down with a giant hammer isn't the same when you can't send that person flying in a heap of limbs.

The Vanguard has also been fixing some usability issues in the Xbox version. Finally, there's a new addition to The Vanguard: a junior programmer named Marius. Welcome to the team!


On the dungeon side of things the Terraformers have been concepting and experimenting with lava flow patterns and maps. We need that molten rock to look hella good. Here's a work in progress look at the latest version of the area surrounding the dungeon.



Beyond the virtual landscaping, work has begun on a cleaver item to help gather meat more easily.


The Berserkers have finished up the auto-targeting and lock-on systems for the combat system prototypes. We saw some concerns about this following last week's community letter. We're currently only prototyping and testing new targeting systems. Nothing is being added until we have something that we think fits well with our desired combat paradigm.


The art team is cranking out new weapons, building pieces and creatures. There are also animations happening. It's better if we just show you what they've been working on.




PUPPY!!!


KITTY!!!



The tools guys are working on improving what kind of information we get in crash reports. Things like knowing the location of players when the client or server crashes, for example.

On the tech team side of things there's been crash fixes and optimization work, especially on the Xbox parity patch that was rolled out on Friday. Work continues this week on further bug and crash fixes.

Finally, the guys working at Coconut Lizard have managed to hack together a playable build of the PS4 version.


Players have been asking for a status update on the new features, and we wanted to give you guys some information on that front. We are currently focused on polish and stability. We have a certain threshold of polish that we would like to reach before we start adding new features again, as we don't want to do things half assed. We'll provide more updates about features in the future.

Sincerely,

Funcom

Does eating an exotic feast meal, made up of spiced haunch, cooked eggs and dried berries, while drinking some nice highland wine sound tempting to you?

Needing food and water at regular intervals can be somewhat of a hassle in both real life and survival games. But just as in real life, where eating and drinking can be a source of great pleasure and fulfillment, eating and drinking has been made much more interesting, helpful and fun in Conan Exiles with the Frozen North expansion update.

You can now make a host of great dishes, made from all types of food, and also brew great wine or alcohol beverages. Read the rest over on our dev blog:

https://blog.conanexiles.com/en/dev-blog-18-eat-drink-hearts-content/

Does eating an exotic feast meal, made up of spiced haunch, cooked eggs and dried berries, while drinking some nice highland wine sound tempting to you?

Needing food and water at regular intervals can be somewhat of a hassle in both real life and survival games. But just as in real life, where eating and drinking can be a source of great pleasure and fulfillment, eating and drinking has been made much more interesting, helpful and fun in Conan Exiles with the Frozen North expansion update.

You can now make a host of great dishes, made from all types of food, and also brew great wine or alcohol beverages. Read the rest over on our dev blog:

https://blog.conanexiles.com/en/dev-blog-18-eat-drink-hearts-content/

Dear exiles, 

Happy October! It's the month of spoops, pumkpin spiced lattes and complaining about Norwegian stores selling their Christmas candy and decorations too early. 

We've been working out of our new offices for four weeks now and everyone has managed to settle into the new work space. The coders have solved their window blinds problem, we finally have a microwave oven in the kitchen, and now that the teams are sequestered in separate rooms you can't hear them scream in frustration when something crashes. 

This week there's been progress on gameplay systems and the art team is filling in gaps. You'll find all the details below. 


Last week we released a hotfix for PC to take care of some lingering issues after the most recent update to the game. You can now repair Exceptional and Flawless items again (if you have the correct thrall and crafting station), and thrall recipes were also taken care of.  

There's still work to be done, obviously.  

Food spoils incredibly quickly and the desert heat can be devastating, even when you're standing in water. We're working on addressing these issues and will be doing additional hotfixes before we do the next major update. G-portal is also helping us improve server performance and stability. 


We patched Xbox with another stability patch last week and our current focus is the PC/Xbox One parity update. There are over 1400 changes, gameplay updates and bug fixes coming to the console version. This will update the sprint mechanics, improve controller support, update the repair system, and remove those pesky broken dancer thralls that sometimes crash the servers.  

We're also rolling out the art optimizations we mentioned last week, which cuts down on the number of polygons used in our art assets. That should make the game run smoother and more stable. 

