Hey folks,

You’ll be pleased to hear that we’re just rolling out another update to Boundless! Those of you who have tried out the latest testing version will be familiar with what’s coming, but let’s go over it all here;

First up is the new Beacon Reclaim system we’ve implemented. From now on, when a beacon expires, the contents won’t be simply lost, but instead will be stored within the beacon itself ready to be reclaimed by the owner. The aim of the beacon system is not to punish players, but to protect land. This will provide a safety net for those unfortunate accidents when a beacon is allowed to expire.

A side effect of this is the new Spark item - any unused Spark in the beacon will be converted to a new Item, which can be bought and sold as normal.

It’s important to note that Beacons still need to be fuelled, and that the beacon expiry system is otherwise unchanged.

We’ve also introduced a new range of signs, with Glass Pane Signs now useable. Further to this, those citizens with Gleam Club membership can now use Emojis on all their signs.

After some time on testing, we’re now implementing the Beacon Compactness rules. These will ensure that players aren’t able to work around plotting restrictions, and have been described at length over here;

https://forum.playboundless.com/t/important-beacon-reservation-abuse-is-officially-banned/40465

If you’d like the video rundown, then as always here’s Jiivita with the report (s);








































And if you’re looking for a more technical breakdown of the update, then James’ full patch notes are over here;

https://forum.playboundless.com/t/release-242-beacon-reclaims-and-compactness/44553

As always, there’s a lot more to come from Boundless, and we’re already hard at work on the next exciting update. In the meantime, enjoy this latest release!

I am working on in-game dialogue and button boxes. This will be like in these screenshots. It is going to be done in 3-7 days. If you don't like the current style, I recommend you to wait a little bit.

Today we adding 15 news events that happen during the an enemy battle. Each enemy will have their own events making they more difficulty over time. Some quality of life were added to the game too, we added icons at the top of the interface to show how many modules are destroyed and how many invaders are inside of your vehicle and big changes were making on the balance of the enemies, mainly on enemies that only invade.


Laser Overcharge inside the vehicle.

- Added 15 Enemies' Events! They happen during a Enemy battle, each enemy has it own events with diferent balance.
- Added Enemy Event: Full Burst. Create multiple explosions in X format after a delay.
- Added Enemy Event: Boss Invasion. Create the invader of the current enemy with extra life and damage.
- Added Enemy Event: Closing Destruction. Lasers close in until a small area of the vehicle, killing everyone on touch.
- Added Enemy Event: Goo Rain. Create a number of goo inside the vehicle.
- Added Enemy Event: Illusion Invasion. Create a big number of invaders with small life and damage for a limited amount of time.
- Added Enemy Event: Concetrate Lasers. Choose a random player and create multiple lasers that move to the player position.
- Added Enemy Event: Laser Saw. Rotating laser that move inside the vehicle.
- Added Enemy Event: Passing Laser. Multiple lasers that move one time side to side at same time.
- Added Enemy Event: Laser Overcharge. Create random lasers inside the vehicle that don't move.
- Added Enemy Event: Lasers Misaligned. Create 3 lasers that move in a path inside the vehicle.
- Added Enemy Event: Rotating Laser. Create multiple slow rotating lasers inside the vehicle.
- Added Enemy Event: Saboteur Invasion. Create one or more invader with high damage.
- Added Enemy Event: World Ends. Create a shield inside the vehicle and after some time kill all players that are not inside the shield.
- Added Enemy Event: Explosive Invasion. Create a invader that after some time explodes if not stopped.
- Added Enemy Event: Huntin Laser. Create 1 laser that follow a player around the vehicle.


Icons show how many modules are destroyed and how many invaders are inside the vehicle.

- Added Icons showing how many modules are destroyed.
- Added Icons showing how many invaders are inside the vehicle.
- Cleaner Gun now clean all goo in the area, not only 1.
- Generator don't play sound anymore when not producing energy.
- Changed some widgets position for better vision.

- Enemies that don't attack now invade over time. The over time invasion has a limition on the amount of invaders.
- Invaders that don't drop items don't drop goo anymore.
- Laser now only apply only 1 effect per target.
- Rebalanced some Enemie's DPS.

