Sep 6, 2018

Dungeons of Tal'Doria - SuneX Games

Hey Tal'Dorians!

We are really excited to be showing you some new content in relationship to our first crafting profession! On top of that, we also have some news about how our NPC's are coming along and what you can expect from them in the next update! Unfortunately it will still take some time.

There has been a lot of new resources added to the game in preparation for our chef profession, and what good is a chef without ingredients? So today we are going to show you some of the food you can find in the world and how it will work.

Harvestable Corn Plant (Farmlands)

Harvestable Pineapple Plant (Maya Jungle)

The NPCs are busy working on those crops for you to steal, crops will grow in random places but some biomes like the medieval plains will have an abundance of crops, like the cornfields, which as you would expect allows you to harvest corn from.

Cherry Tree (Farmlands)

Blueberry Bush (Farmlands)

Trees and bushes will now be a source you can harvest from, but their resources will actually respawn, so once you gather all the apples, for example, you can come back later to harvest them again if you have found a good spot for harvesting.

There are many types of Food you can eat raw, but you will also be able to buy food from chef NPCs as well as cooking your own food with the chef profession. With the entry of food into the world, we will be making potions a bit rarer and hopefully be saved for emergencies. This means that you will want to start carrying around something you can eat in your backpack and find breaks between the fights to consume it as they will take longer to recover health as they have a heal over time effect.

Heal over time effect of food

Food is not only for healing ether, some food will give you attribute bonus' for a short time, so it will be helpful to find the right foods for the given task.

Buff effect of food

We will break down the ins and outs of the chef profession in the next DDD, but the basics are: the chef profession allows you to mix food items together to make dishes, the more tools, and experience you have as a chef will allow you to make exceedingly more complex dishes which will offer greater and greater boons.

Outside of these new resources we are working on improving the world to make it more lively, you have already seen some of the NPCs in the world but now they will have dialog and some will even give you hints to where to find treasure!

Hint from an NPC on the farm

There is still a good deal more than we are working on but will leave you here till we have more to show, as always please stop by our discord and say hello!

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Discord: https://discord.gg/93RQdvz
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SuneXGames
Facebook: https://facebook.com/SuneXGames
Website: http://sunex-games.de/

Sep 6, 2018

Insurgency: Sandstorm Pre-Order Beta 2 Patch Notes - September 6, 2018

Insurgency: Sandstorm - New World Interactive

Today we are releasing our first full update for pre-order Beta #2! The update contains a lot of critical fixes, improvements and optimizations. We look forward to all of your continued feedback as we continue polishing the game.

The game now offers a lot of ways to customize video settings, so please be sure to fine-tune quality and performance depending on your system specs. In particular:

Texture Streaming Pool Size needs to be adjusted depending on your video card. We recommend starting low and increasing to see what your GPU can handle. Setting this too high will cause noticeable hitching because your GPU is overloaded.
Shadow Quality as well as Dynamic Shadow Resolution and Cascaded Shadow Map Resolution have a pretty sizeable performance impact, so we recommend lowering these settings as much as possible if you’re experiencing performance issues.
Full Screen display mode is really important to ensure you’re getting an accurate depiction of performance. If you are struggling with performance and haven’t already ensured you are in full screen mode as was advised in the last hotfix announcement, we highly recommend you switch to full screen mode as soon as possible.

While there are many new settings to tweak, the ones listed above are particularly useful. If you are still struggling with performance after fine-tuning your video settings and ensuring you’re running in full screen mode, please share the details with us HERE.

General Improvements

Added South America server region. See “Matchmaking Preferences” in the Play menu to select it.
Expanded Video Settings Menu
- Video Settings are now only applied when the user presses “Apply Changes.”
- Advanced settings can override Quality settings if changed manually. This change is represented by a blue tint.
- Added new Advanced options.
  - Super Sampling
  - Ambient Occlusion
  - Anisotropic Filtering
  - Tessellation
  - Screen Space Reflections
  - Texture Streaming Pool Size
  - Maximum Dynamic Shadow Resolution
  - Maximum Cascaded Shadow Map Resolution

Major Fixes

Fixed issue with hit registration which would prevent bullets from dealing damage to an enemy, sometimes resulting in a higher time to kill.
Fixed bullets not properly penetrating arms and hands which was preventing them from dealing any subsequent damage to the torso.