Of course, this doesn't mean stability work on Xbox is finished, and there will be more updates and patches. 

What the teams have been working on in the past week: 

Every Friday, the entire development team meets up to discuss what they’ve been working on recently: New content and features, bugs that have been fixed, and things to come down the pipeline. The development team is split into cross professional Scrum teams that each have their own focus and tasks to complete. You can find their names and descriptions in the first community letter. 


Vanguard has been working on expanding the thrall system, and we've now added the ability to equip armor and weapons on certain types of thralls. it's a pretty rad feature, one we hope you'll like. 

In addition to thrall inventories, the Vanguard has been continuing to work on the sickle, which will let you quickly harvest Plant Fiber. No more running around vegetated areas mashing the E key to collect Fiber, wearing out your finger in the process. The sickle is also the first part of a farming system, which is currently being designed. 

Finally, to improve on the building system, Vanguard has done some optimization work to make building feel snappier. Personally, building is one of my favorite things in Conan Exiles, and I welcome any and all improvements we do to that feature. 


The greyboxing for the new dungeon is mostly finished, same goes for the new playfield. Visual effects have been added, making the two areas look vibrant and colorful, and I'm very excited to see our community's reaction to the new content. 

We're now experimenting with how we're going to populate the two areas. The dungeon isn't in a particularly creature friendly place, so we'll need to consider that when we're placing creatures and NPCs for players to fight. Don't expect to see a lot of hyenas, for example. 


Combat prototyping is progressing nicely and the team has added new animations for the two-handed hammer and spears. On the band-end the Berserkers have been working on the combo system, experimenting with soft targeting and lock-on systems. 

The point of all this combat prototyping is to create a more dynamic and better combat system. Improving combat is one of the things our community has been the most vocal about and our goal is still to have the best melee combat in the genre.   


Featurama has been helping the Vanguard expand the thrall system so you can equip thralls. They've also been working on the option to move thralls without returning them to your inventory first. 


The art team wrapped up their optimization work last week and have now moved on to filling in missing content. In practice, this means they're creating assets for anything that's left to be added, everything from new weapons and outfits to new crafting stations, icons and visual effects. 

It's not a small list of things, but certainly doable by artists as hard working as ours. I've already seen two new bows and crossbows near completion, and they're looking pretty awesome.  


The tools team has been working on a backend system to reduce the amount of downtime for the general dev team due to bad submissions.  

Last week we also rolled out improved crash reporting for Xbox One, giving us lots of juicy data to look over when doing crash fixes on console. Work is also being done to figure out further ways we can improve the crash reporting tools, for both PC and console. 

Most of the tech team are still focused on Xbox One, working on crash fixes and stabilization of the PC/Xbox parity patch. We've also begun looking into how we can take advantage of the Xbox One X. 

This doesn't mean we're ignoring the issues with PC, as there's still work to be done there.  

On the PS4 side of things, Coconut Lizard have reported that they can now reach character creation on the PlayStation 4 version of the game. That's not bad for two weeks' worth of work. 


Okay jens Erik, now for something funny and witty to wrap the whole thing up. Hmm... Oh no. They've already started reading! Think, damnit, think! Uhm...  

Wise man says forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza! 

Perfect. 



Sincerely, 

Funcom 

 

Dear exiles, 

Happy October! It's the month of spoops, pumkpin spiced lattes and complaining about Norwegian stores selling their Christmas candy and decorations too early. 

We've been working out of our new offices for four weeks now and everyone has managed to settle into the new work space. The coders have solved their window blinds problem, we finally have a microwave oven in the kitchen, and now that the teams are sequestered in separate rooms you can't hear them scream in frustration when something crashes. 

This week there's been progress on gameplay systems and the art team is filling in gaps. You'll find all the details below. 


Last week we released a hotfix for PC to take care of some lingering issues after the most recent update to the game. You can now repair Exceptional and Flawless items again (if you have the correct thrall and crafting station), and thrall recipes were also taken care of.  

There's still work to be done, obviously.  

Food spoils incredibly quickly and the desert heat can be devastating, even when you're standing in water. We're working on addressing these issues and will be doing additional hotfixes before we do the next major update. G-portal is also helping us improve server performance and stability. 