- Fixed cinematic camera when finding an enemy.
- Fixed Goo effects when vehicle is moving.
- Fixed generators spawning more than 1 energy sphere.
- Fixed some enemies and invaders balance.
- Fixed Cleaner Gun area of effect.
- Fixed all camera effects.
- Fixed Cloner glass door.
- Fixed some possible problems while open a booster box.
- Fixed laser not doing damage some times.
- Fixed Group camera to show all players.

The third Super Mega Baseball 3 reveal video is here! It gives you a closer look at the changes that have been made to on-field gameplay, from reworked batting AI to tweaked pitching mechanics and improved fielder selection.

Along with this video, we are announcing our official launch date for SMB3 - May 13th! When we first announced the game, we were very confident in an April 2020 release – but unfortunately, industry-wide impacts of the COVID-19 crisis have led us to this revised release date.

This has not stopped us from beginning to collect community feedback and getting to work on some free post-launch updates! As you may have seen on our ‘What’s New?’ reveal video announcement, the SMB2 Team Import tool will be in your hands soon after launch. This feature will allow you to import your custom teams and leagues from SMB2 so you can hit the ground running when SMB3 launches. And for those of you who like to start from scratch or go straight into customization, there’s that option too.

Finally, you can expect to hear news before launch about a new online mode we’re working on that will be coming to SMB3 in a free-post launch update. This will take some time to develop, but we can’t wait to share it with you!

Now for the video!

We’re excited to launch the reveal trailer for The Endless Wyrd.

In this dice-deck building, rogue-like adventure, scavenge the Wyrd and escape the approaching Thing of the Dark. Load your dice with powerful augments to create your own synergies and combos and stack the odds in your favour. In the rabbit hole of the Wyrd, the only way back up, is down.

In a couple of months, we will provide a playable demo of the game and will launch on Early Access soon after. The community’s valuable feedback is an integral part in how development will roll out and the launch of major updates. We'd love for you to be part of this exciting journey and our awesome community. Be sure to Wishlist and follow us on social media for all the latest updates and exciting news about the game!

🐙 Join us on Discord
🐙 Follow us on Twitter

Last week, we revealed to you our method for texturing everything in the game. Today we want to show you how we used our lighting systems in the process of creating neat shadows. Grab something to drink and enjoy reading!

As you may or may not be aware, Röki isn’t rendered in the traditional 3D way. Our game environment receives no lighting (but does receive shadows), but appears with the exact colors we specify when we create it (in the swatch texture). The characters are similarly unlit, but in their case are tinted by ‘Unlit lights‘ that we place in the scene to bed them into the background.

WHY SHADOW VOLUMES?

Our existing lighting system is working well, it allows us to bed the characters into the scenes, and we can have smooth interpolation of lighting on our characters as they move around the scene. It’s great for soft broad changes as you move around (see a before and after of how it beds characters into our scenes below).



So why add a new element? Well, Tom created a scene with some hard defined shadow areas. We tried to light the characters to reflect this with our standard ‘unlit lights‘ and it was kinda tricky. As I said, they’re good for broad soft lighting changes but any sudden change of lighting was not easy to achieve.

We didn’t want to rule out having these stark and dramatic shadow areas in our scenes so went thinking about how we might achieve the desired effect by building upon our lighting system.

HOW DO THEY WORK?

In fact the result was actually pretty simple. It builds on a couple of existing things we already have in the game: trigger volumes and pick-up fades.

We use trigger volumes for all kinds of things in Röki. They are essentially an intelligent box. The box can tell if a certain objects enters its volume, if something does, it can then trigger an action. We use these for gameplay, but we realized we could also use them for some kind of shadow volume.



The other elements we had already was simple time-based shader transitions. We’d done these for fading out objects when you pick the up (rather than them vanishing with an unsightly ‘pop').



We realized that in combining these two elements we could use the trigger volume to talk to the character’s shader, telling the character to ‘go dark‘ when they enter, and ‘go back to normal‘ when they exit. We would use the simple fade to soften the transition into shadow when entering the volume, and to gently come out of shadow when they exit the volume, to avoid an instant ‘pop’.