Optimization & Performance

Disabled Nvidia Aftermath as it was a possible cause of some hitching issues.
Improved animation logic processing speed.
Moved all character cosmetics to a new mask shader system.
Improved character cosmetic system logic.
Scaled particle spawn counts for surface interactions based on the user’s Effects Quality setting.
Moved all bullet impact particles to be processed by the GPU instead of the CPU.
Limited the number of bounce effects created on ejected brass to three.
Removed spawning of weapon drop and body fall audio if not audible by the player.
Disabled water tracing for anybody not performing foliage interaction.
Updated Security and Insurgent Weapon Cache objectives to use a material swap instead of mesh swap.
Improved light audio spawning.
Improved textures for the following:
- Russian Transport Truck
- Large Technical
- Gunship
- Support Helicopter
- Destroyed Support Helicopter
- Bomber Drone
- Various small level props
Fixed a bug where dying in a vehicle would continuously play a blood impact effect on the ragdoll that reduced performance when exploded.

Gameplay Improvements

Player Movement
- Reduced player acceleration slightly.
- Force players into a crouch when completing a slide.
- Increased prone to standing transition time from 0.65 seconds to 1 second.
- Cap player speed to prone speed during the prone to stand transition.
Weapon Balance
- Reduced Light Armor effectiveness slightly.
- Reduced Heavy Armor effectiveness slightly.
- Reduced sway caused by stamina loss slightly.
- Reduced sway speed from suppression.
- Melee Bash animation can no longer be used on opened doors.
- Increased bullet drop slightly for 5.56, 5.45, and 7.62 at long ranges.
- Increased Ammo Check speed by 40%.
- Increased free aim recoil slightly.
- Fixed Laser Sight lasers not displaying correctly for other characters.
- Light Carrier no longer gives one extra rocket.
- Heavy Carrier gives only one extra rocket instead of two.
- Reduced the cooking timer for M83 Smoke grenade from five to four seconds.
- Increased M84 Flash grenade draw, put away, and throw speeds by 30%.
- Bipods now allow for more realistic angles based on the deployed surface height.
- Decreased Bipod max pitch.
- Greased Bolt Upgrade
  - Increased supply cost to three in Versus and Coop.
  - Increased supply cost to four in Competitive.
- Mosin Stripper Clip Upgrade
  - Increased supply cost to two in Versus and Coop.
  - Increased supply cost to three in Competitive.
Game Modes
- All
  - Added Gas Mask to the default Loadout for all Insurgent classes.
  - Removed drum magazine upgrade in Versus and Competitive.
- Checkpoint
  - Added Marksman, Breacher, and other unused classes as enemies.
  - Disabled Autocannon Strafe fire support when playing as Insurgents.
  - Added AK suppressors to Security Commander, Observer, Rifleman and Demolitions classes.
  - Added Insurgent sidearms to all Security classes.
  - Added drum magazine upgrades to all classes.
  - Increased enemy AI spawns at the final objective.
  - Improved insertion vehicle navigation paths.
Fire Support
- Gunship and Minigun Support
  - Increased turret angle at which helicopters begin shooting at players, making their initial shots less accurate.
  - Reduced Support Helicopter minigun spread by 10%.
  - Reduced hover time for Gunship from 15 seconds to 10 seconds.
  - Reduced hover time for Minigun Support from 30 seconds to 20 seconds.
- Smoke Mortars
  - Reduced round start cooldown from 30 seconds to five seconds to be consistent with Smoke Artillery.
Supply Cache
- Resupplying will now restore a player’s health to the max.
- Set cooldown for Resupplying to 45 seconds.
- Added UI element which communicates when Resupplying is on cooldown.
Vehicles
- Set Gunner seat to use the vehicle’s full view rotation.
- Set Gunner seat’s aiming to be absolute instead of relative, allowing it to move independently of the vehicle’s movement.
- Improved collision for bus prop steps to stop players from becoming caught on them.
Visual
- Adjust eye exposure levels when transitioning between the Loadout screen and the game world.
- Improved FXAA anti-aliasing quality.