We patched Xbox with another stability patch last week and our current focus is the PC/Xbox One parity update. There are over 1400 changes, gameplay updates and bug fixes coming to the console version. This will update the sprint mechanics, improve controller support, update the repair system, and remove those pesky broken dancer thralls that sometimes crash the servers.  

We're also rolling out the art optimizations we mentioned last week, which cuts down on the number of polygons used in our art assets. That should make the game run smoother and more stable. 

Of course, this doesn't mean stability work on Xbox is finished, and there will be more updates and patches. 

What the teams have been working on in the past week: 

Every Friday, the entire development team meets up to discuss what they’ve been working on recently: New content and features, bugs that have been fixed, and things to come down the pipeline. The development team is split into cross professional Scrum teams that each have their own focus and tasks to complete. You can find their names and descriptions in the first community letter. 


Vanguard has been working on expanding the thrall system, and we've now added the ability to equip armor and weapons on certain types of thralls. it's a pretty rad feature, one we hope you'll like. 

In addition to thrall inventories, the Vanguard has been continuing to work on the sickle, which will let you quickly harvest Plant Fiber. No more running around vegetated areas mashing the E key to collect Fiber, wearing out your finger in the process. The sickle is also the first part of a farming system, which is currently being designed. 

Finally, to improve on the building system, Vanguard has done some optimization work to make building feel snappier. Personally, building is one of my favorite things in Conan Exiles, and I welcome any and all improvements we do to that feature. 


The greyboxing for the new dungeon is mostly finished, same goes for the new playfield. Visual effects have been added, making the two areas look vibrant and colorful, and I'm very excited to see our community's reaction to the new content. 

We're now experimenting with how we're going to populate the two areas. The dungeon isn't in a particularly creature friendly place, so we'll need to consider that when we're placing creatures and NPCs for players to fight. Don't expect to see a lot of hyenas, for example. 


Combat prototyping is progressing nicely and the team has added new animations for the two-handed hammer and spears. On the band-end the Berserkers have been working on the combo system, experimenting with soft targeting and lock-on systems. 

The point of all this combat prototyping is to create a more dynamic and better combat system. Improving combat is one of the things our community has been the most vocal about and our goal is still to have the best melee combat in the genre.   


Featurama has been helping the Vanguard expand the thrall system so you can equip thralls. They've also been working on the option to move thralls without returning them to your inventory first. 


The art team wrapped up their optimization work last week and have now moved on to filling in missing content. In practice, this means they're creating assets for anything that's left to be added, everything from new weapons and outfits to new crafting stations, icons and visual effects. 

It's not a small list of things, but certainly doable by artists as hard working as ours. I've already seen two new bows and crossbows near completion, and they're looking pretty awesome.  


The tools team has been working on a backend system to reduce the amount of downtime for the general dev team due to bad submissions.  

Last week we also rolled out improved crash reporting for Xbox One, giving us lots of juicy data to look over when doing crash fixes on console. Work is also being done to figure out further ways we can improve the crash reporting tools, for both PC and console. 

Most of the tech team are still focused on Xbox One, working on crash fixes and stabilization of the PC/Xbox parity patch. We've also begun looking into how we can take advantage of the Xbox One X. 

This doesn't mean we're ignoring the issues with PC, as there's still work to be done there.  

On the PS4 side of things, Coconut Lizard have reported that they can now reach character creation on the PlayStation 4 version of the game. That's not bad for two weeks' worth of work. 


Okay jens Erik, now for something funny and witty to wrap the whole thing up. Hmm... Oh no. They've already started reading! Think, damnit, think! Uhm...  

Wise man says forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza! 

Perfect. 



Sincerely, 

Funcom 

 

We've released another hotfix to take care of some lingering issues from last week's update. Please restart Steam to make sure you have the latest version of the client.