The only thing left to do was to add an extra ‘shadow volume‘ color parameter to our character shader. This would be used to tint the character’s shader darker when they enter the shadow area. This change in the character’s shader would be driven by the volume interactions and the fade.



And that’s all the ingredients we used. It does build on the underlying system, but is in itself pretty simple. So to recap:

• Character enters a trigger volume, game recognizes this and sends and tell the character to ‘Enter Shadow‘
  
• This then tells the character’s shader material to begin fading up the shadow color (over a short specified time, currently 0.25 seconds but tweakable).
  
• The shadow color (specified in the volume itself) is multiplied over the top of the underlying character color. As the shadow color is faded in, the shadow appears stronger on the character.
  
• When the character leaves the shadow volume the same thing happens in reverse.

As stated above we set it up so each volume had its own shadow color. This allows for different shadow color for different scenes, or even within the same scene (some might want blue tinted shadows and others green for example).



FURTHER TWEAKS

We’re gonna work with the system and see how it feels but have had a few suggestions already on how to improve it further that we’ll take a look at. For now, we achieved what we wanted, the ability to have Tove and her pals walk into dark shadow with a nice transition (and no ‘pop‘). This is quite a good example of how you can achieve something quite quickly with elements from elsewhere in your game.

Until next time,
Alex

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1067540/Rki/

Because Gloria Victis: Siege just reached 10,000 on Steam Wishlist we would like to give every Gloria Victis MMO player who logged within lats 7 days and those who will log till next (24.04.2020) morning restart at 9:20 AM GMT+2 will get Ismir Leader Helm you saw in the trailer!




In the upcoming tier, only 2,000 left, we will present you the first track from the OST created by world famous duo Marcin Przybyłowicz and Magda Ubrańska.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1167140/Gloria_Victis_Siege/

Hello warriors!

First things first – you've got a free skin! As you probably already know it, that our friends from Fish Tank Studio are making Gloria Victis: Siege which will be set in the Gloria Victis world, and they just hit 10.000 on Steam Wishlist!

It means that every player who logged to Gloria Victis in the last week, as well as those who will log in before the next scheduled restart at 9:20 AM GMT, will get the Ismir Leader Helm from the trailer for free!

• Every player who logged within the last 7 days received an in-game notification which lets you claim the badass Kargald Champion Helm skin
  
• Moreover, every player who logs until the next scheduled restart (Apr 24th, 9:20 AM GMT+2) will get the skin too, right at the restart
  
• Next goal – the public reveal of the first soundtrack made by famous Marcin Przybyłowicz and Magda Urbańska!
  
• We will reveal another goal next week, so stay tuned!

On the other hand, a new weekly update has arrived – and we've overhauled the party system! With the addition of customizable player icons on the map, toggleable visibility of such, new types of the party which you can choose from, and numerous smaller or bigger improvements, this system will be much more convenient from now. Besides that, there are several optimization changes, various gameplay improvements and some new crazy looking skins to choose from.

Try out the update and claim your own Kargald Helm skin for free, and see you in battle!



– Introduced the party management panel allowing the party leader to:

• Set the party type
  
• Toggle the map position visibility for each player
  
• Set the detailed permissions for party members
  
• Set the displayed symbol for each player’s position marker

– Introduced various party types, besides the standard one:

• Hidden – allows to hide the position of party members and give permissions to see them to selected players, so you can i.e. hide your scouts from the spies or hide everyone, or show only leaders, and so on
  
• Open – every player can invite new members and accept them, although still there is a leader who can change the party settings, kick players, hide their positions and so on
  
• No leader – a common party which doesn't require preparations; by default, no player takes the rulership and all members are equal but any member can become the leader at any time

