A few months have passed since our last news and a lot of things have happened behind the scenes. So it is time again to show you some progress.
We are currently balancing and testing these (and other) features on new islands, but are still far away from releasing any updates with the new content.

Gone are the town's "clone" days with its pack of grumpy old men, as we have replaced the old model, not just with one new model, but with a whole character randomization system, allowing us to generate new characters with different parameters for age, gender, body type, skin/hair color, and beard style:



When the job is changed, the townsmen and -women keep their personal characteristics and only change their clothing, including hats and tools.
We also added new military units and (head) variations, but they will still always keep their job.



We have replaced the old building animation and added the possibility to upgrade some buildings.


When upgraded, this house will serve as a residence for more people, effectively increasing the population limit.

Buildings can now have add-ons. Add-ons are small extra buildings you can place close to the main building to add extra functionality. Townsmen with a job associated with the main building can also work on the addon buildings.
Some examples:


Woodcutters will still cut down trees, but with the saw addon, they now can also cut the logs into boards.


Farmers will take care of farm animals like chicken, cows or sheep in addition to their harvesting duties.

As 2018 is coming to an end, we want to give you another small glimpse behind the scenes.
We always planned to have more than two trees in the game, so we created several new conifers and broad-leaved trees that fit the style of the overall world even better.

This is a quick overview of the steps in the evolution of the conifer's shape and texture:



And these are the final versions of the new conifers and broad-leaved trees:



With the Christmas holidays ahead this will be all for now. But it will be a busy and exciting 2019 for everyone.

Many of you have asked us about the current state of the game and why there were no updates for several months. So we decided to give you a little insight into the development process.
We are still rewriting many of the game's base systems, a decision that we knew, would allow the final game to be bigger and better, but also stop us from doing regular updates for a longer time.
Most of the game code (buildings, combat, work, resources, controls, VR framework) has been updated to the new system. We have also added localization (the game now supports different languages) and are currently working on the UI, the save game system and the tutorial/quest system, with music and animations still untouched. Most of this progress is “invisible”, so unfortunately we don’t have anything new to show there.

But we have also been working on the level creation tools. The first island was entirely built by one artist, without any ways to reuse parts easily. As we want to create many more and also bigger islands, we knew we had to add tools the level designers can use to directly realize their ideas.

Before building tools, it is a good idea to write down what you want to achieve with them and set boundaries.

These are the things we want from our tools:

• Easy to prototype and test new maps
  
• Easy texturing without external tools
  
• Not just a heightmap terrain but overhanging parts, bridges, caves and a bottom
  
• Good performance (limited materials and polygons)

Things the tools won't achieve:

• Procedural creation and/or levels with basically infinite size (hard for balancing and performance)
  
• A level editor we can ship as part of the game (this would take a big amount of extra time and effort)

We will show you a rough idea of how many steps it takes to build a new level for Townsmen VR:




To decide on the basic shape of a level we do a quick voxel sketch. This is very helpful to define the coastline as well as the location of mountains, rivers and lakes.
We can also take a smoothed version of this island to do first gameplay tests, but as soon as we are happy with the voxel sketch, we start production of the full level.




The voxel island is then used as a template to place 3D tiles. We currently have over 100 different tiles and are constantly increasing this number.
This is actually the most time consuming part of level creation. In this highly sped up time-lapse you can also see the old island in the background for comparison.

• Textures: Having the textures on the small tiles fit with any tile combination would make the textures very small and repetitive. After building the base geometry the wall textures are automatically redistributed. Then the top and bottom stone edges are recalculated to fit the walls. Finally the grass border textures are redistributed randomly to not show the same variation over and over.
  
• Distort: The whole island can be distorted based on a 3d noise function to break up the underlying grid. The stone walls are also being modified so they are not just straight but slightly dented to produce overhangs.
  
• Splat Map: The grass surfaces are merged into one big texture. This “splat map” allows us to directly draw different textures (grass, mud, sand, stones) on the surface with nice transitions between the materials.
  
• Smooth normals: As tiles can be placed in many different combinations, there might be visible edges where they meet. This is due to the normals pointing into different directions. Most of these edges are unintended, so we smooth them.
  
• Sculpt: We have tools to modify the height of the ground to make it look more natural. This is especially being used on beach and river tiles as well as to smooth out slopes. The tools can also be used to move geometry in any direction or even move single vertices, making it easy to modify the geometry anywhere.
  
• Place objects: To decorate the island, we have brushes to draw grass and trees or place single objects like big rocks to further improve the mountains.

Rivers are filled with water by creating and modifying control points for the water flow mesh.




This is the result we can achieve with the current state of our level creation tools. Please note that all the tile models, textures and decoration objects are still not final, but it should give you a good overview how the level creation process works right now.

We hope this has given you some insight into what we are currently working on. Unfortunately we still can't promise a release date for new content, but we are working hard to create the best medieval town simulation/strategy game for VR.

In case you haven’t heard yet, Townsmen VR recently won the German Computer Games Award (“Deutscher Computerspielpreis”) for “Best Game Design 2018” as well as additional funding from the FFF Bavaria and Computec Media Group.

All of this is obviously very good news and grants us the opportunity to make the game even bigger and better. While until recently we were more focused on fixing bugs and improving the overall experience, we are now in preparations to expand the game. This will neither be an easy, nor a quick task, as many underlying systems have to be streamlined and optimized to allow us to meet the requirements for the increased scope of the project. This includes creating new tools that help us build levels and other content faster. Even if it will take a lot of time, we are dedicated to making this the best game it can be, so expect more to come from Townsmen VR in the future!