• Black Ice nodes now correctly give out black ice resources
  
• You can repair Exceptional and Flawless items again, but it needs to be done in a workbench with a thrall
  
• Thrall crafting should now work as intended
  
• Exploit Fix: Fixed a way to duplicate explosive jars
  
• Exploit Fix: You can no longer interact with objects through walls
  
• Placeables can now be interacted with underwater
  
• The "interact" function now works again in the Radial Menu
  
• NPCs should be easier to capture using the fiber bindings
  
• Trebuchet inventories can be opened again

• Some players will see an error message about running out of memory when trying to launch the game. We're looking into this issue
  
• Sometimes too many animals will spawn in at the same location, creating messed up chimeras. There's a fix for this coming
  
• Using Alt-Z to turn the GUI on/off does not currently work

We've released another hotfix to take care of some lingering issues from last week's update. Please restart Steam to make sure you have the latest version of the client.

• Black Ice nodes now correctly give out black ice resources
  
• You can repair Exceptional and Flawless items again, but it needs to be done in a workbench with a thrall
  
• Thrall crafting should now work as intended
  
• Exploit Fix: Fixed a way to duplicate explosive jars
  
• Exploit Fix: You can no longer interact with objects through walls
  
• Placeables can now be interacted with underwater
  
• The "interact" function now works again in the Radial Menu
  
• NPCs should be easier to capture using the fiber bindings
  
• Trebuchet inventories can be opened again

• Some players will see an error message about running out of memory when trying to launch the game. We're looking into this issue
  
• Sometimes too many animals will spawn in at the same location, creating messed up chimeras. There's a fix for this coming
  
• Using Alt-Z to turn the GUI on/off does not currently work

Dear exiles,

Welcome back to the weekly community letter. In case you missed our first letter you can read it right here to catch up on what we talked about last week.

This week will mostly be about fixes and optimizations, but we also have some things to show that we think you'll like. We know we do! Like the things we're going to show you.

There are about 6 months left of Early Access. We're currently mapping out the timeline implementation of the features and content that remain before full launch in Q1, 2018. There's still a lot to do, of course, and we will keep you updated.


We patched PC last week! Version 67264/13947 went live and introduced a lot of changes. The biggest was the update we did to the repair system: From now on you won't be able to repair an item unless you already have the recipe. This change was made so we can increase the value of loot drops in the game – now we can give you a cool weapon earlier in the game, safe in the knowledge that you can't completely circumvent the crafting system.

We're going to do further iterations on the repair system such as adding a time cost to repair (to avoid cheesy stuff like instantly repairing weapons in combat), and adding items like repair kits and whetstones, which will provide the ability to make minor repairs even without knowing the recipe.

The light radius on torches and light sources were also increased. We did this for optimization reasons, because we'd like the game to run well. Brighter torches means fewer point lights, which in terms will help with framerate.

After the patch we released two hotfixes to correct some additional issues, like making sure that thrall recipes work properly, and removing an explosive jar duplication exploit.


Last week's update didn't do everything we set out to accomplish, so we're doing another Xbox One stability patch this week. We've also added a secondary crash report system to the Xbox version, which will give us more detailed information about crashes and disconnects.

Getting parity between the PC and Xbox One is our next focus. There are a lot of fixes, which you can find in the patch notes from the PC version.


Every Friday, the entire development team meets up to discuss what they’ve been working on recently: New content and features, bugs that have been fixed, and things to come down the pipeline. The development team is split into cross professional Scrum teams that each have their own focus and tasks to complete. You can find their names and descriptions in the previous community letter.


The Vanguard have been stomping out bugs and exploits while also making some important changes to the game. As a part of the ongoing battle against "ghost-raiding" one of the team members has done some alterations to players' interaction traces. This should make it impossible to interact with containers through walls.

There's also a new system in place for sorting inventories, which will definitely be helpful when your inventory starts filling up with loot and recipes. The carousel update to the user interface is coming along as well.



Finally, The Vanguard has made some changes to the way NPCs spawned in. This caused too many of them to spawn in at the same location at the same time, creating some weird chimera monsters. We now have a fix in place that we will push to live once we have all the kinks ironed out.


Work on the new dungeon and playfield area is progressing nicely. The Terraformers have been blocking out the areas and they're now mostly playable (as in, we can run around in them), but there's still work to be done before everything's ready for prime time.

