Oct 30, 2019

[Server Maintenance] Wednesday, October 30th, 2019, 21:00 EST

Knight Online - Khenarth

Please be aware that we will be conducting a scheduled maintenance on Steam Knight Online Servers and service will be temporarily unavailable.

Maintenance time will be as follows:

Knight Online Server Time (EST): 21:00
South America (PET): 20:00
Turkey : 4:00, October, 30th

Duration: Approx. 2 hours

The maintenance will include:

Server Restarts Twisted Moradon is back again! http://www.nttgameonline.com/knight/en/news/news_detail/515 Ibex/Crisis Potions will be available for 4 more weeks Flags/Firecrackers are available in Sundries

Please note that the estimated duration of server maintenance may be less than or greater than the time quoted above and is subject to change without notification. We may also update this announcement as necessary during or after maintenance has concluded. We thank you for your patience during the downtime.

NTTGame || Knight Online Team

Oct 30, 2019

HAPPY HALLOWEEN! - LFB: PROLOGUE AND "BOXY" AMANDA"

Lust for Darkness - Amanda Moon

Dear Cultists!
We wanted to publish "Lust from Beyond: Prologue" on Halloween for everyone for free, but we have some problem with publishing it on Steam (because we send it to Steam too late). So we will publish the demo probably after the Halloween.
BUT we really want you to play it as soon as possible, so....

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Reminder: LUST FROM BEYOND: PROLOGUE is still Kickstarter demo with some changes like:
- Steam achievements
- new notes, that teases plots from the full version of Lust from Beyond
- possibility to open the door under the stairs
- option improvements (mouse sensivity etc)
- fixing some bugs, glitches etc.
- new cutscene in the end

And.... we have some gift for you! Now you can build your own "boxy" version of Amanda!
Show us the final result!

DOWNLOAD "BOXY AMANDA" HERE!

That's all for now!
Yv'h lauv'abrarc! Yv'h Lusst'ghaa!

Oct 30, 2019

Major update: Survival and stealth adjusted + bugfixes and optimization.

Chernobylite Complete Edition - Sadocommando

Important note: to make the whole game working smoother, updating faster and requiring less space on your hard drive, we've strongly altered and optimized the general structure of the game build. This means that with current patch you'll need to re-download the whole game content which is about 28 Gigabytes of data after compression. But from now you'll have more free space on your hard drive and the next patches will be smaller and more effectively downloaded and installed.

General fixes:

For everybody willing to make perfect screenshot or virtual photography without the game interface: we've added the option to disable UI using the CTRL + ALT + [ combination of keys. This shortcut disables the UI completely and permanently, to invert it you need to reload the game. We are working on a more elegant solution.
Compression and Steam packages optimization made game build much smaller. Instead of 45 GB right now it should occupy about 30 GB on the disk.
Not all gameplay mechanics were clear to you, especially those in Base and after death. We've added some new tutorials to explain them.
Items and containers now have a small overlay that appears before we pick them up. This should facilitate scavenging and looting soldiers when several items are close by.
Compass UI is a little more subtle.

AI and combat:

Soldiers should now behave more naturally when they find the body.
Takedown produces sound. Killing a few soldiers next to each other should no longer be possible.
Black Stalker uses the laser and no longer shoots using debug tracing lines.

Fixes:

Beating dolls should no longer cause a crash...
Equipment size can no longer be expanded indefinitely.
Tarakan should now appear correctly in the database when using retrospective branching.
Exiting the game at transition levels should no longer cause damage to save if you do so after the indicator disappears.
We've fixed a whole bunch of smaller bugs you have reported. Thanks!

Survival:
The flow of survival is one of the most important elements of our game. Unfortunately, not all of our design decisions were presented clear to you. Many of you asked, "why if the meaning of the game is to survive in Chernobyl, then the game lasts only 10 days?". Well, the game was not limited to 10 days, we rather wanted you to replay the story missions with branching and retrospections, which is best seen at repeated transitions. Today, we are not sure if this decision was correct. Therefore, as part of the experiment, we raise the limit to 100 days, additionally introducing several changes that should emphasize on survival aspect:

Over time, Chernobylite storms are becoming more frequent. Build a Q-wave generator to defend against them.
As a result of chernobylite substance activity, the zone is becoming more and more radioactive every day. Moving around it will be more and more difficult.
Raw materials for crafting are slowly diminishing in the following days, which will result in fewer and fewer of them with time progress.
There will be fewer and fewer animals over time. Hunting for food will be more difficult.

Stealth improvements:
We often hear from you that unfinished AI is one of the biggest problems of the game. However, the problem is much more complex. To make AI better, we also need to improve patrol roads, level design and many game balance parameters. So far we’ve chosen 3 places for testing. If you like it, we will improve the rest of the game in a similar way:

Center of military base on Eye of Moscow:

Near the hospital at Prypiat Port:

Western part of the resort on Kopachi:

In addition, we have introduced the following changes in combat:

When we hide in the bushes, they become slightly transparent. It's easier to move around and watch soldiers.
New takedown animation. Only one at the moment, but it shows the direction in which we want to go. It is slower, more emotional and emphasizes more on the fact that Igor is not a killing machine.