Updated Content

Animation
- Improved body alignment with the ground for characters in prone.
- Added remaining first person weapon animations for the Uzi including Speed Reload, Foregrip, and Drum.
- Improved Grenade Launcher poses.
- Improved Grenade poses.
- Improved Binoculars, C4, mines, and similar item poses.
Weapons
- Added new Compensator for the M45.
Customization
- Unlocked items will appear at the top of the list of variations.
- Female hair, including Covered, can now be used with Headgear.
- Added texture layer for Facial Hair.
- Reduced “Rare” cosmetic costs from 900 to 600 credits.
- Reduced “Very Rare” cosmetic costs from 1800 to 1200 credits.
- Reduced “Rare” cosmetic camouflage costs from 1000 to 800 credits.
- Reduced “Very Rare” cosmetic camouflage costs from 2000 to 1500 credits.
- Assigned Cheap under the Insurgent Eyewear slot to the “Very Rare” category.
- Assigned Shades under the Insurgent Eyewear slot to the “Rare” category.
- Renamed “Shades” to “Stylish”
- Removed Track Top Black/Dark Red under the Insurgent Legs slot.
- Removed Track Pants Black/Dark Red under the Insurgent Legs slot.
- Replaced Dark Brown Cargo with Brown.
- Improved material for Bump under the Headgear slot.
Audio
- Added chemical cough voice over for when taking damage from Chemical Mortars.
- Updated cache rigging audio to be the correct duration of the timer.
- Updated all counter attack music.

Fixes

User Experience
- Fixed an issue where players could sometimes be locked into planting an explosive on an enemy Weapon Cache objective.
- Fixed “High Speed Low Drag” achievement.
- Fixed an occasional crash caused by the movie player during the splash screen sequence.
- Fixed a crash occurring with the Tactical Map.
- Fixed a crash occurring from scavenging weapons.
Weapons
- Fixed AN-M14 Incendiary grenades not showing any effects if they detonated in mid-air.
- Fixed third person shotgun hand position.
- Fixed PK-AS optic reticle alignment.
- Enabled post processing on PK-AS optic.
- Fixed shell in the magazine tube showing for the M870’s empty reload start animation.
- Fixed floating magazine blocking the player’s camera when using an L85A2 with the Extended Magazine upgrade.
- Fixed the G36K stock disappearing when using the Extended Magazine upgrade.
- Fixed audio not playing when deploying a Bipod onto a surface.
Fire Support
- Fixed Rocket Barrage projectiles occasionally bouncing off of terrain.
- Fixed issue with Support Helicopter’s targeting logic.
Voice Over
- Fixed delayed playtimes for:
  - Fire Support Being Finished
  - Observer Thanking Station
  - Helicopter Leaving
- Reduced time to play Kill Confirmed voice over for Gunship and Minigun Support.
AI
- Improved navigation to the objective during a counter-attack
- Improved Vehicle Gunner aiming.

User Interface Improvements

Added empty rank badge icon for players who haven’t completed enough placement matches to be ranked in Competitive.
Added Commander and Observer icons in the Tactical Map.
Added Primary/Sidearm toggle button under Binds.
Added Advanced option to disable the HUD entirely under Video Settings.
Various tweaks to class icons.

Map Balance & Fixes

Crossing
- Landscape optimization pass.
- Moved Security Skirmish spawn a bit further back.
- Moved Security spawns for A and D back a bit on Push Insurgents.
- Tweaked interior lighting to improve readability.
- Fixed various terrain bugs.
- Improved shadows on some level props.
- Fixed insertion vehicle path on Checkpoint.
Farmhouse
- Made various optimization improvements.
- Revised Skirmish scenario to make it less of a spawn trap for Insurgents.
- Particles no longer have a second delay before they become inactive outside players view.
- Fixed AI being able to see through the crop fields.
- Fixed floating issues with roads.

Tweaked post-processing to reduce washed-out look and improve contrast.
Adjusted placement of dynamic level props.
Fixed an issue where Security players couldn't capture objective A in a certain spot on Push Security.
Fixed insertion vehicle path on Checkpoint.
Improved AI vehicle navigation on Checkpoint.
Improved AI’s ability to use cover.
Fixed other miscellaneous bugs.

Hideout
- Optimized terrain to lower triangle count.
- Adjusted playable area to make it feel less restrictive.
- Made river near Insurgents Skirmish spawn more shallow.
- Moved Security spawn closer to the river and relocated D to a different building on Skirmish.
- Moved Supply Crates closer to faction spawns on Skirmish.
- Removed a few balconies that were obstructing firing positions.
- Fixed insertion vehicle path on Checkpoint.
- Fixed other miscellaneous bugs.

Summit
- Optimized buildings to reduce draw calls.
- Optimized background rocks and buildings.
- Modified culling to make it more aggressive at longer range.
- Made particles despawn more quickly if outside player’s view.
- Improved HLODs.
- Switched teams on Checkpoint Security and Checkpoint Insurgents scenarios.
- Removed roads from the hilltop to make them less navigable for vehicles.
- Lowered railing on the bridge to improve defensive positions.
- Improved AI vehicle navigation on Checkpoint.
- Fixed insertion vehicle path on Checkpoint.