Finally, there are moon phases coming to Conan Exiles! This will allow us to create special events based on moon cycles and generally increase the sense that the Exiled Lands is a living, breathing place.


The combat and movement team has a new name! From now on they're The Berserkers. Our internal combat playtests continue. Combat work continues with new features, such as movement cancelling and new animations. In this community manager's humble opinion, it's looking pretty good.

In addition to this there's also a lot of back-end work, new animations when gathering, and the character model now leans left and right when turning. These changes are subtle, but important for overall feel and polish.


Recently, Featurama has been working on a knockback and ragdolling system for combat. The physics for that was implemented in our development build last week. This is a part of what Joel has been talking about with taking inspiration from Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. It's lead to some hilarious bugs.

Other than that, they've been busy fixing audio bugs and exploits, and working on the new Truncheons and Thrall bindings.

Featurama has started on some other new features, but we're not allowed to talk about them just yet! Hopefully next week!


In an ongoing effort to improve game performance parts of the art team have been optimizing destructible building pieces, cutting down the number of polygons used in each building piece. Initially we were using an automatic solution built into the Unreal Engine, but that wasn't particularly good for optimization. We've now "hand optimized" the building passets.

140 objects have been optimized, with an average 86% reduction in polygons. For things like the regular Stonebrick walls the difference isn't huge: going down from 6736 triangles to 4747 triangles. The destructible mesh has seen significant optimization work, from 39.205 triangles to 6527 triangles. That's a lot of triangles!

Optimized


Unoptimized


Optimized


Unoptimized



Together with the Terraformers, the art team has been blocking out the new dungeon and playfield areas, experimenting with different texture variants for rocks, vegetation and the surrounding environment.

Our animation team has continued to optimize creature animations for the new combat system. They've also been doing some tests on special combat event animations, to see if that's something we can implement in the game later on.

Finally, the character artists have been finishing up the Zamorian outfit we showed you guys last week, while our creature artist has been pumping out new animals on an almost daily basis. There are even disgustingly adorable baby versions of some of those animals!





Our crew of coders have been fixing crash bugs, doing some back-end work and improving the way the game loads in buildings. Anything immediately closer to you will be loaded in more quickly than before. This addresses an exploit where players could interact with containers through walls that hadn't been fully loaded in.

The tools team has been optimizing the way we collect crash reports on Xbox, to more easily determine the cause of client crashes in the future. They've also been fixing server settings on Xbox so they'll actually save properly now.

On the PS4 side of things, Coconut Lizard has been able to get the main menu of the game up and running on PS4. Pretty impressive for a week's worth of porting work.


For those of you wondering about the bi-weekly dev streams we're very happy to announce that the basic setup for the new streaming room is done. It's a bit empty and bland at the moment, much like life itself, but it's ready for streaming. We'll announce our next dev stream very soon.

Thanks for reading,

Funcom

Dear exiles,

Welcome back to the weekly community letter. In case you missed our first letter you can read it right here to catch up on what we talked about last week.

This week will mostly be about fixes and optimizations, but we also have some things to show that we think you'll like. We know we do! Like the things we're going to show you.

There are about 6 months left of Early Access. We're currently mapping out the timeline implementation of the features and content that remain before full launch in Q1, 2018. There's still a lot to do, of course, and we will keep you updated.


We patched PC last week! Version 67264/13947 went live and introduced a lot of changes. The biggest was the update we did to the repair system: From now on you won't be able to repair an item unless you already have the recipe. This change was made so we can increase the value of loot drops in the game – now we can give you a cool weapon earlier in the game, safe in the knowledge that you can't completely circumvent the crafting system.

We're going to do further iterations on the repair system such as adding a time cost to repair (to avoid cheesy stuff like instantly repairing weapons in combat), and adding items like repair kits and whetstones, which will provide the ability to make minor repairs even without knowing the recipe.

The light radius on torches and light sources were also increased. We did this for optimization reasons, because we'd like the game to run well. Brighter torches means fewer point lights, which in terms will help with framerate.

After the patch we released two hotfixes to correct some additional issues, like making sure that thrall recipes work properly, and removing an explosive jar duplication exploit.