Psyche system:

We have finally started to work on this mechanics. Treat these solutions as prototypical, it's just a base for the future, which will ultimately hinder survival:
Igor's lack of food allocation results in a decrease in Psyche
When Psyche is at 0 the player starts to drop health points, down to 1 point.
We've added the ability to craft alcohol in a laboratory that raises psyche.

Remember about our virtual photography contest that ends soon:
https://steamcommunity.com/gid/103582791463995837/announcements/detail/1663444077006171888
Many stalkers already provided their great artwork, you can still contribute and win the trip to the real Chernobyl Zone with us!

Oct 30, 2019

Beta 17: Unreal Engine 4.24 Update

Steam Audio - runeberg

We've recently updated the Steam® Audio Unreal Engine integration with the latest Beta 17 API. This version will be part-and-parcel of UE 4.24 and bolsters Steam® Audio performance with support for multi-threaded environmental effect simulation, Intel® Embree, and AMD Radeon Rays.

Each of these features provide developers with significant performance boosts compared to simulating environmental effects with the built-in Steam® Audio raytracer on a single thread. Radeon Rays, which runs on any OpenCL 1.2 compatible GPU, can provide 50-150X speed-ups. Intel® Embree, which runs on the CPU, can provide speed-ups of around 20X when using recent 4-core CPUs. The built-in raytracer also benefits significantly from the new multi-threading support and its performance scales linearly with the number of threads.

Figure: (Top) Absolute time (in milliseconds) for real-time simulation of environmental effects vs. number of threads. (Bottom) Linear scaling for real-time simulation of environmental effects vs. number of threads. Simulations were performed on Intel Xeon Platinum 8124 CPU @ 3 GHz for 32K rays, 32 bounces, and 16 sources.

Figure: Speedup when baking reverb using Radeon Rays vs. Embree (single-threaded) vs. Steam Audio's built-in ray tracer (single-threaded), for two scenes: Sibenik cathedral (80k triangles) and a Hangar scene from the Unity Asset Store (140k triangles). Speedups are averaged over a range of simulation settings and probe grid densities, and plotted using a logarithmic scale, shown in the graph are relative to Steam Audio's built-in ray tracer.

This is already up in Epic's UE main branch for 4.24, Unreal developers wanting to take early advantage of all these features can simply compile this main branch. If you prefer to grab your engine from the Epic launcher, this release will be available in the upcoming UE 4.24 Preview.

Thanks to Doğa Can Yanıkoğlu and Charles Alexander for their contributions to this Steam® Audio update and with additional features such as support for level transitions and improved geometry tagging.

Full Changelist

Updates Steam® Audio API to Beta 17 (h/t @dyanikoglu).
Adds scene reinit on level transitions (h/t @dyanikoglu).
Improved geometry tagging (h/t @muchcharles).
Add support for RadeonRays and Embree raytracers.
Better settings organization.
Add support for multiple phonon sources.
Ensure scene exports are reloaded between editor sessions.
Ensure Android and 32-bit builds falls back cleanly to Phonon (if project is configured with Embree or Radeon).
Various stability improvements.

If you have any questions and/or feedback on this release, please feel free to post in the discussion forums or open an issue on GitHub.

Oct 30, 2019

The test is coming

Community Announcements - Pastorazzi

Hi, friends.

With warmth and ease in our hearts, we inform that we have dealt with almost all the things that we had to deal with before the test. Today we finished sorting letters, and selected people to participate in the test. Thank you very much to everyone who responded and sent applications. Thanks for the words of support and warm feedback on previous games. It was not necessary. And by the way, it did not affect the decision. However, it was a pleasure to read. From time to time, someone could notice how a single tear of emotion rolls down the wrinkled cheek of fellow-developer. He brushes it off or wipes it with his sleeve shortly after, says that his eyes are simply tired of the monitor. And he will start to work again, but somehow happier this time. And his back will become straighter and the look lighter. Thank you for that, fellows.

There were many more applications than needed. Unfortunately, at this stage we can invite only a couple of hundred to the test. Those of you who have passed will receive a letter in the next few days with instructions on what to do next. Nothing complicated, don’t worry. No marching in full uniforms, tasks to get involved in a fight in opera-house, or waiting at night in a dark alley for a figure in a cloak that will pass a package with a key. The most difficult stage has already been completed. You sent an application and got to the test.

Those who won’t receive the letter - do not worry! After this test, a CBT will begin, much larger, and many more people will be able to participate in it. The game will be even better, and there will be many more players to play with. Just stay in touch in the Discord - https://discord.gg/TKFuSnY Cause it won't be many news here in the near future. The main channel for communication will be there. Are you ready to rush into battle?