Known bugs

If you find yourself with missing cosmetics please just hit the randomise button

Sep 6, 2018

AI War 2 v0.767 Released! "Newly In Stock, By Zenith"

AI War 2 - x-4000 (Chris McElligott Park)

Release notes here.

The auto-targeting of player ships, as well as AI ships, should actually fully work better for real this time, unlike yesterday when I botched that a bit.

There's also now finally something that the Zenith Trader is selling! Namely, tamed and chained minor faction monstrosities... yikes, haha.

There are units still getting overhauls, becoming new things like the Metabolizing Gangsaw (so much cooler than the old Vorticular Cutlass) or the Pike Turret (new from what the Needler Turret was). There's also a whole-new Ambush Turret that you can place around wormholes to wreak some havoc. The balance tweaks continue, with the AI Overlords becoming more interesting, and the Sentinel Frigates and Sentry Starships becoming a lot more useful. You're also less likely to get bumrushed by the hunter fleet early in the game, among other things.

I mentioned this last time, but it bears repeating: RocketAssistedPuffin has stepped into a volunteer balancer role, and he is not only looking for feedback, but he's actively integrating lots of things that other people are suggesting on our forums and Discord, as well as things that he's finding and coming up with himself. The more feedback the better, for sure.

I spent more time today going through mantis, as well as getting all my previously-offline notes into there, and I'm now finally done with that. I have finished compiling a big list of things for my trello to-do list, focusing on things that need to happen prior to a "press build" being ready. I mentioned this flow yesterday:

First, we have to get things really nice and clean and polished, and with enough features that people get the idea, for a press build. No press build, no previews, no EA launch coverage, and that is bad.
That has to be out to the press ideally 2+ weeks (3 is just infeasible now) ahead of a launch of the game into Early Access, or again we simply don't have time to get good coverage.
There's then a list of things that we need to get done during that 2 week period, basically to get full polish for the initial Early Access launch. I'd like to set a lot of that time aside for reacting to bugs that are found during that period, but frankly a lot of the time is instead going to need to be spent on art. So that will be a balancing act.
Then we release to Early Access, and life resumes its normal cycles as we head on towards 1.0 some months later.

After much teeth-gnashing, I think we're still aiming for Early Access in mid-October -- so a press build in very early October. Yeah that is faster than I'd prefer, but it's helping us to put a big focus on what needs to be in place in order to really wow people out of the gate, and then we can focus on polish during Early Access. Frankly one of the things that hinders polish is the smaller pool of folks that we have who are playing it. Having that larger pool of Early Access players will be absolutely invaluable to making the 1.0 everything it can be. And of course, the plan is not to stop at 1.0.

At any rate, we'll see if there are any big speed bumps that are hit. In the meantime, expect to see a lot more focus from me in particular on new features in the coming two weeks, rather than bugfixes (aside from critical ones). Puffin will still be on balance, and Badger will be doing whatever strikes him as important, and Keith should be coming in on some AI improvements. So all around it should be a pretty good mix of stuff coming.

Lots more to come this week!

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do.

Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support.

Enjoy!

Chris

Sep 6, 2018

August 2018 Newsletter

Empires of the Undergrowth - Mike

Greetings all! We hope you've enjoyed your summer. Time moves on relentlessly, and as we chug the first pumpkin spice latte of autumn we've made significant strides in the progress of the leafcutter levels as well as plenty of other exciting things. We've recorded with our voice artists Mary Jo, Eric and Callum (Scientist 1, Scientist 2 and Narrator respectively) for the next levels and we're delighted with their work. Before we conclude our work on 3.1, 3.2 and Formicarium Challenge 3, there are some missing bits and pieces in the existing game that need finalising in preparation. Our current plan is to do an interim update between now and the leafcutter update, and that's going to be fairly soon. Let's get on to what that'll include!

A lovely green Formica ereptor colony from jasong

The Interim Update

2nd Tier Challenge Mode

The interim update will include the challenge mode for levels 2.1 Rising Tide and 2.2 Queen of the Hill. It was always our intent for each tier to have its own special mode with an extra challenge - and we're now at the point that we want to get this all up to date before any new levels arrive.

Beach Tiger Beetle Larvae

A screenshot of the beach tiger beetle larva in progress

Activating challenge mode on the 2nd tier levels will introduce lightning-fast beach tiger beetle larvae to the fray. Even in their larval forms, the beach tiger beetles are extremely deadly. They live in small burrows, lying in wait for a hapless victim to pass by - which they then grab with frightening speed. Matt has done some beautiful work bringing these living nightmares to our game - have a look at the screenshot below.