Last week's update didn't do everything we set out to accomplish, so we're doing another Xbox One stability patch this week. We've also added a secondary crash report system to the Xbox version, which will give us more detailed information about crashes and disconnects.

Getting parity between the PC and Xbox One is our next focus. There are a lot of fixes, which you can find in the patch notes from the PC version.


Every Friday, the entire development team meets up to discuss what they’ve been working on recently: New content and features, bugs that have been fixed, and things to come down the pipeline. The development team is split into cross professional Scrum teams that each have their own focus and tasks to complete. You can find their names and descriptions in the previous community letter.


The Vanguard have been stomping out bugs and exploits while also making some important changes to the game. As a part of the ongoing battle against "ghost-raiding" one of the team members has done some alterations to players' interaction traces. This should make it impossible to interact with containers through walls.

There's also a new system in place for sorting inventories, which will definitely be helpful when your inventory starts filling up with loot and recipes. The carousel update to the user interface is coming along as well.



Finally, The Vanguard has made some changes to the way NPCs spawned in. This caused too many of them to spawn in at the same location at the same time, creating some weird chimera monsters. We now have a fix in place that we will push to live once we have all the kinks ironed out.


Work on the new dungeon and playfield area is progressing nicely. The Terraformers have been blocking out the areas and they're now mostly playable (as in, we can run around in them), but there's still work to be done before everything's ready for prime time.

Finally, there are moon phases coming to Conan Exiles! This will allow us to create special events based on moon cycles and generally increase the sense that the Exiled Lands is a living, breathing place.


The combat and movement team has a new name! From now on they're The Berserkers. Our internal combat playtests continue. Combat work continues with new features, such as movement cancelling and new animations. In this community manager's humble opinion, it's looking pretty good.

In addition to this there's also a lot of back-end work, new animations when gathering, and the character model now leans left and right when turning. These changes are subtle, but important for overall feel and polish.


Recently, Featurama has been working on a knockback and ragdolling system for combat. The physics for that was implemented in our development build last week. This is a part of what Joel has been talking about with taking inspiration from Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. It's lead to some hilarious bugs.

Other than that, they've been busy fixing audio bugs and exploits, and working on the new Truncheons and Thrall bindings.

Featurama has started on some other new features, but we're not allowed to talk about them just yet! Hopefully next week!


In an ongoing effort to improve game performance parts of the art team have been optimizing destructible building pieces, cutting down the number of polygons used in each building piece. Initially we were using an automatic solution built into the Unreal Engine, but that wasn't particularly good for optimization. We've now "hand optimized" the building passets.

140 objects have been optimized, with an average 86% reduction in polygons. For things like the regular Stonebrick walls the difference isn't huge: going down from 6736 triangles to 4747 triangles. The destructible mesh has seen significant optimization work, from 39.205 triangles to 6527 triangles. That's a lot of triangles!

Optimized


Unoptimized


Optimized


Unoptimized



Together with the Terraformers, the art team has been blocking out the new dungeon and playfield areas, experimenting with different texture variants for rocks, vegetation and the surrounding environment.

Our animation team has continued to optimize creature animations for the new combat system. They've also been doing some tests on special combat event animations, to see if that's something we can implement in the game later on.

Finally, the character artists have been finishing up the Zamorian outfit we showed you guys last week, while our creature artist has been pumping out new animals on an almost daily basis. There are even disgustingly adorable baby versions of some of those animals!





Our crew of coders have been fixing crash bugs, doing some back-end work and improving the way the game loads in buildings. Anything immediately closer to you will be loaded in more quickly than before. This addresses an exploit where players could interact with containers through walls that hadn't been fully loaded in.

The tools team has been optimizing the way we collect crash reports on Xbox, to more easily determine the cause of client crashes in the future. They've also been fixing server settings on Xbox so they'll actually save properly now.

On the PS4 side of things, Coconut Lizard has been able to get the main menu of the game up and running on PS4. Pretty impressive for a week's worth of porting work.


For those of you wondering about the bi-weekly dev streams we're very happy to announce that the basic setup for the new streaming room is done. It's a bit empty and bland at the moment, much like life itself, but it's ready for streaming. We'll announce our next dev stream very soon.

Thanks for reading,

Funcom