Two concepts for more islands

Until then enjoy the game, keep the feedback coming and stay tuned for more information in the coming months.

Hi everybody,

We added official support for Windows Mixed Reality!

These changes come into effect when playing with a Mixed Reality headset:
• Menu options are mapped on thumbstick directions instead of touchpad directions to avoid unwanted menu inputs when grabbing objects.
• You still can grab objects with thumb and/or index finger.
• Control options now display the Motion Controller instead of the Vive Controller.
General changes:
• The catapult’s aim highlight doesn’t aim at the center of the island when the target position is lost anymore.
• Small performance optimizations of hand touches and catapult aim functions.
• Fixed button mapping in control options for Oculus Rift.

As always: have fun and leave us comments in the forum! :)

Thanks to your feedback and more internal testing we were able to iron out many more minor issues:

- Save System: Fixed autosave not working if the load or save menu have not been opened during the current play session.
- Save System: Fixed enemy archers having wrong colors after loading.
- Save System: Fixed "skip tutorial" activating the two “start townsmen” only once (didn’t work if you loaded an earlier save file and skipped again).
- Save System: Fixed a rare issue with unlocking buildings.
- Save System: Fixed an issue with tutorial UI hints.
- Save System: Fixed the "enemy attacks" option not loading correctly.
- Save System: Fixed some issues with rally flags.
- Pathfinding: Townsmen now better detect if a target is not reachable.
- Combat: Normal townsmen now engage in combat if dropped near an ongoing fight or a building being attacked (previously they only engaged if they were near when the fight started.)
- Combat: Archers now change target or position if they don't hit their target.
- Combat: Removed unintended hand interactions with enemy archers.
- Combat: Catapults and construction sites can now be attacked by enemies.
- Balancing: Increased difficulty of later attacks.
- Map: Removed some small islands around ship landing zones.
- Game Over: Added a Game Over screen that appears when all buildings have been destroyed.
- Fixed an error that let you duplicate resources dropping off a catapult if it was struck by lightning while falling.
- Fixed resources not being slowed down by water if they hit ground before falling in water.
- Fixed enemy attacks not resetting after restarting the game.
- Prevented the victory music from playing if the game is restarted during combat.
- Fixed an issue with townsmen sometimes still reacting to hand rotation after being dropped.

+ Catapults can now damage enemies on ships.

Have fun and keep us updated if you have problems!

Finally we can present our first bigger feature update for Townsmen VR, thanks to your feedback:

- Save System: Added a way to save and load the game progress manually as well as an autosave feature.
- Random Attacks: After the tutorial, enemies will keep attacking your island from different directions and with different strength. You can deactivate this feature in the options menu.
- Enemies now have a chance to drop different resources on death (instead of just swords)
- Enemy archers: Like the player, the enemies can now also have archers.
- Building Names: If you use the info button on your buildings, the name of the building will be displayed on top of the resource info.
- Pathfinding: Townsmen now try to find new paths if they are stuck too long at one position.
- Fixed an error that made the catapult falling through the ground easier while a projectile was loaded.
- Fixed an issue that allowed you to build more soldiers/archers than allowed by the amount of barracks on the island.
- Fixed an issue where people wouldn't stop attacking thin air after their enemy was tossed away by a catapult attack.

Also in order to get the annoying crash fixed that some users experience, we decided to use the version that doesn't have the problem as new main version of the game. The better performing but randomly crashing version can now be found in the beta channel. All users with decent hardware should be able to enjoy the game with slightly worse performance anyway.

We hope you like the update and that no more crashes appear and await your comments here or in the forums.

Thanks for playing!

Finally we can present our first bigger feature update for Townsmen VR, thanks to your feedback:

- Save System: Added a way to save and load the game progress manually as well as an autosave feature.
- Random Attacks: After the tutorial, enemies will keep attacking your island from different directions and with different strength. You can deactivate this feature in the options menu.
- Enemies now have a chance to drop different resources on death (instead of just swords)
- Enemy archers: Like the player, the enemies can now also have archers.
- Building Names: If you use the info button on your buildings, the name of the building will be displayed on top of the resource info.
- Pathfinding: Townsmen now try to find new paths if they are stuck too long at one position.
- Fixed an error that made the catapult falling through the ground easier while a projectile was loaded.
- Fixed an issue that allowed you to build more soldiers/archers than allowed by the amount of barracks on the island.
- Fixed an issue where people wouldn't stop attacking thin air after their enemy was tossed away by a catapult attack.

Also in order to get the annoying crash fixed that some users experience, we decided to use the version that doesn't have the problem as new main version of the game. The better performing but randomly crashing version can now be found in the beta channel. All users with decent hardware should be able to enjoy the game with slightly worse performance anyway.

We hope you like the update and that no more crashes appear and await your comments here or in the forums.

Thanks for playing!

Watch our new dev commentary (Let's Play) with our game designer of Townsmen VR!

By the way. Many of you have requested a specific feature, which we have now implemented. Due to further tests, we officially can't show this yet. But if you are attentive, you can guess it and find a little hint. ;)
Have fun! <3

Youtube Link: https://youtu.be/BevwmpG8Zj4

Watch our new dev commentary (Let's Play) with our game designer of Townsmen VR!

By the way. Many of you have requested a specific feature, which we have now implemented. Due to further tests, we officially can't show this yet. But if you are attentive, you can guess it and find a little hint. ;)
Have fun! <3

Youtube Link: https://youtu.be/BevwmpG8Zj4