Small Improvements System

We have introduced a new way of spending royal jelly to improve certain aspects of your formicarium colony. The type of tweaks that can be made depend on the creatures themselves, but there are 2 types for workers and queens and 4 for the black ant soldiers and wood ant ranged units (there will also be 4 for the leafcutter majors when they arrive).

Spending jelly will give a stat improvement. This can be done multiple times but will cost much more each time you do it. It'll also be a way for those of you who are sitting on a cache of royal jelly to spend some of it before the next update (but please don't feel like you have to grind for it - you don't!). The exact ins-and-outs of this new system will be detailed when the patch comes.

Narration

The recent recording sessions with our lovely voice actors have given us the opportunity to add some dialogue we felt was missing from certain points of the current game - particularly in freeplay. There will be some extra narration for this game mode, as well as some small bits and pieces for the campaign levels.

New Freeplay Map - Towhead

Whilst you’ve been getting heartily stuck into Freeplay and the response has been great, we realise that there’s not much in the way of variety at the moment. To that end, the interim update will include a brand new Freeplay map! Towhead is set on a small sandbank in a body of water, which has some interesting implications for resource gathering. It hasn’t been decorated yet but you can see how things are shaping up from the in-editor screenshot below.

The work-in-progress Towhead. Note the unusually-shaped underground spaces!

And now, back to the leafcutter update...

Leafcutter Ants - Artwork Progress

Whilst previous levels were set on a beach in a temperate environment, the next set of levels take place in the humid subtropical rainforests of Ecuador with its clay-rich soil. This gives a distinct red hue to the underground.

The leafcutter queen beneath the rainforest soil

Various castes of Atta cephalotes patrol their nest

We also have luminous fungal growths illuminating our Leafcutter colony instead of the crystals from the beach levels - a little extra flavour given that the leafcutters themselves are fungus farmers!

Illuminated by fungal growths!

Leafcutter Animations

Here's the current animations for the leafcutter major. Pay particular attention to that leaf-cutting action - after all, that's what leafcutters are born to do.

https://youtu.be/DKB7cy8AWeI

Work-in-Progress Leafcutter Montage

Liam put together this little montage of test material showing the various ways that the leafcutters are being worked on. You can see an example of the upcoming size hierarchy system that will allow some ants to literally run under the legs of bigger ones, as well as seeing some of the vertical ant movement that Matt has been working on to allow leafcutters to collect cuttings from leaves above floor level. There's also a small audio snippet of what Scientist #2 is up to in the next update. Frankly, he scares us.

https://youtu.be/mEhlDIJny8s

Streamlining Level Design

Anyone who has watched the live streams will have seen how putting levels together is a time consuming process (even ones that do not have a story), so to help with this we have developed plugins for Unreal Engine. These allow us to change tiles with a variable size spherical tool in many ways (raise, lower, dig out, make indestructible and even paint) not only speeding up level design but making it more intuitive.

See a short demonstration of John using the new in-house tools on Giphy

Please note that although this time-saving measure is a good thing for the project, we are not currently planning to release a level editor for the game. For now these are UE4 plugins that benefit us - if everything is going well when the game graduates from early access, we might revisit the level editor idea. But not yet!

Twitch Streams

There has been little in the way of live streaming recently - and for good reason. John likes to keep his streams relatively spoiler-free, and pretty much all of his current work has been leafcutter-related. We don't want to spoil all that good stuff for you prematurely.

YouTuber Highlight - ManOfTheAntz

It's rare that we see an EotU-playing YouTuber who's also an antkeeper IRL, so of course we're going to watch their videos when we do. ManOftheAntz plays the game from a remarkably unbiased perspective, given the subject matter, and manages to be damned entertaining whilst he does it. We've thoroughly enjoyed watching his trials and tribulations with EotU, and we look forward to seeing how he does with the upcoming content!

https://youtu.be/iLZ9TH3mMAc

Screenshot Central

As has fast become a tradition for the newsletter, we like to trawl through Steam screenshot uploads and manually-emailed submissions (send them to mike@slugdisco.com) for fun screenshots. F12 does it by default on Steam, if you'd like to participate.

The ants go marching 4 by 4, hurrah! Thanks to Johathon for emailing this in

The destruction of an uber devil's coach horse by joshua.schneider

A never-ending battle? Crabs vs crabs in the Battle Arena from Bilbo Baggins