– Several server-side optimization improvements
– Updated placement of the NPC enemies to improve the server-side performance and reduce the number of NPC enemies encountered in the PVP areas, i.e. in the central part of the world
– Numerous minor improvements to the players synchronization, such as fix to the bug causing that the first step made by the player’s character seen by another player was made in the same direction where the character was moving when in stopped, or that the character seen by another player didn’t immediately stop when running at another character, even though it actually stopped on the player’s PC and on the server
– Updated the crafting chance calculation due to a recent fix to a bug causing that the Mentor Points used to give way too much bonus chance, which was additionally hidden by the fact that, by design, the bonuses from Mentor Points are not visible so even if the interface displayed i.e. 84% chance for +4 item, it was actually 100%; we don't want to bring back the wrong calculations for Mentor Points but we increased the base chance for using +4 workshop, so instead of the former 84% chance for +4 items you used to get with all bonuses except cards, it will now be 90% (plus the hidden “luck factor” from the number of your Mentor Points), so while creating a +3 item at the top workshop will theoretically be possible, it’s not going to happen frequently
– Added the [Group event] prefix to the names of dynamic events which are designed for groups
– Several minor improvements to various quests and dynamic events
– Addeda new set of skins for the Black Guard medium armor, fitting to the Mercykiller’s Helm
– Added 3 skins for one-handed axes



– Fixed the arena button’s tooltip and progress bar texts when moving to/from the arena
– Fixed displaying the interaction labels when hovering the cursor over the mount
– Fixed a bug causing that the player’s attack could get false-positive registered as an ally hit
– Fixed a bug causing small client-side desynchronization of the mount’s disappearing
– Fixed the clipping issues for several shoes models
– Fixed the Midland nation’s name Chinese translation – it’s been changed from 中土 to 米德兰

As you know the original single sawblade has been replaced by 3 sub-blades. Each of these sub-blades deals half the damage of the former single sawblade. This results in 3 x 0.5 = 1.5 times the original damage.
But this was unnecessary. The sawgun should be a beginners panic weapon. Its main purpose is to keep the attackers at bay, nothing more. So I reset the damage according to the following equation:
3 x 0.33 = 1.0

The particular role of these weapons should be to deal much damage in short time. It can be dangerous but you can get rid of drillers quite fast.
Changes:

• damage increased (x 3.33)
  
• range of the explosion increased (x 1.6)
  
• clip size reduced (from 20 to 12)

This weapon is suitable against groups or bigger enemies (driller, welder) but it lacks range (and power).
Changes:

• higher range (approx. x 2)
  
• less spread in order to compensate the range
  
• number of projectiles increased (from 9 to 11)

New single-use weapons. Once dropped the mines wait and beep. The explosion is triggerd by touch.

How they work: Any explosion makes a shockwave. The shockwave consists of 32 radially fired projectiles. The projectiles grow over time in order to close ranks. Each object comming in contact with one or more projectile absorbes damage. The further away from the center the less the number of projectiles that traverse your ship.
The issue: the projectiles are way too big. Even at the edge of the explosion your ship is hit by many projectiles which sabotages the attenuation. In addition the shockwave is hardly noticable.
The repair:

• size of the projectiles reduced (x 0.15)
  
• damage of the projectiles doubled in order to compensate size
  
• visibility increased (alpha value from 0.1 to 0.3)

Hello there!


This is our first entry for "Elva the Eco Dragon" and, first of all, we want to thank to all those people that have been in contact with us with questions and ideas for the game.

As you know, "Elva the Eco Dragon" will be released as Early Release, but this doesn't mean a game with lot of bugs and a poor experience. We are working hard to release this game with many features added from day one, and those features are available in documents in our page and on IndieDB. Images, texts and videos that show the game running, even a complete interactive tutorial.

But, of course, showing images and videos is one thing, actually playing the game is another story. We know that, we are indie developers, but we are also players.

For that reason we want to give a game that can be played from day one with all the main features finished. And we're happy to inform that we have all those main features finished and testing.

Would you like to be a betatester and try it for yourself? Soon we'll be announcing the date the first beta will available, and that will be very soon.



But May 8th remains as the data to release the game. An Early release for a game that will contain four initial areas completely finished, while we're working in new areas.

Want more details? You can visit our IndieDB page for the game, or our Elva page, for more info. You'll see a lot of info there. We have a FAQ, tutorials, and the campaing info. We'll be updating that info very often too.

So that's all for now, thank you for your interest. And remember: cleaning up the planet can be a game too. A game to survive and live in a better world. Thank you!

Elva page here.